By Raffique Shah
April 27, 2020
My younger brother Farouk caught me unawares one evening last week when he telephoned me saying, “The PM used the ‘F’ word today!” “What?” I asked in shock, thinking that either Prime Minister Keith Rowley or Farouk was going off. “He did!” Farouk persisted. “He spoke about food.” The joke was on me, and we enjoyed a hearty laugh at my expense.
Continue reading Hungry people, angry people
By Stephen Kangal
April 26, 2020
A third Road Multi-Sectoral and micro and macro conceptualised Map is now being engineered and brainstormed by the PNM Government. Both the previous 2020 and 2030 Vision Road Maps were shelved because the PNM is politically notorious for conceptualization plans but total failures when it comes to critical implementation commitments.
Continue reading A COVID Recovery Road Map with Too Many Junctions
By Raffique Shah
April 21, 2020
When a nation wages war, and when that war is just, it is the duty of every able-bodied citizen to support his or her country, each according to his ability. In the current situation, the entire world is at war against the invisible CORVID-19 virus that is wreaking death and destruction in an unprecedented global attack. In most countries, people have rallied behind their governments, battling in the frontlines and from their homes, executing simple strategies that are formulated to deny the killer-virus a fertile environment in which it thrives, hence containing it and starving it to death.
Continue reading Assessing the leader
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 20, 2020
As a teacher, I was interested in the exchange between Anthony Garcia, the minister of education (MOE), and Antonia De Freitas, president of the TTUTA, with regard to how best to continue teaching our nation’s pupils while schools are closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The MOE wanted to “determine the extent to which students had access to learning materials while schools were closed” (Newsday, April 11) so it could determine the best platform to deliver online teaching for our pupils.
Continue reading “All Ah We in This Together…”
By A. Hotep
April 17, 2020
PM Dr Keith Rowley’s “Road Map to Recovery” team is mostly the same tone-deaf people who have us in our financial and social crisis today. There was no inclusion of members of the African community who advocate for addressing our racial and cultural issues which remain at the heart of disunity, insecurity and discriminatory social behaviours in this country. Why was the Opposition leader not invited to be part of this group? I am not aware of members of this team placing environmental concerns at the top of their agenda. Where are those who are concerned about the development of our agriculture and water management sectors? I rather suspect some feminists would also have similar concerns about being omitted.
Continue reading Road Map To Recovery Team Needs Rethinking
By Stephen Kangal
April 14, 2020
The Honourable Mr Justice Frank Seepersad in his electronic Easter Message to the PCTT (Express 13 April, p.17) would seem to posit that the current exponential and unprecedented rate of the destruction of human lives now nearing 100,000 wrought by COVID-19 would appear to be, inter alia, a grim manifestation/reminder of the sovereignty of God over all things.
Continue reading Is COVID-19 the Flaunting of God’s Sovereignty?
By Raffique Shah
April 14, 2020
Large mobs of presumably hungry consumers virtually laid siege to fast-foods restaurants across the country last Monday evening after Prime Minister Keith Rowley announced that all restaurants and retail food services will be closed for business until the end of this month. Embedded in that eruption was a conundrum this country faces as it battles the COVID-19 virus.
Continue reading Hooked on foreign foods
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 13, 2020
“They say the sun will shine for all/But in some people’s world, it doesn’t shine at all./ So much been said, so little been done./ They still killing the people/ And they having their fun”
—Bob Marley, “Crisis”
PART 3
I have been writing about the plight of black people in Trinidad and Tobago for a while. Like Marvin Gaye, sometimes it “make me wanna holler/The way they do my life” (“Inner City Blues”). I have argued that we will never solve black impoverishment unless we see it as a national problem that demands the same resolve that we brought to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading Black Betrayal (In the Age of the Coronavirus)
April 6, 2020 – outbreaknewstoday.com
Both surgical and cotton masks were found to be ineffective for preventing the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19. A study conducted at two hospitals in Seoul, South Korea, found that when COVID-19 patients coughed into either type of mask, droplets of virus were released to the environment and external mask surface. A brief research report is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Continue reading Neither surgical nor cotton masks effectively filter SARS COV-2: Study
Dr. Ioannidis on Why We Don’t Have Reliable Data Surrounding COVID-19
By Journeyman Pictures – YouTube
April 3, 2020
As the coronavirus pandemic tightens its grip across the world, is the reaction a fiasco in the making? Stanford University professor Dr John Ioannidis lifts the lid on our worrying lack of reliable data.
Continue reading Perspectives on the Pandemic