Likening the bill to United States President Donald Trump’s proposed heath care package, Elder insisted that the legislation, though seemingly noble in intent, was fundamentally flawed and should be “pulled back” and revamped.

The respected Senior Counsel, who spoke to reporters at her Alfredo Street, Woodbrook, Chambers, further stressed that the Government should have consulted with members of the legal fraternity and other stakeholders whilst drafting the legislation.

She said the bill, which required a simple majority for passage, does nothing to minimise the burdens that have long plagued the criminal justice system.

“My juniors and I have given deep thought to the clauses of this bill and it is our considered opinion that this bill does nothing to address the issues plaguing the criminal justice system,” she said. “Let me say that the intentions behind this bill seem noble but it is bad law.” Alluding to statements made by Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Roger Gaspard at a parliamentary Joint Select Committee meeting on Friday, that the legislation was “short-sighted,” Elder quipped: “But Mr Gaspard is blessed with the gift of the garb and he can use euphemisms.” She dismissed the bill as “a compilation of legislative babble.” “It is flawed. It disregards the rights of the accused. It is contradictory in certain respects . It contains a cut and paste approach, in that certain clauses have been pulled from the existing act and placed in this bill without an understanding as to the significance of those clauses which is really cut and paste,” she said.

The Pre-Trial Procedure Bill was passed in the Parliament on March 18 with no support from the Opposition bench. Nineteen Government members voted in favour of the legislation while 16 Opposition members voted against.

Elder also said the bill, “with due respect to whoever drafted it shows a deep misunderstanding of criminal practice and procedure.” “This bill is going to wreck the system. It is a wrecking bill,” she added.

Elder said when she heard Gaspard say at the JSC meeting that there were about 800 murder cases before the high Court and that if preliminary inquiries were abolished, people will just have to “join the queue,” she immediately thought about MX Prime’s Road March hit, Full Extreme.

“So, even with this bill, we still jammin.

And this bill is going to aggravate the position,” she said.

Elder said the problems in the legislation begin from the moment an individual is charged and appears in the magistrate’s court.

“He appears before the magistrate’s court and the DPP has three months to serve him with statements and a list of exhibits and other items,” she said.

“After he is served, the accused has three months to file any statements if he wishes and notice of alibi and after the DPP has considered the DPP’s statements and the accused statements, if any, the DPP has the discretion to file an indictment “So, we are moving from charged, statements exchanged, indictment.

The issue which immediately arises is what is the jurisdiction of the magistrate over these proceedings because the bill is abolishing preliminary enquiries.” Elder said she thought the bill would have said, immediately, what a magistrate would do if an accused appeared before him or her charged with an indictable offence.

Elder took issue with part three of the legislation which dealt with pre-trial procedures

The hikers were found and rescued shortly after 11 am yesterday by members of the Defence Force and the Chaguaramas Development Authority (CDA).

Major Al Alexander, Civil Military Affairs Officer, Defence Force, said in a statement that the hikers were rescued in a joint operation involving Regiment personnel, soldiers and sailors from the Defence Force Headquarters, a flight crew from the Air Guard, Estate Police and members of the CDA.

“The group of hikers which included a Trinidadian male, Mr Alleyne Young and two Canadian female citizens Joanna Leon and Aubrey Lamb, were safely rescued from a ridge east of Tucker Valley,” he said It is reported that the hikers started the trek from Bagatelle to Macqueripe at about 7 am on Friday and were scheduled to be picked up at 3 pm.

Alexander said when it was realised that the group was lost, concerned relatives reported the incident to the CDA, Regiment and Air Guard, who immediately began coordinating search efforts for the missing people.

“The search team from the Defence Force Headquarters supported by TTAG and the CDA police eventually spotted the hikers at approximately 11.09 am this morning (yesterday) and the Air Guard Rotary Wing helicopter AG13 safely winched the hikers on-board the helicopter from a ridge east of Tucker Valley and dropped them off at the DFHQ sports field where a medical team was on standby,” he said.

Alexander said the hikers suffered no serious injuries apart from dehydration and insect bites.

Smith, 42, also called Shaka, was a father of two and lived on Piparo Road, Tabaquite.

Relatives insisted on Friday his death was a cold-blooded murder by police as Smith was unarmed.

The police tell a different story. A report states that at about 7 pm on Thursday, police responded to a robbery in Rio Claro.

The police claimed they were fired upon while proceeding along Tabaquite Road, Rio Claro an area surrounded mainly by teak trees. They returned fire and Smith who was driving in the area got shot. He died en-route to Rio Claro Health Facility.

Smith’s common- law wife Sonia Belass, 51, however said he had gone to find his brother Cleavon, 34, who had telephoned him saying gunmen had opened fire on him.

Belass said Smith was welding at home when Cleavon called and said he was hiding in a forested area.

Fearful for brother’s life, Smith left home and went in search of him. However, subsequent calls to Smith’s cellular phone went unanswered.

“Everyone started to call one another to find out what was going on. Curtis (another brother) and their father went to the Rio Claro Police Station,” Belass said. “They asked police if Shaka was locked up and they (police) said he was at Forensic (Science Centre).” She said police never contacted relatives about the shooting death and called on the authorities to investigate the incident.

“They did not call me and now I am hearing police are saying that he had a gun.

They mashed him up.

They killed him for nothing. Why couldn’t they just shoot him in the hand or something.

All he wanted to do was make sure his brother safe,” she said.

Smith, a construction worker, was the father of Jason, 20, and Jamerson, 18.

Cleavon recalled he was driving along Tabaquite Road and near Brickfield Junction an unmarked car drove in front of his station- wagon. Another car drove up behind causing him to stop.

“The people in the front vehicle opened fire first. At the time, I did not know who they were. They just started to shoot up the car. I opened the door and run through the bushes but they continued firing shots behind me. When I reached a road, I called for him (Smith) to come for me,” said Cleavon.

Sometime later, Cleavon spotted his brother’s car.

“He went to turn around to come back for me. While coming back, they started to shoot up his car. It was dark so I could not see anything but I heard him scream, he real bawl. I even heard him say ‘Don’t shoot’,” he said.

Their father Andrew Smith, 70, of Mc Carthy Trace, Tabaquite vowed to seek legal advice “We not sure what the police version of the story is. It could have been both sons.

We will be seeking legal advice on this. Not a single police came here as yet to tell us anything,” said Andrew.

Police however continue to investigate the case.

In a sense I had imposed on him the very position he has been writing against, the pigeon-hole, the boxing up of a poet who has been preoccupied with the idea of history as an inheritance rather than events by which we were trapped. We were not victims of our past.

Rather, his was a hopeful vision.

He asked for an understanding of our present; that the past had brought us into a new space as Caribbean people. It was a regenerative space, a place and time where the imagination had the freedom to flourish because we were a people who had nothing to lose.

My introduction to Walcott came not through his poetry but his essays. I wasn’t at the time interested in poetry, a seemingly unattainable aspect of literature that I naively felt was not as important as works of prose. Ideas were my fascination and I remember moving excitedly from Salman Rushdie’s essay Imaginary Homelands (1982) to Walcott’s Nobel Prize Speech The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1992), because the idea of fragmented memory had hit a chord.

Both writers had in a sense expressed the idea with the metaphor of a broken vessel, pieced together to form another whole.

The metaphor is one that I revisit up to today. It simplified the world for, if one thinks of culture in this way, it becomes easier to understand the process of creativity that ensues. (I run the risk here of oversimplifying a complex matter but do bear with me). In essence, the pot or the glass vase, whichever breaks, is pieced together to form a new whole, not exactly like the former, but with a new aesthetic, new patterns. And this brings us to Naipaul’s mimic men, another problematic issue for us where culture is concerned.

“History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul declared in The Middle Passage.

Though I love Naipaul’s work, this was an area of darkness. I couldn’t quite agree and I grappled with this concept of history for a few years before Walcott’s work stepped in to clarify matters.

Three essays in particular have remained important: The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry (1973), The Muse of History (1974) and The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1992). Their connecting threads remain the same despite the time gaps – history as inheritance and the creative possibilities of our supposed non-history.

Mimicry appears in each one, a necessary theme in discussing history.

For, if the Caribbean is seen as a place where nothing happens (one almost feels like a player on Samuel Beckett’s stage), then it is also seen as a place where the only thing possible is repetition and imitation. But all artists know that art begins with imitation. In his attempt to unravel the puzzle for us, Walcott offers a suggestion, taking an example from the natural world.

“Mimicry is an act of imagination and in some animals, endemic cunning…defense and lure. What if the man in the New World needs mimicry as design, both as defense and as lure.” He goes on to cite Carnival as a perfect example of this, a “mass art form which came out of nothing, which emerged from the sanctions imposed on it.” And what may have begun as imitation eventually ended up in invention and today “in their resulting forms it is hard to point to mere imitation”. In his Nobel Prize Speech, he speaks, 19 years after, of the Felicity Ramleela in a similar fashion.

“They believed in what they were playing, in the sacredness of the text, the validity of India, while I, out of the writer’s habit, searched for some sense of elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes.

I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History – the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants – when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation, delight in the boys’ screams, in the sweets-stalls… a delight of conviction, not loss.” Walcott’s was a vision of hope, a vision of the immense creative possibilities present in our landscape.

I can find no other appropriate way to sum up the optimism inherent in his examination of our history but to commit the crime of stealing Salman Rushdie’s ending of Imaginary Homelands (itself a quote from Saul Bellow) for in essence Walcott is making a similar statement.

It is that “For God sakes, open the universe a little more!”

In the early 1970s I began hiking and camping along our forested North Coast. Our early adventures there were described by author Gerry Besson in his first book Tales of the Paria Main Road, beautifully illustrated by Stuart Hahn, and recently republished as an anniversary token of Paria Publishing Company.

While camping at the mouth of the Madamas River we met a family, just “moved in” from the city. Rupert Cox, a disillusioned activist from the 1970 Black Power, brought his wife Jeannette and their children to live in an abandoned house at Cachipa. Over the next couple of years, I as our camp cook got to know Jeannette well, as my companions went with Rupert to catch fish and collect vegetables.

On one trip, we found Jeannette “heavy with child”, and about three months later met her twin boys, which Rupert delivered there in the wilderness. Some weeks thereafter, at home and just after dark I heard someone calling, “Good night, Good night!” It was Keith, Jeannette’s teenaged son. He had walked for two days and two nights to “find Peter” and deliver a message from his mother.

“Things have changed,” he said, “Ma saw you coming across the sea in a boat, and she needs to talk to you.” After dining, I delivered Keith to his relatives in town, but what he told me did not really resonate – at that time. Not even when we next went camping, and upon reaching Matelot a group of hunters packing two pirogues offered to take us down the coast—in a boat! We landed at Tacarib, and walked the short distance back to Madamas.

Keith and his two younger brothers were there and they were naked. Keith reminded me that Ma needed to see me, alone. “She knows you are here,” he said.

So the following morning I set out alone and walked to the little house in the forest. As I approached, I heard her call to me. I looked up. She was standing on the tiny landing at the top of the wooden stairs, holding one of her twins.

And she was naked. She called me to come up the steps, as she put the child to crawl back into the house.

I walked up and looked into the little house. There was nothing there, just the twins crawling naked on the wood floor. Jeannette crossed her arms over her breasts, began to tremble, her eyes rolled back and she began speaking– unintelligibly to me– in tongues. But she ended in English, saying “….. and I am the Alpha and the Omega, and this is the beginning and the end.” Then she “came back”, looked at me quizzically and asked, “You want to know what happened?” We sat inside on the wooden floor, and she described her journey to this place and this state. She was now Mother Earth and Rupert was Good Shepherd. She had received a message to save mankind from the evils of greed and “possessions” and foretold of a great war to come.

“You will know when it is starting,” she instructed, “You will leave where you are and bring your wife and children here to me. Good Shepherd will take you into the wilderness, where you will suffer for 40 days and 40 nights. And when you come back out here, the rest of the world would have been destroyed, and civilization will start anew, in the valley of decision.” We talked a while longer before I returned to the camp on the bay.

A few days later the newspapers carried stories of how the police chased a group of naked people back from Grande Riviere into the forest. But they gathered old crocus bags, covered themselves and walked, via Toco and Arima, into town, where they set up camp in Woodford Square, and she delivered her message daily. When they returned to the forest she had about 70 people with her, the Earth People, living naked in the forest, preparing for Armageddon.

Her story, their story, can be found in the book Pathology & Identity: The Work of Mother Earth in Trinidad, by Roland Littlewood, an English anthropologist who lived with the Earth People for a while.

This was the setting, and the experience, which inspired me to write of the future she had described to me.

But that is for next week.

The first type of politician is called a patriot; these are the men and women who care deeply about our country, our compatriots and about rights and justice for every person living within our borders; regardless of race, religion, or country of origin, and will always do whatever it takes to ensure the success and progress of our twin-island republic. They are a rare breed, but we’ve had several of them grace the halls of our Parliament; the quintessential example being former prime minister and president, ANR Robinson. Robinson cared little about political longevity and much more about what decisions were most beneficial for Trinidad and Tobago.

To fall into this category, one must have unwavering integrity, class, intelligence and fearlessness to do what is necessary regardless of the prospective political backlash. And in addition to possessing all these traits, this politician must be a practical visionary like former prime minister, Patrick Manning.

The second type is called a traitor. Not much explanation is required to explain who falls into this category, but, simply put, a traitor is any politician who uses his/her political power to pillage and plunder the treasury and other vital resources of the country. The traitor is the type of politician that the patriot would have investigated, exposed and passed laws to imprison – preferably for lengthy periods. These people do not deserve much of our attention outside of investigations into their finances and media coverage for their trials.

The third type is the swamp monster who has lived in the swampy corrupt waters of politics for decades and they love it. The swamp monster does not care about the future of the country as a whole because they have significantly benefited from the perks of the position and s/he and his/her family are already set for life. This type of politician still pretends to care by using all the nefarious political language and skill attained over the years while touting their experience as a benefit to the people. Swamp monsters are skilled at spinning tops in mud to give the impression of trying, but are as useless as a glass hammer.

The fourth type is the useful idiot who actually wants to do good for the country, but lacks leadership aptitude. In Trinbago, useful idiots are sophists who may actually be reformed swamp monsters at the end of their political careers, trying to make amends before riding into the sunset; however, their attempts do more harm than good because they use old strategies to solve current issues and ignore any and all advice, similar to Dr Eric Williams’ attitude towards all his political opponents right before using his favourite insult: idiot.

Notwithstanding the forgoing, there’s another option in the words of former senator Mark Thomas Inskip Julien on April 15, 1975 during a debate of an amendment to the Industrial Relations Act: “It might seem strange that I have come to the conclusion that what this country needs at least for a short period of five years is a benevolent dictatorship.

Its main task would be to get rid of all lawlessness and indiscipline which now exist in this country.

The next task is to put the economy of the country on a proper footing, getting rid of all the obstructionists and to inculcate in the hearts and the minds of the citizens a sense of loyalty – loyalty first to their God; loyalty second to their country, and thirdly, loyalty to their fellowmen.

After that period we can have an assessment made to see if it has worked and what is the next course we should take. Before I die I should like this country get back to what it was: the happiest and most peaceful country in the world.” This is what Trinbago needs.

In 2020, the disengaged public must wake up and demand more by rejecting the current breed of pseudo- politicians and only offer support to a young, strong political leader who puts the national interest above that of his own and his party.

Ultimately, we should accept nothing less than a patriot who is willing at times to be a benevolent dictator as our next p r i m e minister.

j a – mille85@ msn.com

A region that bleats on about the mistreatment of black people and the preferential treatment of whites and how an atrocity is reported either seriously or dismissively, depending on the colour of the victims’ skin, patently doesn’t give a damn when a terrorist attack far away, in London, results in maiming and loss of life. Because the victims weren’t black.

It was reported in the media, of course, but largely in a “let’s hope it doesn’t happen here” way.

It is a sign of how the world has become emotionally bankrupt when each of us will only be driven to impassioned comment if hostility and tragedy are directed against our own people.

And yes, of course that is what inspired these 800 words from a commentator who would normally be looking for something to get humorous about.

You know how Donald Trump uses social media, especially Twitter, to get his message across because it cuts out any input, alteration or dilution, by the traditional media? It’s exactly what the private individual does in the 21st century, to broadcast a point of view, not due to contempt for the news organisations but because he or she has no other platform.

Thus we grit our teeth as a Facebook “friend” gets all self-righteous about something, speaking up as a little-known voice of reason for a sector of society that doesn’t have a focal point, or at least not one with the clout to make itself heard on a national scale.

I was thinking about that just the other day when a Trinidadian friend – a highly intelligent woman who could be a significant voice in the country’s media but who instead ploughs her own furrow – made some glib, populist comment about how, in the case of a missing person, no one gets worked up about it unless it’s a “pretty white girl”.

Coincidentally, a quick glance at the TT media the same day produced two stories about precisely that: missing black girls who had been found.

The attack at Westminster might seem inconsequential when you’re doing the school run in Arima or putting the finishing touches to your political agenda in Scarborough, but it’s real to some people.

And there was a wide range of nationalities involved in the Westminster attack, because it was right in the middle of the city, where tourists go to have a look at the famous Houses of Parliament.

Medical staff ran to the scene from the nearby St Thomas’s hospital. My son works there.

He’s a nurse.

It was his day off, as it happens, but he could quite easily have been walking across the bridge when the first element happened: the strangely modern barbarism of ploughing a car into a group of people.

So okay, it might take an event in some way “close to home” to wake us up, but wake up we must.

Why shouldn’t a terrorist attack happen in TT ? Sure, it’s a relatively low-profile place in comparison with London and Paris, but then why attack Bali? What’s that little country got to do with anything? And why mow down a lot of holidaymakers on a beach in Tunisia? Who cares about Tunisia? Well, Tunisians do, for a start.

And most of the people killed and wounded were foreigners anyway. Perhaps what makes Islamic State so dangerous is that it isn’t a country itself, so everyone who doesn’t belong to it is a foreigner.

Its aim is to make the world unsafe for everyone. And because the civilized world is so politically correct, the do-gooders who refuse to call a spade a spade maintain that fighting back is wrong. That is until IS pops up in their neck of the woods and destroys lives at random there.

Fighting back against Islamic extremism isn’t fighting in the name of another religion.

It’s not a religious war in that sense. The point is that global aggressors must be stopped, regardless of why they are doing it. And if one argument is that peaceful Muslims must sort the problem out themselves, then fine, but they had better get on with it before it’s too late.

There is a comparison to be drawn with the school playground, where children will keep quiet as the bully picks on others, for fear of becoming the target themselves if they speak up.

Like it or not, the USA and the UK will always support an innocent underdog, and if the role of international policeman attracts derision, again, just wait until there’s a blinkered zealot driving a truck into people down your street and then see if you can stay balanced and non-judgemental.

It hangs over us as a persistent dark cloud.

In 2008 we were crowned by Google as the country with the highest per capita porn searches, not in the Caribbean, not in the English-speaking world, but in the whole world. This unenviable title was repeated more than once. We are sick on sex and it comes hand in hand with human trafficking, especially of women and young girls. A subset of this sickness about sex and sexuality is the sorry state of the man/woman relationship in this country and the pervasive inability of men to deal with romantic breakdown and jilted experiences.

Proof of this is seen in that horrid expression that often punctuates the pages of the daily press – “in a shallow grave”. No matter how cruel, insensitive, unfaithful some women may have been, nothing justifies such a death. Woman’s rejection of man should never occasion such a deadly and macabre response.

Psychologists tell us how pornography incarcerates the mind and will, virtually becoming an addiction. Men addicted to pornography end up treating women as property, as things, as objects of personal aggrandisement.

When this aggrandisement is no longer controllable the result is violence. But there is something more here than power relations, and our own experts in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy and religious studies need to discuss this more openly in a way the man in the street would understand. We think here particularly of the prodigious output of French literary critic Rene Girard on mimetic theory and his postulation that “violence is heart and secret soul of the sacred”.

This means that our religious texts – should be more critically and honestly read, and myths and passages that promote violence towards women, misogyny and inferiority must be uncompromisingly exposed.

The cleansing of religious cultural memory would be an important step in the theological- emotional restructuring of the man/woman relationship. To claim that our scriptures speak uniformly of treating women with respect and tenderness is sheer hypocrisy and nonsense. History refutes this.

Relevant state departments need to collaborate with CBOs, NGOs and religious organisations in offering workshops that reach every town and village with the objective of showing men and women how to negotiate healthy relationships, how to bring them to a peaceful end when they are no longer life-giving, and how to start over mindful of the mistakes of the past. We need to be free of this suffocating air. The liberation of Easter, to which Lent looks demands it.

The flight arrived on time.

My relative waited until 5 pm and, not yet seeing her friends emerge, she phoned them. The response was that there were hundreds of people ahead of them waiting to clear immigration, there were only two officers and that it should take about two more hours.

My relative went to Trincity Mall and hung around for two hours and called again at 7 pm, only to be told by her friends that they were still in immigration and could not say how long again it would take. My relative advised her friends to take a taxi when they eventually came out.

Very few Trinidadians would be surprised at this situation in a country where the police could block the roads and shut down the country for a whole day on the pretext of checking vehicles. Up to today, no one has been held responsible for this and disciplined accordingly.

Or, a police officer could stop a vehicle on the Priority Bus Route (PBR) driven by a husband taking his pregnant wife to hospital to have a baby in an emergency situation and give them a ticket and force them off the PBR. Up to today, the public does not know the name of this officer, or whether there has been any investigation into this matter.

What had me really concerned, however, was the reported statement of the chairman of the board of the Airports Authority, who said he had “absolutely no jurisdiction on what Immigration or Customs should or should not do.” He added that the authority merely provides the facilities for immigration to carry out their work.

I would respectfully like to inform the chairman that the proper functioning of the airport is entirely within his jurisdiction. He is the head of the airport and it is his duty to ensure that all services are properly provided. So that if immigration is not functioning, he has to do whatever it takes to make it work, even if he has to go to the Prime Minister himself.

He cannot just sit back and state that the problem is not within his jurisdiction while his airport is in chaos.

The same reasoning applies to several other sections of society. For example, we have had reports of magistrates, on convicting someone for possession of a gun, asking in frustration where all these guns are coming from.

But not once have we seen a magistrate ask the convicted person where he got the gun or ask the police if the convicted person co-operated in identifying the supplier of the gun (maybe with an offer that the sentence to be passed would depend on the extent of co-operation).

And this is not outside the jurisdiction of the magistrate as he/ she has other duties outside the Summary Courts Act to preserve the general welfare of society.

LENNOX SANKERSINGH via email

We have learned to love but we love the wrong things. In sweet TT these are the things that we love: We love to party, we love Carnival, we love corruption, we love Panorama, we love to take lives, we love money, we love to have sex with minors — some of us even love to have sex with our own gender.

The list goes on and on.

This shows very clearly that we have learned to love the wrong things.

The real lessons of love that we should learn is to love and praise Almighty God, to love each other, to love all of God’s creations.

Until we learn the lesson of unconditional love our people will be walking around in the darkness that presently surrounds us.

Pure love is the key.

Peace, love and blessings to the people of TT.

VALENTINE YOUNG via email