By Stephen Kangal
December 09, 2006

I have never ceased to agonise in mental pain at the continuing undue pressures being exerted on our Indian community to exercise constant and eternal vigilance geared to curb and correct the natural predilection of some public decision-makers in Trinidad and Tobago to exclude its presence from public symbols that claim by depicting selectively to represent the cultural diversity of our multicultural landscape. The absence of Indian names of public buildings and notably roadways are relevant in this regard.
Continue reading Order of the Republic Exclusionary →

By Adrian Boodan, guardian.co.tt
November 19, 2006

Prime Minister Patrick Manning says the PNM is planning to create “mixed communities” on Caroni lands, so as to avoid ethnic confrontations that plague other countries around the world.
Continue reading PNM plans mixed Caroni communities →

By Raffique Shah
November 19, 2006

Besides Alcoa not even referring to its highly-touted new technologies for “safely” disposing spent pot lining (SPL), both the company and the Government have made no reference to the proposed plant being used for recycling aluminium cans and other waste. If Alcoa were to promise to absorb, say, 75 per cent of the beverage cans that prove to be as dangerous to our environment as smelters, I’ll probably back its construction. In the UK, where an estimated five billion cans are used every year, Alcan has established the only dedicated recycling plant for beverage cans.
Continue reading Death and development →

By Stephen Kangal

In a reliable Guardian poll published on Thursday 2 November, ninety-five percent of persons interviewed accused Cabinet Ministers of being increasingly arrogant, insensitive and disrespectful of the polity that elected them. Consider the obscene and vulgar conduct of bad john MP Achong at the Chatham Youth Centre. Against his own Point Fortin constituents. That is the beginning of the end of the Manning regime for they are sowing the seeds of their own political demise as they did in pre-1986. Power has corrupted them absolutely.
Continue reading The Arrogant and Insensitive →

By Linda E. Edwards
November 14, 2006

According to headlines in the major dailies, and substantiated in the accompanying articles of Nov.12, 2006; people of Indo-Trinidadian descent are besieging the visiting Vice-president of India for relief from the discrimination suffered daily in Trinidad and Tobago at the hands of the Afro-Caribbean and other people. This letter is in response to those pleas.
Continue reading The “Indians” Are At It Again! →

By Raffique Shah
November 12, 2006

I think Alcoa spokesman Wade Hughes is “damn farse and outa place” (let him go learn our dialect) to suggest that Trinidad is “ideally positioned to become the aluminium hub of the Caribbean”. But Hughes got his license to make such insulting pronouncements from none other than Prime Minister Patrick Manning. When the PM referred to his fellow citizens, distinguished and ordinary, as being “dotish”, what could we expect from a “preferred” alien? Hughes and Alcoa, thanks to the “dotish” stance adopted by Manning and company on constructing aluminium smelters here, have been given “rank” over all of us natives. It was always this way as governments genuflected to multinational corporations, making them overlords of our nature-given resources.
Continue reading Manning, Alcoa must come clean →

By Stephen Kangal

PM Manning, Minister Rowley and Alcoa have assured the Chatham villagers that the proposed third generation, state -of-the-art aluminum smelter earmarked for construction in the ecologically fragile and sensitive S.W. Peninsula will pose no serious threat to the human, physical and ambient environment. Accordingly I wish to suggest that having regard to this undertaking Chaguaramas would appear to be a superior site to Chatham as the preferred location for the Alcoa plant.
Continue reading Site Smelter in Chaguaramas →