Editorial

It took British High Commissioner Mr Fraser Wheeler only a year after arriving here to discover that “Guyana has a lot of strategies” for dealing with its intractable security situation.

Pity Marion Jones. Now that she can no longer deny using steroids at the 2000 Olympics, the sprinter formerly known as the most successful female athlete in history has admitted cheating and announced her retirement from track and field-probably as part of a plea bargain in the ever-widening BALCO scandal.

On June 15 this year in a column in Stabroek Business, commentator Mr Christopher Ram reflected on the perils facing the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and emphasized the need for swift action.

Guyana is full of rumours, some of which have greater resilience than others.

Finally! The archaic laws governing sexual offences are set to be reformed with drastic changes proposed throughout the entire Criminal Law (Offences) Act Cap 8:01 and with some new offences and harsher penalties recommended.

Let us pick up where our editorials of last Friday and Sunday left off in their discussion of the warm glow caused by the maritime award and the way forward with respect to our foreign policy in general and more specifically, the management of the border controversy with our western neighbour.

According to the BBC the government in the UK recently unveiled a new 10-year youth strategy in order to tackle teenage delinquency.

The seemingly unsolvable security situation on the East Coast of Demerara needs more than arrests, detentions, interrogations, searches and joint police-military operations.

Colonels in the Guyana Defence Force have had a hard year.

In his opening address at GuyExpo 2007 where he spoke feelingly about his vision for Guyana, President Jagdeo adverted to three areas in which he desired a partnership with business.

The withdrawal of ministry advertisements from this newspaper by GINA started in November 2006.

Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee recently told this newspaper that he had identified a connection between the escape of inmates from the Mazaruni Prison and a similar escape from the Lusignan Prison in 1999.

Religious and political protestors last week must have been so consumed by the controversy over the coming of casino gambling and by complaints about the confusing introduction of the value added tax that few found of them time to contemplate the worsening plight of this country’s girl children.

Considering the indecent haste with which it was bundled through Parliament, the Gambling Prevention (Amendment) Act will leave critics shaking their heads in collective disbelief that the government has been so inconsiderate of well-founded concerns.

In our Sunday edition last week we carried a report on the appointment of former Region 3 Chairman Esau Dookie as headmaster of Saraswat Primary School.

In her novel Dangerous to Know, English-born best selling writer Barbara Taylor Bradford describes a sixteenth century matriarch who had stipulated that her huge house should always be passed down to a female inheritor.

No one who is familiar with the faltering academic standards and squalid physical conditions at the University of Guyana’s central Turkeyen campus should have been surprised at the desperate tone of Vice-Chancellor Dr James Rose’s address to the 40th convocation congregation.

Does the President need a national security adviser to analyse the abundant amount of raw information that passes through his office and to coordinate the myriad security agencies and programmes in the country?

The moral protest by local religious organizations over the official introduction of casino gambling in Guyana has obscured a disturbing feature of this development.

Two revealing meetings were held over the last two weeks in relation to local government at which the subject minister Mr Kellawan Lall presided.