By Richardson Dhalai
July 16, 2014 – newsday.co.tt
Public Administration Minister, Carolyn Seepersad-Bachan, has advised the nation to embrace the ideals and principles of former South African president, Nelson Mandela, saying “his life principle of ‘Ubuntu’ or ‘I am because you are’ can greatly benefit our nation as it deals with the inequities in our society.”
Continue reading Embrace ideals and principles of Mandela
By Raffique Shah
June 15, 2014
I am writing this column knowing that it will not be read by the target audience—young, black and ‘er…unschooled men.
Few if any in this group read anything, least of all newspapers. If they pick up an Express, it would be to watch a photograph of some dead “bredren”, felled by bullets from police or criminal, same difference, and to wonder if they, upon meeting a similar fate, would make a pretty corpse.
Continue reading Architects of our own demise
By Winford James
April 30, 2014 – trinidadexpress.com
Donald Sterling, the suddenly infamous owner of the NBA team, Los Angeles Clippers, has been caught out being racist and now finds himself having to sell his team and dissociate himself entirely from basketball. Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner has fined him $US2.5 million and, on top of that, banned him from all association with both the Clippers and the NBA for life. But since he is 80, the last punishment will unfortunately not be as severe as warranted.
Continue reading Any Sterlings here?
By Dr. Kwame Nantambu
April 26, 2014
One of the most ridiculous and hypocritical political statements ever made in the history of public policy-making in this country is the remark by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar that her Government “will look at legislation that can offer protection to children in their homes”.
Continue reading Hypocrisy towards violence in T&T
By Iniko Ujaama
April 24, 2014 – africaspeaks.com/reasoning
I watched the video of the Trinidadian parent who recently posted the video of herself beating her daughter over posting some ‘sexy’ pics on facebook and the subsequent video of her two daughters(an elder sister and the one beaten) explaining away and justifying the mother’s actions.
Continue reading Corporal Punishment: Shame, Fear and Unreasoning
By Raffique Shah
March 23, 2014
If we think that the top-to-bottom lawlessness and overpowering crime that besiege the country today are portents of hopelessness in tomorrow, think again. It will be much worse. Those who will live here for the next 50 or 80 years (I will be long gone, thankfully) should be afraid…very afraid.
Continue reading Hurtling to self-destruction
By Dr. Selwyn R. Cudjoe
March 11, 2014
Part 1
Maxie Cuffie is a dear friend. It is unfortunate that he misrepresented and distorted what I said in my article. In his anxiety to defend our party, he simply repeats and repositions what he believes rather than to confront the points I made in”PNM’s Last Chance.” (Express, March 3 & 4, 2014)
Continue reading Cuffie’s Fantasies
By Yvonne Baboolal
February 25, 2014 – guardian.co.tt
Homosexuality is not only threatening the arts but is used to indoctrinate gang members, says artist LeRoy Clarke. The T&T Guardian asked Clarke to elaborate on the comment he made last week at his book launch which shocked and outraged some of his fellow artists, members of the gay community and others. In a phone interview yesterday, Clarke related homosexuality to the increase in crime, saying young men are usually indoctrinated into gangs with homosexuality and because of the violation of their manhood use the gun as a symbol of their masculinity.
Continue reading Homosexuality threatens the arts, fuels crime—Clarke
By Raffique Shah
February 08, 2014
I know there are many people in the country who think that Keith Rowley is too black to be Prime Minister. I didn’t need Fitzgerald Hinds to tell me that, although his charge that such sentiment emanates from the bowels of the PNM, from important persons in the party, did surprise me somewhat.
I don’t know why we bury our heads in the sand when the issue of colour prejudice, which is often linked to race prejudice, rears its ugly head in the society. It has always been there, and, I imagine, it always will be. Most people of lighter or whiter complexion, whatever their ethnicity, believe they are superior to others who are dark-skinned, or worse, black.
Continue reading Judge not by colour
“An Eye-Opener and Essential Reading…”
By Edward S. Herman
January 21, 2014 – Global Research
Robin Philpot’s important new book Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa is an eye-opener and essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the recent history of Rwanda, ongoing U.S. and Western policy in Africa, and how efficiently the Western propaganda system works.
As in the case of the wars dismantling Yugoslavia, there is a “standard model” of what happened in Rwanda both in 1994 and in the preceding and later years, a model that puts the victorious Tutsi expatriate and Ugandan official Paul Kagame, his Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), and his Western supporters in a favorable light and the government of Rwanda, led by the Hutu Juvenal Habyarimana, in a negative light. Philpot challenges this model in all of its aspects and shows convincingly that, in a virtual miracle of systematic distortion, this version of history stands the truth on its head.
Continue reading Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa