By Stephen Gowans
June 25, 2008
This is a war between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries; between nationalists and quislings; between Zimbabwean patriots and the US and Britain.
Should an election be carried out when a country is under sanctions and it has been made clear to the electorate that the sanctions will be lifted only if the opposition party is elected? Should a political party which is the creation of, and is funded by, hostile foreign forces, and whose program is to unlatch the door from within to provide free entry to foreign powers to establish a neo-colonial rule, be allowed to freely operate? Should the leaders of an opposition movement that takes money from hostile foreign powers and who have made plain their intention to unseat the government by any means available, be charged with treason? These are the questions that now face (have long faced) the embattled government of Zimbabwe, and which it has answered in its own way, and which other governments, at other times, have answered in theirs.
Continue reading Zimbabwe at War
PREOCCUPIED as we are with wanton and random bloodletting, rampant crime, spiralling food prices and football politics, major national issues in this crowded barracoon, interesting developments in the wider world could steal past us hardly eliciting a glance. Last week, David Davis, a very senior member of Britain’s Conservative Party, shocked his colleagues and England by resigning his parliamentary seat over renewal of the “42-days detention” law. And in Washington the US Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision: detainees at the controversial Guantanamo detention camp are entitled to the privilege of habeas corpus.
Barbados: 16 and Under
I heard one of the talking heads on CNN, Tuesday night, talking with some relish – if not awe – of the fortuitous happenstance that sees Barack Obama winning the Democratic nomination (not that Ms Clinton doesn’t seem about to do her damnedest to prevent it, good sense, though, ultimately bound to prevail) on the anniversary of the very day that Martin Luther King gave his now legendary “I Have a Dream” speech.
“We have not seen the last of the rising price of rice.” This is the view of president of the Supermarkets Association of T&T (Satt) Heeranand Maharaj. 
BACK in the mid-1970s there was a very vocal minority of “Tobago secessionists” who ranted about the sister-isle being treated like a “bastard”, and who demanded its independence. Dr Winston Murray, one of its two elected MPs, designed a Tobago flag which he proudly displayed on his desk in the Parliament chamber. The secessionist lobby argued, with some justification, that the island was starved of resources, its residents not treated fairly by the central government in Port of Spain.
We 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?