Editorial

Next Sunday we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Guyana becoming a republic.

At the end of December 2019, when the coronavirus outbreak was still in its early stages, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital used WeChat to alert colleagues to the true scale of the threat.

Yesterday we carried a Reuters report about more than half of Malta’s traffic police being arrested on Tuesday for suspected fraud. 

On Sunday last, the American Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, better known as the Academy Awards or the Oscars, held its 92nd ceremony to recognise excellence in those fields.

Last week Monday, Cricket West Indies’ selection panel released the names of the 15-member squad for the upcoming One-Day International (ODI) Series in Sri Lanka.

Our national track record will show that there exists no innate culture of respect for and serious adherence to environmental laws across the spectrum of communities and workplaces in Guyana.

Three weeks from today, March 2nd, voters  will head to polling stations countrywide to cast ballots in what will easily be the most hotly contested General and Regional Elections in decades.

Our fractured political system has militated against governments taking a robust stance against corruption.

On July 14th, 1789, the first day of the French Revolution, Louis XVI’s diary entry was the single word: “rien” because he had shot nothing in his daily hunt.

In early December last year we published a letter from artist Ms Bernadette Persaud who said that a few weeks previously the site of the Chateau Margot chimney had been closed off to the public and that the gates now carried two notices.

Up to late last week, the families affected by the collapse of a section of range houses in East La Penitence were still marking time.

As we go about our daily lives we are required to make a series of choices, many of which are trivial in nature with little long-term consequences, while the more difficult ones, such as career pursuits, family decisions and retirement planning, to name a few, require serious thought.

On Thursday last, at the Annual Police Officers’ Conference, President David Granger returned to the now patently familiar theme of police reform, outlining elements of his vision for the Guyana Police Force, going forward.

A January 29th 2020 letter from anti-corruption watchdog, Global Witness to ExxonMobil’s Country Manager has quantified the likely loss to Guyana from the disastrous 2016 Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) at a whopping US$55b.

It is perhaps surprising why it hasn’t happened before. Former murder accused Cloyd Harris recently filed a $100 million lawsuit against the state for loss of liberty after spending six years on remand without trial.

As the impeachment trial in the US Senate heads towards a partisan anticlimax, the intellectual debasements of the Trump era have plumbed new depths.

On Wednesday a letter was pinned up on the notice board of the Rusal-owned Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI) informing 146 workers whose names were listed that they had been laid off.

On Thursday and Friday last week, two women were violently attacked in their homes by men wielding sharp instruments; one was killed and the other critically injured, adding to the ever-growing statistics of Guyanese women killed or affected by domestic violence.

On Sunday, the sporting world received the shocking news that basketball icon, former Los Angeles Laker Kobe Bryant, along with his thirteen year old daughter, Gianna, and seven other people, had died in a helicopter crash, Calabasas, California.

The Ministry of Education’s run of ‘bad form’ persists The protracted run of ‘bad form’ which our education system has been facing was alarmingly extended last week with the horrendous stabbing of a schoolgirl in Linden, during the course of an out-of-school fight in which the attacker allegedly intervened on behalf of the injured child’s opponent.