Amid her si­lence on the fate of Sen­a­tor Janelle John-Bates, Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) po­lit­i­cal leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les has ac­cused To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine of “mute lead­er­ship.”

The Cen­tral Bank of T&T (CBTT) yes­ter­day dis­closed that it is en­gag­ing Re­pub­lic Bank Ltd re­gard­ing con­cerns over the in­tro­duc­tion of new and high­er bank­ing fees, in­clud­ing whether cus­tomers were giv­en suf­fi­cient no­tice ahead of the changes.

T&T’s Josi­ah Hills will go in search of the sin­gles ti­tle in the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Ten­nis of Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (COTECC)/Ju­nior/In­fan­tile Ten­nis In­ter­na­tion­al Cham­pi­onships (JITIC) Un­der-14 Tour­na­ment in San­ta Tecla, El Sal­vador on Thurs­day.

When Spoil Bratts won the Nescafé Par­ty Time in 1992, they be­came the first dance crew to claim the crown. For the boys from Mor­vant, life changed overnight. The hys­te­ria was so in­tense that found­ing mem­ber Hamid Rah­man couldn’t even at­tend school the next day. Any time he stepped out of his house, it was pan­de­mo­ni­um. “As we pulled up on the Mor­vant taxi stand to go home, girls would point at us, scream, stare, and even run af­ter us,” Hamid re­calls. “They would say things like, ‘Oh my god! Look them!’”

If a busi­ness is in­tent on build­ing cus­tomer al­le­giance, it has to stop mak­ing com­plaint res­o­lu­tion a strate­gic goal. Busi­ness­es have be­come so ob­sessed with re­solv­ing their cus­tomers’ com­plaints that they are miss­ing the big­ger is­sue - pre­vent­ing com­plaints. Many busi­ness­es fall in­to the trap of fire­fight­ing their way out of com­plaints, es­pe­cial­ly those that have be­come chron­ic. The big fail­ure here is not re­al­is­ing or ac­knowl­edg­ing that per­sis­tent and re­cur­ring com­plaints are a sig­nal of sys­temic dys­func­tion that needs cor­rec­tion at its root.