Monos Island drug trial: Six to serve life in jail

CocaineTWO Trinidadians and four Venezuelans were yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment for trafficking cocaine in what the trial judge said was the “largest amount to ever pass through the courts of Trinidad and Tobago.”

Justice Alice Yorke-Soo Hon, presiding in the Port-of-Spain Third Criminal Court, took her time, more than an hour, as she sent the six guilty people to serve lengthy prison sentences for trafficking 1,749 kilos of cocaine at Monos Island on August 23, 2005.
Full Article : guardian.co.tt

‘Escape of big fish alarming’

JUSTICE Alice Yorke Soo-Hon yesterday questioned why the main house at Passy Bay, Monos Island, was not searched following the August 25, 2005 drug bust which netted $700 million in cocaine.
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Industrialization by Illusion: T&T Today

By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
May 08, 2008

Trini PeopleIn his 1972 article titled “The meaning of development”, Professor Dudley Sears argued that “a country which had doubled per capita income could not claim to have experienced development if poverty, inequality, (inflation/ spiraling high cost of living, food shortages, human safety/security, level of crimes) and unemployment had not been reduced.”

In lay man’s terms, this phenomenon can best be classified as “growth without development”; in other words, it represents a scenario wherein an inverse relationship exists between economic, financial and industrial expansion/growth and the Quality of Life (QOL) and Basic Human Needs (BHN) of the citizenry of the country. Today, Trinidad and Tobago resembles such a phenomenon/scenario.
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Woman 21 charged for raping boy 17

$80,000 bail for woman charged with having sex with teen boy

By Nikita Braxton
Tuesday, May 6th 2008

Trinidad and Tobago News Blog
www.trinidadandtobagonews.com/blog

ViolenceA woman, charged with having sexual intercourse with a 17-year-old boy without his consent, was yesterday granted $80,000 bail and ordered to stay 100 feet away from the young man.

Reshmi Dipnarine, 21, of Calcutta Settlement, Freeport, appeared before Magistrate Melvin Daniel in the San Fernando Second Court charged with two counts of the offence, which allegedly occurred at Teak Avenue, Claxton Bay, on March 30 and April 4, 2008.
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Digging Our Own Graves

By Michael De Gale
May 06, 2008

Trini PeopleIn this season of rejuvenation and renewal, my friend celebrated yet another birthday. She may have passed the dreaded half way mark by now but since time has been a friend to her, that mark is not immediately apparent. Free of the sags, wrinkles and tiredness that is commonly associated with aging, she remains gracious, vivacious and fashionably appropriate. Perhaps out of mischief or maybe a temporary lapse in judgment, I did the unthinkable and inquired about her age. Needless to say, her response was quick, predictable and coy. “You don’t ask a woman her age”, she chimed; evidently cognizant of the negative connotations associated with extended longevity.
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Frying in their own fat

By Raffique Shah
Sunday, May 4th 2008

MarketSeptember 2001: “Focus on agriculture declined from as far back as the first oil boom of 1973-79, when, with oil prices increasing at a dizzying pace, food production was no longer an attractive option. Like most oil-rich countries, Trinidad and Tobago felt it had the money to purchase its food requirements from low cost (though highly subsidised) producers in developed countries.
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Arnold Rampersad’s Storied Odyssey

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
May 02, 2008

Arnold RampersadThree decades ago I met Arnold Rampersad when he joined the African American faculty at Harvard University as a professor. At the time I was an assistant professor at Harvard, having received my doctorate from Cornell University and having taught previously at Ohio University. In those early years I could not foresee the heights to which Professor Rampersad would reach in the academic world.

I remember only too well the day that Professor Rampersad journeyed to Brown University to meet with George Houston Bass, the literary executor of the Langston Hughes estate and a professor of theater arts at Brown University, to consider the possibility of writing a biography on Langston Hughes. I had known Bass somewhat having spent a year at Brown as an adjunct Associate Professor.
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