Kaieteur News

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Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Health Sciences Dean emphasises need for

nurses to upgrade The need for nurses to specialise in various fields was emphasised by Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, Dr Emanuel Cummings, when he spoke at an awards ceremony on Saturday, for nurses who recently completed the Bachelors of Science (BSc) Degree Programme at the University of Guyana.

As he addressed the gathering, Dr Cummings disclosed that in securing for itself the flagship status at the university, the Health

Sciences Faculty has over the years developed quite a number of post graduate programmes in medicine.

Since 2005, he disclosed, over nine programmes have been established in medicine and “I want the development of nursing to go hand in hand with the development of medicine because if you have a doctor who is a psychiatrist, you will also want a psychiatric nurse.”

“If you have a general surgeon you will also want to

have nurses specialising in surgical nursing,” Dr Cummings added.

Moreover, he extended a challenge to the nurses in attendance to eye various specialties in nursing which he said can be kick-started with the BSc programme which commenced in 2002.

This programme, he stated, is now well established at the university, so much so that there is no longer a shortage of lectures.

“From time to time you will hear in the press that many of the university lecturers...about 30 per cent, are first degree holders, but all the tutors in the BSc nursing programme have Masters Degree.” “I can tell you that our current Vice Chancellor, who was recently installed, has already told one of our graduates that ‘you need to go and do a PhD in nursing,’” related Dr Cummings.

He disclosed too that there are many nurses who seek to further their studies by venturing into medicine and dentistry. While this is a very ambitious move, the Dean noted that there is also a need for nurses to attempt the third degree (PhD) in nursing.

With graduates in this area, he insisted that “we can then further strengthen the nursing programme.”

Dr Cummings pointed to the fact that the nursing profession has evolved over the years with nurses in the past only seeing themselves as registered nurses (RNs).

However, with the development of the BSc programme, nurses can move up from the level of RN. However, the Dean was resolute in insisting that there is now the need for the introduction of specialty nursing at the University of Guyana so that “we can have nurses specialise in areas such as mental health.”

“Currently as we work in the School of Medicine we are working on a Master’s Programme in psychiatry and I think at the same time we need to work on a post graduate programme in mental health nursing, because that is very, very important to deal with a lot of the issues that we do have in our society today,” said Dr Cummings. Emphasising his conviction that they should never be satisfied, the Dean said that nurses should be motivated by the fact that theirs is a profession that is now much more visible in health care

Dr Emanuel Cummings delivery. As such, he underscored the need for them to learn from their colleagues in the Caribbean, particularly those in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados.

He alluded to a point in time when local nurses would send research work to the Caribbean Health Research Council (CHRC) and papers were accepted and presented, and they were recognised.

“That is something that I have said that we need to resuscitate - the nurses and other allied health care programmes which we do in the faculty, we do want to encourage all of them, including nurses, to do research.” He made reference

to the fact that a premier function of the university is research which is essential to determine some of the issues that are existing and to gain the “know how” to address these.

Health care in the Region has reached a stage where at the level of the CHRC, a research agenda has been established and this is so in Guyana, Dr Cummings added.

The research agenda, he noted, too, is not in isolation of what goes on in the Ministry of Health or the Faculty of Health Sciences.

“This research agenda has been put together by key players within the Ministry of Health and also the Faculty of Health Sciences, and so it was carefully chosen based on the issues we think are of national interest to health care delivery.”

Dr Cummings it is critical that nurses get on board with this movement and seek to do quality research so that answers can be found for a lot of the issues which exist here in the area of nursing education, thereby making an even more significant contribution and further developing themselves.

This, by extension, could see nurses not only being recognised as important, but on par with any other health care professional.

DO YOU KNOW THAT JAGDEO’S BEST FRIEND IS THE ONLY PERSON IN GUYANA TO OWN THREE MEDIA HOUSES ...

Radio, Television and Newspaper?

Dr. Bobby Ramroop

1) Channel 28 now TVG 28 2) A radio station - 89.5FM 3) Guyana Times newspaper

Former President Bharrat Jagdeo

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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Hugo Chavez dies at 58 President Hugo Chavez was a fighter. The former paratroop commander and fiery populist waged continual battle for his socialist ideals and outsmarted his rivals time and again, defeating a coup attempt, winning re-election three times and using his country’s vast oil wealth to his political advantage.

A self-described “subversive,” Chavez fashioned himself after the 19th Century independence leader Simon Bolivar and renamed his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

He called himself a “humble soldier” in a battle for socialism and against U.S. hegemony. He thrived on confrontation with Washington and his political opponents at home, and used those conflicts to rally his followers.

Almost the only adversary it seemed he couldn’t beat was cancer. He died yesterday in Caracas at 4:25 local time after his prolonged illness. He was 58.

During more than 14 years in office, his leftist politics and grandiose style polarized Venezuelans. The barrel-chested leader electrified crowds with his booming voice, and won admiration among the poor with government social programs and a folksy, nationalistic style.

His opponents seethed at the larger-than-life character who demonized them on television and ordered the expropriation of farms and businesses. Many in the middle class cringed at his bombast and complained about rising crime, soaring inflation and government economic controls.

Chavez used his country’s vast oil wealth to launch social programs that included state-run food markets, new public housing, free health clinics and education programs. Poverty declined during Chavez’s presidency amid a historic boom in oil earnings, but critics said he failed to use the windfall of hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the country’s economy.

Inflation soared and the homicide rate rose to among the highest in the world Chavez paid a one-day visit to Guyana in February 2004 and assured his Guyanese counterpart Bharrat Jagdeo that he had no intention of pursuing claims for Essequibo, signaling the dawn of a new era in his country’s relations with Guyana with which it has had a longstanding border controversy.

“The Essequibo issue will

be removed from the framework of the social, political, economic relations between the two countries and we will tackle each issue from a different perspective based on mutual respect,” said President Hugo Chavez.

“The Venezuelan Government will not hinder any project to be conducted in (the Essequibo) whose purpose is to benefit the inhabitants of the area. By that I mean projects like water supply, communication roads, energy programmes, agricultural programmes.

“Any other sensitive projects that might be organized in the area, we are planning to immediately get in touch and review the projects together within the framework of the high level bilateral commission. We have to find the right way to tackle the problem,” The move was criticized by Former Venezuelan Attorney General, Jesus Petit Da Costa.

Da costa called Chavez a “traitor” for supposedly surrendering the southeastern Essequibo region of Guyana, which has been traditionally claimed by Venezuela.

“Chavez is doing the same as President Guzman, when he sold the Guajira and Casanare (western) Venezuela to the Colombians in exchange for joining his family to European nobility ... this time Chavez did it in exchange for a vote in the Organization of American States (OAS).”

Chavez’s move allowed Guyana to go ahead with developing the disputed region (two-thirds of Guyana).

At the end of discussions with his Guyanese counterpart nine years ago, the former Venezuelan leader said that things have changed drastically from the “imperialist” thinking of the past and Venezuela now has “no kind of sentiment against Guyana whatsoever.”

Evidence of the closer cooperation between the two countries were the cancellation of US$12.5M of the debt Guyana owed Venezuela, and the undertaking by President Chavez to favourably consider adjusting to terms and conditions of the Caracas Energy Cooperation Accord to make it compatible with Guyana’s obligations under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.

Chavez and Jagdeo had also agreed to pursue poverty alleviation as well as infrastructure projects under the Hemispheric Integration Project.

Chavez had stated during his 2004 visit to Guyana.Before his struggle

President Chavez talks to media operatives on arrival at the UNASUR summit in Guyana in 2009 with cancer, he appeared on television almost daily, frequently speaking for hours and breaking into song or philosophical discourse. He often wore the bright red of his United Socialist Party o f Ve n e z u e l a , o r t h e fatigues and red beret of his army days. He had donned the same uniform in 1992 while leading an ill-fated coup attempt that first landed him in jail and then launched his political career.

The rest of the world watched as the country with the world’s biggest proven oil reserves took a turn to the left under its u n c o n v e n t i o n a l l e a d e r, w h o c o n sidered himself above all else a revolutionary.

“I’m still a subversive,” the p r e s i d e n t t o l d T h e Associated Press in a 2007 interview, recalling his days as a rebel soldier. “I think the entire world has to be subverted.”

Chavez also was inspired by his mentor Fidel Castro and took on the Cuban leader’s role as Washington’s chief antagonist in the Western Hemisphere after the ailing Castro turned over the presidency to his brother Raul in 2006. Like Castro, Chavez vilified U.S.-style capitalism while forming alliances throughout Latin America and with distant powers such as Russia, China and Iran.

Supporters eagerly raised Chavez to the pantheon of revolutionary legends ranging from Castro to Argentine-born rebel Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Chavez nurtured that cult of personality, and even as he stayed out of sight for long stretches fighting cancer, his out-sized image appeared on buildings and billboard throughout Venezuela. The airwaves boomed with his baritone mantra: “I am a nation.” Supporters carried posters and wore masks of

his eyes, chanting, “I am Chavez.”

In the battles Chavez waged at home and abroad, he captivated his base by championing his country’s poor.

Chavez carried his inyour-face style to the world stage as well. In a 2006 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he called President George W.

Bush the devil, saying the podium reeked of sulphur after the U.S. president’s address.

At a summit in 2007, he repeatedly called Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar a fascist, prompting Spain’s King Juan Carlos to snap, “Why don’t you shut up?”

Critics saw Chavez as a

typical Latin American caudillo, a strongman who ruled through force of personality and showed disdain for democratic rules.

Chavez concentrated power in his hands with allies who dominated the congress and justices who controlled the Supreme Court.

“El Comandante,” as he (Continued on page 14)

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Kaieteur News

Kaieteur News Printed and Published by National Media & Publishing Company Ltd. 24 Saffon Street, Charlestown, Georgetown, Guyana.

Publisher: GLENN LALL Editor: Adam Harris Tel: 225-8465, 225-8491. Fax: 225-8473, 226-8210

Letters... Where your views make the news Letters...

Guyana’s airport upgrade and no International carriers DEAR EDITOR,

EDITORIAL

Experience with China

There have been criticisms of China’s involvement in Guyana’s recent development drive and also some responses, both official and unofficial, to those comments. China’s involvement in Africa predates ours and their experience might serve as a useful background for us.

Peter Eigen is a member of the Africa Progress Panel, chaired by Kofi Annan. He is the founder and chair of the Advisory Council, Transparency International, and chairman of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Below are extracts from his article, “Is China good or bad for Africa?”

“China’s growing presence in Africa is one of the region’s biggest stories, but even seasoned analysts cannot decide whether this booming relationship is good or bad for Africa. Critics say Chinese strategy is entirely selfpromotional, aimed at maintaining access to Africa’s precious mineral resources even when that means propping up odious governments. China’s supporters say the Asian superpower is strictly neutral and business-oriented, preferring to generate economic growth not a dangerous dependency on aid. China has certainly been contributing to Africa’s economic growth, both in terms of trade and with building infrastructure. All over the continent, it has built roads, railways, ports, airports, and more, filling a critical gap that western donors have been shy to provide and unblocking major bottlenecks to growth.

Meanwhile, bilateral trade between Africa and China continues to grow at an extraordinary pace, reaching $160 billion in 2011 from just $ 9 billion in 2000.

But some 90 percent of Sino-African trade is still based around natural resources – oil, ores, and minerals.

And exports of natural resources by themselves do not help Africa to develop as we can see from the examples of Nigeria and Angola, Sub-Saharan Africa’s two largest oil exporters.

First, oil and mining are not labour intensive industries.

So while natural resources may create impressive headline growth figures, they do not necessarily translate into widespread job creation.

So what else could Africa and China do so that Africa benefits more from its growing relationship with China?

For a start, African countries could diversify their economies as much as possible away from supplying unprocessed natural resources to China. This will make them less dependent on the vagaries of both the Chinese economy and the ups and downs of global commodity prices. African nations should also prepare for the day when they no longer have natural resources to sell. At the Africa Progress Panel, we talk about transforming natural resource wealth into human capital, by investing revenues into health and education. Second, African countries need to encourage Chinese investment into more labour intensive sectors.

Africa’s population is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and job creation is a top priority. If Africa cannot create jobs to keep up with the growth of its workforce, then we can expect to see a large and growing population of frustrated, jobless youth.

Third, African countries could negotiate better terms with Chinese investors, including quality control and better linkages with local economies. African governments could urge China to improve market access for African goods overseas, for example in trade fora such as the World Trade Organization. The IMF estimates the average import tariff faced by low-income countries in Africa in the BRICS at 13 percent – around three times the level in the United States and the European Union (which also operate a range of non-tariff barriers). On quality, observers describe shoddy workmanship in a range of Chinese investments from crumbling walls in a Chinese-built hospital in Angola, enormous potholes in Ghanaian and Zambian roads, and a leaking roof in the African Union’s new $ 200 million headquarters opened in January. Fairly or unfairly, many in Africa complain that Chinese projects do not employ enough Africans or do enough to transfer skills and technology.

The reality is that this will vary from project to project. But at the Africa Progress Panel we view job creation as a priority issue for Africa’s development. Skills development has a major role to play in this respect.

And when Africans are employed, working conditions are sometimes substandard. Human Rights Watch reports dangerous work conditions in Zambian mines.”

As old folks say, “Hint a Beneba mek Quashiba tek notice”.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Guyana, a developing country with a vast interior doesn’t have a national carrier and is spending about US$200 million to modernize and extend the runway of its international airport. And without a realistic master plan, the country hopes to become an aviation hub in Northern South America .

Interestingly, Guyana is struggling to attract reputable international carriers. Adding to the woes of Guyana ’s aviation industry was the decision to award Caribbean Airlines (CAL) flag carrier status which caught everyone by surprise.

It was a hasty decision shrouded in secrecy and lacked transparency. So where is the justification to modernize and expand Guyana ’s international airport, CJIA and naming CAL Guyana’s national carrier?

This could be the moment for the government to get back into the airline business through a joint venture with Suriname Airways (SLM) or Liat but this may never happen because CAL is now Guyana ’s national carrier.

There are all sorts of speculations as to why Delta Airline is leaving Guyana. The government of Guyana denies that it’s the flag carrier status granted to CAL. Delta claims that it is low passenger load and CAL ’s subsidized fuel that led to its decision to end its service to Guyana . At the same time, Minister Irfaan Ally said to the press that

Guyana is keen to take up the subsidy issue.

Strangely, why would that be an issue for Guyana ? It’s the fuel subsidy that CAL receives that keep fares low for Guyanese. However, that will lead to other carriers such as Delta and Suriname Airways leaving the Guyana market soon.

Caribbean Airlines operates 39 weekly Boeing 737-800s flights from Georgetown, including 36 flights to Port of Spain and three flights to Barbados, five Boeing 767-300 non –stop flights to New York and three Non-Stop to Toronto , taking about 75 per cent of the Guyana market since the demise of Red Jet. CAL is poised to take about 80 per cent of the market when Delta pulls out of Guyana in May. Considering this and the large fuel subsidy that CAL receives from the Government of Trinidad, it’s hard for small airlines such as Fly Jamaica, Red Jet or Surinam Airways to survive the Guyana market.

CAL is accused of driving airlines out of the Caribbean .

Chief Secretary of the Tobago House of Assembly, Orville London, speaking on the issue of Tobago ’s tourism industry this week said he was not comfortable with the role Caribbean Airlines (CAL) was playing. He said that “CAL was using its subsidies from the central government to introduce predatory pricing on routes into T&T, deterring foreign airlines from bringing people to Tobago.” This could very well be the reason

why Delta is leaving Guyana and SLM maybe next.

In my previous letter to Stabroek News, dated December 25, 2012, I asked the following: “ CAL may very well do as it pleases because the Government of Guyana will now protect the North American routes and the POS-GT Bridge . What agreement did the two parties sign? How does this affect Delta and Suriname Airways, and future carriers plying the North American routes?

What recourse does the government have if CAL disappoints the Guyanese people?”

Well one thing is for sure, Delta is terminating its service to Guyana and CAL is yet to station aircrafts at CJIA connecting Guyana to Brazil and Lethem.

A Developing Country like Guyana with a vast interior needs a national carrier even if that means servicing domestic and regional routes only.

The PPP Regime rants about the growing tourism industry. One wonders how many local Guyanese can afford to fly domestically.

However, CAL had promised the PPP Regime that it would service at least Lethem from what information was shared with the media. This hasn’t happened yet.

And locals can’t afford to fly with private domestic carriers unless their families who are visiting from North America pay for them. Thus, it’s an empty promise that the

PPP Regime is serious about opening the country’s frontiers.

I had asked, “Were SLM and Delta consulted before this agreement with CAL was made? The PPP/C regime begged SLM to return to Guyana . How does this affect SLM’s plans to expand into Northern Brazil, New York and Toronto from Guyana ?”

It is very clear now that Freedom House kept SLM, Delta and LIAT in the dark about granting CAL flag carrier status. Now how embarrassing it is that the PPP Regime approached SLM to service the New York route that Delta will drop. Really, does this administration consult or think before it acts?

In addition, the future of Fly Jamaica, the new upstart airline that plans to fly to Guyana is very uncertain.

Guyana is and will not be a tourist destination in the near future. Further, there are no migrant workers who travel back and forth between Guyana , Toronto , Miami and New York , thus, reputable air carriers such as JetBlue may not fly to Guyana .

The Guyana load is seasonal and the country has little tourist infrastructure to be marketed as a tourist destination. Further, and above all, because of high crime rate, violence and constant political turmoil in Guyana , tourism is unlikely to take off. Guyanese going back home are not tourists.

Ray Chickrie

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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Letters... Where your views make the news Letters... Where your views make the news

DEAR EDITOR, I want to begin this letter by sympathizing with the victims of the brutal attack on their person by outlaws, masquerading as members of the Guyana Police Force, at the Marudi Mountains right here in Region Nine.

Secondly, I condemn in the strongest terms possible, the actions of those rogue cops. They should face the fullest brunt of the very law they have sworn to uphold.

I was out of the Region and only got back (2013-0304) to be met with the news of the beating. My initial reaction was to visit the area immediately to ascertain the facts. I changed my mind when I learnt that most of the main persons in this sordid episode were on their way to Lethem.

I met with them (this morning) and was able to get a firsthand account of what actually transpired. I met the woman who was beaten; I

met her 12-year-old son, whose left leg was heavily bandaged, and who was having difficulties standing up, much less to walk; I met her elder son who used his body as a human shield to prevent his mother from getting more lashes, and who exhibited abrasions to his hands, legs, back and buttocks. His right hand was also heavily bandaged.

I met another miner, Otillo Pereira, who also was part of the human shield around the besieged woman. I was also able to view the video recordings made of the incident.

I was overcome with emotion and rage at the mercilessness of the ranks involved. They set upon a grown woman as if she were their child. While the Corporal was unleashing his blows, the other ranks and two other miners stood guard with weapons cocked and at the ready.

Mr. Editor, I shudder to think what would have been the outcome had those miners retaliated. Certainly, we would have read the usual cock-and-bull story how the ranks were attacked with cutlasses and guns. These guns would have been displayed in the newspapers as evidence.

Hence the miners must be commended for their peaceful stance even in the face of death.

The Marudi situation goes back a long way. When I was District Development Officer in Aishalton between 1991 and 1992, I met mining activities at Marudi. I am certain those activities were there long before my arrival there. In those days, Romanex allowed the miners access to the area since they recognized that the surrounding communities needed some sort of economic activities for their sustenance. There was never

KWAYANA IS DISTURBED DEAR EDITOR, When Mr. Eusi Kwayana fires, his aim is not to disarm but to ensure specific objectives are achieved.

Speaker Raphael Trotman of the opposition AFC has justifiably ruled that the Home Affairs Minister has every constitutional legal right to speak in parliament.

No longer would he be subjected to a “Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son Clement, gagged by the opposition in parliament, with one shoe off, and one shoe on, by Trotman’s grace all now gone”.

The opposition wanted him gagged because of Linden not Agricola. Enter Mr. Kwayana as the supreme judge to hold Mr. Rohee all over again responsible for all Linden’s wickedness where three lives were needlessly lost. In a letter to the SN on 2/22/13 titled “the lack of comment on Minister Rohee’s conduct after the Linden shooting is disturbing” the ancient Mighty Echo awakens to bring a Daniel to judgement. He wants his pound of flesh.

(Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice).

Those commuters, mostly Indian people harassed at Agricola, are not his concern.

Has Mr. Kwayana awakened from a sleeping sickness? Or is he sleepless after finding Guyanese apathetic with “the lack of comment on the Minister’s conduct after (finding) the (Linden) shooting is disturbing”?

A commission of Inquiry has met and all evidence has

been presented. Why this harkening back hubbub? Mr. Kwayana better be careful. He may be found complicit in the deaths of those Lindeners and guilty for all the destruction inclusive of Agricola.

Mr. Kwayana proclaims that “whenever and wherever there is a fatal shooting by the police, the Minister of Home Affairs cannot be left out”. So who is guilty of aiding and abetting, organizing, inciting and now disturbingly condoning rioting at Linden and Agricola? Is the Home Affairs Minister automatically guilty because he is sworn to preserve law and order and also guilty of causing the ensuing mayhem?

California, Kwayana, cannot be clearer than asserting the right to break the law without facing the consequences. Overnight a lawyer, he quotes the Police Act “to me the fact that the Minister was not on the spot is not important. He does not have to be on the spot to be responsible. The President charged the Minister with responsibility for the police under Article 107. The Minister cannot escape political and constitutional responsibility.

The Police Act says, “The Commissioner shall subject to the general orders and directions of the Minister have the command and supervision of the Force and shall be responsible to the Minister for peace and good order throughout Guyana.”

(Section 6).”

Then he does a quick

about turn demurringly conceding “this is not on the face of it criminal responsibility. Evidence must establish criminal responsibility.”

Mr. Kwayana is, of course, also, again very disturbed that the PPP/C government democratically held talks with the top leadership of the PNC who control Linden. Arising from the ashen smoky haze comes forth Mr. Kwayana’s shrill legendary wisdom, after the fact, that the PPP/C government should have dealt directly with the Linden rabble instead of their PNC leaders.

He fumes that the PPP/C “government had been in office for 20 years and should have known the proper (sic) Region 10 authorities to bargain with, rather than bargain with proxies” What makes him more representative and lesser a proxy by this misplaced fretting? Keeping hope or hate alive?

What Mr. Kwayana is questioning is the internal PNC right to decide who legitimately speaks for them.

All Guyanese will come under Mr. Kwayana’s brimstone and fire cognizant that the obvious transparent objective of his fusillade aims directly for a ricochet to eventually target the Linden Commission of Inquiry report.

What does the village sage discern peering at his looking glass from afar that so disturbs?

Respectfully, Sultan Mohamed

ever any conflict between the miners and Romanex. Any conflict was between and among the miners themselves.

This situation changed recently, when a new company took over. The management of the company formed an alliance with one Orlando Wong, a miner like anyone else, and it was through the instigation of this now greedy miner that the company decided to severe its relationships with the miners.

Wong would engage in raiding the claims of the company in the absence of management, so the other miners followed suit.

Naturally, Wong would be privy to the arrival of the managers of the company, and he would, unknowing to his colleagues, withdraw his operations from the claim. He would then report to his new bosses that the other miners were raiding. Naturally, the company sought to have the miners evicted.

President Ramotar, on a recent visit to Aishalton, met with the miners and promised to look into the issue of having adequate lands is

made available to the small miners so that they could continue their work to support their families and to meet obligations to the bank among others.

It seems as though the police, mining officials and the company have pre-empted the President’s action on the matter. In fact, when this was explained to the police, and all of this is on video, the police, in some of the vilest language possible, stated that he does not work with the President, and that the President cannot give him orders.

If that is so, then surely the President is not in control of things in this country, certainly he is not in control of the security forces of which he is the Commander-in Chief.

One has to view the recordings to appreciate the gravity of the incident.

Further to this is the fact that the police forced two young Amerindian miners to dismantle camps, that was after they too received a sound trashing from the cops.

It was reported that one of them ran away and the cops fired a few shots at him.

In view of this incident, I am calling on the President himself to state what plans he has to ensure that miners in general, and the Marudi miners in particular, can continue their activities to ensure that they can lead normal lives minus the harassment of the security forces, some of whom seem to be totally out of control.

I am also calling on the Commissioner of Police to ensure that the cops involved be severely disciplined. A custodial punishment would be the minimum. I would also like to see the prosecution of the non-military persons in this matter.

For one it has to be established whether or not the guns they so boldly brandished are licensed, and if so those licenses should be revoked immediately.

If the guns are not licensed, then we have a clear cut case of illegal possession.

The outcome of this matter will determine whether the government is in control; or, is it the lawless and powerful?

Yours sincerely, Carl Parker Regional Councillor

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Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Letters... Where your views make the news Letters... Where your views make the news

DEAR EDITOR, I found your editorial of 3/4/13 to be nebulous with regard to the definition and use of the word legacy, and rather cavalier in the attribution of credit for the genesis of Guyana’s independence movement.

Legacies in any context have to be viewed as passed-on measurable personal and p r o f e s s i o n a l accomplishments/ achievements, or lack thereof, that affect individuals and societies.

And, as will be noted later, legacies with societal effects, such as those left by politicians, cannot be easily obliterated because they are disregarded or neglected by their political inheritors. So while I agree that Marxism should guide any analysis of Cheddi Jagan’s disappointing legacy, because he claimed reliance upon Marxism to determine his personal and professional contribution to our nation, I disagree that his legacy is Marxism or that his “legacy is dead” because of

the failure of the consciously corrupt minority PPP government to embrace Marxism.

I am no fan of Mr. Jagan because of his and the PPP’s rancid hypocrisy on democracy in Guyana and communist countries. He and his PPP gladly used their freedom of travel and speech under the PNC to wail about rigged elections in Guyana even as they gladly supported travel and speech restrictions and vote rigging in communist countries.

Nevertheless, if his legacy is dead for the reasons you posit, then so are the societal-enhancing legacies of every parent who ever raised several good children but ended up with some that chose a life of crime.

For while we wouldn’t mind a comparison of our legacy with that of others, we would reject any attempt to declare our legacy as being dead based on a conflation of our non-criminal actions with the criminal actions of our children or other relatives.

We must look at the effects of Mr. Jagan’s actions

on our nation for his legacy and cannot conflate Mr. Jagan’s disappointing legacy with the odious one being built by the consciously corrupt inheritors of his party.

Mr. Jagan was known for his political use of the race card as much as he was known for his embrace of Marxism.

And his and Forbes Burnham’s use of the race card has had tragic consequences for our nation.

The consciously corrupt minority government learned the use of the race card from Mr. Jagan, and uses it at every opportunity it gets.

No one fails to see how much better our country would have been if Forbes Burnham and Mr. Jagan had failed to use the race card. So, in my view, aspects of Mr. Jagan’s disappointing legacy are alive and well because race relations in our country could at times be seen as a ticking time-bomb.

Mr. Jagan’s disappointing legacy is also evident in the disdain with which PPP complaints of PNC rigging are greeted by knowledgeable

people. Mr. Jagan in August of 1968 refused to condemn the crushing of democratic reforms by the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia, but was in December 1968 hollering about PNC vote rigging in Guyana.

On the positive side, is Mr. Jagan’s education legacy really dead because the consciously corrupt PPP minority government has been running the University of Guyana into the ground?

No! Given his founding role in the university, every UG graduate and all they have achieved because of their UG degree can be claimed as part of that legacy. Thus many aspects (both negative and positive) of Jagan’s legacy are alive and will be for a very long time.

Prior to delving into Mr.

Jagan’s nebulously defined legacy, your editorial further caught my interest when it used the contestable article “the” in addressing Mr. Jagan’s founding role in the PPP and the independence movement. The editorial stated that Mr. Jagan was “the founder of the PPP and the independence movement.”

Every knowledgeable person knows that Mr. Jagan was “a” rather than “the” founder of both modern groups, but I am here concerned with the independence movement.

The term “independence movement” is not reflexively associated with slave rebellions, let alone leading to an association of slaves with the quest for national independence.

But if the slave rebellions

in Guyana and such places as Haiti weren’t about national independence, then rather than rightly saying that Columbus was probably among the first Europeans to visit and see the New World, I insist on peddling the preposterous claim that Columbus discovered the New World, even though he met natives on arrival, and Inca and Aztec civilizations had been built and destroyed in the New World long before any European ever imagined that there was a New World.

Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, and other educated local elites played their roles in our nation’s drive for national independence. But those roles must always be placed in their proper perspective.

Lionel Lowe

Rendered dumb by calypso ban DEAR EDITOR, The reported banning of the year’s calypsos, or some of them from the government’s radio station or radio and TV stations is a denial of freedom of expression in art. I had the pleasure of listening to De Professor.

I wonder what most frightened the government in it. I ask myself, Is this a rumour? Can it be true? This is not the police now. This is cabinet rank. “ Who appointed anybody in the Cabinet to decide these things?

Some two years ago, or

less, when the columnist Freddie Kissoon described the PPP/C regime as fascist, I said to myself, “Hello.”

Calypso is one of the liberating forms of art, in song, developed in the ranks of the much slogan -eered working people.

Is this judgment not a part of the work of the Board of the Broadcast Authority?

Here again, don’t we have a second command?

I was lucky to hear the Minister of Culture, a young Guyanese man, declaring open a new drama school.

I waited to hear some young insights. Nothing, nothing at all about theatre or

drama. And they are taking decisions on where to bury and where the people want a monument. They have heavy boots.

There are many signs that somebody somewhere is not at ease with people’s voices.

Many of us remember “Tell the Prime Minister” before the PPP staged “The return to democracy.”

I bring these things up to show what has not changed.

I speak only for myself. I know others will have much more sense to say. I am dumb, speechless.

money of this country which was used to train and instill discipline in them.

2) The apparent plan to take over the legion by force, initially by spreading misinformation about the current executives using emails, posters and other derogatory means.

3) Disrespect of the legion’s building and Executive Members by using profane language, throwing of water, drinks on an executive member by female soldiers, refusal of Ex GDF males to take off headwear in the building, threats to do

executive members harm.

4) However, point to note, there were ex -GDF members, who displayed their professional training and should disassociate themselves from the menagerie to which they find themselves connect.

5) The gallant men and women gave their lives to WWI and WWII must be thoroughly disgusted at the blatant indiscipline of the ex soldiers and must be turning in their graves.

6) If any lesson was learnt by all the points mentioned, then if the ex GDF cabal takes over the Legion, may God help us all, the legion members, by the way when ex is placed in front of anything, it simply means it is not anymore, e.g. ex-wife, exhusband, ex-prisoner, exsoldier. I hope sincerely those ex-soldiers do not become ex -people or ex- human beings by their behavior.

Respectfully, Eusi Kwayana

Taking over the Legion DEAR EDITOR, What should been an election for a new executive of the Guyana Legion on the February 24, 2013 became nothing short of a national disgrace.

Members of the Ex -GDF Association who applied to join the Legion probably thought that by joining the en bloc, might have got votes to install their executives of choice. No problem there but these points stood out clear.

1) Those Ex- GDF Members have literally squandered us taxpayers’

Legionnaire

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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Letters... Where your views make the news Letters... Where your views make the news

Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act must be fully implemented Eighteen years ago, in the context of a health crisis in which septic and incomplete abortions accounted for the third and eighth largest causes respectively of admission to public hospitals in Guyana, a network of women’s groups, health professionals and human rights activists engaged in a wide-ranging debate advocating for legislation to address unsafe and unregulated abortions.

The end result was the enactment of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTPA) in 1995.

The reasons and purpose for the enactment of the MTPA are as relevant and current today as they were in 1995. They are threefold: to enhance the dignity and sanctity of life by reducing the incidence of induced abortions, to enhance the attainment of safe motherhood by eliminating deaths and complications due to unsafe abortions and to prescribe the circumstances in which any woman who voluntarily and in good faith wishes to terminate her pregnancy may lawfully do so.

The death of Karen Badal, a mother of two, on 31st December, 2011, at the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH) from a perforated uterus and acute peritonitis following a botched abortion performed by an uncertified doctor at his private office on the lower East Coast, tragically exposed the ineffective implementation of the MTPA. This maternal death could and should have been avoided.

We may never know how many other women in Guyana have died as a result of backstreet abortions. What we do know is that, according to the Ministry of Health Assessment of Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care in Maternity Facilities 2010 (the EmONC report), released in 2012, severe abortion

complications are the fourth leading cause of maternal deaths in Guyana and that approximately a third of all terminations of pregnancy are incomplete (botched), in some cases with severe complications, and all requiring post-abortion medical care. There was also one recorded maternal death from severe abortion complications during the report survey period.

The EmONC report also confirms that even though 99.6% of terminations are done at private hospitals, treatment for 70 per cent of incomplete abortions takes place at public hospitals.

These data need some explanation as they do not coincide with or track the large number of terminations performed at private doctors’ offices and clinics throughout Guyana.

The data also seem to suggest that the private hospitals are responsible for the remaining 30 per cent of incomplete abortions requiring further medical care, even though the same report cites only one recorded termination of pregnancy for the East Berbice/Corentyne area, but 130 terminations required post-abortion care.

The report also indicates that, in 83 per cent of all cases, there was no record kept of the trimester in which the termination occurred. In spite of the MTPA, the report identifies termination of pregnancy in the second trimester as the least available individual medical service in all public health facilities.

We welcome the statements made last month

by Minister of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran, and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Shamdeo Persaud, that the Ministry of Health: (1) Plans to make terminations available in the public health system; (2) Is currently embarked on a mission to raise awareness among women about the medical termination of pregnancies, targeting in

particular young girls; (3) Will be making efforts to improve current methodologies from dilation and curettage (D&C) to much safer manual vacuum evacuation, and (4) Will conduct training, certification and gazetting of the doctors certified to perform medical termination of pregnancies.

We call for these statements to be put into effect without delay and for the relevant authorities to expeditiously take all necessary action to: 1. Conduct a full and expeditious investigation into the death of Karen Badal.

2. Ensure that in future full investigations of all septic or other complications from uncertified abortions are conducted and that appropriate disciplinary action is taken against unauthorised medical practitioners.

3. Reduce the number of incomplete abortions that lead to increased maternal morbidity and mortality by ensuring access to reproductive health services, including the right to safe and affordable terminations within both the public and private health sectors.

4. Monitor the application and efficacy of regulations made under the MTPA in relation to: a. The conditions for authorisation of registered medical practitioners to perform terminations. b. The conditions for approval of institutions to perform terminations. c. The maintenance and submission of records of terminations. d. Pre- and posttermination counselling services.

5. Conduct and publish an assessment of currently available reproductive health services, including: a. The current number of doctors working in the public and private health sectors who are qualified to

DEAR EDITOR An article in the Guyana Times newspaper of Tuesday March 5 headlined ‘Aircraft body roasts KN over article on Gouveia’ is so petty, it is disgusting.

However, a clearing of the air is in order. While the erstwhile Aircraft Owners Association of Guyana would like to paint Mr. Gouveia as being far better than sliced bread, maybe a keen check

into history would reveal a collage which may have a taint or two.

That being said, please let us correct the records – owning an airline and being a pilot does not qualify one to be one of the most informed aviators in Guyana.

There are informed Aviators who have decided to remain quiet and let the fools be passed further on.

Also, please do not derail

the history about ‘main medevacuation’. I am from the Hinterland and I can attest to the fact that, years before Roraima Airways, there was Air Services Limited (Yacoob Ally) that did evacuations at any hour, day or night, with or without pay.

So, AOAG, hold off on the halo and wings – there are no free dinners with your golden boy.

Hinterland resident

DEAR EDITOR,

On a Point of Order

perform terminations. b. The names and addresses of MTPAauthorised medical practitioners and MTPAapproved institutions. c. The annual numbers of incomplete abortions since 2003 and the types of complications.

6. Review the composition and work done by the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Board, with a view to improving its capacity to effectively monitor implementation of the MTPA. 7. Ensure the availability of mandatory emergency contraception for

all female victims of rape and incest of all ages at all hospitals so that they are not burdened with an unwanted pregnancy.

8. Ensure that emergency contraception is also made available at all health centres and hospitals so as to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies leading to terminations.

9. C o n d u c t investigations into the hundreds of cases of other women who, after the enactment of the MTPA in 1995, ended up at the GPHC or other regional hospitals with septic or other

complications from uncertified backstreet abortions, and where the doctors performing these abortions were named, investigate and take necessary action against them as outlined in the Medical Practitioners Act. Yours faithfully, Danuta Radzik, Mother, Woman & Child Rights Activist, Andaiye, Leila Jagdeo, Reverend Pat Sheerattan-Bisnauth, Minister, Guyana Presbyterian Church, Joy Marcus and 46 others

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Wednesday March 06, 2013

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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THE OPPOSITION IS NOT GOING TO HOLD THE POLICE ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHAT HAPPENED IN LINDEN Imagine that you lose something from your yard.

You do not know who took it, but you were told that a certain character was seen leaving the yard and he was the only one that left the yard.

While you may not be able to prove that this individual was the one who took the item, you would suspect that it had to be him and therefore would want to hold him responsible for the disappearance of the item.

This is the same type of reasoning that was employed by the Commission of Inquiry into the events of July 18, 2012, at Linden, which led to the deaths of three individuals.

The Commission could not prove who fired the shots that led to the deaths of the men. But based on the evidence led, the police were seen on the scene with weapons and had used those weapons. No ballistic tests, however, could link the police to the actual shots that killed the men. And as such, it cannot be proven that the police killed the men.

However, the Commission reasoned that since the police were the only ones seen with weapons, then the fatal shots had to have been fired by them. As such, the police were believed to have been responsible, but the Commission could not prove this, they could only express a belief.

That sort of conclusion is not going to hold up in any

criminal prosecution of anyone where the standard of proof is beyond reasonable doubt. But it may hold up in civil proceedings, where there is a mere requirement of proof, based on a balance of probabilities.

The Commission has made some “awards” which are really recommended because the commission was only required to recommend.

And these sums have been criticized as being too low. It must however be noted that these awards were made by eminent jurists who would have been familiar with how the courts arrive at compensation in similar cases.

Usually in making an assessment about such matters, the courts would consider a number of factors: the age of the person and their earnings at the time of their deaths. While the individual sum of three million which was recommended may seem low, given that the police cannot be held legally liable for the deaths, then the awards may not have been that low after all.

And an additional factor to consider is that the commission could not have awarded exemplary damages, because it could not prove that the police shot the three men. Had exemplary damages been considered, the sums awarded would have been significantly higher. Those damages, however, were never really possible

Dem boys seh...

Adios Compañero Chavez Old people does always seh that is de good does die young. That ain’t always de case because dem had some young bandits who dead and de only people who woulda claim that dem was good was dem mother.Dem also had some crazy driver and some mad motorcyclist who dead young.

Dem kill nuff people wid dem madness.

Well Hugo Chavez dead. He too was a young man. He was only 58. Of course dem got people who gun cuss he because he refuse to bow to dem. Some of these people call he dictator and some call he tyrant. Fuh a tyrant he had de whole country behind he, suh de people had to love this tyrant. When Chavez come to power one of de first thing he do was to stop the nonsense about Venezuela owning twothirds of Guyana. He come till to Georgetown and mek a statement that Guyana ain’t got to worry about any invasion.

That is how Guyana end up wid de Amaila Falls project in Essequibo. De first time Guyana try wid a hydro in de same Essequibo, Venezuela kick up a stink till it even block money fuh de project. This time Venezuela didn’t even try fuh tell we who must invest and who mustn’t.

Dem boys remember de same Chavez know that Guyana didn’t got money fuh buy all de oil it need fuh run GPL and dem car. Chavez tell Jagdeo that he got oil and that all he got to do is pay 10 per cent and Guyana can pay de rest when dem grandchildren get big. He call it de Petro Caribe fund.

That is how Guyana end up wid nuff money so that people coulda thief. That is de only bad thing Chavez do fuh Guyana.

He gone and Guyana got to wonder who gun tek over. De next man might tell Guyana that he ain’t Chavez. De hydro ain’t even get off de ground yet and anything can happen.

Before Chavez come pun de scene, de Venezuelans tek over de whole of Ankoko. When he come all that nonsense done.

He was a good man to Guyana.

Talk half and pray fuh he soul.

considering what took place on July 18, last, when there was a stand-off between the protesters and the police.

In the report itself there were serious criticisms about internal procedures within the Guyana Police Force and certain recommendations were made, including the need for a management audit. The commission seemed to be leaning in the direction that there were operational deficiencies within the police

force and while these did not lead to the deaths of the men, they did frustrate a thorough investigation.

The problem of management and operational deficiencies cannot be laid at the feet of the policy-making because policy makers are not responsible for these problems. Yet the opposition in this country wanted the neck of the Home Affairs Minister.

They passed a motion

after the unrest and demanded the resignation of the minister. Yet, they never at any stage called for anyone in the hierarchy of the police force to be held responsible.

They wanted to jump several levels and go straight to the persons who hold no operational responsibility.

And you can bet that despite the deficiencies pointed out in the report of the Commission of Inquiry that they are not going to

demand the neck of anyone in the Guyana Police Force.

They will continue to insist that the minister should go.

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Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

=== THE FREDDIE KISSOON COLUMN ===

Chavez, populism and inevitable confrontationist Hugo Chavez is dead.

What is his legacy? Chavez’s approach to power and economics is nothing new. In political theory, he came within the tradition that is known as populism. The list of populists is long. Populism has its roots in late 19th century Europe.

Its most infamous practitioner was Benito Mussolini. In the group are some famous names including Nasser from Egypt and Peron from Argentina.

In the scholarly literature, populism is benign dictatorship. It is essentially a politico-economic programme in which the State uses an extensive welfare system to benefit the poor, but the leader encapsulates himself in the clothes of the Roman emperor where he adopts messianic postures.

As the funds of the State dry up so do the benefits to the poor. As dissent emerges, so does dictatorship. The leader refuses to concede

changes. He refuses to tolerate an open society. The result is dictatorship which in some cases is mild (Nasser and Peron), in others, weird (Gaddafi) while in others, it is very violent (Cuba).

Populism inevitably ends up being more morbidly unfree than the capitalist system it removes, of which Chavez and Castro are egregious examples. Castro attempted a coup against Batista and failed. He was jailed for a few years. When

he became President of Cuba, he executed countless persons who attempted to overthrow him. Chavez tried a coup against a legally elected government and it didn’t succeed. He was placed under house arrest, not executed.

Since he became President, Chavez arrested dozens, including top level army officers who are still languishing in jail without trial.

Populism’s main strength

lies in its criticism of existing capitalism. Mainstream rightwing pro-business governments seldom withstand the onslaught of populist campaigns. Hugo Chavez literally had it made.

He rallied against modern capitalist oligarchy in oil-rich Venezuela where petrodollars benefited the wealthy classes only.

Under the oligarchic party system in Venezuela, every five years the traditional parties changed hands, but the economic system remained the same. In preChavez Venezuela, statistics showed a yearly deterioration in the distribution system of wealth that negatively impacted the poor. In other words, the rich got richer the poor got poorer.

In campaigning for the presidency, Chavez was the rebirth of Peron, Castro, Nasser, Nkrumah and the long line of populist 20th century leaders who came to power in order to rid their country of poverty. He was virtually unbeatable and handsomely won the election.

Not surprisingly, his first major political act was to abolish the term limit on the presidency. It is really sickening how these populist leaders denigrate their capitalist opponents who hold free elections and vanish into history after they lose, but the populist dictators are literally intoxicated with prospects of permanent reign.

Castro fell just months short of attaining fifty years in power.

The balance sheet of Chavez is hardly impressive and that is because his approach to development was fundamentally patriarchal and clientelistic (clientilism has a long history in Latin American politics). He used oil money to fund programmes for the poor and build an international image for himself. But like most of his predecessors development suffered, because there were no structural changes in the economy, no industrialisation.

Frederick Kissoon When balance of payments problems step in, poverty alleviation is the first casualty. Chavez learnt nothing from the fifty-yearold mess that is Cuba today.

After fifty years in power, the Castro brothers in 2012 discovered that the economy can’t spend what it does not earn. If you keep sharing out money without more coming in, it will dry up one day. This is not how development works.

Chavez learnt nothing from the mistakes of Cuba, in that after fifty years, Cuba still remains a poor, Third World state that is millions of years behind Singapore and Malaysia.

In the last parliamentary elections, his party lost the popular vote, though he retained a majority in the National Assembly because of the ‘First Past the Post’ system. It was a rude awakening for him because populists are messianic dreamers who believe their population will always be in love with them.

On the political front, Venezuela under Chavez resembled any authoritarian country. The private media has been devastated. Trade union rights have been curtailed and a gamut of freedoms that the Venezuela people enjoyed under the oligarchic system, including (and particularly) judicial independence, have been destroyed by this tropical Mussolini.

The most unpleasant thing about populist leaders is the huge contempt they have for poor people – give them bread and milk and they will gladly take them in exchange for freedom. For people like Castro and Chavez, the poor want food not freedom.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

Page 11

GPL embracing new technology to combat persistent electricity theft The Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) is looking to take a highly technological approach to address the persistent challenge of electricity theft, according to Chief Executive Officer, Bharrat Dindyal during an interview with this publication.

This move comes in light of the fact that a whopping 5,000 cases of electricity theft were detected by the company during the past year. However, the GPL boss is convinced that there is a significant amount of theft that is still undetected.

“We think this is just the tip of the iceberg. We think there are a lot more and we think quite a bit of shenanigans are going on between persons who are part of our crews...” Dindyal speculated.

He disclosed that the Loss Reduction Department of GPL has over the years seen the highest turnover in the company which is linked to incoming reports of how the efforts were made to hurt the company and “we are taking action,” added the CEO. However, he observed that the incidence of theft

among new consumers has reduced with the advent of the prepaid meter, but generally there still remains a problem in this regard.

This is despite the fact that the platform on which “we are running the prepaid meter there are quite a few more things we can do in terms of tracking...”

“There are many ways we can keep an eye on you by using the prepaid platform and that is why I think people are trying to hack into that system,” disclosed Dindyal.

However, he noted that that system is highly secured as there are currently only two senior officials who have ultimate access and “could do things to hurt us, and they are very senior people.”

But in an attempt to further reduce the instances of electricity theft, the CEO disclosed plans for the launch of a pilot programme financed by the InterAmerican Development Bank.

This proposed programme, he said, is expected to target areas with high electricity theft and will be characterised by the introduction of new designs to curb such practices.

GPL Chief Executive Officer, Bharrat Dindyal “This will not only look at the network design using a more secure network sometimes called a fraudproof network, but we are looking at introducing the latest in metering technology, something called an Automatic Metering Infrastructure, which is more advanced than the prepaid that we are using,” Dindyal explained.

“The experience, internationally, no matter which country you are in, is that pleading with people

doesn’t work. They think you can’t do anything different when you plead and jailing them makes them your enemy.

So you have to introduce technology in a coordinated manner that allows you to get the intelligence to act on,” he added.

Once the Automatic Metering Infrastructure is installed it will be connected to the GPL’s Billing Department via wireless control.

This technology, according to Dindyal, would allow GPL officials to literally speak to the meter whenever the need arises.

“So what happens is that there is a platform there with a server that is running and that is tracking the meter all the time,” he expounded.

He noted too that the transformer that is serving the area will be metered as well as the customers connected to that transformer will be metered and its software will be tasked with looking at the amount of power that is going in while simultaneously recording how much is actually going to each customer. Moreover,

the system would be able to develop intelligence on each customer, thus it would be able to flag a particular customer when something is happening, hence an alert will be sent to GPL to check on this customer.

“In future we are looking to introduce this in a big way.

We are hoping we can go to this technology totally, so that when we come to your house we know exactly why we are coming there,” Dindyal asserted.

In fact, through this system customers would even be able to read their own meter information which can be corroborated by GPL. “When you come to us and you say ‘sorry my bill is not reflective of the meter reading’ we will be able to show you the meter reading,” the CEO insisted.

He anticipates that the pilot programme for this new technology could be in place as early as next year with some components being in place by the latter part of this year.

However, he is confident that in 2013 “we will have these new meters installed and people will be surprised that we can sit in the office and run comprehensive tests on their meters”.

With this newest technology being viewed as the solution to electricity theft, Dindyal is hopeful that it will allow GPL officials to check the customers’ meters from the office.

The system, according to him, will also guard against collaboration between technical officials and customers to tamper with the system. The meter, he explained, is outfitted with a motion sensor which could announce “‘somebody is playing with me’.”

Additionally, if attempts are made to jump the meter there is a circuit breaker within and “we could test the meter and if we say there is power it could say ‘my breaker is open’. So as the system runs, if you are an old customer we have a lot of historical information which will load unto the system and the system records the historic consumption.”

According to Dindyal, as soon as the system is connected to power it would instantly be able to relate historic trends and all the intelligence is fed into it, thereby allowing it to commence referencing customers’ information.

“If you are out of whack then we will flag you.”

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Kaieteur News

- dealers accuse company’s management of gross arrogance

By Dale Andrews Petrol dealers contracted to the Guyana Oil Company Limited (Guyoil) are up in arms over what they described as the arrogance displayed by the senior management of the stateowned oil company.

The situation stems from the company once again running out of fuel, especially gasoline, to supply its clients, most of whom have had to shut down operations and incur dire financial consequences.

The dealers have been without gasoline on and off for the past three weeks, and such is the alleged arrogance of the Guyoil management that the dealers do not even know when their fuel supply will be regularized.

They complain of having to join long queues with their trucks (those who have), only to be told after several hours of waiting that there was no gasoline. The dealers from the West Coast of Demerara to the West Coast of Berbice

put the blame squarely at the feet of the company’s new senior management, noting that “since they take over, this problem has been occurring.”

Most of the dealers have indicated that although they sell about 10,000 gallons of gasoline per week, the company has been limiting them to less than half of that amount, and since their business is heavily dependent on the volume of sales, the state of affairs has some of them facing bankruptcy, which could result in several persons becoming unemployed.

At least two of the dealers have indicated that for the past three weeks they were “fortunate” to get 4000 gallons of gasoline to start the week, and within two days, they have to be making excuses to customers after their supplies ran out.

“We suffer so much embarrassment; it’s as if we are managing our business badly when it’s the other way around. Customers come in and tell us things like ‘why

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Several privately-run Guyoil Fuel Stations have had to put up signs like thiS.

Guyoil’s Managing Director Badri Persaud you don’t sell out de gas station and tek de money and buy gas?’ “ one of the dealers explained.

The dealers disclosed that efforts to meet with the company’s Managing Director Badri Persaud and the Terminal Manager are always unsuccessful.

“You can’t even ask them when the situation will end.

There is this wanton disregard for the clients,” another frustrated dealer pointed out.

This newspaper has also been trying to contact Guyoil’s Managing Director,

but all calls were greeted with the responses “he is in a meeting.”

“He’s not available”.

The current situation is not affecting the Guyoilowned gas stations, since they are given preferential treatment whenever the situation reaches crisis stage.

Kaieteur News understands that Guyoil recently acquired another vessel to bring in its fuel supply, but a reliable source at Guyoil has indicated that the vessels seldom bring in its actual capacity of fuel.

In addition, Guyoil has expended millions of dollars to install two additional fuel storage tanks at its Providence, East Bank Demerara terminal and according to the source, who asked not to be named, it remains a white elephant as it is seldom used.

Fuel dealers are also lamenting the fact that private fuel dealers who are not contracted to Guyoil are given better treatment with regards to the distribution of fuel.

They claimed that during a fuel crisis like the present one they are prohibited from buying fuel from other suppliers, even if it means having to temporarily close

down their operations.

“When Guyoil has enough fuel, they sell to everybody - their friends - but when they don’t have, they still giving the noncontracted dealers, who have the option to buy elsewhere.

We don’t have that option,” one of the dealers explained.

The dealers are of the firm belief that the Guyana Oil Company officials are trying to ration their sales and limit the meagre profits they try desperately to make.

“They told us that whenever Guyoil runs out of fuel, we must close down,” one dealer pointed out.

Another pointed to the gross arrogance of a senior company official who boasted that “Guyoil does not need the dealers because Guyoil has enough (fuel) stations to sell off the fuel we have.”

Presently, the private Guyoil dealers make a paltry $7 profit per litre of gasoline and this has to take care of overhead expenses such as staff payments and electricity.

This is compared to the $20 per litre profits made by dealers contracted to other fuel companies.

“Right now Guyoil got us like Economists. We have to

be experts in Mathematics to survive. We have invested millions and this is the return we get,” one of the affected dealers declared.

According to the dealer, if a station runs out of gasoline, as is the case these days, the other related businesses like the Guyshops suffer, because no one comes into the facility.

They lamented that their efforts to have the President or the Prime Minister intervene on their behalf have been frustrated.

“We try the president and fail. As soon as they hear that it’s about gasoline, they suddenly become not available,” a fuel station owner lamented.

Guyoil is involved in the importation, storage, distribution and marketing of motor gasoline, gasoil, kerosene, fuel oil, Castrol lubricants and bituminous products. The products are distributed through the largest distribution network in the petroleum business in Guyana, comprising 36 dealer-owned and seven Company-owned service stations.

These are all serviced by its three terminal locations in Regions Two, Four and Six.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Hugo Chavez dies at...

President Chavez during a recent visit by his daughters at a hospital in Cuba From page 3 was known, insisted Venezuela remained a vibrant democracy and denied charges that he sought to restrict free speech. But some opponents faced criminal charges and were driven into exile. His government forced the opposition-aligned television channel, RCTV, off the air by refusing to renew its license.

While Chavez trumpeted plans for communes and an egalitarian society, his rhetoric regularly conflicted with reality. Despite government seizures of companies and farmland, the balance between Venezuela’s public and private sectors changed little during his presidency.

Nonetheless, Chavez

maintained a core of supporters who stayed loyal to their “comandante” until the end.

“Chavez masterfully exploits the disenchantment of people who feel excluded ... and he feeds on controversy whenever he can,” Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka wrote in their book “Hugo Chavez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela’s Controversial President.”

Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias was born on July 28, 1954, in the rural town of Sabaneta in Venezuela’s western plains.

He was the son of a schoolteacher father and was the second of six brothers. His mother was also a schoolteacher who met her husband at age 16.

Hugo and his older brother Adan grew up with their grandmother, Rosa Ines, in a home with a dirt floor, mud walls and a roof made of palm fronds.

Chavez was a fine baseball player and hoped he might one day pitch in the U.S. major leagues. When he joined the military at age 17, he aimed to keep honing his baseball skills in the capital.

But between his army duties and drills, the young soldier immersed himself in the history of Bolivar and other Venezuelan heroes who had overthrown Spanish rule, and his political ideas began to take shape.

Chavez burst into public view in 1992 as a paratroop commander leading a military rebellion that brought tanks

to the presidential palace.

When the coup collapsed, Chavez was allowed to make a televised statement in which he declared that his movement had failed “for now.” The speech, and those two defiant words, launched his career, searing his image into the memory of Venezuelans.

Two years later, he and other coup prisoners were released from prison, and President Rafael Caldera dropped the charges against them. After organizing a new party, Chavez ran for president in 1998, pledging to clean up Venezuela’s entrenched corruption and shatter its traditional twoparty system. At age 44, he became the country’s youngest president in four decades of democracy with 56 percent of the vote.

After he took office on Feb. 2, 1999, Chavez called for a new constitution, and an assembly filled with his allies drafted the document. Among various changes, it lengthened presidential terms from five years to six and changed the country’s name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

By 2000, his increasingly confrontational style and close ties to Cuba disenchanted many of the middle-class supporters who voted for him, and the next several years saw bold attempts by opponents to dislodge him from power.

In 2002, he survived a short-lived coup, which began after large anti-Chavez street protests ended in shootings and bloodshed.

Dissident military officers detained the president and announced he had resigned.

But within two days, he returned to power with the help of military loyalists amid massive protests by his supporters.

Chavez emerged a stronger president.

He defeated an opposition-led strike that paralyzed the country’s oil industry and fired thousands of state oil company employees.

The coup also turned Chavez more decidedly against the U.S. government, which had swiftly recognized the provisional leader who briefly replaced him. He created political and trade alliances that excluded the U.S., and he cozied up to Iran and Syria in large part, it seemed, due to their shared antagonism toward the U.S. government. Despite the souring relationship, Chavez kept selling the bulk of Venezuela’s oil to the United States.

By 2005, Chavez was espousing a new, vaguely defined “21st-century socialism.” Yet the agenda didn’t involve a sudden overhaul to the country’s economic order, and some businesspeople continued to prosper. Those with lucrative ties to the government came to be known as the “Bolivarian bourgeoisie.”

After easily winning reelection in 2006, Chavez began calling for a “multi-polar world” free of U.S. domination, part of an expanded international agenda. He boosted oil shipments to China, set up joint factories with Iran to produce tractors and cars, and sealed arms deals with Russia for assault rifles, helicopters and fighter jets.

He focused on building alliances throughout Latin America and injected new energy into the region’s left.

Allies were elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and other countries.

Chavez also cemented relationships with island countries in the Caribbean by selling them oil on preferential terms while severing ties with Israel, supporting the Palestinian cause and backing Iran’s right to a nuclear energy program. All the while, Chavez emphasized that it was necessary to prepare for any potential conflict with the “empire,” his term for the United States.

He told the AP in 2007 that he loved the movie “Gladiator.”

“It’s confronting the empire, and confronting evil. ... And you end up relating to that gladiator,” Chavez said as he drove across Venezuela’s southern plains.

He said he felt a deep connection to those plains

where he grew up, and that when died he hoped to be buried in the savanna.

“A man from the plains, from these great open spaces ... tends to be a nomad, tends not to see barriers. What you see is the horizon,” Chavez said.

Running a revolution ultimately left little time for a personal life. His second marriage, to journalist Marisabel Rodriguez, deteriorated in the early years of his presidency, and they divorced in 2004. In addition to their one daughter, Rosines, Chavez had three children from his first marriage, which ended before he ran for office. His daughters Maria and Rosa often appeared at his side at official events and during his trips. He had one son, Hugo Rafael Chavez.

After he was diagnosed with cancer in June 2011, he acknowledged that he had recklessly neglected his health. He had taken to staying up late and drinking as many as 40 cups of coffee a day. He regularly summoned his Cabinet ministers to the presidential palace late at night.

Even as he appeared with head shaved while undergoing chemotherapy, he never revealed the exact location of tumors that were removed from his pelvic region, or the exact type of cancer.

Chavez exerted himself for one final election campaign in 2012 after saying tests showed he was cancer-free, and defeated younger challenger Henrique Capriles.

With another six-year term in hand, he promised to keep pressing for revolutionary changes.

But two months later, he went to Cuba for a fourth cancer-related surgery, blowing a kiss to his country as he boarded the plane.

After a 10-week absence, the government announced that Chavez had returned to Venezuela and was being treated at a military hospital in Caracas. He was never seen again in public.

In his final years, Chavez frequently said Venezuela was well on its way toward socialism, and at least in his mind, there was no turning back.

His political movement, however, was mostly a oneman phenomenon. Only three days before his final surgery, Chavez named Vice President Nicolas Maduro as his chosen successor.

Now, it will be up to Venezuelans to determine whether the Chavismo movement can survive, and how it will evolve, without the leader who inspired it.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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Baby born with H.I.V. deemed cured - Guyana-born doctor led research team Washington, US (indiawest.com) - A baby born with the AIDS virus appears to have been cured, a research team headed by Guyana-born, Dr. Deborah Persaud, announced March 3.

The Mississippi baby who’s now two-and-a-half has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.

There’s no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus’ genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark only the world’s second reported cure.

Specialists say the March 3 announcement, at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, offers promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African countries where too many babies are born with the virus.

“You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we’ve seen,” Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who is familiar with the findings, told the Associated Press.

A doctor gave this baby faster and stronger treatment than is usual, starting a three-drug infusion within 30 hours of birth. That was before tests confirmed the infant was infected and not just at risk from a mother whose

HIV wasn’t diagnosed until she was in labour.

“I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot,” Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.

That fast action apparently knocked out HIV in the baby’s blood before it could form hideouts in the body. Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Persaud, associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Infectious Disease Fellowship Program at Johns Hopkins’ Children’s Center in Baltimore, Maryland.

She led the investigation that deemed the child “functionally cured,” meaning in long-term remission, even if all traces of the virus haven’t been completely eradicated.

Next, the team is planning a study to try to prove that, with more aggressive treatment of other high-risk babies. “Maybe we’ll be able to block this reservoir seeding,” virologist Dr. Persaud said.

No one should stop antiAIDS drugs as a result of this case, Fauci cautioned.

But “it opens up a lot of doors” to research if other children can be helped, he said. “It makes perfect sense

Dr. Deborah Persaud

what happened.”

Better than treatment is to prevent babies from being born with HIV in the first place. About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 percent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies.

In the United States, such births are very rare, because HIV testing and treatment long have been part of prenatal care.

“We can’t promise to cure babies who are infected. We can promise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the moms are tested during every pregnancy,” Gay

Fuel storage tank bases for Lusignan, EDWC Thirteen (13) bids were opened yesterday at the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) for the construction of fuel storage tank bases at Lusignan, East Coast Demerara, and the East Demerara Water Conservancy (EDWC), Flagstaff, Mahaica.

Meanwhile, a single bid was submitted for the procurement for various services for the LCDS newsletter and addendum-LCDS Institutional Strengthening Project for the Office of the President.

stressed.

In the Mississippi case, the mother had had no prenatal care when she came to a rural emergency room in advanced labour. A rapid test detected HIV. In such cases, doctors typically give the newborn low-dose medication in hopes of preventing HIV from taking

root.

But the small hospital didn’t have the proper liquid kind, and sent the infant to Gay’s medical center. She gave the baby higher treatment-level doses.

The child responded well through age 18 months, when the family temporarily quit returning and stopped

treatment, researchers said.

When they returned several months later, remarkably, Gay’s standard tests detected no virus in the child’s blood.

Ten months after treatment stopped, a battery of super-sensitive tests at half a dozen laboratories found no sign of the virus’ return.

There were only some remnants of genetic material that don’t appear able to replicate, Dr. Persaud said.

In Mississippi, Gay gives the child a check-up every few months: “I just check for the virus and keep praying that it stays gone.”

The mother’s HIV is being controlled with medication and she is “quite excited for her child,” Gay added.

Dr. Persaud, born in Guyana on August 23, 1960, moved to Brooklyn, New York when she was a teenager. She earned her B.A. from York College, M.D. degree from NYU Medical School, and did her pediatric residency at Columbia-Presbyterian.

She was the only recipient of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation’s 2005 Scientist Award, which included a $700,000 research grant.

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Wednesday March 06, 2013

Collaboration needed to address violence against women and children – Min Webster Violence against women and girls is one of the most widespread violations of human rights, and is prevalent in every continent and in every culture.

This assertion was made

by Human Services Minister Jennifer Webster as she addressed the fifty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women. The event, which commenced on Monday and is set to culminate next week Friday, is taking place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

According to Webster, violence usually manifests itself in many forms, transcends race and class and occurs in diverse settings, and presents a challenge which causes significant harm to the individual and degrades the fundamental moral and social fabric of the society. Moreover, it impedes social progress and development for advancing women’s rights, the Minister added, even as she pointed out that the priority theme “elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls”-is an issue that commands high priority within the Region.

As such, she noted that women play a critical role in the socio-economic and political development of the Caribbean, and Member States of the Region should take pride in the achievements made in the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.

The Minister asserted that “CARICOM countries are not unique in the problems we face to attain the goals and objectives set out in the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action and other international instruments established to protect the

Human Services Minister Jennifer Webster rights of women and girls”.

She explained that the one problem which is of great concern to the Region’s Governments is that of domestic violence, adding that “we have recognized that the endemic culture of violence and widespread gender-based violence in particular, demands intensive and extensive strategic action and multilayered interventions by all of us.”

She alluded to the fact that trafficking of humans for sexual or labour exploitation is a growing concern for CARICOM Member States, particularly as the victims of sexual exploitation and trafficking are predominantly young women and girls.

She disclosed, too, that traffickers now routinely use the lure of lucrative job opportunities to target women and girls across the region through websites, even as she noted that it is anticipated that as the region becomes “a more networked society”, the internet will increasingly facilitate the transnational marketing of sex workers.

“Other issues of gender

inequality, social exclusion, youth unemployment and violence in schools continue to pose challenges as we attempt to protect our women and girls, and adequately prepare them for their various roles in our societies,” Webster emphasised.

Additionally, she vocalized that the lack of resources for proper data collection and research within the region is a fundamental issue which impedes timely and accurate updates on the implementation of national policies aimed at addressing these concerns.

ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGE At the national level in CARICOM Member States, various legislative measures are being enhanced, even as monitoring frameworks are being developed to address gender-based violence, Webster mentioned.

Added to this, she noted that CARICOM has taken the opportunity to express its appreciation to UN Women and UNIFEM for their valuable support and assistance in the formulation of programmes and legislative reform initiatives geared towards addressing violence against women in CARICOM Member States.

With the support of UNIFEM, a standardized programme titled ‘Partnership for Peace – A Domestic Violence Intervention’ was introduced in several CARICOM Member States. This, according to Webster, is aimed at engaging men and boys in confronting negative gender stereotypes and to encourage them to accept their roles and responsibility in ending violence against women and girls.

The further development

or elaboration of such programmes at all levels for men and boys, that target behavioral change and socialization to counter gender stereotyping, should also be encouraged, she added.

“We are also appreciative for the support provided by UN Women in the establishment of a Caribbean Young Women’s Transformational Leadership Programme which is geared towards enhancing the leadership and decisionmaking skills of women, and to the development and empowerment of young women.”

And as attempts are made to move forward in this regard, the Minister insisted that “our efforts at addressing violence against women and girls must adopt a multisectoral ‘whole of society’ approach, engaging Government and civil society players”.

The media, according to her, must also play a responsible role in the sensitisation of this issue.

Norms and standards developed for gender equality, she stressed, must be reflected in the policies for all related sector areas for coherence of action and

sustained impact.

In CARICOM, the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) spanning all social sectors, is well placed to spearhead and facilitate this work at the regional level.

Moreover, Webster recounted that CARICOM Heads of Government, at their 24th Inter-Sessional Meeting held in Haiti last month, adopted a Regional Crime and Security Strategy which includes as one of its Strategic areas, Crime Prevention, to be addressed through the CARICOM Social Development and Crime Prevention Action Plan. COHSOD and the Council for National Security and Law enforcement will collaborate on the roll out of this Strategy.

According to Webster, in the upcoming period, increased focus must be placed on the provision of multi-sectoral services encompassing, inter alia, law enforcement, with continued training for the police force being a top priority, as well as prevention training, legal assistance and youth-friendly medical care and counseling services.

The UNDP 2012

Caribbean Human Development Report – ‘Human Development and the shift towards better Citizen Security’ highlights the fact that in our region, ‘violence against women is disproportionately borne by youth and significantly impacts the girl-child’, said Webster.

The Minister asserted, too, that since the family is the nucleus of every society, it is therefore of utmost importance that “we recognize the need to reinforce in our homes, the teaching of respect for women, pay critical attention to socio-cultural expressions and stereotypes that degrade women, and perpetuate the myth that women are an inferior class to be abused and exploited.”

“We also need to inculcate in our young women a deeper awareness of their own values, and recognition of their own selfrespect and the need to demand that respect from others,” she added, stressing that “these are the types of interventions that will no doubt assist in our efforts to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls.”

Beating of civilians at Marudi…

Probe to focus on failure of GGMC officer to intervene An investigation into the beating of civilians at Marudi is to focus on the actions of a Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) officer who was present when the assault occurred.

The investigators are to query why the GGMC personnel failed to intervene when the civilians were being assaulted.

Kaieteur News understands that top officials from the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment as well as the Board of Directors of the GGMC met today and also viewed the footage of the incident.

“There is an investigation into why there was no intervention on the part of the GGMC officer who was present…the Ministry and the Board of Directors of the GGMC reviewed the footage…we were upset by what we saw,” a senior official said.

The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) has commenced an investigation into the beating of civilians by police ranks during an operation to curb

illegal mining within Marudi, Region Nine.

Minister Robert Persaud had called for an emergency meeting of the Board of Directors for the GGMC in addition to requesting the assistance of the Commissioner of Police in investigating the allegation.

The Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association (GGDMA) has also been requested to provide support to the investigation.

A release has stated that the Commission will be working closely with the Ministry of Home Affairs to investigate the confrontation.

Commissioner of Police Leroy Brumell has also ordered an investigation into the assault on the civilians.

The incident occurred on Saturday when police ranks accompanied officials from the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) to clear several illegal miners from the Marudi mining district.

A photograph published in last Sunday’s Kaieteur News showed a police corporal inflicting blows on

civilians who were lying on the trail to protest their removal from the mining area.

An even more graphic video, posted on YouTube, shows the foul-mouthed policeman clubbing and dragging the civilians, while some of his colleagues, and other men in plainclothes, stood with guns at the ready.

The civilians are part of a group of miners who are protesting what they are calling their unlawful removal from a mining claim that is registered to a Canadian mining concern, Romanex Guyana Explorations Limited.

About 300 local miners have been operating about 22 dredges in the area for the past 10 years when the Canadian firm appeared to have neglected it.

Only last week the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment issued a statement indicating that it was reviewing the licence of Romanex Guyana Explorations Limited, after investigations revealed that the company failed to carry out exploratory works in keeping with its requirements.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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Govt. clamps down on co-ops - Illegal sale of state lands, mismanagement targeted The illegal sale of state properties by co-operatives across the country is being targeted by government in a systematic crackdown.

According to Labour Minister, Dr. Nanda Gopaul, the Ministry has heard very disturbing stories in relation to land and housing cooperatives. These include the sale of houselots and state property; failure to conduct regular election of members and failure to account for activities within the cooperatives.

“These illicit activities will have to be put to an end…we are going to halt any act of corruption and indiscipline or those aimed at enriching a few rather than the collective,” he told a three-day workshop which started Monday at the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union (GAWU) Labour College at High Street.

The participants included representatives from the local trade unions and cooperative movements and aimed at providing capacity training towards ensuring the optimal functioning of cooperatives.

“I cannot say that I am happy over the functioning and performance of many cooperatives in Guyana. A lot is left to be desired over the management and operation of many. There are rules, standard rules, most based on the Cooperative Acts and I am very unhappy over the failure of many of the cooperatives in Guyana to observe these acts,” Minister Gopaul said.

Government has been struggling a number of years to revitalize the co-op societies, as they are known.

In addition to housing coops, there are also sugar-cane and rice farming coops.

Because of poor administration, many have fallen to disrepair or to the hands of a few members who were accused over time of taking over lands and property and running it as if it belonged to them. There were allegations of fraud, also, with state lands being sold illegally.

Many of the members have either died or migrated.

According to the Minister, the ministry has been seeking to address unprofessional conduct and mismanagement in some of the local co-operatives, with the aim of getting them to work more effectively for members.

Accountability is one such issue, he said.

“I intend to do, as I have been doing over the last 12 months, to work hard to ensure that we have an accountable and a viable cooperative movement in Guyana, and that the cooperative movement and organisations in this country get every support to ensure that they continue to be buoyant; that they continue to serve the interest of their members and that they continue to aid the development process.”

The official opined that the workshop holds immense potential for the development of the cooperative movement, and it is the expectation that the members will use the training to “bring the cooperative movement back.”

Also present were Permanent Secretary of the Labour Ministry, Lorene Baird; ILO Specialist,

Sustainable Enterprise Development and Job Creation, Kelvin Sergeant, and heads of several trade union movements in Guyana including the Consultative Association of Guyanese Industry (CAGI), Samuel Goolsaran; Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC), Norris Witter and Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Guyana (FITUG), Carvil Duncan.

According to a government release, the workshop is a collaborative venture between the Labour Ministry and ILO and forms part of the training programmes that the ministry must provide, having signed onto the ILO’s Decent Work Country Programme in April 2012, which seeks to promote decent work as a key component of national development strategies.

According to PS Baird, the participants will spend quality time discussing the role of cooperatives in nation building and the development of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

“In Guyana there are hundreds of cooperative societies, however many have been defunct or are not functioning optimally, in this regard this workshop offers participants guidance on the path to sustainability by reemphasising the importance of cooperatives.”

During their brief address, heads of the Trade Union Movement acknowledged the need for cooperation within and among the movements.

They also recognised that there was need to revamp the movement, which because of mismanagement had lost some of its important pillars of nation building that preceded its establishment in the 1940s.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Two convicted on separate charges Two men were sentenced to serve a total of 14 months in prison on separate charges

by Magistrate Sueanna Lovell last Monday.

Neil Ramsaran, 42, of 50 G Sheriff Street, Georgetown, was sentenced to eight months in prison for stealing a handbag, $82,000 and a gold chain valued at $100,000.

He initially appeared before Chief Magistrate Priya Sewnarine-Beharry and

pleaded not guilty to the robbery charge. He was placed on $200,000 bail.

Ramsaran was unrepresented throughout his trial. The matter was prosecutor by Police Sergeant Alexis David Hosannah.

Meanwhile, a former handyman of Dr Faith Harding received a six-month sentence for stealing a $300,000 gold necklace from her. Eighteen-year-old Akiani

Perry of 17 Turkeyen, East Coast Demerara, was charged for breaking into Dr Harding’s house and stealing the piece of jewellery. According to the facts of the case, Dr Harding stated that Perry stole from her while she was asleep.

Harding in her police statement had said that the teen was the only person with that kind of access to her home since he had been working with her for a few years.

Under the theme “Statistics in Everyday Life; Let us Educate and Appreciate,” the International Year of Statistics (Statistics 2013) will officially be launched today at CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen.

According to CARICOM, the year-long celebration of Statistics is premised on the far-reaching effects of statistics on everyone, and an inherent lack of awareness by many people of how statistics improve their lives.

It was noted that dedicating an entire year to statistics is to: increase public awareness of the power and

far-reaching impact of statistics on all aspects of society; promote and nurture statistics as a profession, especially among young people; and promote creativity and development in the sciences of probability and statistics.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat through its Regional Statistics Programme is collaborating with Member States of CARICOM to observe the International Year of Statistics 2013. By celebrating statistics, the CARICOM Secretariat is aimed at helping persons gain a greater

appreciation for the myriad ways that statistics has helped improve the quality of life and has greatly advanced society.

CARICOM further explained that while educating all stakeholders about statistics will be the general thrust of activities to observe the year, the Secretariat’s public awareness programme will have at its core, a focus on the Region’s youth. Other areas in statistics will pivot around that core youth focus and will dovetail with activities to observe the 40th anniversary of the Caribbean Community.

Zaman Deen, 47, of 242 Garnett Street, Newtown, has been remanded to prison on an unlawful wounding charge. Deen, a mason by profession, allegedly dealt Mahendra Ramsingh several chops about his body following an argument they had on Sunday last.

He pleaded not guilty to the charge which was read to him by Magistrate Judy Latchman at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court.

Attorney At Law Paul Fung-A-Fat requested bail and leniency for the

defendant.

He told court that the complainant had stolen the defendant’s bicycle and as a result the two persons had engaged in a fight.

The lawyer told the court that the complainant was the aggressor in the matter, in that he charged Deen with a knife.

“It was scramble between the two and the virtual complainant got a little cut on his hand in the process.”

The prosecution opposed the submission stating that the complainant received head injuries.

The

complainant’s mother told the court that the defendant had attacked and chopped her and continuously threatens to harm her.

“Madam, this man always threatening to burn down my house and do all sorts of things and I am afraid because I live alone with my daughter. I do not have a husband and advantage does take on me all the time.”

After listening to the woman’s statement, Magistrate Latchman ordered that Deen be remanded to prison until March 11.

CARICOM officially launches Int’l Year of Statistics

Wounding accused refused bail

Man charged for breaking into Judge’s private property A father of seven has been accused of breaking into the home of a Judge, and appeared in court yesterday to answer the related charge.

Otis Peters, 45, of ‘A’ Field, Sophia, pleaded not guilty when he stood before Magistrate Judy Latchman at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court. He had no legal representation.

The allegation is that on Monday, March 4, Peters broke and entered the dwelling house of Justice

Brassington Reynolds and stole a complete window frame valued at $25,000.

Following the reading of the charge, the defendant offered an explanation for his actions.

Peters said that he did go into the house, claiming that he was collecting scrap metal.

“Normally I does push cart and pick up old iron and I was in the street when I see some iron went by the gate and ah pick it up. I didn’t go in the yard or break in

nowhere” ‘My wife died and I does got to go fuh old iron because I got seven children fuh mind.”

Police Prosecutor Vishnu Hunte objected to bail on the basis of the penalty attached to the offence.

“Should the defendant be granted bail there is a likelihood that he will not return to court for trial.”

Peters was remanded and will be back in court on March 11.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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CARICOM energy policy gets the green light GEORGETOWN, Guyana - CMC – Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries have given the green light to a Regional Energy Policy that will guide the 15-member grouping in its pursuit of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

A Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat statement issued here, said that approval was given at the “historic” meeting of the CARICOM Council of Trade and Economic Development (COTED) in Trinidad and Tobago over the last weekend.

“For more than a decade, the policy, which was mandated by the CARICOM Heads of Government, was under formulation and review,” The Secretariat said.

“The goal of the policy is the fundamental transformation of the energy sector of CARICOM through the provision of secure and sustainable supplies of energy in a manner which minimizes energy waste in all sectors. Targets towards such efficiency have been set in the policy. The document will now be presented to the

Heads of Government of CARICOM for endorsement.”

Dominica’s Energy Minister Rayburn Blackmoore, who chaired the meeting, described the adoption of the policy as “historic, bearing in mind this year marks 40 years since the oil crisis.

“We recognise therefore from a collective standpoint if we are to really realise economic development there must be something deliberate by way of a policy direction,” he said, adding there is a need to develop the energy sector to reduce the cost of energy.

Blackmoore said that the policy document in itself takes into account the efforts of all member states and “it will provide a road map with specific timelines which will serve as a guide for member states”.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Energy and Energy Affairs Minister Kevin Ramnarine said approving the policy was a “very significant achievement for COTED” while his Jamaican counterpart Phillip Paulwell acknowledged that there was a lack of regional unity in the

energy sector.

“We have set the stage now for a sustained focus now on solving our energy problems. The first energy crisis occurred some 40 years ago and we as a region have not been able to resolve that.

Until we have cheaper sources of energy, we will not get our region to advance as quickly as it ought to and this policy is seeking to do just

that,” Paulwell said.

Belize Minister with responsibility of Energy, Joy Grant said that she was happy that the meeting had approved the policy that would set outer bounds of “what we have to do”.

“This is a very good start… I see this as a really great day. Moving from this day onward, we will now be able to implement what we

have been talking about for so long…,” she said.

The meeting also discussed matters such as the development and implementation of the Caribbean Sustainable Energy Roadmap and Strategy (C-SERMS), the management if energy information systems, and the development of geothermal energy, the Secretariat added.

Kevin Ramnarine

OECS countries sharpening trade negotiation skills CASTRIES, St. Lucia CMC – Trade officials from the sub-regional organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) have started a weeklong workshop aimed at enhancing their capacity to formulate effective trade policies and boost participation in regional and international trade negotiations.

The event is being jointly hosted by the London-based Commonwealth Secretariat and the OECS and has attracted participation from Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, the British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada,

St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Economic Advisor at the Commonwealth Secretariat, Veniana Qalo, said the workshop will also provide an opportunity for the Commonwealth to present a summary of its analytical work on the fiscal programmes and to demonstrate how trade data and policy analysis tools can be utilised by negotiators.

“In addition, a Commonwealth guide for small states negotiators will be presented, highlighting successful approaches that

can be used to help these capacity constrained economies to leverage successful outcomes, despite their size.”

Qalo said that small states face unique challenges such as remoteness, small size, and limited options for diversification, as well as capacity and skills constraints making them vulnerable and limiting “their ability to effectively take advantage of the benefits of globalization and that the Commonwealth continues to be a champion of their interests”.

The workshop is regarded

as a key intervention in building the region’s capacity to develop, implement and monitor national and regional trade policies and effectively engage in trade negotiations.

Currently, the OECS countries are engaged in trade negotiations with Canada and have signed agreements with Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela and as part of the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) grouping that signed the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union in 2008.

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Wednesday March 06, 2013

Venezuela expels 2 US officials St Vincent Opposition Leader CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela’s vice president yesterday announced on national television that a U.S. Embassy attache was being expelled for meeting with military officers and planning to destabilize the country.

Foreign Minister Elias Jaua also announced the expulsion of a second U.S. official, also a U.S. Air Force attache.

Vice President Nicolas Maduro told Venezuela’s high military command and civilian leaders that the U.S. Embassy’s Air Force attache, Col. David Delmonaco, had 24 hours to leave the country. He said the official had been spying on Venezuela’s military.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Greg Adams confirmed Delmonaco’s identity but had no immediate comment.

In Washington, Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “We are aware of the allegations made by Venezuelan Vice President Maduro over state-run television in Caracas, and can confirm that our Air Attache ... is en route back to the United States.”

Late Monday, Communications Minister Ernesto Villegas said Chavez was suffering from “a new,

denies asking Britain to investigate Harlequin

In this photo released by Miraflores Presidential Press Office, Venezuela’s Vice President Nicolas Maduro, right, addresses the nation from Miraflores presidential palace as Governor Adan Chavez, the older brother of President Hugo Chavez, looks on in Caracas, Venezuela, yesterday.

(AP Photo/Miraflores Presidential Press Office) severe infection.” The state news agency identified it as a respiratory infection.

Chavez has been undergoing “chemotherapy of strong impact,” Villegas added without providing further details.

Chavez has neither been seen nor heard from, except for photos released in midFebruary, since submitting to a fourth round of surgery in Cuba on Dec. 11 for an unspecified cancer in the pelvic area. It was first diagnosed in June 2011.

The government said Chavez returned home on Feb. 18 and has been confined to Caracas’ military hospital ever since.

He also lashed out at “the corrupt Venezuelan right” for what he called a psychological war seeking “scenarios of violence as a pretext for foreign intervention.”

He called on Chavez’s supporters, who include thousands of well-armed militiamen, to be “on a war footing.”

KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent - CMC - Opposition Leader Arnhim Eustace has denied asking Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to investigate Harlequin Property, which owns the Buccament Bay Resort here, after the company’s chairman, Dave Ames, wrote to investors on the issue.

“That’s a lie. I have not written to anybody. It’s the investors (who) have written their lawyers and asked them to do that in England,” Eustace said during his regular weekly radio programme on Monday.

Ames, in his letter last week, said “it is an attempt to embroil Harlequin in local politics and is driven by those seeking to harm Harlequin.

“As far as Harlequin is concerned, there is no reason why the SFO would or should be looking at the company.

However, in the event that the SFO wishes to discuss these matters with Harlequin, Harlequin will be happy to do so,” Ames said.

But Eustace insisted that “that is not me; I can’t do that.

“These people invested … millions of pounds and they can’t see anything for it and they want back their money,” Eustace said, noting that investors in Harlequin, about which the U.K.’s

Arnhim Eustace Financial Services Authority has issued an alert, are mostly pensioners. Harlequin said it specialises in luxury five star resorts in some of the best locations in the Caribbean.

It offers property investors the opportunity to buy overseas properties, ranging from studio apartments to six bedroom luxury villas, off-plan at well below market value. The properties are freehold and offer excellent potential for high capital appreciation and an annual rental income, the company says.

But Eustace said that while pensioners have invested their money, “there is no building for them to see, no room for them to go to.

Eustace has sought to distance himself from any

action being taken by the British officials telling radio listeners “the fault is that they did not build for the people what they were supposed to build and people want back their money and they are taking legal action to get back their money”.

Eustace said that most of the comments he makes regarding Harlequin, has to do with the money the company owns Vincentians.

“The workers, farmers and small contractors, those are who I spoke about and will continue to speak about. I want them to get their money.

I can’t bring a case against Buccama or tell the United Kingdom fraud squad what to do. I can’t tell our fraud squad here anything, far less the UK. “They must be thinking Vincentians are fools or something. I want people to understand that people in other parts of the world and here in St. Vincent have lost millions of dollars because of this exercise that is going on here with Harlequin.

“And people are seeking every means to get back their money. And if it means closing down Harlequin, that is what they are going to do.

That has nothing to do with me, either the New Democratic Party,” Eustace told listeners.

No Caribbean student died in Cuba crash - CARICOM statement HAVANA, Cuba - CMC – The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) says no Caribbean student was killed in a vehicular crash over the last weekend.

“The CARICOM Heads of Mission in Havana seeks to clarify that news reports which claim that five students had been killed in a vehicular accident in Cuba are misleading,” according to a statement issued by the grouping yesterday.

“The Caucus further wishes to assure the parents of students on scholarship in Cuba that no Caribbean student died in the accident,” the release said.

The CARICOM Caucus, however, confirmed that there was an accident in which a bus carrying students to an activity to celebrate Grenada’s 39th anniversary of Independence in the eastern province of Camaguey overturned along a highway.

The accident resulted in minor injuries to some students from Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas and Mozambique, who were all treated at hospital and discharged, the release said.

“The Caucus later learnt Sunday of the lamentable death of one Cuban national as a result of the accident in circumstances which have not been made clear.

The CARICOM Heads of Mission regrets the alarmist nature of the news report datelined Havana and for which none of the CARICOM Embassies in Havana had been contacted for clarification prior to publication,” the release said.

Hundreds of Caribbean nationals are pursuing university education in Cuba as a result of an agreement between several CARICOM member states and the Cuban government.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

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Colombian lawmakers want time limit to reach peace deal (Reuters) - Colombia’s government and Marxist rebels must sign a peace deal to end five decades of war by July to give Congress time to pass the necessary laws, lawmakers including a senior member of President Juan Manuel Santos’ party said yesterday.

Santos is negotiating peace with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, Colombia’s largest and strongest rebel group, and has said he wants a deal by November.

Six members of Congress, including Senate President Roy Barreras, met with FARC negotiators this week in Cuba, where the government and rebels are engaged in prickly negotiations to try to end Latin America’s longestrunning insurgency.

“We express our concerns about the slow progress of the talks,” the lawmakers said in a joint statement.

They cited the time it would take to debate any needed reforms and also the 2014 national elections as

reasons why the negotiations needed to be completed quickly.

“The government and FARC ... have between March and July to sign the peace agreement. Either peace is made now or it will not be made,” they said.

The most decisive factor in the presidential and congressional poll next year will be the outcome of the negotiations with the FARC. Opponents have already taken shots at Santos for the slow pace of the process so far.

Santos, 61, has been coy about whether he will seek another four-year term in May 2014, but the tone of his appearances in the last few weeks suggests he will run again.

He must declare his candidacy six months before the poll, which would be around the time he wants peace talks completed.

However, the government would need to send a bill on the peace agreement to Congress no later than

Parliament approves increasing debt ceiling as money runs out HAMILTON, Bermuda CMC – Parliament has passed legislation allowing the One Bermuda Alliance government to borrow an additional one billion US dollars after it said it needed to act swiftly before it ran out of funds.

The Government Loans Amendment Act 2013 was approved by a majority vote allowing the government to raise the national debt ceiling from US$1.45 billion to US$2.5 billion.

Finance Minister Bob Richards said the government, which came into office two and a half months ago, regretted having to borrow more cash but the only alternative was to cut jobs and services.

He said the amendment was essential to prevent the public coffers running dry.

“For the edification of members of this House, had it not been for this provision this government would have run out of money. We would have run out of money had it not been for this act.

“Let no one have any illusions about the severity of the cash flow of this government.”

Economic Development Minister Dr Grant Gibbons said he believed it was the first time in Bermuda’s history

that government had come to the brink of being totally cash-strapped.

The previous Progressive Labour Party (PLP) government left debt of $1.4 billion when it left office last December.

Richards acknowledged there had been “some disquiet in the public domain” about the severity of the debt ceiling increase, but that plans were already being put in place to bring down debt in the long term, by reducing government spending and increasing investment coming into the island.

He said under the former PLP government, which ran the country for 14 years after ousting the now defunct United Bermuda Party in 1998, raising the debt ceiling had become “an annual ritual” which had undermined the island’s financial credibility.

“If we carried on doing what you were doing, this country would be four billion dollars in debt in five years,” he said, adding the “the last government was very keen on spending money but not that keen on raising it”.

Shadow Finance Minister David Burt supported raising the debt ceiling but denied the PLP government had spent money recklessly.

August, the lawmakers said.

Approval would need an absolute majority then the bill would be reviewed by the constitutional court.

“Congress will not legislate on any matter of substance, while the deal ending the conflict is not signed,” they said.

In apparent response, the FARC said in a statement: “Peace cannot be made †subject to election needs nor legislature timings; the search should be constant.”

Various peace efforts

since the 1980s have failed, and rebels were widely seen to have used past negotiations to re-arm and rebuild their ranks. Rightwing elements linked to Colombia’s political establishment were also accused of undermining talks.

Colombia’s war has heated up in recent weeks after a series of kidnappings and combat across the country, dragging down Santos’ popularity as many believe FARC guerrillas are

gaining ground again.

Rebels have stepped up attacks against the oil and mining sectors, key industries for economic growth that have attracted huge foreign investment inflows since a 2002 military offensive pushed rebels into more remote hideouts.

Yesterday, FARC rebels detonated a car bomb in the south-western Tumaco municipality near installations of state-run Ecopetrol, military sources said. No casualties were reported.

Juan Manuel Santos

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Wednesday March 06, 2013

Italian president mulls new technocrat government – sources (Reuters) - President Giorgio Napolitano is considering appointing a new technocrat government led by a non-politician as one way out of Italy’s political stalemate, Italian officials said yesterday.

Such a solution would come into play if centre-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani failed to form a government after receiving an initial mandate from Napolitano, as is expected, they said.

“Napolitano wants a government with the broadest possible support that will last as long as possible,” one of the officials told Reuters.

Bersani won a majority in the lower house of parliament and says he has the right to be the first to try to form a government, although he has no workable majority in the Senate.

However, 5-Star Movement leader Beppe Grillo, who holds the whip hand after winning a huge protest vote, responded to speculation about a technocrat government in Italian media yesterday by saying he would not

support such an administration. “ T e c h n o c r a t governments don’t exist in nature but only political governments supported by parliamentary majorities. The Monti government was the most political government since the war,” he said on his blog.

He said a technocrat premier would just be a “fig leaf” to cover the responsibilities of the traditional parties.

The stalemate has caused alarm among Italy’s European partners because of concern that instability could reignite the financial crisis that brought the euro zone to the brink of collapse before former EU commissioner Mario Monti formed a government of technocrats in November 2011.

Napolitano is charged with finding a way out of the impasse but does not begin formal consultations until after March 15, when parliament will be convened, for constitutional reasons.

Politicians have used the limbo period between last

week’s vote and the talks with Napolitano for both speculation and manoeuvring.

Napolitano encouraged political forces to use the time more constructively yesterday, noting in a statement that they had “ample time for a fruitful preparatory phase for the head of state’s consultations for the formation of a government”.

With no party able to control the upper house, the options for putting together a government depend on an agreement between at least two of the three main rival forces in parliament Bersani’s centre-left, the centre-right bloc led by Silvio Berlusconi and the antiestablishment 5-Star Movement.

Grillo has expressed repeated hostility to overtures from Bersani and appears unlikely to support a government led by him.

On Monday, Vito Crimi, newly appointed leader of the 5-Star Movement in the Senate, said his group would not give a confidence vote to any government led by one

of the main parties but could back an administration “alternative to the party system”.

However, yesterday he said his remarks had been misinterpreted and the movement would not support a technocrat government. He said the 5-Star Movement’s aim was to lead a government itself.

Grillo spent much of the election campaign making fierce attacks on Monti’s unelected government.

Monti remains in charge of day-to-day government business until a new government is formed, but cannot introduce any major legislation.

His own involvement in the election, in which he led a centrist grouping that won just over 10 percent of the vote, is thought to have ruled him out for another term as a non-partisan head of government.

Monti invited the heads of the three main blocs to meetings to discuss next week’s European Council meeting in Brussels, the first opportunity for the main party chiefs to meet since the

election.

The leadership of Bersani’s Democratic Party (PD) is due to meet separately today to discuss its next steps and to approve a core programme of reforms in areas including corruption and party finance, which he has said he will present to parliament.

He has ruled out an alliance with Berlusconi and has called on Grillo’s party, the third most powerful force in parliament with 163 members in the two houses, to back his proposals.

PD ally Nichi Vendola, leader of the Freedom Ecology Liberty party, said yesterday after a meeting of party managers that he opposed another technocrat government.

“We want a government for change, a government of anti-technocrats,” Vendola told reporters.

However, Bersani’s own position has been badly weakened by the election, which the PD had been clear favourite to win, and speculation has grown that he may be replaced, possibly by the 37-year-old mayor of

Giorgio Napolitano Florence, Matteo Renzi.

Renzi met Monti yesterday for two hours in his office in Rome. Afterwards, the mayor said the two discussed freeing up city funds that have been blocked by internal budget controls.

On Monday, finance ministers from the 17-member currency bloc meeting in Brussels said they were optimistic that whatever government was formed in Italy would show responsibility.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

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Isolated Britain fails to avert EU bank bonus cap BRUSSELS (Reuters) Britain was left isolated in Europe yesterday after it failed to secure backing to water down new EU rules limiting bankers’ bonuses, a measure that could threaten London’s dominance as a financial centre.

The rules, which would limit bankers’ bonuses to the equivalent of their salary, or two times their salary if shareholders agree, are set to be introduced next year and would represent the toughest bonus regime anywhere in the world.

They threaten Britain’s financial industry the most, raising the risk that some banks and their top bankers could relocate to other financial centres outside the European Union.

Chancellor George Osborne appealed to EU ministers to change the rules at a meeting in Brussels, arguing that the proposed cap would have a “perverse” effect.

“It will push salaries up, it

will make it more difficult to claw back bankers’ bonuses when things go wrong, it will make it more difficult to ensure that the banks and the bankers pay when there are mistakes, rather than the taxpayer,” said Osborne in a part of the meeting that was broadcast.

But none of the other 26 EU member states was willing to stand with him, and it looks very unlikely that any significant changes to the rules will be made. Since the rules do not require unanimous backing, Britain has no veto over the proposals.

“The space for further negotiation is quite narrow,” said Michael Noonan, the finance minister of Ireland, which as the current holder of the EU’s rotating six-month presidency negotiated the deal with the European Parliament.

Osborne’s inability to fend off the reform, the first of its kind globally, underscores Britain’s waning influence in the EU and is

also likely to fuel deepening euroscepticism in Britain.

“Britain has done a lot to isolate itself from the rest of the European Union,” said Philip Whyte of the Centre for European Reform, a thinktank. “It isn’t exercising very much influence in European debates, pretty much across the board.”

Officials indicated that the best Britain could hope for in further negotiations over the rules in the coming weeks was perhaps an increase in the amount of bonus that can be deferred and therefore discounted when calculating the total payout.

But Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for financial regulation and an author of the proposals, said the broad parameters would not change. Asked about the possibility of any legal challenge to the bonus cap, he replied: “Good luck.”

Britain’s powerful financial sector fears the rules will put London at a disadvantage and provoke an

Kenya: Runoff seems likely after ballot decision NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A slow ballot count in Kenya’s presidential vote raised questions yesterday about the election process, but it was a decision on the more than 325,000 rejected ballots that made it appear likely the election will be decided in a runoff.

Nearly 330,000 ballots — the number keeps rising — have been rejected for not following election rules, raising criticism of voter education efforts.

The election commission chairman announced late yesterday that those spoiled ballots, as they are called here, will count in the overall vote total. That makes it very difficult, given the tight race, for either top candidate to reach the 50 percent mark needed to win outright. A runoff election between the top two candidates is expected.

Kenya’s 2010 constitution — passed after 2007-08 election violence killed more than 1,000 people — says a candidate wins the presidency if he or she has “more than half of all votes cast in the election.” That clause made the decision on the definition of “cast” key.

Partial returns yesterday showed an early lead for Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of Kenya’s founding president and who faces charges at the

International Criminal Court.

That prompted the camp of candidate Prime Minster Raila Odinga to hold a news conference to tell supporters that more of their strongholds have yet to be counted from Monday’s largely peaceful vote.

Returns for most of the day showed Kenyatta with 53 percent and Odinga with 42 percent. But Kenyatta’s percentage is likely to drop after the decision on rejected votes. The commission said percentages would be updated today.

More than half of the votes cast have yet to be counted, and observers said Odinga was likely to make gains.

“If Odinga’s performance improves, as seems likely, and with this decision on the rejected votes, then it’s inevitable there will be a runoff,” said Nic Cheeseman, a lecturer in African politics at Oxford University who is an official observer of the election.

Kenya is the lynchpin of East Africa’s economy and plays a vital security role in the fight against Somali militants. The U.S. Embassy in Kenya is the largest in Africa, indicating this country’s importance to U.S. foreign policy.

The chairman of the election commission, Isaak Hassan, met with political

Uhuru Kenyatta parties yesterday to talk about the rejected ballot issue, said Tabitha Mutemi, a spokeswoman for the commission.

Hassan acknowledged what he called “growing concern” over the slow pace of elections results. He said the delays are due to high voter turnout, a large number of contested seats and long travel times for polling officers.

Candidates’ percentages, he said, will be calculated “based on total votes cast.”

Of the rejected ballots, he said: “Of course they will have an impact in the overall result.”

Hassan noted the law gives his commission seven days to perform its work, and he asked for patience “from the public, the political parties as well as the candidates.”

Kenya’s Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka, who is also Odinga’s running mate, (Continued on page 25)

exodus of major banks and staff to rival financial centres, although HSBC, one of Britain’s largest banks, has said it does not have any plans at this stage to move its headquarters.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble indicated that he would be uncomfortable with any country being outvoted on the new legislation, opening up the possibility of some change.

EU officials indicated that any alterations are likely to have only a slight impact on the total amount of bonus that can be paid.

“There is very little further we can do for them because we pushed the negotiations to quite a degree, and we got the best possible compromise with the parliament,” Noonan told reporters before the meeting began. “There isn’t any more room left.”

Schaeuble told ministers he would back a greater flexibility in how a banker’s bonus is calculated, which could allow banks to pay more over the long term, said one official who attended the

talks.

Britain could also try to push to change the scope of the rules, which will apply to all EU bank staff globally, regardless of where they are based.

But any changes will also require the approval of the European Parliament. Othmar Karas, the Austrian lawmaker who drove the negotiations in parliament, said he did not see any reason to re-open the deal clinched last week.

While the finance ministers agreed not to finalise the deal on Tuesday, partly out of courtesy to Osborne, there is little appetite to change it. Officials indicated it would be approved later in March or possibly in April. The aim is to put the legislation in place from January 1, 2014.

Some in the British government believe banks could take legal action on the grounds that the European Union is going beyond its remit in legislating on remuneration, an official familiar with British thinking told Reuters.

AFME, the bank lobby group, stoked speculation,

George Osborne saying “it would not be surprising” if the industry were gathering “legal opinions”. But the European Commission, which writes EU law, said it would be “absurd” to challenge the legality of the cap.

The new rules will not affect most bank staff, who on average earn bonuses of up to 30 percent of salary, but target senior management and so-called “risk takers”, such as traders, whose bonuses can be many times their base salary.

Analysts estimate the law will initially affect around 300 to 500 people in each large bank, or around 5,000 people in London all told.

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Wednesday March 06, 2013

Maldives ex-president arrested, to appear in court today (Reuters) - Police in the tropical Indian Ocean resort archipelago of the Maldives arrested former president Mohamed Nasheed yesterday, 10 days after he left the Indian High Commission where he had taken refuge to avoid detention.

A court had ordered police to arrest Nasheed after he missed a February 10 court appearance in a case relating to accusations that he illegally detained a judge during the last days of his rule.

“We have received a court order to arrest him and produce to the court,” Maldives police spokesman Hassan Haneef told Reuters. “...We have him in police custody. He will be produced in court tomorrow (today).”

Nasheed, the Maldives’ first democratically elected leader, left office last year in contested circumstances. He entered the Indian High Commission, or embassy, on February 13 and left 10 days later on the understanding that he would be able to

conduct “peaceful political activity”.

His supporters say he was ousted last February in a coup in the Maldives, a major tourist destination. They have clashed with police outside the diplomatic mission.

Soon after Nasheed’s arrest, minor scuffles broke out in Male.

Supporters of the detained president threw the brother of the current president, Mohamed Waheed, off his motorcycle and attacked a

parked military vehicle.

Some gathered outside the former president’s home and blocked nearby roads.

The U.S. embassy in nearby Sri Lanka called for calm in the Maldives and said Nasheed “must be accorded due process under the law regarding his pending court cases”.

If Nasheed is found guilty in the case, he could be barred from standing in a presidential election on September 7.

Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party denounced

his detention as politically motivated, carried out by “numerous armed and masked police officers who did not...produce an arrest warrant or court summons”.

The party says any trial is part of efforts to exclude him from the contest and has challenged the court’s legitimacy.

A spokesman for President Waheed said no deal had been struck with the Indian government in connection with the former president’s decision to leave the high commission.

“There is no deal between us and the judiciary on Nasheed’s judgement,” said spokesman Imad Masood. “It is totally up to the judiciary.

We will have no interference with court.”

Nasheed says he was forced from power at gunpoint after opposition protests and a police mutiny.

Mohamed Nasheed A national commission last August said the toppling of his government was not a coup, but a transfer of power that followed the constitution, a ruling that triggered several days of demonstrations.

The Maldives held its first free elections in 2008.

Nasheed defeated Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who had ruled for 30 years and was accused by opponents and international human rights groups of running the country as a dictator.

Armed police break up Zimbabwe PM’s meeting: spokesman HARARE (Reuters) Armed riot police broke up a meeting called by Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai yesterday, his spokesman said, raising tensions in a fragile powersharing government ahead of elections this year.

Former opposition chief Tsvangirai went into government with his rival President Robert Mugabe after a violent and disputed vote in 2008.

The two have had a stormy relationship and Tsvangirai has accused Mugabe of using the security services to intimidate his supporters in the past charges Mugabe denies.

Tsvangirai’s spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka said around 40 heavily armed riot police arrived at public meeting about a proposed new constitution in a Harare township on Tuesday evening and ordered the audience to leave before the prime minister arrived.

The officers said the debate had not been authorized, said Tamborinyoka - all public meetings have to be cleared by the police by law.

“It is a campaign for a constitution that both parties

Morgan Tsvangirai are supporting. We have the same message. Imagine during the election campaign when we have differing messages?,” he said, referring to presidential and parliamentary votes expected in July. Tamborinyoka said Tsvangirai’s officials had informed the police about the meeting.

Tsvangirai and Mugabe have agreed on the terms of a new constitution to strengthen the powers of parliament and curb those of the president, which will be put to a national referendum on March 16. No one was immediately available to comment from the police.

Mugabe has been in power since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

Page 25

Big powers want fast results in revived diplomacy with Iran VIENNA (Reuters) - Six world powers called yesterday for quick and concrete results in nuclear negotiations with Iran that have resumed after an eightmonth hiatus, aimed at averting the threat of a new Middle East war.

In a joint statement, the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain described last week’s talks with Iran in the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, as “useful” and said diplomacy would be pursued actively in the coming months.

They said they were “deeply concerned that Iran

continues to undertake certain nuclear activities” contrary to U.N. Security Council resolutions, including recent steps to install more advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges.

The two sides are due to meet again in early April at the same venue for another round of political discussions to try and end years of stalemate in the dispute, following expert level talks to be held in Istanbul later this month.

“We seek tangible results in this diplomatic process at an early stage,” said the statement delivered at a

meeting of the 35-nation governing board of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna.

“We reaffirm our continuing support for a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue,” it said.

It was read out by British Ambassador Susan le Jeune d’Allegeershecque.

The powers urged Tehran to immediately take “substantive steps” to address IAEA concerns about “possible military dimensions” to the country’s nuclear program. Iran has stonewalled the U.N. inquiry

Kenya: Runoff seems likely...

From page 23 held an afternoon news conference — the first by any of the major candidates — to calm Odinga supporters who were forced to look at TV news reports of Kenyatta’s lead all day.

“We wish to appeal for calm and call on our supporters to relax, because we are confident that when all votes are in (we) will carry the day,” said Musyoka.

Musyoka said more Kenyatta strongholds were counted yesterday, meaning Odinga’s vote total would rise as more ballots came in.

A European election observer gave credence to Musyoka’s claim, saying an electoral analysis done by the U.S. Embassy showed that Odinga was likely to gain ground as more votes came in. The observer said he was not allowed to be identified by name.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman said the embassy did not have any comment.

Long lines of voters formed around the country Monday. Election officials estimate that turnout was about 70 percent of 14 million registered voters. Attacks by separatists on the coast killed

19 people, and other attacks were seen near the border with Somalia, but the vast majority of the country voted in peace.

In the coastal city of Mombasa yesterday, three suspected members of the secessionist group Mombasa Republican Council were charged in court for the murder of four police officers during elections.

Also on Tuesday, grenade blasts hit two areas — the Somali section of Nairobi and a vote tally center in Mandera, near the Somali border. Minor injuries, but no deaths, were reported.

The leading candidate, Kenyatta, faces charges at the International Criminal Court on allegations he helped orchestrate postelection violence in 200708, when more than 1,000 people were killed.

The U.S. has warned of “consequences” if Kenyatta is to win, as have several European countries. Because Kenyatta is an ICC indictee, the U.S. and Europe have said they might have to limit contact with him, even if he is president.

After Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki was hastily

named the winner of Kenya’s 2007 vote, supporters of Odinga took to the streets in protest, a response that began two months of tribe-on-tribe attacks. In addition to the more than 1,000 deaths, more than 600,000 people were forced from their homes.

Officials have been working to ensure that level of violence does not return this election cycle.

Both Kenyatta and Odinga have pledged to accept the results of a freely contested vote.

Kenyan residents appeared to approve of the electoral process so far. The election commission is giving televised press conferences and TV stations are showing the commission’s frequently updated vote tallies.

“It is better managed than the 2007 elections,” said Judith Egesa, 24, who works at a food shop in Mombasa.

“Whoever wins the presidency, we will accept him as long he leads Kenya without tribalism and discrimination. I voted for Raila, but if Uhuru wins I have no problem provided he leads us in peace and fulfills his promises.”

U.S. aims to support Israeli defense systems despite budget cuts

Chuck Hagel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel met with his Israeli counterpart yesterday, expressing strong support for Israeli missile and rocket defense systems despite fiscal uncertainty caused by across-the-board spending cuts.

“Secretary Hagel is committed to working with members of Congress to ensure that there is no interruption of funding for Iron Dome, Arrow, and David’s Sling rocket and missile defense systems,” a U.S. defense official said.

Hagel’s nearly two-hour-long talks with Israel’s Ehud Barak represented his first faceto-face meeting with a foreign counterpart since he took over the Pentagon on February 27.

for more than four years.

The relatively mild language used in the onepage statement reflected an apparent compromise between the four Western states on the one hand and Russia and China on the other.

Moscow and Beijing have in the past criticized unilateral Western sanctions on Tehran, and have tended to be less harsh in their public statements.

Western diplomats said the priority now was to demonstrate big power unity on the Iran nuclear issue.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on Monday that President Barack Obama was not bluffing about using force to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions if all else fails, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for a “credible military threat” against Tehran.

Iran denies Western and Israeli allegations that it is covertly seeking the capability to make nuclear weapons, saying its nuclear program is an entirely peaceful project to generate electricity.

But its refusal to curb atomic activity that can have both military and civilian purposes, and its lack of full openness with U.N. inspectors, have prompted increasingly tough U.S. and European punitive measures against the major oil producer.

Israel, Iran’s arch-enemy, which is convinced that it is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, is tiring of the protracted, inconclusive talks and has threatened preemptive war against Tehran if it deems that diplomacy has failed.

Iran was upbeat last week after talks with the powers in Kazakhstan about its nuclear work ended with an agreement to meet again. But Western officials said it had yet to take concrete steps to ease their fears about its atomic ambitions.

In Almaty, the six powers offered modest relief from economic sanctions in return for Iran scaling back its most sensitive nuclear activity, but made clear that they expected no immediate breakthrough.

The powers’ statement in Vienna said they “take note of the useful meetings” in the

Joe Biden Kazakh city “to carry on a constructive diplomatic process, which will be pursued actively in the months ahead on the basis of reciprocity and step-by-step approach”.

The aim would be to restore “international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program”.

Separately, diplomats said Sweden was trying to weaken the tone of a separate statement on Iran by the 27nation European Union, delaying agreement on this text.

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NCN CHANNEL 11 05:00 hrs - Inspiration 05:30 hrs - Newtown Gospel 06:00 hrs - BBC 07:00 hrs - Guyana Today 08:00 hrs - Guysuco Roundup (R/B) 08:30 hrs - Close Up.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

09:00 hrs - Stop the Suffering 10:00 hrs - Remembering Dr. Cheddi Jagan 11:00 hrs - History 12:00 hrs - CNN 12:30 hrs - NCN Newsbreak 12:35 hrs - Insight (r/b) 13:05 hrs - African Moves (r/ b) 14:00 hrs - News Break 14:05 hrs - GINA Presents 15:45 hrs - International Football 16:00 hrs - News Break 17:00 hrs - Anderson 18:00 hrs - NCN News Magazine – Live 18:30 hrs - Insight

19:00 hrs - Al Jazeera 19:30 hrs - Oral Traditions 20:00 hrs - 3d/daily millions/ play de dream/lotto draw 20:05 hrs - NCN Newsbreak 20:10 hrs - GRPA Discussion 21:00 hrs - NCN Sports Magazine 22:00 hrs - Late Edition 22:30 hrs - Caribbean Newsline 23:00 hrs - Movie DTV CHANNEL 8 08:55 hrs. Sign On 09:00 hrs. This Morning 10:00 hrs. Live! With Kelly and Michael 11:00 hrs. Roseanne

12:00 hrs. The View 13:00 hrs. Prime News 13:30 hrs. The Young and the Restless 14:30 hrs. The Bold and the Beautiful 15:00 hrs. The Talk 16:00 hrs. Chain Reaction 17:000 hrs. Family Feud 18:00 hrs. World News 18:30 hrs. The Wayans Bros 19:00 hrs. Greetings and Announcements 20:00 hrs. Channel 8 News 20:30 hrs. DTV’s Festival of Biblical Movies for the Lenten Season: “Solomon” 00:00 hrs. Sign Off

Guides are subjected to change without notice

Wednesday March 06, 2013 ARIES (Mar. 21–Apr. 19) Too much emotional attachment in a personal relationship can make you feel antsy, since you value your independence.

However, you may be eager to make a commitment today without any fear of being tied down.

TAURUS (Apr. 20–May 20) Your instincts may tell you to slow down today and you would be wise to listen to them. Although you are in tune with the emotional buzz as Venus hums happily, you might also be tempted to overplay your hand.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20) You attempt to focus on your work, but an emotional attraction may be too strong to ignore now. You cannot help yourself because there are many intriguing social opportunities tempting you to abandon your obligations.

CANCER (June 21–July 22) You may feel on edge today with an unsettled sensation in your belly that w o n ’t g o a w a y. E v e n though you want to believe your perceptions, you still need to protect yourself from possible rejection.

LEO (July 23–Aug. 22) Today you just know things that others cannot perceive. Perhaps you believe that someone is trying to control you and it doesn’t sit well with you.

VIRGO (Aug. 23–Sept. 22) Although it seems as if you know what your partner or friend is thinking today, your intuition might raise unnecessary concerns over unimportant details.

LIBRA (Sept. 23–Oct. 22) The cosmic love-buzz is aimed at you today since your key planet, Venus, is in the spotlight; luckily, your feet are planted firmly on the ground.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23–Nov. 21) It’s all about revealing your presence in the outer world today, rather than emphasizing your normal focus on the inner dimensions of life.

SAGIT (Nov. 22–Dec. 21) Whether you’re playing on the field of love or friendship, you’re often ready to jump in without considering what comes next. Fortunately, there’s no need to spend time in endless strategizing today, because your long-term goals are in full harmony with what you are doing right now.

CAPRI (Dec. 22–Jan. 19) The possibility of love and affection is so real today that you can feel it in your bones. Your key planet, karmic Saturn, receives a lovely trine from sweet Venus.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20–Feb. 18) Your ambitions are within reach today and you might not need to make too much of a sacrifice to get what you want.

Nevertheless, reconsider your priorities and concentrate on your ambitions because valuable Venus harmonizes with responsible Saturn in your 10th House of Career.

PISCES (Feb. 19–Mar. 20) Your compassion is overflowing and you may be eager to attend to the needs of the masses today, but it’s not healthy to ignore your own desires. Setting yourself up in the role of a martyr or victim doesn’t help anyone in the long run.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

Page 27

Farmers to receive $53M owed by Mahaicony Rice Mills

From left: Douglas Chappels, General Manager; Roopnarine Sukhai, Managing Director and Fitzroy McLeod, Financial Controller Farmers owed by Mahaicony Rice Mills Limited for paddy at Village 70, Corentyne, and at Paradise and Vilvoodren, Essequibo Coast will today and tomorrow be paid a total of $53M by SeaRice Caribbean Guyana.

Management of SeaRice Caribbean Guyana made this announcement yesterday at John Fernandes Wharf, Water Street.

According to Fitzroy McLeod, Financial Controller,

the company purchased Mahaicony Rice Mills Limited’s assets at Paradise and Vilvoodren, hence inheriting the debts.

It was noted that as part of an agreement concluded between the Ministry of Agriculture, Guyana Rice Development Board and SeaRice Caribbean Guyana, payments will begin at Village 70 today and will continue at Paradise and Vilvoorden on Thursday.

The company has been in

the rice milling business for years and wants to begin operating the mills and receiving centres at Black Bush Polder, #70 Village, Vilvoorden and Paradise from this crop.

McLeod related that the company is aiming to produce 20,000 tons of rice with the acquired assets, and targets the Venezuelan, European and Jamaican markets.

There are no real plans to supply the local market with

rice, but by-products such as bran will be available. He assured that the company has a good track record with making payments timely to farmers.

SeaRice Caribbean Guyana made it clear that monies owed to the Guyana Cooperative Financial Service have already been settled in full. In addition, $495M owed to Government by Mahaicony Rice Mills Limited was repaid nine days ago.

Govt. looking for contractor for Kato Hydropower Plant - Start of construction delayed The Guyana government has advertised for contractors to build a Micro Hydropower Plant and Irrigation Infrastructure in Kato, Region Nine.

The European Union is funding the project to the tune of over $600 million.

The project is being implemented by the Hinterland Electrification Unit of the Office of the Prime Minister.

Eligible bidders have until April 23, 2013 to submit tenders.

The 330 kilowatt microhydro power station will be located at the Chiung River head waterfall, located near the Kato village.

The EU had announced that the project is intended to promote the use of sustainable and climate friendly energy use.

The Financing Agreement for the project has since been dispatched by the EU Delegation in Guyana to the Minister of Finance who acts as the National Authorising Officer (NAO) for the EUfunded programmes in Guyana.

EU said that the total cost of the project is pegged at Euro 2,455,797 ($615M) with the EU contributing Euro 1,841,848 ($460M) under the 10th European Development Fund (EDF). The Guyana Government will contribute Euro 613,949 ($154M).

The project aims at the installation of a hydropower plant and irrigation facilities in the village of Kato, Region 8. The works to be accomplished are split in two lots.

The first lot includes the design and construction of

the 330 kW hydropower plant at the Chiung River falls in Kato, including final project design, construction of the hydropower plant and the supply, installation and commissioning of the two turbines.

Lot two is for design and construction of the irrigation infrastructure including one irrigation weir; one irrigation pumping station with 90 kW pumping capacity and four pumps; 1,000 m irrigation water feeding pipe; 7 600 cubic metres volume irrigation water storage reservoir.

The transmission line supply and installation works will be tendered separately and are not part of this tender.

“Sufficient generating capacity for electrical services are to be provided to a secondary school complex to be constructed by the Ministry of Education, existing government buildings such as the

nursery/primary schools, the guest house, the police outpost, medical facilities, school dormitories and to also facilitate agro processing and commercial farming,” the EU said.

Furthermore, the system will provide electricity to Paramakatoi through a 16 kilometres transmission line which forms part of the intervention.

“It is expected that the Government will fast track the construction of the secondary school facility, which is a pre-condition for the investment to be made.

The secondary school is foreseen to be the main electricity consumer and therefore forms the basis for feasibility of the investment.”

The construction phase was expected to begin last month. Now, it is likely that the completion date of February 2015 would also have to be pushed back.

Legislation adequate for causing death and drunk driving offences -Traffic Chief Traffic Chief Hugh Denhert believes that the existing legislation is adequate to deal with persons who cause death by dangerous driving and the incidence of drunken drivers Senior Superintendent Denhert added that while this is so, it is only on the police to carry out the breathalyzer tests and institute charges once tests confirm that a driver is above the legal limit.

The Traffic Chief further pointed out that on the first occasion that a person is charged for drunken driving that person is fined $7,500; the second time the person is fined and their licence is suspended for a year, and on the third occasion, the person can be jailed or their licence suspended indefinitely.

Further, as it relates to the penalties for causing death by dangerous driving, Denhert said that these vary from suspended sentences to custodial sentences. This, the Traffic Chief explained, rests solely on the judgment of the presiding Magistrate. He also used the opportunity to call on parents of teen drivers to be more involved with their children.

With specific reference to a recent accident on the East Coast of Demerara where a drunken teen was behind the

steering wheel of a vehicle which was involved in an accident that resulted in the death of two persons, Denhert said parents and guardian can play a greater role.

“I am appealing to parents to get more involved, once you are aware that your child is the holder of a valid driver’s licence, you should be able to monitor him or her on the roadways…It is in their nature to want to experiment on the roadways, but parents can help us, the Traffic Department, by monitoring these teen drivers,” the Traffic Chief opined.

He added that the law provides for a person to be issued with a driver’s licence once they are 17 years and older, but the guardian of these teen drivers should get more involved and if they find that these teens are not responsible as drivers, then they should be supervised.

This, Denhert said, will aid the efforts of the traffic department in dealing with errant and reckless drivers.

The Guyana Police Force’s Traffic Department has stressed that it will be targeting night spots with the aim of preventing drunken drivers from getting behind steering wheels. That campaign is currently in full effect.

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Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

GTTA names national Cadet, Junior squads

Priscilla Greaves

Chelsea Edghill

Committee of the G u y a n a Ta b l e Te n n i s Association (GTTA) met last Friday and named a Junior and Cadet squad, comprising of some of G u y a n a ’s t a l e n t e d a n d brightest table tennis prospects to participate in the Caribbean Junior and C a d e t Ta b l e Te n n i s Championships scheduled for April 2-8 in Trinidad and Tobago.

The team was named

under the association’s “With the Future in Mind Project”, according to a release from the GTTA. The team includes: Under18 Girls: Chelsea Edghill, Akecia Nedd, Anna Joao and Jewel Todd; Under-18 Boys: Stephan Corlette, David Duncan, Joshua Lalbachan, Bryton Murray and Kevon Corbin.

Under-15 Girls: Priscilla Greaves, Kristie Lopes, Neveah Clarkston, Salema

Jackman, Sheldon Atherley, Miguel Wong, Nicholas Lawrence and Alex Hopkinson.

Under-15 Boys: Shemar Britton, Kyle Edghill, Elishaba Johnson and Scott Garraway.

The Executive Committee will be meeting with the players and parents tomorrow at the Cliff Anderson Sports

Hall at 5:30pm.

The Team will commence training under a rigid and structured training programme aimed at preparing them for the competition.

The officials identified for the Championships include Deirdre Edghill, Idi Lewis and Linden Johnson.

Latiff guides Everest Masters to 5-wicket victory

Richard Latiff Middle order batsman Richard Latiff slammed six fours and ten sixes in a robust unbeaten 111 as Everest Masters defeated Dynamic Security Force by 5 wickets in a feature 20 over softball match sponsored by Tiger Sports last Friday evening at the Everest Cricket Club ground.

Rupie Sewjattan supported Latiff with 23 as Everest finished on 183-5 in 17 overs in response to 179 made by Dynamic Security Force. Rama Malone top scored for the visitors with 77 as Avinash Persaud took 423. The home team collected a trophy while Latiff was given the man of the match award.

Earlier at the said venue, Speed XI got the better of Savage XI by 5 wickets.

Savage XI took first turn at the crease and scored 136-8 off their allotted 20 overs.

Navin Kaladin led with 40, while Rawl Reid captured 213. Speed XI replied with 1375. Latiff rescued them after a poor start with a top score of 67 as they achieved victory in 15 overs.

Speed XI received a trophy while Latiff took the player of the match prize. The game was sponsored by Ray’s Auto Sale.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

Taffin Khan/ Anthony Drayton cart off spoils in DDL Republic rapid chess tournament National Senior Chess Champion Taffin Khan upheld the confidence of his fans and notched up 6 points from a possible 7 to take top honours in the senior category when the Guyana Chess Federation (GCF) staged the DIAMOND Mineral Water Republic Anniversary rapid chess tournament at the West Demerara Secondary School, Sunday March 3 last.

Khan had earlier succumbed to his junior counterpart, Anthony Drayton, in the fifth round, while Drayton surrendered a game to Alexander Duncan in the fourth sitting.

The Junior Champion rebounded to win all of his other games to finish with 6 games and take the honours in his category.

Dravin Drickpaul of West Demerara Secondary finished just behind Drayton, while Roberto Neto of Diamond Secondary sealed off the third place.

Carlos Petterson copped the fourth prize. Trenton Bennett was adjudged the Best U-16 player in the

Page 29

Trophy Stall on board with GNNL Table Tennis tournament In true humanitarian style that defines his character, Managing Director of Trophy Stall (Bourda Market and Hadi’s City Mall) Ramesh Sunich, yesterday joined forces with Guyana National Newspapers Limited Sports Committee, to co-sponsor their Post Mashramani table tennis tournament.

Sunich yesterday committed himself to donating the trophies for the tournament which serves off tomorrow afternoon at 17:00hrs, where defending champions Garfield Niles (Over-40) and Calvin Roberts (Elite) will put their titles on the line.

A new category has been

added to this year’s tournament, Beginners, for those first timers, giving them a chance to compete, while Roberts will be competing in both the Over-40 and Elite category, going up against Niles, O’Neil Rodney, Mark Bradford and James Johnson in the former and Orlando Milner and Keiton Nelson in the latter.

Other players who will be on show during the one day tournament are Kizan Brumell (former national Under-19 rugby player), Rawle Toney, Gary Eleazar, Duane Prince, Sonell Nelson, James Leitch, Calvin Marks, Christopher Hardyal, Marlon Mitchell and Cullen-Bess Nelson.

Mix Up take Wiltshire Dominoes title Taffin Khan (right) is all concentration as he considers his next move against Alexander Duncan. tournament.

In the other points lineup, Alexander Duncan scored five points while Dravin Drickpaul, Roberto Neto and Carlos Petterson each scored four each. Trenton Bennett finished in the cellar after notching up 3 ½ points.

Meanwhile, President of the Guyana Chess Federation, Shiv Nandalall complimented the participants for a keenly contested tournament. He also extended deep gratitude to the officials of the DDL for once again acquiescing to

sponsorship requests as well as the school’s administration for allowing the players to utilize their facilities. DDL Sales Manager Alexis Langhorne presented the trophies and prizes to the winners on her company’s behalf.

Mix Up marked 46 games to win the final of the Mark Wiltshire Twenty\20 after Mash Dominoes competition which was contested last Sunday evening at F and H Strikers Sports Club, Meadow Brook Drive.

Martin Permaul chalked 11 for the winners while Mark Wiltshire and Tony Smith chipped in with 10 apiece. Pressure Point and Sophia Players were tied in second position with 45 games each but the former got the by registering more fours.

Darwin Chase top scored for Pressure Point with 11 and Emily Dodson supported with 10.

Mix Up received $50,000 and a trophy, while Pressure Point collected $30,000 and Sophia Players $15,000.

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Kaieteur News

Yolo Entertainment inaugural 10/10 Softball Challenge Series

Digital Technology joins growing list of sponsors

Digital technology became the latest entity to join the list of growing sponsors for the Yolo Entertainment inaugural 10/10 Softball Challenge Series.

The technology giant located on the Diamond Public Road recently donated $1million towards the tournament and during the presentation ceremony CEO of Digital Technology Terrence Sukhu stated that the tournament is one that will definitely assist in the continued development of softball cricket and will also provide for excellent family oriented entertainment.

According to Sukhu those two reasons were pivotal in his Company’s decision to offer its support for the event.

He also noted that softball cricket reaches a wide cross section of Guyanese and is a sport that many could relate to as having participated in at some stage in their lives.

The CEO stressed his company will continue to contribute to the development of Guyana, be it in Sports, ICT or other areas that could aid in the continued growth and development of this beautiful nation. Digital Technology has been in operation for over 10 years starting as a Sole Proprietor business , during which time it employed over 20 young, highly qualified and trained Guyanese workers.

Their global vision is to provide their customers with affordable, consistent and professional services and to be on par with the accelerated global competition. It is also not the first occasion that the company will be collaborating with Yolo Entertainment and

Digital Technology CEO Terrence Sukhu (left) hands over one of the winning trophies to Yolo Entertainment Director Kirk Jardine recently.

Advertising (YE&A) as they (YE&A) managed the Company’s Orange Tent Christmas craze promotion 2012 which was extremely successful and envisaged the same for the 10/10 challenge series.

“We at DT are impressed with the work of Yolo Entertainment; they are a professional group and we at DT are certain that the tournament will be staged at a high standard. It is also good to note that the major 10/10 softball cricket teams are involved. Trophy Stall, Wolf’s Warriors and Regal have all won the GT&T 10/10 Tournament and it will be a thrill to see them in competition again. We are

also willing to work with the organisers in future events,” Sukhu mentioned.

Responding on behalf of the Organisers, Yolo Entertainment Director Kirk Jardine said the Group was extremely grateful for the support offered by the Company and hailed their backing as a major win for the softball fraternity.

“We can now move on with confidence and security as we establish the foundation for major advancement of the sport, Jardine said.

The preliminary round of the tournament gets underway on Sunday, March 10 at the Wales Center Ground and continues on March 16, 17, 23 and 24.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Sponsors begin support for Annual Mayor’s Cup Football tourney With the Annual Mayor’s Cup Football tournament is set to commence on March 15 at the Den Amstel ground, several sponsors have begun to lend their support to the event to date as the organisers anticipate several other key partners will come on board to ensure the success of the tournament.

To date Macorp, Nazar Mohamed, Two Brothers Gas Station, Guyana Beverage Company (Busta), General Equipment Guyana Limited, Bakewell, Guyana Gold Fields, Beepat and Sons and Crown Mining have stepped forward.

Coordinator, Former National footballer and coach, Lennox Arthur said he was grateful for the support received so far, but he is looking forward for more tangible assistance from several key sponsors. He has made a request for President Donald Ramotar to provide the first prize of $1M, an undertaking that Former President Bharrat Jagdeo undertook in the past and is waiting for a response, which is hoped will be positive.

Keen competition is anticipated in this year’s tournament with teams from Georgetown, West Demerara, East Coast and one overseas club likely to compete.

Action is set for March 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 26, 28 and 31 when the final and third place playoff will be contested. Action is set for the Den Amstel, BV and GFC grounds.

Teams will battle for a $1M first prize, while the other top positions will claim $500,000, $300,000 and $200,000 rewards.

Teams competing are: Uitvlugt, Police, Den Amstel, Riddim Squad, Bakewell (Buxton), Santos, BV Triumph, G.F.C, Stewartville

Tichard Joseph

Orville Stewart

Marlon Brandis

Llyton Ramsey

G.D.F, Slingerz, Northern Rangers, Camptown, Golden Grove, Fruta Conquerors , Mahaica, Alpha United, Pele, Seawall and BK Western Tigers.

The fixtures indicate a possible meeting of the newly formed Slingerz FC and Alpha United in the very latter stages of the competition and fans will be in for a treat as both sides, Alpha look to cement their dominance, and Slingerz seek to make their mark after their grand entrance to the football scene will victory in a West side tourney

organised by them last weekend.

The action is expected to be fierce as clubs will look to improve and some create upsets as football action locally heats up following a not so good period last year.

Several key players will be turning out for their teams and among a few expected to make their mark are Orville Stewart, Tichard Joseph, Llyton Ramsey and Marlon Brandis, along with a whole lot of others, some of whom, we will mention over the course of the event.

BCB secures Raffik Construction...

From page 37 Amsterdam/Canje and Upper Corentyne and the Raffik Construction Services tournament would complete the circle. Teams from No. 1 to No. 43 would be part of the tournament which would be played on a twenty overs per side basis.

First Vice President Anil Beharry hailed the sub-zone tournament as another red letter achievement for the

Berbice Cricket Board.

President Keith Foster urged all the young cricketers in the ancient county to take advantage of the hard work of his Board and to seek ways to personally improve their cricketing skills. The Berbice Cricket Board, the President stated would continue to invest heavily to develop Berbice Cricket even further and to identify talents for the future.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Javed Raffik, representing his father at the presentation hailed the Berbice Cricket Board as the best sport organisation in Guyana and stated that the $100,000 sponsorship was one of the easiest his company had to make. He stated that Raffik Construction Services was pleased to be associated with the Berbice Cricket Board because of its outstanding work in developing Berbice Cricket. In an emotional plea, Javed Raffik urged his fellow business colleagues to support the Berbice Cricket Board as sit was worthy of assistance.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

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Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

EISS, SSPS PLAYFIELDS IN POOR CONDITION The present state of the Sans Souci Primary School playfield.

A dangerous ground! The EISS recreational facility has become a habitat for snakes and alligator.

As the old saying goes ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. Well, children attending the Essequibo Islands’ Secondary and the Sans Souci Primary Schools in Wakenaam are being starved of recreational activities for a number of years. This is due to the shabby state of both playfields which have being taken over by bushes.

The Physical Education teachers at both schools cannot use the playfields to

execute their programmes, and it is expected that students will sit the PE exam in a few years at the CSEC level. Kaieteur Sport was made to understand that Alligators and Snakes were found in the Essequibo Islands Secondary school on several occasions.

Both schools are located in the village of Sans Souci and residents of the area said that since the EISS were relocated (from Fredericksburg) the students

never had an opportunity to use the ground despite numerous efforts by the Wakenaam NDC to upgrade the playfield.

Chairman of the Wakenaam NDC Ahmad Zakir Khan in an invited comment said that efforts were made to upgrade the Primary school ground in 2012 but it was halted due to rain and work on the facility will commence shortly.

He informed that a lot of work has to be done on the

ground at the secondary school since it is low. “The NDC had made a one million dollar proposal which was channel through the Youth and Sport officer to the Ministry of Sport in 2011 and is still waiting on a response.

We did some work on the ground but it was not enough because the land is low and it has to be raised. This will take more than just the efforts of the NDC to fix”, added Khan.

He also said the NDC would

assist the clubs on the island to upgrade their grounds from time to time.

This publication was made to understand that the Ministry of Education recently cut the Arthurville Primary School ground. It will also be beneficial if this Ministry can assist in the upgrading of the EISS playfield.

Wakenaam, a Dutch word which means ‘waiting for a name’, is an 18 square mile island and is situated in the

mouth of the Essequibo River, and has a population of just over 3,000. The island has six cricket clubs but only three grounds are in playable condition, this forced some of the players to use neighbouring clubs, but despite these hiccups the island has recently produced two national cricketers; Ricardo Adams and Kemo Paul. Adams is a former student of the EISS, while Paul is still attending the institution.

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

Metro renews Cricket sponsorship of Rose Hall Town Youth & Sports Club Female Team Stationery giants Metro Office & Computer Supplies has for the 6th successive year renewed its cricket sponsorship of the Rose Hall Town Youth & Sports Club Metro Female Team. The Company since 1998 has been sponsoring the team at the cost of $160,000.

Regional Manager of Metro Ms. Avia Lindie in handing over the sponsorship praised the Rose Hall Town Metro Team as true representatives of her company’s brand and noted that their hard work and discipline over the years has produced positive results. She urged the members of the team to r e m a i n f o c u s e d and discipline and to always aim for the highest standard.

Secretary/CEO of the RHTYSC Hilbert Foster expressed the club’s delight at having Metro on board once again as an official sponsor and noted that the

A representative of Metro hands over the sponsorship to Renwick Batson of RHTYSC. Metro Female Team has been very successful in the past, winning both the Berbice and national female championship. Shemaine Campbelle, the first Guyanese female cricket to score an International century, is a

product of the team and is also the captain. Erva Giddings another West Indies player is the Vice Captain, while national players Nikita Toney, Melanie Henry, Phaffiana Millington are also members of the team.

Windies players available for T&T PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD - Trinidad and Tobago will have their full contingent of players available for their crucial regional four-day match against Guyana bowling off at Queen’s Park Oval, Port of Spain today.

T&T manager Omar Khan, speaking to the Express on Sunday, confirmed that they will have all their players, including those on West Indies duty, available for selection meaning that the squad could be significantly different from the one that defeated the Leeward Islands by 120 runs on Saturday.

Khan also expects the game against Guyana to be very competitive, with the visitors also having their best team available for selection.

“All the West Indies players will be available for

round four so we will have our best team available. That will be a big boost and that will also give the younger guys an opportunity to play alongside the senior players,” the manager explained.

The T&T players on West Indies duty against Zimbabwe were Denesh Ramdin, Dwayne and Darren Bravo, Kieron Pollard, Sunil Narine, Lendl Simmons, Shannon Gabriel and Samuel Badree.

“Guyana will also have their best players available so it promises to be a very high profile game with all the stars available,” Khan added.

The T&T manager also praised the younger players for stepping up and helping the team win full points over the Leewards in round three of the regional four-day competition.

“It was a fantastic performance by the guys and what was more heartening was that it was the younger players who stepped up,” said Khan.

“Young Yannick Ottley and Steven Katwaroo both scored half centuries and played a fighting innings for us to score 279. Then young (Yannic) Cariah made a brilliant 82 in the second innings and he really showed maturity and class in that knock.

“So the young guys put up their hands (up) and showed they are ready to represent Trinidad and Tobago at the highest level,” he added.

T&T returned home on Sunday night and will resuming training. Guyana arrived in Trinidad on Sunday.

(WICB Trinidad Express)

Barbados to stage Horace Phillips Memorial Boxing tourney The Barbados Boxing Association will this coming weekend will stage the Horace Phillips Memorial Tournament which will feature several overseas boxers.

The annual event held this time of the year, is in honour of one of Barbados’ boxing fraternity’s most faithful and dedicated members who passed on several years ago.

There will be thirteen bouts on the Card, six of which will involve boxers from

Trinidad & Tobago.

This Card is part of the preparation process for Barbados Junior boxers whom are preparing for the Continental Youth Boxing Championships, the World Youth Boxing Championships, and the 2014 Youth Olympics.

Meanwhile, from March 15-17 (next weekend), a team of female boxers from the Flying Fish Island will travel to Trinidad to participate in the Southern Games which will be concentrating on

Women in Sport.

Barbados has a vibrant programme which is aimed at improving the sport there.

This is similar to the moves being made by Guyana and the two countries are expected to be involved in various programmes in the not too distant future.

Guyanese fighters have journey to Barbados over the last year and it is anticipated reciprocal arrangements will continue between the two Caribbean countries.

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National Sports Commission age group badminton tournament 2013 continues The NSC AGE GROUP B A D M I N T O N TOURNAMENT continued on Monday at the Queens College Badminton Courts with the Under-15 Boys SemiFinals, the Under-17 Girls & Boys Semis & Finals and the Under-21 Semis.

The Under 15 Boys Singles Semi-Finals saw Jonathan Mangra defeating Ajave Singh: 21-15, 21-13. The Finals will see Mangra facing Omari Joseph. The Under-17 Boys singles Semi-Finals saw Omari Joseph defeating Jonathan Mangra in a three sets: 21-14, 13-21, 18-21.

The other Under-17 SemiFinals saw 14 year old Junior & Senior Champion Narayan Ramdhani Defeating Cecil Abrams: 21-19, 21-0 and also defeated Omari Joseph in the Finals: 21-2, 21-1.

The Under-17 Semi Finals saw Ambika Ramraj defeating Arian Kayume: in a three setter: 21-18, 16-21, 21-17.

The other Under-17 SemiFinals resulted in 2011 Junior Sportswoman & 2012 RunnerUp Junior Sports Woman- 11 year old Priyanna Ramdhani defeating Nadine Jairam 21-9,

2-11 and also defeated Ambika Ramraj in the Finals: 21-15, 21-14.

The Under-21 Semi-Finals saw Nicholas Ali defeating Avinash Odit: 21-10, 21-11 The other Semi-Finals produced a win for Narayan Ramdhani over Cecil Abrams: 21-8, 21-9. The tournament continues on Friday with the remaining two finals in the Under-15 Boys Singles: Jonathan Mangra against Omari Joseph and the Under21 Boys singles Finals: Naryan Ramdhani versus Nicholas Ali. The Results are: Under-15 Boys Singles Semi-Finals: Jonathan Mangra defeated Ajave Singh Under-17 Boys Singles Semi-Finals: Narayan Ramdhani defeated Cecil Abrams: 21-19, 21-0 Omari Joseph defeated Jonathan Mangra: 21-14, 1321, 18-21 Under-17 Boys Singles Finals: Narayan Ramdhani defeated Omari Joseph: 21-2, 21-1 Under-17 Girls Singles Semi Finals:

Nicholas Ali Ambika Ramraj defeated Arian Kayume: 21-18, 16-21, 21-17 Priyanna Ramdhani defeated Nadine Jairam: 21-9, 21-11 Under-17 Girls Singles Finals: Priyanna Ramdhani defeated Ambika Ramraj: 2115, 21-14 Under-21 Boys Singles Semi-Finals: Nicholas Ali defeated Avinash Odit; 21-10, 21-11 Narayan Ramdhani defeated Cecil Abrams: 21-8, 21-9

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Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Jamaican sprinter Mullings Samuels and Roach to play for loses appeal against life ban Sagicor HPC against Zimbabwe

Steve Mullings (Sporting heroes.net) BERNE (Reuters) Jamaican sprinter Steve Mullings has lost his appeal against a lifetime ban from athletics, imposed in November 2011 for a second doping offense, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) said on Monday.

Mullings, 30, who won a gold medal in the 4x100 meters relay at the 2009 world championships in Berlin, tested positive for testosterone in 2004 and for the banned diuretic furosemide in 2011.

The sprinter, who missed the Athens Olympics because

of the first ban, questioned the methods which led to the results of both tests, but CAS rejected his arguments.

“The athlete argued that there were problems with the 2004 positive test meaning it should not be counted as a first sanction for a doping offence,” said CAS. “He argued further that the laboratory results of the 2011 test were unreliable and that the disciplinary proceedings were flawed.”

CAS said proceedings were delayed as it collected evidence from both tests.

“The CAS panel..... considered that the athlete had not presented any basis to challenge the testing procedure of the 2011 sample,” said the verdict.

“Furthermore, while Mullings has attempted to raise suspicion about his first violation, the CAS panel did not find that the circumstances surrounding the first offence warranted a more lenient sanction.”

Mullings tested positive for furosemide after finishing third in the 100 meters final at the Jamaican national trials in June.

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados – West Indies players Marlon Samuels and Kemar Roach have been named in the Sagicor West Indies High Performance Centre squad to play against Zimbabwe this week.

The three-day contest will be played from Thursday to Saturday at the Desmond Haynes Oval at the Carlton Cricket Club complex and will be a minimum of 90 overs per day. The teams will be allowed to use 13-players-per-side with 11 allowed to bat. First ball is 10 am (9 am Jamaica Time).

Samuels and Roach are listed in the Top 20 of the International Cricket Council’s Test rankings.

Roach, the 24-year-old new ball bowler, is at Number 12 in the bowling while Samuels, the experienced middle-order batsman, is at Number 18 in the batting. Zimbabwe will use the match as a warm-up for the upcoming two-Test Series against the West Indies.

SQUAD: Kyle Hope (Captain), Jermaine Blackwood, Yannick Carriah, Sheldon Cotterell, Miguel Cummins, Jason Dawes, Andre Fletcher (Wicketkeeper), Trevon Griffith,

Marlon Samuels and Kemar Roach will line-up alongside the boys at the Sagicor High Performance Centre to play against Zimbabwe this week. (WICB) Jahmar Hamilton (Wicketkeeper), Keddy Lesporis, Kemar Roach, Marlon Samuels and Jomel Warrican.

Graeme West (Head Coach) and Rodney Alkins (Team Manager).

Schedule of remaining matches:

Thu, Mar 7 to Sat, Mar 9: Tour match – Desmond Haynes Oval, Barbados Tue, Mar 12 to Sat, Mar 16: 1st Test – Kensington Oval, Barbados Wed, Mar 20 to Sun, Mar 24: 2nd Test – Windsor Park, Dominica

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

Busy weekend for cyclists Local riders are in for a busy weekend with the staging of two cycling events in different parts of the country.

On Saturday, Assuria Insurance Company will venture into the sport of cycling for the first time, by providing full sponsorship for an 11-race Meet at the Inner Circuit of the National Park.

That event will commence at 09:00 hours and will conclude with the feature 35lap School Boys and Invitational race.

Among the other races carded for the day are the BMX age group categories, veterans, uprights and mountain bikes.

Representatives of the company, including Assistant General Manager, Yogindra Arjune, will be on hand to assist with the presentation of prizes.

On Sunday, the action switches to the West Demerara roadway for the 5th annual Cheddi Jagan

memorial 50-miler.

The race will pedal off at 09:00 hours at Wales; proceed to Bushy Park, Parika, before returning to the Demerara Harbour Bridge for the finish.

Veterans, uprights and female riders will turn at Uitvlugt Ground on the upward journey and finish at the Harbour Bridge.

Paul DeNobrega is the defending champion of the senior race, having won last year’s race in a time of One Hour 59 Minutes 24 Seconds.

DeNobrega also won the junior category last year, but he has since graduated to the senior level, making way for a new champion to be crowned this year. Talim Shaw (Veterans Open), Dexter Wilson (Upright), Naomi Singh (Female) and Walter Isaacs (Veterans Over-60) are the defending champions of the other categories.

Sunday’s race will be sponsored by Krishna Samlall, a businessman of Parika.

Joseph and Wiltshire T\20 Dominoes fixed for Sunday Faye Joseph and Mark Wiltshire will be hosting a Twenty\20 Dominoes competition on Sunday 10th of March at Hararuni Creek, Linden Highway.

According to the organisers teams will battle for a top prize of $100,000 and clubs in and out of Georgetown are invited to take part.

Transportation will leave Dynasty Sports Bar at 10:00 am and individuals are required to pay a fee $1,000.

Faye Joseph

WICB announces change to Super50 schedule St John’s, Antigua – The West Indies Cricket Board today announced a change in the Regional Super50 schedule.

The three Round 4 matches which were scheduled to be played on Tuesday March 12, have been brought forward to Monday March 11.

This change has been effected to avoid a clash with the West Indies v Zimbabwe First Test which commences on March 12 at the Kensington Oval in Barbados.

The venues, match officials and start times for

the Super50 matches remain unchanged.

Two of the matches (Trinidad and Tobago v Guyana at Queens Park Oval and CCC v Leewards at 3Ws Oval) are day/night encounters and will commence at 2pm local time while the third match (Jamaica v Windwards at Grenada National Stadium) will be played during the day and is slated to begin at 9:30am.

Following Round 4 there will be a mid-season break.

The Super50 will resume on March 21st with three matches in Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica.

Page 35

School’s Football adds life to WDFA; Momentum must be maintained

Part of the crowd at the Fazia’s Collection Inter School Final at the Den Amstel Ground on Saturday afternoon.

The just concluded Fazia’s Collection Inter Secondary School Under-17 Girls tournament and the Slingerz Mashramani Senior knock-out competition which concluded a day apart brought the game back to life and some degree of competitiveness on the West Demerara.

Main sponsor of the inaugural female inter-school tournament, Fazia’s Collection of America and Longden Streets in the City and Anna Catherina on the West Demerara; New GPC and under their Codol Compound product and Long Hi Centre has ignited an aspect of the sport that has real potential

on the West Side.

The six schools involved, eventual champions Leonora, Uitvlugt, St. John’s, West Demerara Secondary, Zeeburg and Vreed-en-Hoop surely came out and played to the best of their respective abilities as they enjoyed a good game.

Support from the Head Teachers of the various schools, Ministry of Education through the Regional Education Department on the West Demerara, the West Demerara Football Association, parents and fans were admirable at all the matches played.

The caretaker/ groundsman at the Den

Amstel community Centre Ground must also be commended for keeping the ground in good shape.

President and executive of the West Demerara Football Association must now build on this momentum that has started and clearly shows that more tournaments are needed to develop the game, fan support undoubtedly is guaranteed.

Slingerz FC’s Mash tournament was another success, the crowd support again was beyond imagination and very encouraging. Ansa McAl under their Stag Beer brand, Digicel, Hopkinson Mining, Two Brothers Service Station

and Double Standard Wash Bay among others must also be complimented for bringing off this tournament.

The host club, featuring a number of national players, won the tournament but that apart, the teams and fans have all embraced the new kid on the block which can only raise the bar on the West Side.

What’s next for the West Side in terms of competition is left to be seen but what is certain, the executive has a solid platform on which to build. Some exciting times lay ahead for the game on the West Side which they say, is the best side.

Page 36

Kaieteur News

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Wednesday March 06, 2013

Kaieteur News

Page 37

India go 2-0 up after Australia capitulate

R Ashwin traps Glenn Maxwell lbw. (BCCI) ESPNcricinfo - When India’s confidence was rattled by the drubbings in Australia and England over the past two years, they took solace in their outstanding home record. Even that bit of relief had been taken away when Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann outspun India earlier this season, but India’s belief at home has come surging back with two thumping victories over Australia.

Though it was widely expected that Australia would go down on the fourth day, few thought it would happen with the embarrassing rapidity that it did. Australia’s batsmen were once again nonplussed

by the turning ball to subside to 131 all out, handing India an innings-and-135-run victory and a 2-0 series lead.

If Australia’s chances were slim at the start of the day, they vanished with two deliveries of vastly contrasting quality. Ishant Sharma got his first wicket of the series with a harmless ball sliding down the leg side which Shane Watson guided through to the wicketkeeper.

Ravindra Jadeja, usually the butt of derogatory jokes from Indian fans despite a stellar first-class record, then produced the ball of the match, a delivery that drifted onto middle stump and spun

back to beat Michael Clarke’s forward defensive to crash into off.

From then it was only a matter of time. Ed Cowan had gritted it out for nearly three hours, forgetting the deliveries that ripped past his outside edge to concentrate afresh. Jadeja, with his tail up after that magic ball to Clarke, ended Cowan’s resistance on 44 as an edge ricocheted off MS Dhoni’s gloves deflected to Virender Sehwag at slip.

It got even better for Jadeja soon after as he lasered in a throw from cover to run out Moises Henriques, who was yards out despite Jadeja fumbling the ball before

BCB secures Raffik Construction Services sponsorship for Lower Corentyne 20 Overs Tourney

Javed Raffik presents sponsorship to Representatives of BCB. The Berbice Cricket Board has secured another sponsorship deal for its proposed tournaments this year. Raffik Construction Services on Thursday last came on board as the official sponsor of the Lower Corentyne Twenty Overs Tournament.

Raffik Construction Services Lower

Corentyne Tournament for Second Division teams and a total of eighteen teams would be part of the tournament.

Chairman of the BCB Special Events Committee Hilbert Foster expressed gratitude to Mohamed Raffik, CEO of Raffik Construction Services for his sponsorship of the tournament. Foster

explained that the Berbice Cricket Board in an effort to return cricket to the grassroot levels has embarked on hosting cricket tournaments for teams within the four subzones in Berbice. The Berbice Cricket Board has already completed tournaments in West Berbice, New (Continued on page 30)

collecting it.

Then the man who started Australia’s slide on Monday evening, R Ashwin, took over.

He has kept his Twenty20 variations to a minimum this series, and cleverly used them against the lower order. Glenn Maxwell was looking towards square leg after attempting a flick only to be confounded by the carrom ball that was heading for the off stump.

There was time left for Ashwin to complete his eighth five-for in 11 home Tests.

While the capitulation on Tuesday morning was painful viewing for Australia fans, much of the damage had been done by the batting failure on the first day, when the pitch was at its best. Just three months ago, the muchcoveted No. 1 Test ranking was within Australia’s grasp and Clarke and the team management seemed to be able to do no wrong. After the two defeats, he will be assailed by questions, just as Dhoni has been over the past couple of years.

The result will be a major source of relief for Dhoni, who after settling doubts

Ravindra Jadeja struck three times on the fourth morning. (BCCI) over his Test batting in Chennai has now become India’s most successful Test captain with 22 wins.

The next match is in Mohali, typically a swingfriendly surface, but given Australia’s ineptness against spin, the curators are likely to work overtime to produce a

turning track there as well.

Scores: India 503 (Pujara 204, Vijay 167, Maxwell 4-127) beat Australia 237 for 9 dec (Clarke 91, Wade 62, Jadeja 3-33, Bhuvneshwar 3-53) and 131 (Ashwin 5-63, Jadeja 3-33) by an innings and 135 runs.