Category Archives: International

Crime in T&T, Drug Trade, General T&T, International, Latin America, Media, USA

Drugs Don’t Kill People, Neoliberalism Kills People

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By Brad Blankenship
November 22, 2017 – telesurtv.net

DrugsOpioids, a class of drugs chemically similar to the painkiller morphine, have been sweeping across North America since the late 1990s into the first two decades of the 2000s. These powerful sedative drugs, which include prescription painkillers like oxycodone and powerful street drugs such as heroin, are extremely deadly because their depressant effects can stop a user from breathing. Because of their widespread and ever-increasing use, drug overdose deaths “are the leading cause of injury death in the United States,” according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).
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Africa, England, European Union, International, Zimbabwe

What is Behind the Military Coup in Zimbabwe?

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By Gregory Elich
November 21, 2017 – gregoryelich.org

Zimbabwe WatchLong-roiling factional conflict within Zimbabwe’s ruling ZANU-PF political party exploded last week in a military coup that quickly seized control of the government and state media.

The coup was led by Commander of Zimbabwe Defense Forces Constantino Chiwenga, who is closely aligned with former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Emboldened by President Robert Mugabe’s declining mental sharpness and physical health in recent years, Mnangagwa actively maneuvered to ensure that he would succeed the president. Mnangagwa served as one of Zimbabwe’s two vice presidents. From that position, he and his supporters, known as Team Lacoste, became embroiled in a bitter struggle with younger party members who coalesced around Secretary of Women’s Affairs Grace Mugabe, wife of the president, and whose group was known as Generation 40, or G40.
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Crime in T&T, International, PNM, Politics, USA

Targeting Dr. Williams

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
November 06, 2017

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIn October (2006) I reviewed Colin Palmer’s Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean for the Journal of British Studies. I congratulated Palmer for exposing the intrigue of Britain and the United States against Williams when he fought for the return of Chaguaramas for the federal capital of the Federation of the West Indies. I wrote: “It might come as a shock to many that the United States gave some thought to ‘eliminating’ Williams during the Chaguaramas discussion. The British sought to sabotage his efforts.”
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General T&T, International, USA

Ancestors

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
October 19, 2017

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeLast weekend I traveled to Fort Lauderdale to see Mislet Harry, the senior member of the Cudjoe clan. It didn’t hurt that Miami was celebrating its annual carnival celebrations. The daughter of Aunt Elaine, Mislet has lived in the Miami area for the past thirty years or so. She started the Boston carnival in the 1960s and began to participate in Miami carnival once she got there.
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Culture, England, France, General T&T, International

Love A Donkey: Besson’s Independence Fables – Pt 2

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
September 10, 2017

PART 1 – PART 2 – PART 3

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeIn “Independence Legacies,” Gerard Besson offers his reading of Trinidad’s modern history. He says: “From 1783, Europeans and Black people who were not enslaved… arrived mostly from French islands. Many were refugees, political enemies and strangers to each other.… After the British conquest of 1797 to this milieu were added Chinese, Portuguese, and African freedmen. Then after much miscegenation, some decades later, Indian indentureship commenced, and latterly [sic] the Lebanese and Syrians arrived” (my emphasis).
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General T&T, International, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, USA

How ‘Regime Change’ Wars Led to Korea Crisis

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The U.S.-led aggressions against Iraq and Libya are two war crimes that keep on costing, with their grim examples of what happens to leaders who get rid of WMDs driving the scary showdown with North Korea, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
September 065, 2017 – consortiumnews.com

North Korean leader Kim Jong UnIt is a popular meme in the U.S. media to say that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “crazy” as he undertakes to develop a nuclear bomb and a missile capacity to deliver it, but he is actually working from a cold logic dictated by the U.S. government’s aggressive wars and lack of integrity.
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Africa, Barbados, Caribbean, Finance, General T&T, International, Racism Watch

Timeo Beckles et Dona Ferentes

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By Stephen Kangal
August 06, 2017

Stephen KangalThere can be at least three reactions to the question of lumping Indians and Africans together by Sir Hilary Beckles for advancing his money-based regional CARICOMesse reparations agenda:

1. One cannot trust Afro-Caribbean intellectuals to sincerely look after the interests of Caribbean Indians after they have been excluded in the first instance by CARICOM.
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Africa, Education, General T&T, International

MOST OF US ARE ALREADY EMANCIPATED, UNFORTUNATELY

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By Corey Gilkes
August 01, 2017

EmancipationNo, I haven’t gone completely mad, just thought I’d try to grab your attention and so make you understand the importance of understanding what power words have.

Today is Emancipation Day, celebrating the ending of the enslavement of African people. You will hear the usual platitudes and speeches about how great we are and how we “broke the shackles of slavery”….and so on. Now as cynical as I’m sounding, those are important words to hear. So too are the sights of people walking around dressed in African or African-inspired attire, all that is praiseworthy.
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Africa, Caribbean, CARICOM, England, General T&T, International, Politics

President Anthony Carmona: Pay for slavery

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By Sean Douglas
August 01, 2017 – newsday.co.tt

President Anthony CarmonaPRESIDENT Anthony Carmona yesterday publicly supported a call to have European governments, whose countries benefited from slavery in the West Indies, to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves.

In his Emancipation Day message, Carmona said TT should support the efforts of Caricom governments as expressed by Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and Chairman of the Caricom Reparations Commission, in an address to the British House of Commons on July 16, 2014.
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Africa, General T&T, International, South Africa

Long Walk to Freedom – Part 2

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By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
July 16, 2017

PART 2

Dr. Selwyn R. CudjoeThe Anti-Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, offers an excellent exhibition on the life of Nelson Mandela, the most recognizable person of the twenty-first century. On one of the walls there is a quotation that is attributed to Aristotle, the Greek philosopher. It reads: “Good moral character is not something that we can achieve on our own. We need a culture that supports the condition under which self-love and friendship can flourish.”
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