PH’ driver drinks poison
By Radhica Sookraj
Wednesday, March 18 2009
For 27 years, Churaman Ramsaroop showed no signs of being a violent person. But on Monday afternoon, Ramsaroop chopped 14-year-old Zoreen Ansara Mohammed to death, after tying her up with shoe laces, slicing her with a knife and bludgeoning her with a blunt object on the head.
He then committed suicide.
The murder/suicide took place off Bancroft Trace, Freeport, on a deserted track about four miles from Ramsaroop’s home in Arena Village. Late yesterday, both Ramsaroop’s and Mohammed’s relatives were trying to find out what had caused the murder/suicide.
Continue reading Schoolgirl, 14, hacked to death
The Picton Folk Performing Company is one of the most recognized cultural groups in Trinidad and Tobago. Coming out of Picton, Laventille, (or as some of the residents prefer to call the area ‘Love-Until’) this group consists of about twenty-three members, most of whom are young people.
AFTER you overcome the initial shock you feel angry, very angry. Then a feeling of sadness overwhelms you, followed by stark reality that the sports you so enjoy, the sportsmen and women who give you such pleasure, who are seen as symbols of sanity amidst a sea of madness, are being destroyed before your eyes. Those are but a few of the emotions that ran through my mind as I watched the carnage that erupted in Lahore last week.
During the RIC hearings that subsequently resulted in the current electricity rate hike I made it abundantly clear that the net effect of the proposed unit rate increase from 15 cents to 35 cents per unit would result in a 45% hike in electricity bills. T&TEC and the RIC under Professor Dennis Pantin used every statistical trick in the book to deny and discredit this percentage increase.
This article seeks to clear the air as to my obdurate professional assertion that there is a direct correlation between soca lyrics and moral decadence, public pornography cum simulation of sexual intercourse and sexual promiscuity in T&T.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) defines child labour as work that exceeds a minimum number of hours, depending on the age of a child and on the type of work. Such work is considered harmful to the child and should therefore be eliminated. There remains no official statistics on the magnitude of child labour in T&T. However, rapid assessment studies conducted by the International Labour Organisation, (ILO), in 2002, uncovered some alarming facts.
FOR too many years we have haggled over what the minimum wage should be in this country: should we pay the poor buggers $9 an hour, or $10? That would amount to less than $2,000 a month, but it’s worth fighting over. For those trapped in this gloomy underworld-not so hidden, since we shop at groceries and stores where they labour every day-it could mean being able to afford an extra “doubles” for lunch, or buying their children the toys they so covet. As far as I am concerned, what we call a minimum wage is in fact starvation wage, a kind of semi-slavery endured only by those who have no other options, except perhaps to turn to crime.