Editorial

There are expressions of shock as it has emerged that 16-year-old Vivian Singh Balrup was quite likely beaten to death because he picked watermelon someone else had planted.

What used to be called the Western world, the area of the post-war world centred on the NATO alliance, has this week been celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the effective end of what, on the other hand, used to refer to itself as the World Socialist System.

The murder of People’s Progressive Party stalwart and former Vice-Chairman of the Essequibo Islands-West Demerara Region Ramenauth Bisram last month has opened a can of worms in legal and political circles and in the security community.

Wednesday’s blitz by criminals against police stations, the Supreme Court of Judicature and a High School which left one man dead must be condemned in the strongest possible terms and the perpetrators brought to justice.

The government has perhaps been taken off-guard by the vehemence of the reaction from all quarters of society to the appalling injuries inflicted on a teenager by the police in the Leonora Police Station last week. 

Early next week a district court in New York will decide whether a class-action settlement that would allow Google to continue digitizing millions of old books violates federal antitrust legislation.

It is somewhat ironic that even as we were calling last Friday for heads to be banged together in order to resolve the constitutional crisis in Honduras, an announcement was being made to the effect that a high-level US mission, led by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, had succeeded, on the previous evening, in getting representatives of the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, and of the interim leader, Roberto Micheletti, to agree on a negotiated solution.

The seeds of violence, planted, watered and fed have taken root and blossomed; violently cut down they spring up again sprouting numerous branches wherever one is lopped off.

Caribbean observers will have been watching with interest the efforts of the Bruce Golding government, since its accession to office in Jamaica, to come to terms with what domestic and external observers recognize as a serious economic crisis.

Public confidence in the Guyana Police Force has been eroded over the past decade by numerous allegations of bribery, corruption, collaboration with narco-traffickers, extra-judicial killings, torture and other wrongdoing.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the abandonment of the UK Security Sector Reform Programme is the unmistakable signal from the Guyana Government that the course as it relates to security issues is set.

All societies need men and women of vision; people who can lift their eyes to the horizon and assimilate the larger contours of a landscape rather than studying only the earth beneath their feet.

In just over a month, the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen will attempt to strike a balance between developing nations who need to reduce their use of carbon, and industrialized nations who have already deforested their own nations and perpetrated many of the environmental  mistakes which they are seeking to prevent their poorer counterparts from repeating.

Contrary to expectations that a negotiated solution to the four-month-old crisis in Honduras was near, the stalemate continues.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez told the citizens of that country last week that they should shower for just three minutes in order to conserve on water usage in the face of low water reserves as a result of the current El Nino weather phenomenon.

From time to time there are suggestions that Caricom is not making progress or has lost its raison d’etre.

Only two days after Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan had been jailed in New York for several crimes including importing cocaine into the USA from his base in Georgetown, Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee found it appropriate to congratulate the Customs Anti-Narcotic Unit and pour praise on its personnel for their “work in the suppression of illicit trafficking in narcotics.”

After years of unremitting pressure, the government seems to be attempting to do something about the elephant in the room – the rampage of Roger Khan and his cohorts in these parts.

There was some discussion earlier in this newspaper, particularly in the letters column, about whether Mavado should have been banned from performing in this country.

Within the space of a week, the mainstream press in the United States has embarrassed itself at least three times by confusing fact and fiction Not only have many television stations and newspapers managed to attribute unsourced (and patently false) racist remarks to the conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, they have also managed to attend a fake press conference without realising that they were listening to actors, and devoted dozens of hours and thousands of column inches to the dramatic story of a young boy borne up into the sky by a homemade balloon, only to discover that he had never been inside the balloon and that the whole incident had been staged by his family.