A Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­al is among the vic­tims of a cat­a­stroph­ic build­ing col­lapse in Flat­bush, Brook­lyn – a heav­i­ly Caribbean en­clave in New York City – that left at least eight peo­ple dead and 18 oth­ers in­jured.

The Gov­ern­ment has in­formed the pop­u­la­tion that the Guaracara Re­fin­ery will restart, promis­ing a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic boost and much-need­ed em­ploy­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties. No one doubts that restart­ing the Guaracara Re­fin­ery is tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble. The crit­i­cal ques­tion is whether the re­fin­ery can be man­aged and op­er­at­ed safe­ly, re­li­ably, prof­itably, and sus­tain­ably over its 15- to 20-year in­vest­ment cy­cle across chang­ing gov­ern­ment ad­min­is­tra­tions—with­out shift­ing mas­sive fi­nan­cial risks on­to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s tax­pay­ers. This ar­ti­cle aims to stim­u­late con­ver­sa­tion and dis­cus­sion on this im­por­tant jour­ney the coun­try is about to em­bark on.

Pour a small nip of some­thing aged and raise your glass­es, the West In­dies Test team has nav­i­gat­ed the en­tire 2026 cal­en­dar year with­out los­ing a sin­gle Test se­ries. Let that sink in for a mo­ment. West In­dies has not pulled off a feat of this cal­i­bre since 1994, a dis­tant era when Richie Richard­son cap­tained in his sig­na­ture ma­roon flop­py hat, Sir Curt­ly Am­brose broke stumps for fun, and half of the West In­dies cur­rent start­ing XI were not even a thought.

When far away from home, there is of­ten a part of us that longs for even the small­est piece of fa­mil­iar­i­ty. That was how 28-year-old Aman­da Ar­joon felt when she first moved near­ly 9,000 miles away from Trinidad and To­ba­go.

We have been liv­ing through a rapid tran­si­tion from a world gov­erned by rules and prin­ci­ples to one de­fined by op­por­tunis­tic re­al­ism. Per­son­al con­vic­tion is fick­le in the face of this trans­ac­tion­al prag­ma­tism; hu­man in­ter­ac­tion is no longer but­tressed by truth or trust; in­ter­na­tion­al law no longer has the pow­er to re­strain; and gov­er­nance in most coun­tries just dri­ves cit­i­zens to frus­tra­tion and tries their pa­tience by dis­re­spect­ing their in­tel­lect.