By Raffique Shah
Sunday, April 13th 2008
BACK in the mid-1970s there was a very vocal minority of “Tobago secessionists” who ranted about the sister-isle being treated like a “bastard”, and who demanded its independence. Dr Winston Murray, one of its two elected MPs, designed a Tobago flag which he proudly displayed on his desk in the Parliament chamber. The secessionist lobby argued, with some justification, that the island was starved of resources, its residents not treated fairly by the central government in Port of Spain.
Continue reading A torch for Tibet…and Tobago
OPPOSITION LEADER Basdeo Panday’s legal problems just got a little worse. More than one year after having his political life revitalised by the quashing of a criminal conviction against him, the Privy Council yesterday paved the way for him to face a retrial on three charges of failing to declare a joint London bank account to the Integrity Commission. 
Over the past two weeks, some of my friends have accused me of or complimented me for going down memory lane. Others have suggested that once the genie is out of the bottle there is really no way to get it back in. They are both correct but for the wrong reasons. There was no attempt to go down memory lane for its own sake or to get the genie back into the bottle. I was trying to say that when experts talk about our crime situation and/or the factors leading towards its escalation they usually forget the human or ideological dimension of the problem even as they emphasize the hard, economic, policing or political dimensions.
Roman Catholic priest Fr Garfield Rochard who took a controversial decision late last year to stop a man who had witnessed a murder from entering the compound of the Church of the Assumption, Maraval, yesterday said the man’s murder over the weekend was expected.
ON March 26, Tata Motors, a division of India’s oldest and most diversified conglomerate, paid the mighty Ford of America US$2.3 billion to acquire two jewels in Britain’s motoring crown, Land Rover and Jaguar. The next day Tata Chemicals acquired General Chemicals of the USA for US$1 billion. Even as the Tata Group spread its wings across the globe, a handful of Trinidad and Tobago’s biggest businessmen and institutions gathered at the Trinidad Hilton to sell their shares in RBTT to the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).
We are unconvinced of the need for Government to purchase the Tobago Hilton. What is involved here is not only the cost of the purchase, more than $200 million, but that additionally Government has had to approve the allocation of $45 million for immediate repairs although the hotel was constructed less than a decade ago. Was there not normal ongoing repair work over the years?
Pandemonium broke out in the Lower House yesterday as Speaker Barendra Sinanan suspended Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday for using his laptop without permission.