While the gov­ern­ment has yet to an­nounce who will lead Trinidad and To­ba­go’s del­e­ga­tion to next month’s 50th Reg­u­lar Meet­ing of Cari­com heads in St Kitts and Nevis, for­mer for­eign af­fairs min­is­ter Dr. Amery Browne be­lieves Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar is like­ly to at­tend.

One year be­fore T&T gained in­de­pen­dence from Great Britain, a lit­tle air­line called Wind­ward Is­lands Air­ways In­ter­na­tion­al NV (Winair) was found­ed in Sint Maarten. One year lat­er, it spread its wings and be­gan com­mer­cial op­er­a­tions. Now, 64 years lat­er, the Caribbean’s old­est air­line is spread­ing its wings once again and launch­ing flights to Trinidad.

In the high-stakes are­na of mod­ern sports, the dif­fer­ence be­tween medal­ing and al­so-ran re­sults is not just about raw tal­ent or nat­ur­al abil­i­ty. As the gap in phys­i­cal con­di­tion­ing nar­rows, the com­pet­i­tive edge has shift­ed to­ward strate­gic in­tel­li­gence. For ath­letes, teams, coach­es, train­ers, and tech­ni­cal per­son­nel seek­ing to break through per­for­mance plateaus, ap­ply­ing busi­ness plan­ning tools such as SWOT and PES­TLE is in­eluctable.

The Un­der­cov­er Cool­er Fete took place at Drew Manor in San­ta Cruz last Sat­ur­day, draw­ing a live­ly crowd of so­ca and Car­ni­val en­thu­si­asts ea­ger to kick off the short­ened Car­ni­val sea­son.

Un­der­stand­ing shift­ing glob­al pow­er dy­nam­ics and eco­nom­ic in­flu­ences re­quires clar­i­ty and con­text. Cari­com con­sists of 15 mem­ber states and five as­so­ciate mem­bers. Ac­cord­ing to the World Pop­u­la­tion Re­view (WPR), the pop­u­la­tion is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 18 mil­lion peo­ple (Trinidad and To­ba­go: 1.5 mil­lion), though fig­ures can vary slight­ly by source and year, rang­ing from around 16 mil­lion to over 18 mil­lion across dif­fer­ent re­ports. The Unit­ed Na­tions has 193 mem­bers, and the WPR es­ti­mates the world pop­u­la­tion at 8.29 bil­lion.