The Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion (DO­MA) is warn­ing that per­sis­tent in­ci­dents of vi­o­lent crime are un­der­min­ing pub­lic con­fi­dence, dis­rupt­ing busi­ness op­er­a­tions and wors­en­ing the eco­nom­ic chal­lenges fac­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Lo­cal con­trac­tor, NH In­ter­na­tion­al (Caribbean), has se­cured a US$243 mil­lion (EC$666 mil­lion) con­tract to ex­pand St Lu­cia’s Hewanor­ra In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port, even as con­struc­tion firms T&T con­tin­ue to raise con­cerns about de­layed pay­ments and the slow roll­out of gov­ern­ment projects.

Goal shoot­er Maikea Bram­ble was in omi­nous form as she drained 87 goals from 90 tries to steer the Trinidad and To­ba­go net­ball team to a 106 to 17 de­mo­li­tion of the British Vir­gin Is­lands (BVI) in the Amer­i­c­as Net­ball World Cup Qual­i­fiers at the Sir Garfield Sobers Com­plex in Bridgetown, Bar­ba­dos on Sun­day.

South­ern Trinidad’s for­got­ten his­to­ry is be­ing brought to light through ar­chae­o­log­i­cal re­search that is un­cov­er­ing ev­i­dence of the lives of In­dige­nous peo­ple, in­den­tured labour­ers and the com­mu­ni­ties they built, while train­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of lo­cal re­searchers to pre­serve the coun­try’s her­itage.

A health bud­get must be judged not sim­ply by how much mon­ey is al­lo­cat­ed, but by what that mon­ey de­liv­ers. Can pa­tients ob­tain the med­i­cines pre­scribed to them? Can fam­i­lies ac­cess time­ly treat­ment? Are hos­pi­tals equipped, staffed and func­tion­ing as they should? And when the sys­tem fails, does the Gov­ern­ment iden­ti­fy the cause, cor­rect it and re­port hon­est­ly on the re­sults?