It’s taken a couple o’ days well for the rage to simmer low enough – and the heart to steel itself tough enough – to contemplate the gang rape of the 16-year-old child in Rio last week by perhaps up to as many as 33 men, including her 17-year-old boyfriend. The world knows of it because several of her assailants posted pictures and video of her and the crime, some turning her degradation into selfie-opportunities; one particularly low low-life made what he thought was a good joke about it. Read more

IN SYMPATHY with the 11-year-old children of Trinidad & Tobago who, two weeks ago, might have had the rest of their lives ruined – by the Secondary Entrance Assessment examination, not by having to marry a man old enough to be their grandfather – I attempted last year’s actual SEA maths paper two Fridays ago. This morning, I’ll do what was called “the English paper” when I sat the 11-Plus 47 years ago, but what the Ministry of Education now insists is better described as, “language arts”; let’s see if I have enough art at language to get me into a Trini “prestige” secondary school – i.e., one in which teachers actually turn up occasionally, if only to have their car washed by one of this year’s graduating class; I note, too, that “grammar” has itself now been downgraded to “grammar skills”, so you don’t have to know grammar, just show some skills relating to it.

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Had it not been picked recently, **Fargo BEST FILM OF THE DAY 7.15pm FoxClas, would have topped today’s list.

Today’s number one film:

The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum/ 2014/ UK-USA/ Biography-Drama-Thriller-War/ 114 mins/ PG-13 for some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking) 1.10pm HBO & 2.15pm HBO Caribbean.

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A Saudi Arabian “family therapist” has the newest video poised to go viral, a scholarly treatise on how to properly beat your wife, in accordance with Islamic teaching. The video is not a hoax, though anyone could be forgiven for assuming it had to be a conspiracy against the old “religion of peace”.

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If it had been on a little later, one of the great spaghetti Westerns would surely have been picked (Once Upon a Time in the West, 7.30am FoxClas).

Today’s number one film:

Winter Sleep (aka Kis Uykusu) (Nuri Bilge Ceylan/ 2014/ Drama/ Turkey/ 196 mins/ PG-13 for some language and zombie violence), 8pm Cinemax.

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