By Jada Loutoo
Thursday, April 16 2009
newsday.co.tt
CHILD rights activist Verna St Rose Greaves yesterday chose to take her lobby outside the Hyatt Regency, instead of attending the Civil Society forum, which was taking place metres from where she held her one-person demonstration, outside the Carnival Victory cruise ship.
She wore a white dress, splashed with red dye to represent blood and carried a poster which read “Shame on a Nation. You neglect children, women, poor, homeless, communities in need, persons with disabilities.” On the poster were photos of Akiel Chambers and Amy Emily Annamunthodo, both victims of murder. Ringing a brass bell and shouting at the top of her voice, a barefooted St Rose Greaves said she chose the public place to speak out against what she called the injustice being done to the children in the country.
Continue reading Activist takes to the streets
For the host of the Fifth Summit of the Americas to decide to travel to 6 out of 33 Latin American countries with leftist leaning Presidents within a short period of four days using a most expensive private jet merely to ascertain the perspectives of these heads of state on the summit agenda of energy security and the Cuban question is nothing short of egoism gone mad.
ONE agenda item that no doubt crops up at every Summit of the Americas is the illegal drug trade. The two main mind-altering drugs produced, traded and used in the Western Hemisphere are marijuana and cocaine. Note-I have not mentioned alcohol, which is also mind-altering but which has been legalised globally. At the Fifth Summit, many leaders will slosh down the finest liquors taxpayers’ money can buy. Some of them will get embarrassingly drunk-as happened at recent top-level international conferences.
It seems that every expert testimony given so far to the Uff Commission of Inquiry has revealed mismanagement, technical incompetence and, perhaps, deep-rooted corruption.
There is clearly a link between the findings contained in the February 20 report presented by Gerry McCaffrey, construction expert hired by the Uff Commission of Inquiry that the structural steel work at the Brian Lara Stadium project “is effectively condemned” and the cancelling of his return flight to Trinidad on February 27 by the Office of the Prime Minister.
A self-imposed media embargo seems to have overtaken Minister Colm Imbert lately on the tenuous fate of his TRRP. This prognosis has been reinforced by the negative and depressing body language that he displayed while communicating to the press at Whitehall on the Interchange. I am coming to the intuitive conclusion that Cabinet seems to have ordered secretly a pre-emptive moratorium against the TRRP, in an election year, to avoid any further disastrous fallout from another major reversal and embarrassment while the wounds inflicted by the Chatham debacle are still fresh, politically painful and electorally threatening.