Porsche questions

Newsday Editorial
January 23, 2012 – newsday.co.tt

Minister of Food Production, Vasant BharathThere are bound to be questions and indeed raised eyebrows at the purchase of a luxury Porsche Cayenne SUV – with a showroom price tag of $925,000 – for the official use of Minister of Food Production, Vasant Bharath. Bharath defended the purchase by saying the actual price paid – after exemptions for taxes and duties – was about $400,000, which he said was comparable to the cost of other SUVs.
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Kamla Spoils the Bharatiya Party in Jaipur

By Stephen Kangal
January 22, 2012

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar

It is patently clear that the staging of the tenth annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) pilgrimage to India by the Indian Ministry of Overseas Indians Affairs is geared and exclusively configured to exploiting and attracting for the benefit of the Indian economy the enormous wealth, political influence and entrepreneurship to be found within the 30 million Indian diaspora. Remittances alone to India amount to over US$50bn annually that is seven times T&T’s budget.
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Joker wild in Cabinet

By Raffique Shah
January 21, 2012

Raffique ShahJUSTICE Minister Herbert Volney invariably comes across as a joker in the theatre of the macabre…a kind of black humour specialist.

He seems not to know whether his role is to make people laugh, cry or have a compelling urge to throttle him. He cannot decide if he is an entertainer, intimidator or Soca Monarch contender.
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De Prime Minister Eh Dey

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 20, 2012

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeI have never accepted V. S. Naipaul’s description of our society as being half-made or our people as mimic men and women. Some years ago, I wrote a trenchant criticism of Naipaul’s work in which I responded to those designations in an effective manner. For the past three weeks, I have been traveling in Germany and England. As I view our political landscape from afar, I cannot help but get the impression that our Prime Minister is playing dolly house with our people’s future; fiddling around which their good nature; and treating them with a contempt they do not deserve.
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To Goar or Not To Lagay

By Stephen Kangal
January 15, 2012

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar receives the Pravasi Samaan Award in Jaipur
PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar receives the Pravasi Samaan Award in Jaipur

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar attempted to touch the feet of The President of India, Shrimatee Pratibha Patil in true Trini Hindu-style of performing the “goar lagay” after receiving the Pravasi Samaan Award in Jaipur. The question is whether she has compromised the concept of the sovereign equality of states and infringed the secular configuration and contours of governance by this Hindu act of humility, respect, diplomacy and submission.
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Boorish behaviour by schools’ boards

By Raffique Shah
January 14, 2012

Raffique ShahTELEVISION footage that showed a hapless young female teacher being bullied by hard-backed men and a “be-hijabed” woman was the pannier that broke this jackass’ back. I had stupidly stayed silent when Sat Maharaj and sundry Maha Sabha persons, again men and women, hounded school principal Sita Gajadharsingh-Nanga. I thought that more than enough had been said and written about that unsavoury stand off to convince Sat and his people that they should improve their pedigree.
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Karen Nunez-Tesheira: They ill-treated my husband

By Andre Bagoo
January 13 2012 – newsday.co.tt

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-BissessarFORMER Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira yesterday for the first time revealed the personal reasons she had for taking her money out of the Clico Investment Bank (CIB) in December 2008, saying she did so in order to cut ties with Clico because her late husband Russell Tesheira – right up to his death in 2004 – had been badly treated by Clico and its former executive chairman Lawrence Duprey.
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Trini Scam family sent off to prison in U.S.

Mom, dad & daughter ripped off immigrants

By Christina Carrega
January 12, 2012 – nypost.com

A seething Queens judge walloped three members of a crooked Richmond Hill family yesterday, sending them upstate to serve a combined 418 years for a brazen immigration and real-estate scam.

The mom, dad and daughter — dubbed “The Ramsundar Gang” by Queens Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Holder — paid a shocking price for defrauding 19 families of $1.8 million over six years.
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