By Raffique Shah
Sunday, August 10th 2008
How I look forward to the next three weeks as the magic of the Olympic Games impacts on most people across the world. There’s something about the Games that holds human beings spellbound. It gives us some respite from wars, a lull in crime, relief from politicians, makes us forget our daily woes. What makes the Olympics more appealing than football World Cup is that every country, small and big, can participate in it, if only with one athlete-and six officials! In Beijing this year, a record 205 countries are participating.
Continue reading Magic of the Olympics
There are two major foreign policy challenges that are confronting our relatively new and untested Foreign Minister Gopee-Scoon during the next six months the eventual outcome of which can either boost or bust her hitherto short internship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 
The news that the United States still officially included former South African President Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) on its terror watch list and that the US Senate only moved last week to correct this absurdity has come as a shock and eye opener to many.
PREOCCUPIED as we are with wanton and random bloodletting, rampant crime, spiralling food prices and football politics, major national issues in this crowded barracoon, interesting developments in the wider world could steal past us hardly eliciting a glance. Last week, David Davis, a very senior member of Britain’s Conservative Party, shocked his colleagues and England by resigning his parliamentary seat over renewal of the “42-days detention” law. And in Washington the US Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision: detainees at the controversial Guantanamo detention camp are entitled to the privilege of habeas corpus.
Barbados: 16 and Under
I heard one of the talking heads on CNN, Tuesday night, talking with some relish – if not awe – of the fortuitous happenstance that sees Barack Obama winning the Democratic nomination (not that Ms Clinton doesn’t seem about to do her damnedest to prevent it, good sense, though, ultimately bound to prevail) on the anniversary of the very day that Martin Luther King gave his now legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.