By Raffique Shah
January 10, 2022
Not even George Orwell, who wrote the right-wing classic Animal Farm which summarised workers in power, post-revolution, in the worst possible light, could have scripted the post-Covid tragi-comedy that premiered a few weeks ago, when the Delta variant of the virus first showed what it could do, and now Omicron is breaking box office records, leaving mankind stupefied.
Continue reading Bring back the ‘Bull’
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
January 04, 2022
“You may know the man by the conversation he keeps.”
—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Our Prime Minister, Dr Keith Rowley, is reputed to have said to US President Joe Biden that the salient factor in our democracy is his capacity to listen to the opinions of his people. I hope he meant that he listened not only to what they say loudly and directly, but also to what isn’t said aloud but is equally as pertinent.
This is important: the Prime Minister’s success in office over the next four years depends upon his listening not only to what is said directly, but also to what is communicated silently.
Continue reading Move Satan move
By Raffique Shah
January 03, 2022
The Covid-induced confinement imposed on citizens by the Government provoked a range of reactions—from anger and drunkenness to solitude and self-pity. Some persons came perilously close to crossing the thin line between sanity and insanity.
I was lucky to have lived the multi-faceted life I did before the pandemic—soldier, adventurer, prisoner, politician, teacher and a range of other life-skills that prepared me for just about anything I might face during the pandemic. Of course, as a human being and more so a humanist, I was shocked by the mass of people globally who were impacted by the virus, by how many were dying “live” before the lenses of reporters’ cameras, agony etched on their faces, questions writ large on them: why me?
Continue reading Covid and gas pains: who’s crying now?
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 27, 2021
My mother, Carmen Cudjoe (nee Batson), was born in Belmont in 1909. After spending her childhood years there, she moved to San Juan where she met my dad, married him, and moved to Tacarigua. Although my mother attended only primary school, she read constantly and wrote with eloquence and grace. In Tacarigua she was the secretary of most of the voluntary organisations there, such as the Garden Club and the Village Council.
Continue reading Suffer the little children
By Raffique Shah
December 27, 2021
Twenty twenty-one will be recorded as the year in which the Earth was battered by calamitous events that seemed set to fulfil the biblical end-times that Man has feared from the dawn of civilisation, or the advent of religions.
There were heat waves that sparked forest fires that ravaged Western America and huge swathes of the vital Amazon jungle, and shockingly, the Tundra region in the sensitive Arctic Circle.
Continue reading Be done with the lies: They’re killing us
By Dr Kwame Nantambu
December 24, 2021
As the US House of Representatives Select Committee continues to issue subpoenas to former president Donald John Trump’s advisers and allies in regard to the endemic dynamics of the historic, violent insurrection on the nation’s capital on January 6; plus the stark legal reality that on November 12, a federal grand jury “indicted” one of the former president’s advisers, Steve Bannon, “on two counts of contempt of Congress”; and as a sidebar, as of this writing, 32 “non-related sentences (have been) handed down so far” in cases filed by Justice Department prosecutors; ergo, it is a sine qua non to expose the gut danger of cult personality leaders: Jim Jones’ “Jonestown massacre” in Guyana on November 18, 1978, v Donald John Trump’s putatively inspired, violent insurrection on the nation’s capital in Washington DC, USA, on January 6.
Continue reading Exposing the danger of cult leaders
By Stephen Kangal
December 23, 2021
The emotionally charged response of Prime Minister Rowley to the Sunday Express feature article is exclusively more political than the requisite scientific in relation to his weak defense of the alleged low efficacy of the Sinopharm vaccine.
He procured it with a secretive agreement from the Chinese with a huge cost — loan in a large quantity without obtaining any expected guarantee about its expected efficacy level even though scientists from developed countries refused to accept it as a genuine vaccine because trial results were not published globally and were not accessible.
Continue reading Let Medical Professionals Speak on COVID Vaccines
By Rishard Khan
December 20, 2021 – guardian.co.tt
The Chinese Embassy, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the St Augustine Medical Laboratory (STAML), have all condemned an Express newspaper article [Putting vaccines to the test] that challenged the efficacy of the Sinopharm vaccine.
The article, published in the newspaper’s Sunday edition, implied the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine is ineffective at generating immunity against the disease.
Continue reading PM, PAHO, Chinese Embassy condemn news report on Sinopharm
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 20, 2021
Despite its fancy-sounding title, “Human Rights, Equality and Diversity: An Inquiry into the Right to Equal Access to Education with Specific Focus on the Under-performance of Schools in Port of Spain and Environs”, the children in this area (mainly Africans) will be condemned to educational backwaters even as the Ministry of Education (MoE) continues with its anachronistic approach of not-educating our children.
Continue reading Human rights, equality and diversity
By Raffique Shah
December 20, 2021
I do not believe there is a common factor that unites people of any particular pigmentation or persuasion across the world, except, perhaps, religious doctrines that are deemed to be the “words of God”, written or revealed by the Almighty Himself, hence not subject to alterations by man.
Those of us who have studied history know only too well that in the name of religion, of spreading the word of God, atrocities were committed, entire civilisations were wiped off the map, and the anointed soldiers of God just moved on to other souls to be saved by swiping heads off bodies, then raiding their treasures.
Continue reading Do your duty, dammit!