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A Politician’s Cry
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 08, 2012
Initially, Jack wept publicly because he wanted to persuade black people that he felt their pain. Like Brigadier John Sandy, his enabler, he just could not stand how black people were killing one another so he joined his UNC colleagues to impose a State of Emergency that threw black people in prison, for the most part. I noted then, “Jack wept just as Peter wept after he betrayed Christ.”
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Malay Steps out of His Crease
By Stephen Kangal
February 06, 2012
In the aftermath of the current euphoria and unbridled optimism generated from the highly successful recent State visit conducted by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissesar to India in connection with the annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas it is very disconcerting to hear HE The High Commissioner of India to T&T, Malay Mishra using an occasion to promote his mission’s Hindi language program in T&T, to unleash unwarranted and undiplomatic criticisms of her alleged inability to connect with the people of her ancestral village of Bhelupur because she spoke in English- the official language of T&T.
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Impossible dreams
By Peggy Mohan
February 05, 2012 – trinidadexpress.com
There is nothing strange in a person from India visiting Trinidad and being beset by dreams of connection with Indo-Trinidadians. They look so much like us…if only they could speak Hindi like us too. Once upon a time they must have…
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From blimp to ‘battimamselle’
By Raffique Shah
February 05, 2012
SHORTLY after the PNM government acquired the second or third sky ship (“blimp”) a few years ago, a well-informed patriotic national who resides in the US asked me why they did not consider new surveillance technology like remote-controlled drones. We had a healthy discussion on the issue. I did not understand, nor could I explain, why Martin Joseph and his security advisers opted for the unwieldy “blimp” over the many ultra-modern devices that were then in service from Afghanistan to America.
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Principal Charged with Cruelty to Children
By Nalinee Seelal
February 03, 2012 – newsday.co.tt
POLICE officers last night charged Arlene Blackman — Principal of Blackman’s Private School in Maraval — with two counts of Cruelty to Children, under the Children’s Act, Chap 46:01, Section III(I), for allegedly placing the head of two students in a toilet bowl at her school and flushing it.
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We need a strong opposition
By Derren Joseph
February 01, 2012
Recently I ended up at a fundraiser organised by Democrats Abroad here in the UK. As one would expect, the event was to raise funds for the re-election of President Obama in this year’s US Presidential elections. Those of us in favour of campaign finance reform in Trinidad and Tobago are impressed by the relative transparency in the campaign finance process in the US, and in the UK. Foreigners are not normally allowed to donate to political parties and all contributions over a certain threshold are a matter of public record. In fact, I was only able to attend the event as a guest of my wife, who is a US citizen and a registered Democrat.
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The Beauties of Mozart
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
February 01, 2012
It was a good time to be away. While my good friend Louis Lee Sing was fighting down Brian Lara (a bad fight to pick: you just don’t dump on a national hero like that); and Penny Beckles, a woman I admire politically, was being chastised for cultivating her own group of supporters (I thought every politician had a right to develop his or her own political base); and my favorite publisher, Maxie Cuffie, was lambasting Lennox Grant for trying to compromise his journalistic ability (he says that Grant failed in his duty to advance the integrity of the press), I took time out to visit Wolfgang Mozart’s residence in Salzburg, Austria.
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Alternative to Crossing the Kala Pani
By Stephen Kangal
January 29, 2011
The official visits undertaken by Prime Ministers Panday (1997) and Bissessar-Persad ( 2012) to their respective ancestral homeland villages located in North India after receiving the Pravasi Samaan Awards bring into sharp focus the truth inherent in the maxim that God works in mysterious ways His wonders to behold.
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Let the tax debate begin
By Raffique Shah
January 29, 2012
PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s bold move to seek to apply a tax rate of 30 per cent to America’s super-rich should serve as a catalyst of sorts for Finance Minister Winston Dookeran. Dookeran said recently that his ministry would soon review the income tax regime in Trinidad and Tobago. Changes to this country’s income and corporate taxes were last made in 2006. Then, the Patrick Manning government raised the personal allowance for individuals to $60,000, and applied a fixed rate of 25 per cent tax on all chargeable incomes above that.
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