The jour­ney to par­ent­hood is usu­al­ly filled with ex­cite­ment and an­tic­i­pa­tion. Par­ents ea­ger­ly pre­pare for the ar­rival of their child—dec­o­rat­ing nurs­eries, buy­ing ba­by clothes, choos­ing names, and dream­ing about the fu­ture. They imag­ine first birth­days, school grad­u­a­tions, and the many mile­stones that lie ahead.

As a means of break­ing the cur­rent re­gion­al dead­lock on the is­sue, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has wise­ly called for the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ) to pro­vide an ad­vi­so­ry opin­ion on whether the process used to reap­point Cari­com Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Dr Car­la Bar­nett com­plied with the pro­ce­dures es­tab­lished and tra­di­tion­al­ly fol­lowed for se­lect­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tive head of the re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion move­ment.

The best game of the World Cup so far was be­tween Ar­genti­na and Cape Verde. Pure class. Gen­uine mag­nif­i­cence. A cham­pi­on team that just would not give in, and a hun­gry for glo­ry team from a small coun­try that does not seem to know how to give up.

For many in Trinidad and To­ba­go, the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump's in­ter­ven­tion in the 2026 FI­FA World Cup sus­pen­sion of US strik­er Fo­lar­in Ba­lo­gun strikes an un­com­fort­able chord.

I sus­pect few oth­ers no­ticed, be­fore now, that the sharpest metaphor de­liv­ered at the 51st Cari­com Sum­mit in St Lu­cia came not from one of the po­lit­i­cal vet­er­ans, but from an elo­quent par­tic­i­pant in a large­ly over­looked Youth Di­a­logue.

The Caribbean has nev­er lacked in­spir­ing rhetoric about re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion. What has too of­ten been miss­ing is the po­lit­i­cal will to turn those as­pi­ra­tions in­to mean­ing­ful ac­tion. As lead­ers meet in St Lu­cia this week for their 51st sum­mit, they must recog­nise that the great­est threat to the Com­mu­ni­ty may not come from out­side its bor­ders, but from di­vi­sions with­in.

The re­port­ed de­ci­sion by Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) to re­place Blue Wa­ters prod­ucts on its flights has raised im­por­tant ques­tions that re­quire clear and time­ly an­swers. While com­mer­cial com­pa­nies rou­tine­ly change sup­pli­ers, the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing this de­ci­sion make trans­paren­cy es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant.

Ed­u­ca­tion is one of the prin­ci­pal dri­vers of na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment. It de­vel­ops hu­man cap­i­tal, in­sti­tu­tions, val­ues and in­no­va­tion ca­pac­i­ty that en­able sus­tained eco­nom­ic, so­cial and po­lit­i­cal progress. These rea­sons have been the dri­vers be­hind the sub­stan­tial in­vest­ment in ed­u­ca­tion since self-gov­ern­ment in 1956. The dif­fi­cul­ty in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries such as Trinidad and To­ba­go is that the na­tion­al econ­o­my does not grow fast enough to ab­sorb all its school leavers.

In 2013, the Cape Verde gov­ern­ment re­quest­ed that its orig­i­nal Por­tuguese name, Cabo Verde, be used in­ter­na­tion­al­ly across all lan­guages. “Cape Verde” isn’t in­cor­rect, but it isn’t their pref­er­ence. If they want to re­name them­selves The In­vin­ci­ble Isles, that’d be al­right with me.

Con­grat­u­la­tions are in or­der for this year’s out­stand­ing Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) per­form­ers. Adam Ng Tang and David Ram­lakhan (Mon­trose Gov­ern­ment), Kather­ine Ad­jod­ha (St Pe­ter’s Pri­vate), Ama­ra Bat­tan (Curepe Pres­by­ter­ian), Shiv­an Khan (Ca­roni Hin­du), Shaz­ana Mo­hammed (Debe Hin­du), Liam Ra­j­nauth (Trinidad Re­nais­sance Prepara­to­ry), Ethan Ram­lack­hans­ingh (San Fer­nan­do TML) and Vivek Su­per­sad-Ma­haraj (Munroe Road Hin­du were in the top nine named by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion.

For decades, Trinidad and To­ba­go’s sta­tus as one of the world’s lead­ing ex­porters of methanol and am­mo­nia was a source of pride and a ma­jor con­trib­u­tor to for­eign ex­change earn­ings and gov­ern­ment rev­enue. Methanex’s an­nounce­ment that it will in­def­i­nite­ly idle its Ti­tan methanol plant at Point Lisas from Oc­to­ber is there­fore more than a cor­po­rate de­ci­sion—it is an­oth­er warn­ing about the grow­ing chal­lenges fac­ing the coun­try’s petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor.

Our cir­cle has grown much small­er over the decades. Life has seen to that. Chil­dren have grown, ca­reers have un­fold­ed, some friends have moved away, and oth­ers have died. That makes these lunch­es more valu­able than they once were. They have be­come a tra­di­tion.