To­bag­on­ian au­ton­o­my is back in the air and there are views aplen­ty on the mat­ter. One of my broth­ers, Max Al­bert, is among those who hold strong views on the theme gen­er­al­ly and, more specif­i­cal­ly, on the is­sue of town and coun­try plan­ning. We have had an ex­change of ideas and one re­sult is this col­umn, which is a col­lab­o­ra­tive ef­fort be­tween him and me. He is a for­mer Sec­re­tary in the As­sem­bly and, be­fore that, a PSA ac­tivist on cer­tain el­e­ments of the cur­rent THA Act (40 of 1996). He is still an ac­tivist, though not for the PSA.

But a lot of the time, what gets called “ob­vi­ous,” is some­thing that had to be built from scratch.

On Wednes­day, we will ob­serve In­ter­na­tion­al Well­ness Day, which aims to pro­mote aware­ness and ac­tion for holis­tic well-be­ing. The UN re­minds us that the 2030 Agen­da for Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment em­pha­sis­es “health and well-be­ing as cen­tral to achiev­ing sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment. Goal 3, Good Health and Well-Be­ing, aims to en­sure healthy lives and pro­mote well-be­ing for all at all ages, ad­dress­ing key chal­lenges such as ma­ter­nal and child health, com­mu­ni­ca­ble and non-com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases, and ac­cess to es­sen­tial med­i­cines and vac­cines. This tar­get al­so high­lights the im­por­tance of men­tal health, uni­ver­sal health cov­er­age, and the re­duc­tion of health in­equities to build re­silient and in­clu­sive so­ci­eties.”

Dis­claimer: this ar­ti­cle will of­fend some peo­ple but it’s al­right be­cause some­body needs to say it.

Yes, I get it. When an in­di­vid­ual is el­e­vat­ed to a lead­er­ship role, prov­ing one­self be­comes a burn­ing goal. But re­straint should over­ride un­bri­dled en­thu­si­asm.

We are liv­ing in the most med­ical­ly ad­vanced time in hu­man his­to­ry. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, trust in med­i­cine has nev­er felt more frag­ile. It has wors­ened since COVID-19.

The US/Is­rael war on Iran has ex­posed the fragili­ty of mod­ern civil­i­sa­tion with its de­pen­dence on fos­sil fu­els. With Iran chok­ing the Strait of Hor­muz in re­tal­i­a­tion, oil prices have sky­rock­et­ed, cre­at­ing chaos in en­er­gy mar­kets with soar­ing prices and long-term sup­ply fears. This is “the great­est glob­al en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty threat in his­to­ry,” says head of the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Agency, Fatih Birol.

“When the stakes are mea­sured in lives, glob­al and na­tion­al health de­ci­sion-mak­ing can­not be left to chance.”

Pur­chas­ing a ve­hi­cle, whether new or used, re­quires a siz­able in­vest­ment for the av­er­age cit­i­zen. For many of us, a re­li­able ve­hi­cle is seen as a ne­ces­si­ty and as such, we may be com­pelled to make such an in­vest­ment, even though it may leave us in fi­nan­cial strain. As we are al­ready mak­ing the de­ci­sion to part with a lump sum of our hard-earned mon­ey, we should en­sure it is a good in­vest­ment and not one that may be more cost­ly a few months down the road.

Giv­en the head­lines in 2026, it would be rea­son­able to ask, “Have we en­tered World War 3?” Mil­i­tary con­flicts have touched the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca with Venezuela, Eu­rope, with Ukraine and the Mid­dle East with the Iran con­flict. There is al­so the fur­ther threat of an es­ca­la­tion with Cu­ba and a pos­si­ble at­tack on Tai­wan by Chi­na in the fu­ture.

This month marks the first an­niver­sary of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Gov­ern­ment’s gen­er­al elec­tion win. The ques­tion is: Did “every­body win?” and is one year enough time to an­swer it? GE2025’s “two to one” vic­to­ry of the UNC’s Coali­tion of In­ter­ests over the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) in Trinidad and their ban­ish­ment from To­ba­go by the To­ba­go Peo­ple’s Par­ty (TPP) was a de­fin­i­tive re­jec­tion of a PNM gov­ern­ment af­ter a decade.

I have al­ways been a rough cus­tomer. At the age of ten, I vowed to kill a man. This man was my Un­cle Sabee, my fa­ther’s boat-own­ing fish­ing bud­dy. My fa­ther had been in a Volk­swa­gen car, fol­low­ing Un­cle Sabee to see him off at the air­port. On the Mc Bean Stretch, a truck lost its wheel, col­lid­ed with the Volk­swa­gen, killed Un­cle Sabee’s moth­er, who was in the back seat, and se­ri­ous­ly in­jured my fa­ther. When I saw my fa­ther’s red-stained shirt ar­rive at my grand­moth­er’s home, so en­raged, hor­ri­fied, torn I was, I shout­ed, “I go kill Sabee Un­cle!”