“Lions led by donkeys” was the pithy assessment of the tragedy of the hundreds of thousands of British Empire troops sent to their slaughter by incompetent generals on the Western Front in World War I (1914-1918).
Just over a week ago, four girls all below the age of 18, and two under the age of 16, were rescued from a gold mining location in the interior, where it was reported they were being forced into prostitution.
Returning from attendance at the Summit of the Americas in Colombia where she focused on getting support for her country’s claim to the Falklands, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner turned her attention to another issue destined to attract headlines in the international press.
Shortly before the start of the recently concluded 13th Caribbean Sustainable Tourism Development Conference the Government Information Agency (GINA) issued a media release in which it announced that government was partnering with the private sector to ‘spruce up’ the city so that our visitors could experience a more wholesome capital than that which those of us who live here must live with, day in, day out.
Where theatrics and histrionics are concerned, the government has outdone itself on the opposition budget cuts that have reduced subventions to the Government Information Agency (GINA) and NCN to a dollar.
If one didn’t know better, one might have thought that some of our politicians were competing with the rulers of the Italian city states in Renaissance times, since there has been more than enough intrigue and perfidy to go around in the last ten days.
The battle between online giants Apple and Amazon to control the lucrative ebook market took an unexpected turn three weeks ago when the US Department of Justice (DoJ) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and seven major trade publishers for colluding to “substantially increase the prices that consumers pay for ebooks.”
Generally recognised as the greatest writer in the English language and perhaps the greatest playwright the world has ever seen, William Shakespeare would have been 449 on April 23.
Over the past 16 months or so, the world has been preoccupied with the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions, which started in December 2010 and the ongoing global economic downturn that spawned the universal ‘occupy’ movement.
The first round of French presidential elections has been disappointing, though not entirely unexpected, for President Nicolas Sarkozy and his party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).
On February 16, during the debate in the National Assembly on supplementary budget allocations, Finance Minister Ashni Singh declared that the government had found itself “in completely uncharted territory,” a reference to the delayed approval of supplementary budget financing based on opposition queries relating to the legality of some of the spending.
No matter how it is parsed or spun, APNU’s deal-making last week with the PPP/C government will be seen as a continuation of the historic engagement of the duopoly that has bestridden the political landscape for the last 55 years or so and which has left the country wallowing in the backwaters of development and deeply divided.
A document circulating on the internet which has been seized on by many persons locally, makes the assertion that April 29, 2012 marks the two hundredth anniversary of Georgetown.
We live in a sceptical age. After the Wikileaks phenomenon it is hard to be naïve about the news.
On the third day of his trial, which began on Monday, for the massacre of 77 people in Norway, last July, Anders Behring Breivik began his testimony.
Come August 1, this year, Trinidad and Tobago’s (T&T) twelve-year-old Dangerous Dogs Act will finally come into force.
The northern Colombia city of Cartagena de Indias, the location of the 6th Summit of the Americas, and once a major slave-trading port and subsequently the home of large numbers of people of African descent, would certainly have been of interest to leaders of Caribbean states attending the conference.
What is now clear about events in Syria is that the government of Bashar al Assad may have already come to terms with the inevitability of its demise.
With World Press Freedom Day approaching on May 3rd, the collective mind of the press will be focused on the restraints that continue to be in place on the media and the government’s own approach to openness.
Those who have been following the saga of the Tobago Hill ponds would have been afforded a little light relief amid all the earnestness of the Budget debate last week.
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