Perfect performer
By Sean Douglas
Thursday, May 15 2008
The Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (Udecott) is above board, executive chairman Calder Hart said yesterday at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Port-of-Spain, in a keenly-awaited media conference which drew the focus away from Hart and leant towards the technical details of Udecott’s operations.
Hart led four Udecott directors and six managers to face reporters the day after Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s nod in the Senate for Udecott to be probed by a parliamentary Joint Select Committee (JSC) — but not by a commission of inquiry — after charges of insufficient oversight made by fired Trade Minister Dr Keith Rowley.
Continue reading UDeCOTT’s Calder Hart Responds
There should be no tears shed over Government’s decision to hold parliamentary Joint Select Committee meetings in camera, and not on camera. Already, members of the Opposition and some independent senators have expressed outrage, accusing the Government of using its majority to muzzle MPs and senators. Many people who follow parliamentary proceedings also view the move as one to deny the public the right to follow the proceedings of these committees. It reeks of cover-up, they argue.
TWO Trinidadians and four Venezuelans were yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment for trafficking cocaine in what the trial judge said was the “largest amount to ever pass through the courts of Trinidad and Tobago.”
In his 1972 article titled “The meaning of development”, Professor Dudley Sears argued that “a country which had doubled per capita income could not claim to have experienced development if poverty, inequality, (inflation/ spiraling high cost of living, food shortages, human safety/security, level of crimes) and unemployment had not been reduced.”
A woman, charged with having sexual intercourse with a 17-year-old boy without his consent, was yesterday granted $80,000 bail and ordered to stay 100 feet away from the young man. 
September 2001: “Focus on agriculture declined from as far back as the first oil boom of 1973-79, when, with oil prices increasing at a dizzying pace, food production was no longer an attractive option. Like most oil-rich countries, Trinidad and Tobago felt it had the money to purchase its food requirements from low cost (though highly subsidised) producers in developed countries.