Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
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THE EDITOR: The public, unscientific and unfounded notion/assertion by Finance Minister Karen Nunez Tesheira that “the majority of Trinbagonians support the Property Tax Bill’ flies in the face of the slightest scintilla of common sense and intellectual rationality.
Continue reading Tyranny of the minority in T&T
By Andre Bagoo
December 29, 2009 – newsday.co.tt
CHAIRMAN of the Commission of Inquiry into Udecott Professor John Uff QC has hit back at the State-owned enterprise for making what he described as “improper” allegations against him in a High Court lawsuit the Calder Hart-chaired company has brought to challenge the proceedings.
Continue reading UDeCOTT Improper
By Adib Rashad
November 19, 2000
Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog
American and European history informs us that the celebration of Christmas was once banned in Britain and the North American colonies. This occurred in the early 17th century. The so-called Puritans in England considered the entire Christmas celebration as repulsively non-Christian. The Puritan Party under Oliver Cromwell in 1642 rendered all Christmas celebrations, religious and secular an anathema, and forbidden by Parliament.
Continue reading Christmas and Santa Clause: A Historical Review
By Raffique Shah
December 27, 2009
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog
‘TWAS a year that brought mankind’s madness crashing into the stark realities of the punitive sins of excesses, the deleterious effects of unbridled greed, and maybe, just maybe, it also slammed some heads-in-the-clouds freaks to ground level.
Continue reading Year we learned discretion but ignored destitution
By Stephen Kangal
December 27, 2009
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog
Here was Minister Colm Imbert at his arrogant worse spewing loud and rapid dragon-fire and non-supportable and baseless brimstone in the House as he wallowed in half-lies, untruths and innuendoes in his PT speech on Monday. As I sat in the public gallery and was inflicted with this spectacle, I agonized loudly: How could Mr. Speaker allow his House to be brought into such disdainful odium and total disrepute in the eyes of citizenry by sanctioning Imbert’s loud shouting, his comic antics, his peacock arrogance and his demeaning undiplomatic remarks directed at the Opposition members? His behaviour was nothing short of “waganry” at its sordid and obscene worst.
Continue reading Imbert’s Nonsensical Fire and Brimstone
December 25, 2009
guardian.co.tt
Better roads, health, security, water electricity supply is Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s gift to the nation for the coming year. In his Christmas message to the nation, Manning said the Government understood the needs of citizens but patience was required to accomplish some of its goals. He said despite international turbulence, T&T had been able to make progress and remained a further fortified democracy. “We have weathered the most severe international economic crisis since the 1930s, one whose effects continue to persist in most countries,” Manning said. He said in the midst of the effects of the economic crisis still being faced by most countries and despite T&T’s significant loss of revenue, this country had been able make a “turbulent crossing with greater steadiness than most.”
Continue reading PM pledges better life for citizens
December 23rd 2009
by Amy Goodman – Democracy Now!
Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez spared no criticism of the climate conference in Copenhagen. At a joint news conference he held with the Bolivian president Evo Morales on Friday afternoon—this was before President Obama announced the accord—Chavez called the proceedings undemocratic and accused world leaders of only seeking a face-saving agreement. He described President Obama as having won the “Nobel war prize” and said the world still smelled of sulfur, referring to his comments about President Bush at the United Nations last year. Well, shortly after the news conference, I caught up with President Chavez for a few minutes.
Continue reading Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on How to Tackle Climate Change: “We Must Go from Capitalism to Socialism”
By Evens Sanon and Jonathan M. Katz
Associated Press writer © 2009 The Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Poverty has forced at least 225,000 children in Haiti’s cities into slavery as unpaid household servants, far more than previously thought, a report said Tuesday.
The Pan American Development Foundation’s report also said some of those children — mostly young girls — suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship.
By Stephen Kangal
December 20, 2009
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog
As a participant in the peaceful, legal and orderly picket conducted on the northern precincts of Parliament on Friday 18 during the debate on the controversial property tax bills I can say categorically that these armed to the teeth riot squad policemen acted on pre-meditated decisions and intentions to arrest Comrade David Abdullah. They in fact indulged in an act of unnecessary provocation while the picket was proceeding smoothly and being conducted in a most orderly, peaceful and legal manner to create a basis to arrest him.
Continue reading Riot Squad Provoked The Picketing Fracas
By Phyllis Johnson
December 21, 2009
THIS is the first in a series of eight articles on the events of late 1979 and early 1980.
Thirty years ago, on December 21 1979, an agreement was signed in London that set in motion a series of events that put Zimbabwe on the course to where it is today.
The signatures appended reluctantly to that agreement beneath the chandeliers and subterfuge of Lancaster House ended the war in a place that some called Rhodesia and signalled a different route to independence for a country that the majority called Zimbabwe.
Continue reading Lancaster House revisited