By Raffique Shah
December 02, 2007
As the Armed Forces Veterans Association (AFVA) prepares for its annual Christmas party for selected children in Laventille (where its operations are based), my ex-soldier friend Selwyn Nurse asked: what toys do you think we should give them this year? “Books!” I responded, without hesitating. Books? He seemed somewhat puzzled by my response. I imagine the children, too, would be unpleasantly surprised when Santa (Brigadier Alfonso? WOII Gellizeau?) hands them books, not Nintendos or the latest tech-toys. Parents may even cuss Santa and storm out of the compound, probably pelting bottles and stones, if not spraying the “vets” with real bullets.
Continue reading Give a child a book for Christmas
Rev Cyril Paul of the Presbyterian Church is urging citizens to use the opportunity of Advent Sunday (today) with its emphasis on repentance, to apologise for wrongs done. 
The avalanche of criticisms that slammed into National Security Minister Martin Joseph and his protective services chiefs after their media briefing last week was not only predictable, but, necessary. Here’s a country in the vice-like grip of a crime clinch that seems to come from a mutant octopus, and there were the minister and his chiefs saying: no worries! Well, not quite. But their apparent insensitivity to the mayhem that has engulfed the nation, the fear that most people live with, every minute, every day, only served to infuriate the population.
NEKEISHA Noel was breathless, shaking, excited. 
In the rest of the civilised world politics is the art of the possible and of compromise. In T&T it degenerated in 2007 into a fine art of naked UNC deception that caused some 190,000 unsuspecting people to be so manipulated that they bought into it with their rustic innocence and hero worship of a badly scarred leader.