Let’s see what manner of insanity is in the local news today, shall we?

Girl Attacked, Adults Wring Hands

As a woman who spent years travelling before finally giving in and buying a car, I am intimately familiar with the gaps in T&T’s transportation services. Every so often, someone will make noise about the fact that any random person can park on a taxi stand and “pull bull”, but the reality is that we don’t have enough licensed taxis or maxis for everyone who travels to get where they need to go. Those PH drivers are filling a wide gap.

They can also be very dangerous to vulnerable people. There have been many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many cases of PH drivers robbing and assaulting their passengers over the years. It’s not new.

So, when a man pretends to be a taxi driver so he can attack a 14-year-old student in Tobago, I’m going to expect more from the Education Secretary than this:

Education Secretary Zorisha Hackett said she was devastated and horrified to hear about the attack on the student.

“My heart aches for the student and her family during this unimaginable time. We will launch an immediate investigation to uncover the details and ensure she receives every bit of support and care she needs. This tragedy painfully underscores the urgent need for stronger safety measures nationwide,” Hackett said.

Williams, Elizabeth. Schoolgirl, 14, beaten, raped: PH driver held. 12th June, 2024. Express

It’s not that I think she can personally address the situation. Transportation obviously isn’t her portfolio. But if you aren’t going to at least call for this specific problem to be addressed, if you don’t have anything more to offer in your official capacity than an investigation that seems redundant when the police have already caught the suspect, what are you doing?

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Are We Mistreating Immigrants in the Name of National Security?

As someone who has heard, with my own ears, the way people talk about immigrants—and specifically Caribbean immigrants—up there in the north, I am forever bemused by the way some Trinis speak about particular people when they arrive on our shores. Not all of them, mind you. Some of them, we’re quite fond of. But if they come from an island smaller than our own, or the continent 11 kilometres off our south-western tip, we’re decidedly less welcoming.

That’s why I’m not sure how many of us will care about the story of a woman who spent 19 months at the Chaguaramas heliport for the crime of seeking asylum.

In 2020, Hernandez and her son fled persecution in their homeland to seek asylum in this country. They were detained at the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force heliport in Chaguaramas between December 2020 and July 2022, becoming the longest to be detained at the facility at that time.

Hernandez challenged her detention, taking the matter up to the Privy Council. She was successful and both she and her son were released. She still has matters pending before the court in which she is seeking asylum and damages for false imprisonment. Her son was awarded damages.

In the present matter, which came up for hearing before Justice Margaret Mohammed yesterday, Hernandez is seeking a declaration that the decision of National Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds, around July 25, 2023, to declare the heliport an immigration station was irrational, illegal and amounted to an unlawful exercise of power.

[…]

In her affidavit, Hernandez described the conditions as horrific and traumatising. She said it is more than suffering, it is mental torment and designed to inflict a certain amount of punishment.

The minister will be called upon to set out the matters he took into account before he exercised his discretion to designate the heliport as an immigration station after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While Persad stated that the minister considered security, capacity, location and convenience for making the heliport an immigration station, Hernandez claimed that bathroom facilities, special meals for those with dietary restrictions or having interpreters were among factors not considered.

Hernandez said the facility was inhumane as it was overcrowded, they had to sleep on the ground, and the children were placed along with adults.

Braxton-Benjamin, Nikita. Horrific heliport. 12th June, 2024. Express.

This obviously isn’t the worst of our crimes against those seeking safety in T&T, but I personally don’t feel comfortable with migrants being treated this way in the name of national security. Given how many of us have at least one relative who went north seeking better opportunities, I’d think we’d all feel the same way. Especially those of us who claim to have empathy for suffering peoples elsewhere.

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Minister of Health is Concerned About Kids Vaping

I can’t say I’m impressed by our leaders’ refusal to be proactive, but I guess they get points for consistency?

We’ve seen what happened elsewhere with children when the authorities failed to move fast to ban candy and fruit-flavoured e-cigarettes from the market. And yet, here we are, two months after Witco announced its intention to sell that mess here, the Health Minister is talking about seminars and outreach sessions to raise awareness.

Deyalsingh said, “There are many health effects that are attributable since its use. There is a growing body of scientific evidence which is beginning to elucidate the deleterious health effects of vaping, especially on our children.”

These include increased risk of developing asthma, a gateway to the increased use of cigarettes, physical injuries (burns from explosions or malfunctions of vaping devices) and the presence of nicotine in some vaping products which carries the risk of addiction to the drug.

Deyalsingh said the ministry, through the National and Drug Abuse Prevention Programme and its Tobacco Control Unit, has developed some initiatives to increase awareness and reduce the harmful risks associated with vaping amongst children and other groups.

Wilson, Sascha. Debe dad held after daughter, 3, left alone in car. 10th June 2024. Guardian

What else can we expect from the man who saw a WHO statement about transitioning to long-term management of the pandemic and interpreted it as “de pandemic done?”

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Bandit Robs Woman, Accidentally Turns Himself In?

I saw this one yesterday and almost included it, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it make sense. It popped up again today, and… it still doh make sense.

• Some bandits try to rob a woman sitting in her car.
• She flees and tosses her keys into the bush.
• They snatch her phone and flee in their own car.
• She returns, finds her keys, decides to follow the bandits.
• They stop, the passengers flee and she crashes into the car.

This is where it gets really weird…

• The bandit agrees to go to a nearby police station to report the accident.
• The cops connect him to another car theft on top of this fiasco.

It’s day two, and I still have so many questions:

• How’d she manage to find her keys and catch up with them?
• Did they know she was following them? If not, why’d they jump out of the car?
• Why’d the driver go with her to the station? Who goes toward the police after criming?
• Why’d they take his prints? That’s not SOP for an accident report. Did she tip them off? Why don’t either of the reports I’ve seen say that?
• Was it worth it? Because when they charge you, you know the TTPS is going to post your mugshot on their FB page and you’ll be Donkey of the Day for about a week.

Here, see if you can make heads or tails of it:

At 8.25pm on Monday, the 42-year-old woman parked her SUV on Rickson Street, El Dorado. She remained in the car.

Two men approached, one armed with a gun. They knocked on her window and announced a robbery.

The woman got out of the car, threw her keys into some nearby bushes and ran off. She hid behind a nearby wall and watched as the men searched her car and stole her phone.

They then got into a gold Nissan Tiida which was waiting nearby and drove off.

The woman went to the bushes, found her keys, got into her car and began following the getaway car.

The men got out at Macoya Road, El Dorado and ran in opposite directions.

The woman then crashed her car into the back of the getaway car and raised an alarm, at which a passer-by started video-recording the incident.

The victim and the alleged driver of the getaway car both went to the nearby Tunapuna Police Station and made reports.

While he was at the station, police identified the driver as a suspect in the theft of a Suzuki Swift in March last year. The Swift was stolen in Tunapuna and found in San Juan with the man’s fingerprints inside.

Mc Burnie, Gregory. Woman chases bandits, crashes into getaway car. 12th June 2024. Newsday.

Weird, right?

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Ministers Doing What Ministers Do

Talk. That’s what they do. That’s pretty much all they do.

That’s why our Minister of Public Utilities (AKA the Minister of Macaroni Pie… IYKYK) will sit in the Senate and openly speak about corruption under a past administration without hinting at any intention to do a thing about it:

He said, “It is in a 2013 document submitted to the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) by the then UNC government that 2,500 workers were earmarked to be dismissed from WASA.”

Gonzales added this document was signed by Ganga Singh, who was WASA CEO and Environment and Water Resources Minister at different times during the May 2010- September 2015 tenure of the UNC-led People’s Partnership (PP) coalition government.

Singh, he continued, approached the IDB for a $1.5 billion loan and told the bank “he was going to restructure WASA and on that basis, 2,500 workers will be dismissed from the authority.”

Gonzales said this situation subsequently got worse.

“They got $500 million to engage in a VSEP (voluntary separation of employment) package to separate these WASA workers.”

Gonzales said 1,000 workers participated in that VSEP package and “as they exit the authority, they entered by another door, costing the people of TT over $500 million.”

He added that the UNC must account “for that scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money and their scandalous behaviour in the water sector in TT.”

Chan Tack, Clint. Gonzales : No new water company being formed. 11th June. 2024. Newsday

Who’s going to make them account for it, if not the current government of which he is himself a member?

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KPB’s Still Out Here Selling Dreams

If nothing else, the UNC’s election campaigns are entertaining. I don’t take them seriously as an opposition party (and I think they’re downright dangerous as the incumbent), but I do keep an eye on what they promise their base because it provides insight into what they think will be effective.

And every so often, the stopped clock is right:

THE STAR Team, which is contesting the United National Congress (UNC) internal elections, has promised to introduce Spanish as a compulsory subject in all schools and implement computer technology and software development as core parts of the syllabus.

Gioannetti, Andrew. UNC Star Team promises compulsory Spanish, starting in pre-school. 12th June, 2024. Newsday

Spanish should absolutely be part of the core curriculum because we’re right off the tip of South America and because we host a significant number of Spanish-speaking individuals. Of course, that last part wouldn’t sit right with her base as a rationale (which should tell you about the kind of support she courts), so she had to walk it back:

“Why do I say that? Not because there are Venezuelan migrants here, (but) because right next to us is the whole of Latin America, South America. The majority speak Spanish, and we should pursue (more agreements) with that side of the world.”

Gioannetti, Andrew. UNC Star Team promises compulsory Spanish, starting in pre-school. 12th June, 2024. Newsday

So she gets half-marks for that one and full marks for the information technology and software development shout-out too, because at this point, too many kids don’t know anything about how a computer actually works, which is going to be a real problem in our tech-driven world.

What she didn’t say is how she intends to integrate these things into an already packed curriculum that many teachers aren’t actually finishing. Then again, follow-through was never her strong suit.

That’s why her promise to lower and waive taxes should be taken with a grain of salt too, unless she’d like to share how she plans to replace that revenue.

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When it Rains, it Floods… Like Clockwork

Trinidad and Tobago has two seasons. One is very dry. The other is very wet. When it gets very wet, certain places are vulnerable to flooding, landslides, and other kinds of dangerous unpleasantness.

In a country with proactive leadership, these very simple facts would inspire them to prepare those areas in a way that makes them resilient to those issues.

In Trinidad and Tobago, however:

THE week was off to a wet start after Trinidad and Tobago saw torrential downpours on June 10.

While the rains brought a reprieve from the heat, it resulted in damage in several regions, particularly in Moriah, Tobago, said training and education specialist Lt Cdr Kirk Jean-Baptiste of the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) .

The Tobago Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) also issued a warning about a threatening landslide in Moriah after the heavy rain on June 10.

[…]

In the Diego Martin region, three fallen trees were reported.

In one instance, a bamboo stool fell into a watercourse in Carenage, prompting the Diego Martin Regional Corporation (DMRC) to seek assistance from the Fire Service (TTFS).

On Saddle Road, Maraval, DMRC tree cutters swiftly removed a fallen tree, while in Hillsborough, Maraval, the TTFS intervened to clear a tree that had collapsed onto power lines.

Port of Spain also felt the brunt of the heavy rains.

The city corporation reported a fallen tree on Jackson Street, which resulted in a collapsed wall.

[…]

In Tunapuna, a roof was blown off on Green Street, as reported by the Tunapuna/Piarco Regional Corporation (TPRC).

Deonanan, Josette Nicole. Moriah residents warned about possible landslide after rain on June 10. 11th June 2024. Newsday.

Taking bets on the approach for 2025?

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Who Pays When a Government Minister Forgets Which Tree to Climb?

Asking as a concerned, taxpaying citizen, because if folks are going to start suing Fitzgerald Hinds every time he puts his foot in his mouth, I want to make sure that my tax dollars eh in the mix. Well, they will be because we’re paying his salary, but I guess that money done wasting already, so… *shrug*.

Just kidding, though, because we all know that Hinds and Co. much prefer to wash their mouths on folks that can’t afford to sue them for it.

I don’t know what possessed him to pick a fight with this lady, but judging by how quickly he pulled an about-face, I’m guessing someone with an Esq. after their name set him straight. It sounds like she’s not satisfied, though:

On June 5, Hinds in a brief press release admitted, “As part of my contribution to the media, I suggested that Mr Towfeek Ali was identified in a court affidavit as the gun dealer who was unable to produce his records when required to do so by the police, explained that the said records were stolen, and that no report was made to the police.

“I here state that that aspect of my statement was erroneous, as Mr Ali was not identified in the court document, as the dealer.

“The statement therefore, being erroneous, is hereby withdrawn.”

But on June 10, Alfonso told Newsday, “He did not issue an apology, which I think was the human and decent thing to do.”

[…]

Alfonso continued, “I would have expected the decent thing to do was identify you made a mistake, which he (Hinds) has done, and to apologise.

[…]

Alfonso said Hinds’ error was worsened by the fact he was supposedly quoting sworn evidence from an affidavit.

“I would have expected an apology, and like I said, we are certainly looking at our (legal) options.”

[…]

“It cannot pass with that degree of ease, especially without an apology.”

Giving an apology, she said, takes nothing away from someone, she said, but shows you are human like everyone else.

“You are duty-bound to tender an apology. You hold a press conference shared thousands of times. It wasn’t some side comment while you were in a cocktail party.”

She also said in matters of defamation, a correction must be issued with the same prominence as the original statement.

“Sending a last-minute two-paragraph press release is not the same as having a press conference.” Newsday tried but was unable to get a response from Hinds on June 10.

Douglas, Sean. Anglican Bishop: ‘Great empathy’ but no assurances for BATCE teachers as transition talks continue. 9th June 2024. Newsday.

The lady wants her apology, and she wants it now. Given how reluctant Ministers tend to be with their apologies when speaking to the people they swore to serve, I’m very interested in seeing if he complies.

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And there you have it, today’s fwiw Roundup.

What’d you think of these stories? Did I miss any interesting ones? Let me know in the comments!