NEWS
Trini Payge Turner moves up on The Voice
Singer and musician Paige “Payge Turner” Roopchan has won her first battle on US network NBC’s The Voice. She was chosen as the winner over fellow Team Gwen member Lauren Frihauf. On Tuesday a producer on The Voice contacted Newsday to ask for permission to use a previous story about the show, to demonstrate that Turner has the support of her community. The battle broadcast on Monday, saw the TT-born 27-year-old Turner going up against 16-year-old Frihauf, singing If the World Was Ending by JP Saxe. Turner’s smooth voice and stage presence drew praise and comments from all the judges. Read more here
Family keeping faith diver Reinaldo’s alive
Before disappearing 18 miles off of the coast of Manzanilla on Sunday afternoon, 66-year-old Reinaldo Novoa began writing a book about the love of his life, titled Tales of the Trinbago Sea. It’s now been more than sixty hours since he went missing but his family has no doubt Reinaldo will finish his book himself. “Our failures at finding Reinaldo Novoa Senior at sea, despite the tremendous effort by the public, government and the private sector, can only mean he made it to land, which increases his chance of survival immensely,” Novoa’s son, Reinaldo Jr, said yesterday. Read more here
POLITICS
Former ministers: Poor taste by UNC to plagiarise
Former ministers have called on Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar to issue a personal apology to the UK leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer as well as a public apology to TT for a plagiarised statement. A message posted on Persad-Bissessar's Facebook page congratulating the US president- and vice-president elect had clearly been taken from Starmer's message, posted online a short time earlier. Read more here
BUSINESS
No-pay T&TEC causing NGC pain
It is a phrase that sticks out like flared natural gas on a dark Mayaro night: Read more here
New supermarket coming to the Avenue
While bars continue to be closed for in-house dining, a supermarket is about to make it’s a debut on Ariapita Avenue in Port of Spain, an area well known as one of this country’s most popular liming strips. Read more here
REGIONAL
Hope Restored
RESTORING balance to an economy ‘rattled’ by a five-month elections impasse and the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, while protecting people, has been the foremost aim of the new People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government over the past 100 days in the office, said President, Dr. Irfaan Ali. Guyana’s economy, according to President Ali, was in a state of “neglectful distress”, especially during the five-month impasse after polling day on March 2, 2020, when people not only patiently awaited the election results, but were ‘forced’ to confront the effects of the pandemic, alone. Read more here
Few Jamaicans Will Get Hands On Shield Against Virus
A down payment has already been made for Jamaica to access the coronavirus vaccine for a sliver of the population once it becomes available, but failure to immunise a significant number of nationals is unlikely to eliminate COVID-19 in the north Caribbean island, an expert on viruses has said. Referencing the growing anti-vaccination lobby in Jamaican and across the world, associate professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts, Dr Wilmore Webley, has argued that mass takeup was crucial to achieving herd immunity and stemming the pandemic’s deadly march. Read more here
INTERNATIONAL
Alarm grows over Trump's 'dictator moves' as he denies election defeat
President Donald Trump's administration is taking on the characteristics of a tottering regime -- with its loyalty tests, destabilizing attacks on the military chain of command, a deepening bunker mentality and increasingly delusional claims of political victory. In response, a visibly confident President-elect Joe Biden is going out of his way to project calm amid the deepening chaos, even as Trump and senior Republicans still refuse to acknowledge the President's defeat in a stunning break with America's democratic traditions. Read more here
Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmakers resign after China ruling
All of Hong Kong's pro-democracy lawmakers have resigned after four of their colleagues were disqualified. On Wednesday Beijing passed a resolution allowing the city's government to disqualify politicians deemed a threat to national security. Shortly afterwards Hong Kong Democratic Party chairman Wu Chi-wai told reporters that they would all leave the city's legislature. "We... will stand with our colleagues who are disqualified," he said. Read more here
11th November 2020