The suspension from Parliament yesterday of Basdeo Panday, Trinidad and Tobago’s leader of the Opposition, for unauthorised laptop use, has left me feeling me terribly confused. Please help me resolve some of the issues surrounding the matter by taking this poll:
*in June 2006, US Senator Stevens famously referred to the internet as “a series of tubes“
UPDATE: The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society blog has a listing of news articles about the incident.
First it was just the hot water, when my water heater sprung a leak which the technicians took three days to come and repair. Then it was running water period, when the electric pump that drives water from the storage tanks into the house (a necessity in these parts when your house is on a hill) was taken away for servicing for a 24-hour period that morphed into five days.
As desperate as the situation felt at the time, I always knew I’d eventually get my running water back, so it would be churlish of me to compare myself with the thousands in this country who don’t ever have running water in their homes, not to mention the 1.1 billion across the world who lack access to water that’s even clean. I also had a number of options, including borrowing showers at friends’ homes and forgoing personal hygiene altogether (which, for the record, I did not do).
But filling buckets from a storage tank is tedious work, and a bucket full of water is heavy, especially for a weakling like me. In many parts of the world, of course, it’s women and girls who ensure that their families and communities are supplied with water, often walking great distances to and from water sources carrying vessels filled with the precious commodity (which is why developments that improve the water supply in communities–for example, the roundabout play-pump–often improve the lives of women and girls as well).
The reason I have water on the brain today is that yesterday was World Water Day. No doubt netizens throughout the world would have been quoting World Bank VP Ismail Serageldin’s famous statement that the wars “of the next century [meaning this century, of course] will be over water”, linking to websites like 1h2o.org and wishing films like Sanjeev Chatterjee’s “One Water” and Shalini Kantayya’s “A Drop of Life” were available for viewing at their local cineplex (Sanjeev’s film will be in a few weeks, if you happen to live in Miami or New York City). Or maybe even that other great film about water-related conflict, “Chinatown“.
The ‘08 report is out: “The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago. And the problems, increasingly, appear to be different than many experts have predicted.”
“India presents a very grey-scaled picture on this front. India had a woman prime minister and women Supreme Court lawyers and judges long before most of the world. It also has high levels of domestic abuse and dowry-deaths. And of course, there are femal
“If you want to know the future of humanity, don’t look someplace new. Look someplace old: someplace where dynasties and empires have risen and fallen for thousands of years, someplace where scant land has sustained swelling populations for millennia. L
“Who will play Cindy Breakspeare?” asks a cheeky Nikipedia in the e-mail he sent along with this link to a Gleaner report on the two Bob Marley film projects in the works.
From Annie in J’ca: “Suffice it to say that far more education and honest debate on the subject needs to take place here. At the same time international gay rights organizations also need to educate themselves on the very complex reasons for what is being
“A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try
“Even as the United States State Department points to Jamaica being a hub for marijuana production and export in the Caribbean, the island’s government has revealed it’s exploring the possibility of making the drug legal.”
Women in Johannesburg don miniskirts to stage a protest: “The protest came after Nwabisa Ngcukana, 25, was allegedly attacked by a group of taxi-drivers and street hawkers for wearing a miniskirt.”
