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TrinidadandTobagoNews.com
April 26, 2007
In the aftermath of the Akon and Danah scandal at Club Zen, new reports have surfaced of another controversy/incident at the club in which Soca giants Machel Montano, Kernel Roberts and Benjai have been questioned by police. According to reports, twenty-five year old Russell Pollonais of Princess Town was the victim of a physical attack involving Machel Montano and members of his entourage around 2:30 this morning. According to a female relative of Pollonais, he and a group of friends, some visiting from England, went to the Zen Night Club on Wednesday night to celebrate an upcoming wedding when the incident occured.
Continue reading Machel Montano in Brawl at Zen Over Spilled Drink
ANITA ANAMUNTHODO, mother of Amy Emily Anamunthodo, the four-year-old girl who was raped and beaten to death last year, was yesterday freed on six charges of wilful neglect and child abandonment. Deputy Chief Magistrate Mark Wellington, presiding in the San Fernando First Magistrate’s Court, freed the mother due to the non-appearance of police complainant PC Hamilton (since August 2006) and other prosecution witnesses. 
Former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday’s conviction and sentence have been squashed. The Court of Appeal this afternoon ordered a new trial at the Magistrate’s Court before a different Magistrate. Mr. Panday was sentenced to two years in jail and fined by Chief Magistrate Sherman McNicolls after being found guilty of not declaring a Million Dollar London bank account to the Integrity Commission.
It’s the columnist’s perennial dilemma: what topic to address on a Carnival Sunday? Who reads newspapers around this time anyway? Pan “peongs” in their thousands will be bleary-eyed and either celebrating the sound of steel or fuming over the judges’ decisions from last night’s Panorama finals. Many more who will have attended Friday night’s cacophony, “Soca Monarch”, rendered tone-deaf by noise boxes supreme, are too dazed to do anything but seek out more noise. And the few who have remained sober until now will be psychologically adjusting their systems for the stupor that will start by nightfall.
The national community must show its outrage on the post -Cabinet uttering made by Minister Valley on the crime situation and widely reported in the media on Thursday 24 January. After the Manning Administration has led many citizens without any protection into the valley of the shadow of untimely and premature death and rampant crime that also potentially threatens each one of us, Minister Valley repeats the insensitivity of his Prime Minister and proceeds to justify our spiraling crime pandemic as being part of a “global event”. It has nothing to do, according to him, with the total failure of his Government to guarantee our life, liberty, the security of the person and our hard-earned property. For him crime, like inflation, is a feature of the global village of which T&T is a part. It is externally determined.
The recent slaughter of four individuals in Morvant including a police officer and the horrific exposure to the atrocity by a young child, is a startling reminder that few are safe from harms way in our present-day society. 
The comical though heavy-handed manner in which the police handled the Inshan Ishmael issue makes one want to laugh till you cry. Here’s a man who decided to mount a crusade against the evils that bedevil the society. In the still of the night, on the eve of his planned shutdown of the country, tonnes (yeah, tonnes!) of cops swoop down on his home and drag him away from his family much the way kidnappers do. They cart him off to Police HQ, hold him for most of the day. They then charge him with publishing a pamphlet without identifying the publisher-one of the most trivial, archaic laws in our statute books!