Editorial

At an interaction with the media on Monday last, President Bharrat Jagdeo hedged when asked whether the reports that he was planning a Cabinet reshuffle were true.

A centuries-old Italian proverb says that “When a fish rots, it starts from its head.”

One of the most widely known articles of the United States’ Army Uniform Code of Military Justice states that “Any commissioned officer, cadet, or midshipman who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

A 16-year-old, an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old are dead. Having graduated, reports say, from being lookouts for bandits, they took up arms and went on the attack in Non Pariel.

Minister of Local Government, Mr Kellawan Lall has declined several invitations from this newspaper to speak about what he is alleged to have done three Sundays ago at a rum shop at Vryheid’s Lust on the East Coast.

The year 2007 is not ending very well for President Jagdeo.

In the aftermath of a series of serious security incidents, the cabinet conducted a weekend ‘outreach’ campaign on 16-17 November on the Corentyne coast.

Compared with the tension that exists in Muslim communities across Europe, America’s Muslims are a more contented lot.

The novelist Martin Amis recently asked a British audience to raise their hands if they felt ‘morally superior to the Taliban’.

If the allegations that Patrick Sumner, Victor Jones and David Leander were tortured can be proven, some members of the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Defence Force are likely to be in big trouble.

This newspaper carried a report last week about a mother in St Lucia, who was jailed for one year for failing to do anything when she was told that her daughter was being sexually abused by her grandfather.

The convictions secured against two of the accused in the cocaine in fish glue case constitute a small but important victory in the struggle against the drug trade.

In our Wednesday edition we reported that last Sunday, a minister of government entered a bar in Montrose, East Coast Demerara, at about 1 am.

On Thursday most Guyanese in America – or Guyanese Americans, as they should probably be more correctly called – whether ignorant of or ignoring the minor fuss in our letters column about cultural erosion or cross-fertilization and copycat behaviour, would have tucked into their Thanksgiving turkey, with or without cranberry sauce, but certainly with great relish.

Nothing quite characterises the contradictions in the current ‘Operation Safeway’ as the success in arresting hundreds of petty offenders on the one hand, and the comparative failure to arrest the spiralling toll of road fatalities, on the other.

The 13th Conference of the Parties, COP, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCC, and the 3rd Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, will be hosted by Indonesia on the island of Bali from December 3 to 14, 2007.

There is a sad sameness to several recent rape-murders. In two of the most savage, the victims were innocent schoolgirls in small rural villages.

When UNICEF celebrates the 18th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child today, it will appoint Ishmael Beah as an Ambassador.

Now that new leadership is in place in the Guyana Defence Force the environment has been created for a fresh approach in the way the army interfaces with the public on matters of national interest.

On Thursday, Venezuela made incursions into Guyana’s territory – again. On this occasion two dredges were destroyed in the Wenamu/Cuyuni, and helicopters intruded into our air-space.