All posts by News

The Values Imperative

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 10, 2008

Young PeopleOver the past two weeks, some of my friends have accused me of or complimented me for going down memory lane. Others have suggested that once the genie is out of the bottle there is really no way to get it back in. They are both correct but for the wrong reasons. There was no attempt to go down memory lane for its own sake or to get the genie back into the bottle. I was trying to say that when experts talk about our crime situation and/or the factors leading towards its escalation they usually forget the human or ideological dimension of the problem even as they emphasize the hard, economic, policing or political dimensions.
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Priest defends decision to keep murder witness out of churchyard

I told you so, says Fr Rochard

By Nalinee Seelal
Tuesday, April 8 2008

newsday.co.tt

The Christian BibleRoman Catholic priest Fr Garfield Rochard who took a controversial decision late last year to stop a man who had witnessed a murder from entering the compound of the Church of the Assumption, Maraval, yesterday said the man’s murder over the weekend was expected.

The man Harold Joseph, 50, was gunned down outside Marmon’s Bar in Petit Valley on Saturday.
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Backward ever, forward never

By Raffique Shah
Sunday, April 6th 2008

Financial ComplexON March 26, Tata Motors, a division of India’s oldest and most diversified conglomerate, paid the mighty Ford of America US$2.3 billion to acquire two jewels in Britain’s motoring crown, Land Rover and Jaguar. The next day Tata Chemicals acquired General Chemicals of the USA for US$1 billion. Even as the Tata Group spread its wings across the globe, a handful of Trinidad and Tobago’s biggest businessmen and institutions gathered at the Trinidad Hilton to sell their shares in RBTT to the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).
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Land of Hope and Glory

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 04, 2008

Young PeopleLast week when I alluded to my double allegiance to Christian and Yoruba religious practices that attended my growing up in Tacarigua I wanted to suggest that religion, be it of the European or African variety, structures our imaginative and emotional lives and how we behave in our society. The English understood what it took to discipline a population and how to make a people see things through their (the colonizers’) eyes.
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PM hints he needs Jet

By Clint Chan Tack
Thursday, April 3 2008
www.newsday.co.tt

Manning And The JetPRIME MINISTER Patrick Manning last night announced that two of the country’s 14 local government bodies will be axed.

In a televised address to the nation, the Prime Minister disclosed talks have begun with the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) to “identify new boundaries for local government” ahead of the local government election which will be held “later this year” .
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Why Tobago Hilton?

Newsday Editorial
Wednesday, April 2 2008

TobagoWe are unconvinced of the need for Government to purchase the Tobago Hilton. What is involved here is not only the cost of the purchase, more than $200 million, but that additionally Government has had to approve the allocation of $45 million for immediate repairs although the hotel was constructed less than a decade ago. Was there not normal ongoing repair work over the years?
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Norway: good governance, better discipline

Norway (in orange)
Norway (in orange) – Image from Wikipedia

By Raffique Shah
Sunday, March 30th 2008

ONE can easily learn to love Norway only for its majestic fjords that are almost unique to that country. But its beauty extends far beyond the landscape and seascape. Here’s a country that discovered oil off its coast at the same time Britain, Holland and others did in the North Sea. That was some 70 years after the first productive oil well was drilled in Trinidad. True, the quantities differed vastly: ours never exceeded 300,000 barrels per day (bpd), while Norway ranks 10th among oil producers at 3.2 million bpd. Its reserves are also far bigger than ours, both in oil and gas.
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Basdeo Panday suspended over laptop

By Anthony Milne
Saturday 29th March, 2008

Basdeo PandayPandemonium broke out in the Lower House yesterday as Speaker Barendra Sinanan suspended Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday for using his laptop without permission.

The Speaker relied on Standing Order 43 (12) to suspend Panday and the sitting ended at 2.15 pm, 45 minutes after it started.

Following the order paper, government ministers answered questions and then it was time for debate on a private motion on rising food prices brought by Naparima MP Nizam Baksh.
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Creating Community

By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 27, 2007

Young PeopleWhen I grew up in Tacarigua in the nineteen forties and fifties my mother made sure I attended Tacarigua E.C. School while my grandparents immersed themselves in their Yoruba religion. Each year, we celebrated the Christian holidays (Christmas, Easter, etc.,) but on those glorious nights of October when the Shango drums rang out through the village we all went to Mother Gerald’s Shango tent. Cousin Lily’s thanksgivings; Tantie Lenora’s devotion to the Shouter Baptists; and the respect we paid to our ancestors on All Saints Night were parts of that corpus of ritual belief that gave village life a sense of purpose and wholeness.
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URP and Crime

Newsday Editorial
Thursday, March 27 2008

URPAt long last, the Government through National Security Minister Martin Joseph had admitted to a link between the high murder rate and the Unemployment Relief Programme (URP). The question is, what is going to be done about it?

It has taken the PNM administration a long time to reach even this partial admission. Indeed, at the start of the year, even as he acknowledged that the Government’s crime-fighting initiatives had failed, Mr Joseph denied the link between murder and URP — and mere days later denied that he had even said that the Government had failed. And it was only a few weeks ago that, after High Court judge Anthony Carmona spoke publicly about the URP link to crime, Mr Joseph declared stoutly that he had “no evidence of that”. Now, at a press briefing last Tuesday, he says that such a link is “very possible.”
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