Keeping you updated on current events...
Tuesday May 25, 2021
ONLINE DAILY NEWSPAPER
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EDUCATION MINISTER LAUNCHES QUIZ-ME ONLINE LEARNING
THE GUYANA POLICE FORCE HAS REFUTED ANY CLAIMS THAT HAITIAN NATIONAL ARE BEING BAN FROM ENTERING THE COUNTRY
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Wednesday May 26, 2021
Independence Day is one of Guyana’s biggest national holidays, with celebrations including fireworks and festive activities across the country. The event is to commemorate the day Guyana became a free and independent nation. In 1814, the British Empire took control of
the country from the French, Spanish and Dutch colonies. 152 years later Guyana gained its independence from the British on May 26, 1966. This year marks 55 years since Guyana became an independent nation, with its own national identity. Guyana’s unique symbols of nationhood include
the National Flag or the Golden Arrowhead, Coat of Arms, the National Anthem, and the National Pledge. The National Independence Arch on Brickdam, near Vlissengen Road, also commemorates Guyana’s Independence from Great Britain.
For this occasion, residents usually celebrate Guyana’s rich cultural background with festivals ranging from fireworks, parades, food, arts, and music events to more casual family gatherings. This year, in light of the coronavirus pandemic, celebrations will look a little different, with social
distancing restrictions in place and many events cancelled due to gathering size restrictions. The Flag Raising Ceremony will be held on Tuesday, at the intersection of Young and High streets, Georgetown from 7:30 pm. There will also be a Military Band parade, a
cultural display, fireworks, and the presidential address by President Irfaan Ali. Traffic restrictions will be in place for the ceremony. The event will be broadcast live on NCN and streamed on the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, DPI and NCN Facebook pages.
programme to facilitate better learning. Adding to the handout packages filled with learning material and the booster program filled with videos explaining various topics, according to the Ministry, the programme is set to facilitate some 50 quizzes that were developed by
teachers in the study areas of English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies. With the programme already loaded with the answers for the various questions, students will be able to assess the needed strength and their weakness by knowing directly who the correct and wrong answers are. The programme is set to also facilitate learning for those who are differently able and will be Zero-rated by both internet provider Digicel and GT&T. The programme is set to be accessed by any devised platform a student or a parent may have just by visiting the Education Website and by forwarding to the “Quizme” platform. Speaking at the launch this morning, Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, applauding the move but however said that she
remains disappointed that the utilization of such a platform was not done since 2014. Minister Manickchand said that despite such, this acts as a way of giving whatever the Ministry can to facilitate learning, but says that the Ministry does not know the outcome of providing such tools but says that something must be done in an environment where learning must be more innovative. “This here is adding another service to the Ministry. It is not easy for us to stand here and boast about all these things we give because we still don’t know what the outcome would be; that is something we have to measure. “We have to measure at the end of this weather if this intervention worked, whether it was timely. If we had done it better would it have been better off?
“If we would have given it along with some kind of face to face will they be better off (our student)? So, these are things we still have to measure. But what is factual is that students are getting more at a time when they are in a crisis than they ever got before.” Minister Manickchand added that she hopes that students and parents utilize the platform for better learning and doing better at exams. “Getting more, parents and teachers don’t amount to doing better unless the more that we give is used and utilized effectively. We want to plead with you to make sure these services are used and used effectively and supervised by you because doing is what will change our effect on the results,” Manickchand further noted. The Minister said that with such she is of the view that she will see better results
Education Minister launches Quiz-Me online learning
On the heels of the Booster Learning Platform by the Ministry of Education for National Grade Six Assessment Students, the Ministry of Education is looking to further enhance the learning capability of students by Re-launching “Quiz-Me”, online learning fit for answering
questions and getting immediate responses. That launch took place this morning, Wednesday, where it is disclosed that the programme which was launched back in 2014 was further boosted to support better learning in the advent of the COVID-19 Pandemic by adding more content to the
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Wednesday May 26, 2021
GGMC PROSECUTOR GRANTED BAIL ON BRIBERY CHARGE A Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) Prosecutor was allegedly caught in a sting operation collecting money from a man charged for illegally mining has been charged and granted bail. The bribe was supposed to induce the officer to drop his case The Defendant 44-year-old, Sherwin Crandon, of George Street, Werk-enRust, appeared before Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan and denied the allegation made against him. It is alleged that Crandon, on May 19, 2021, at Seeta’s Bar. Kitty, while being a prosecutor with the Guyana Geology and
Mines Commission corruptly obtained $300,000 from Viveka Singh as inducement for forbearing to prosecute and cause the matter to be dismissed against Mr. Singh for illegal mining an act in relation to his principal affairs. Crandon was later granted bail in the sum of $150,000 and was ordered to return to court on June 8. Reports are that Singh, who is a gold miner, paid the police a visit at CID Headquarters at Eve Leary, Georgetown, and related that back in 2019, he was charged by the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission ((GGMC) for illegal mining at Blackwater, Mahdia.
The miner later related that Crandon would have contacted stating that he is a prosecutor and told him he is willing to dismiss his case if he pays him $300,000 Guyana Currency and if he does not comply then he will be convicted for the offence. The gold miner said Crandon later gave him a location to meet him; that is a popular bar in Station Street, Kitty, yesterday, just around 16:00 hrs. With that information given, a sting operation was set up in order to catch Crandon redhanded. A party of Policemen acting upon information arrested Crandon. Crandon was later identified as a prosecutor
11-YEAR-OLD REPORTS RAPE BY A FAMILY MEMBER
An 11-year-old girl from Region Seven who was scolded allegedly by her mother after trying to come clean about her being sexually abused by a family member has mustered the courage to tell another family member about her abuse. The matter has now reached the attention of the Guyana
Police Force. Reports suggest that between August 2020 and May 2021, the young girl was raped constantly, allegedly by one of her adult relatives. However, when the victim reported that the perpetrator continually assaulted her, her mother scolded her for complaining.
She however found the courage to tell another family member who reported the matter to the police. As an investigation was launched into the matter, a medical certificate was obtained in the victim’s favour and the suspect was arrested as enquiries continue
for the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission. Later, a search and the sum of $300,000 Guyana Currency, in dimensions of $5,000 was reportedly found in his pants pocket. He was then told of the
allegation, arrested, and placed into custody. Crandon admitted that he is a Prosecutor at GGMC and he was prosecuting an active matter against the gold miner at Mahdia Magistrate court.
This matter was being tried at the Diamond Magistrate’s Court. He admitted that he indeed collected the money from the gold miner, but claimed that he wanted to “borrow” the money.
BRITISH MODEL DIES AFTER ASTRAZENECA JAB A British model has died days after receiving the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in Cyprus. Stephanie Dubois, 39, suffered a “serious thrombotic episode” after being given the jab in the town of Paphos. Health officials at Cyprus’s main state hospital in the capital, Nicosia, said that she had no underlying health conditions. The possible link between the jab and Ms. Dubois’ death is yet to be confirmed and her death be investigated by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Charalambos Charilaou, a Cypriot health service spokesman, said. Ms. Dubois received the first dose of the vaccine on May 6 and shared the news on Facebook. She wrote: “So I had the vaccination today! I hate needles, today was no exception . . . And now I feel horrendous . . . pizza and bed for me.” On May 14 she was
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taken to hospital after she experienced “fullbody shakes” and was “struggling to breathe”. She wrote: “Woke up feeling fine and then within an hour I had full body shakes, all my joints seized and I was struggling to breathe and was cold to the bone with a persistent headache and dizziness. “Mum and dad came to look after me and took me for a Covid test, which thankfully was negative . . . but it still doesn’t explain what the problem is. Maybe I’m having a prolonged reaction to my Covid jab last week.” By May 19 she had slipped into a coma and “was not expected to come out of it”, according to Andrew Powers, a friend. Local media claims that she had a brain hemorrhage and died on Saturday afternoon. It follows after Cyprus temporarily halted its use of the AstraZeneca vaccine pending a review
by the EMA in March. Germany, France, and other EU member states followed suit but re-introduced the jab on March 18. Only two other people in Cyprus are known to have developed blood clots after the AstraZeneca vaccine. Both had underlying health issues and neither died. In April, a review by the EMA safety committee concluded that “unusual blood clots with low blood platelets should be listed as very rare side effects” of the Oxford jab. Emer Cooke, executive director of the EMA said its review “confirmed that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing Covid-19 overall outweigh the risk of side effects”, adding: “Vaccination is extremely important in helping us in the fight against Covid-19.” The EMA and AstraZeneca have been approached for comment.
Wednesday May 26, 2021
THE GUYANA POLICE FORCE HAS REFUTED ANY CLAIMS THAT HAITIAN NATIONAL ARE BEING BAN FROM ENTERING THE COUNTRY.
In a statement the force stated that it has not been directed by any authority, neither has the Commissioner of Police been instructed
by the Minister of Home Affairs to ban Haitian Nationals from entering Guyana. There is no ban on Haitian Nationals seeking to enter Guyana.
The Police Force is categorically refuting such allegations which are being peddled on social media by irresponsible,
mischievous and misleading media reporting. Additionally the force said, that between Sunday May 23 and
Monday May 24, 2021, seventeen (17) out of a total of sixty-one (61) Haitian Nationals, who had arrived aboard Caribbean Airlines flights at the Eugene Correia International Airport at Ogle, were refused entry into the country because of the fact that they did not satisfy Immigration requirements. Having not been landed, the 17 Haitians have been kept at the Airport awaiting a return flight to their Port of
Embarkation for their journey to Guyana. They have since departed aboard a Caribbean Airlines flight from the Eugene F. Correia International Airport, Ogle at 14:40 hours on today Tuesday May 25th, 2021 according to the force. The Airline, airport officials and the Ministry of Home Affairs assisted with feeding and accommodation for the affected persons during their stay at the airport.
announced that he was at Number 63 Village. This must have been the result of the brew produced by Banks DIH and DDL. Indar must have been disoriented not to know where he was. His outburst continued the attempt to bully Tiwarie. He actually said that he would have Tiwarie return the sand to the location, something that he has no power to do. Such was his intention that he got favourable news outlets to publish his utterings on the front page of their newspapers. Despite all the attempts to correct him, Indar simply refuses to change his position. In
fact, confronted with his mistake he opted to remain silent. And rest assured, there will be no apology to Tiwarie for the embarrassment. And no sooner had the Number 63 Village accusation ended than another surfaced. One of Indar’s followers published another statement designed to accuse Tiwarie of something of which he knows nothing. The accusation is that Tiwarie owns Village Voice, a nascent newspaper that is published online and in hard copy. The writer of the social media post states that Tiwarie is behind the paper and
that Adam Harris is one of the principals. Perhaps the brew that Indar drinks are shared among his followers . It clouds their vision and removes their short-term memory. The man behind Village Voice moved to the courts and secured a writ against the publishers of the newspaper. He named every operative and how much money they were paid. None of the names was Brian Tiwarie and none was Adam Harris. But that information seemed not to make its way into the heads of those who are bent on attacking Tiwarie and slandering him.
BULLYING AND DISCRIMINATING ARE HALLMARKS OF SOME PEOPLE
ADAM’s Notebook The world is full of examples of the strong and powerful taking advantage of the weak. Bullying is a classic example of the powerful subduing the weak. More often than not the bully or the perceived strong and powerful may pick on a person who, though possessing the ability to retaliate, would often shrug and try to move on. While this may work sometimes, for the greater part, bullies being less educated than the average person who would reason or who would let better judgment prevail continues the attack. The past week saw a continuation of the perceived strong and powerful using the seat of power to bring an ordinary person to his knees or at worse, demean him in the eyes of the wider society. This is the case of Brian Tiwarie, a self-made businessman, who climbed the ladder of entrepreneurship and expanded his operations. He set up a number of diverse companies.
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There is the story of the moth and the flame. The moth saw the flame and thought that it looked beautiful. Sadly, it got too close and got burnt. Some people flirted with the flame but decided that it was too dangerous and moved on. But the flame can be unforgiving. There are many people who have found an unforgiving political situation. Most of them worked with a previous administration, some as far back as forty years. These people remained unforgiving and moved to destroy them. The cases of the public servants who were dismissed these past few months are just one example. The placing of other public servants before the courts, even though the charge may fall through is another. The bottom line is that these people charged would have to find money that could have been used in other areas to satisfy legal costs. Soon after acceding to the seat of government, there were people who turned their attention to
Tiwarie. They attacked his ownership of the property; they revoked contracts granted under the previous administration; they threatened to shut Tiwarie out of future contracts. This threat was mouthed by Minister Deodat Indar. He said that he was going to write to the Central Tender Board to have the body refuse to accept tenders submitted by BK International. Indar does not end there. He goes to the press with a statement that Tiwarie is removing sand from Number 63 Beach on the Corentyne. Banks DIH and Demerara Distillers Limited produce a brew that does strange things to some people. If one imbibes too much one could become disoriented. Many people have lost track of time. Some went home but could remember how they did. Indar went to Number 59 Village where he saw a pit resulting from reef sand extraction by BK International. He stood at the location and
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Vaccine refusal is as dangerous a pandemic as COVID-19
By Sir Ronald Sanders (The writer is Antigua and Barbuda’s Ambassador to the United States and the Organization of American States. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London and Massey College at the University of Toronto. The views expressed are entirely his own) Vaccine refusal is fast becoming as dangerous to human health and to economies as the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, even before the novel coronavirus was confirmed and began its spread around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that vaccine refusals had led to a resurgence of diseases such as measles in countries that were close to eliminating them. The WHO identified vaccine refusal as one of the 10 leading threats to global health. At
that time, complacency, inconvenience in access, and a lack of confidence were said to be the driving factors for people’s refusal to inoculate against disease. Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the problem has become worse and so widespread that a comprehensive approach by all governments and non-governmental organizations, globally, is now necessary to overcome it. Promoted on social media platforms by farright organisations and church groups in the U.S., the anti-vaccine propaganda has spread like wildfire, convincing persons at all levels of societies that they would either die from an inoculation or some harmful material would be injected into their bodies. Religious groups in the Caribbean, influenced by fundamentalist U.S. churches, also encourage
their followers not to vaccinate. Research done by the New York Times reported, on April 5, that “among evangelicals in the U.S., Pentecostal and charismatic Christians may be particularly wary of the vaccine, in part because their tradition historically emphasizes divine health and miraculous healing in ways that can rival traditional medicine”. Charismatic churches also attract followers in the Caribbean. The most popular social media platforms used by anti-vaxxers are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram which have all committed to banning anti-vaccine content. But, accounts on these platforms turn up as quickly as they are taken down. In turn, the propaganda, which includes fabricated videos purporting to show actual events, is communicated tens of thousands of times around the world on
WhatsApp. Governments and social media platforms, such as those named in this commentary, as well as organizations such as the WHO and the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), must gather specialists together to find ways to counter the antivaccination propaganda campaigns and to strengthen educational progammes showing the benefit of vaccines. PAHO has started using Facebook to educate about the benefits of vaccines, but more effective communications techniques should be used, including dropping huge images of syringes and needles, that may be reinforcing reticence to inoculate. Groups of persons in many parts of the world, who decline to take the COVID-19 vaccine, now pose a risk to themselves and the people with whom they come into contact, especially their families. They also pose a risk to the opening-up of the economies of their countries. Data, gathered worldwide, shows that the claims of the anti-vaxxers, concerning detrimental effects of the vaccine, are wrong. Figures confirm that the COVID-19 vaccine prevents severe infection and deaths at astounding rates. Studies show that
in Israel for instance, vaccines prevented hospitalization among adults 65 and older by 94%. They also prevented symptomatic infection among healthcare workers by 97% and blocked severe disease by 97.4% in Qatar. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an Infectious-Diseases Specialist, and Professor of Medicine at The University of California at San Francisco, reports that serious infections among vaccinated individuals are extremely rare. She points out that “of over 115 million vaccinated Americans, only 0.0009% contracted severe COVID-19 after vaccination despite the virus continuing to circulate in their communities. As she concluded: “Vaccines truly defang the virus”. In the U.S. and Britain where (at the time of writing on 20 May) 48.09% and 55.49% of the populations have been vaccinated, data shows that vaccines also block transmission. People, who have been inoculated against the coronavirus, are rightly concerned that, despite their responsible action in taking the vaccine, irresponsible persons are asserting their right to refuse it. The question that has to be asked is: whose rights are greater? Are the rights to safeguard lives and livelihood less than the right to put lives
and livelihoods at risk by refusing to be vaccinated? This is not a moral dilemma; it is a commonsense question, deserving a common-sense answer. However, no answer is being attempted as individual governments and their health authorities shy away from the question for political reasons. No ruling political party wants to risk losing electoral support to its rivals on the back of an accusation of depriving people of their rights. Yet, when that right is upheld, it threatens others and entire societies. Just as measles has returned in countries where groups of people decline to be inoculated against it, COVID-19 will not be subdued or eliminated in countries where groups of people refuse to be vaccinated. This conflict must be tackled and resolved by global agreement and action. No one country can act alone. Maybe the answer lies in an intense education programme globally constructed, financed, and implemented. The mantra that “we’re all in this together” assumes a profound global relevance for maintaining life and sustaining livelihoods. Doing nothing is not a solution. The 74th World Health Assembly being held from May 24 to June 1, is the ideal place to start.
Unnecessary hassle at CJIA Dear Editor, On April 25, 2021, I was making the midnight Jet Blue trip to NY. In the departure lounge after clearing Immigration, and preparing to be screened, I had my second most horrifying experience with the screening technician. Because of a radiationrelated cancer surgery I had in 2007, I requested
a pat-down instead of using the x-ray machine. This request was denied, I was made to parade myself four times in and out of that machine with undue care from uncouth staff. As if this was not enough, CANU continued with the most degrading search on my personal effects. I am a septuagenarian; I was never involved in
transporting any illicit stuff, and would like to know why I am being targeted when attempting to depart Guyana. I would like Mr. Ramesh Ghir and the Civil Aviation Director to note my harassment. These people need to be trained. They are an embarrassment to Guyana. Traumatized citizen.
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