​A legal notice has been signed, officially making the Scarlet Ibis an Environmentally Sensitive Species.
The notice was signed on Thursday and will be Gazetted.
The national bird's designation as an ESS, based on scientific research and observation of the species’ population trend was proposed by the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) which sought to enhance the Scarlet Ibis’ legal status to ensure their continued protection. 
Despite the Scarlet Ibis’ previous protective legal status and that of its major/only breeding habitat the Caroni Swamp, the species continued to face the threat of poaching and habitat destruction.
However, with the signing of the legal notice, a fine of $100,000 or two years imprisonment can be imposed where a person recklessly endangers or adversely impacts the species. 
The Scarlet Ibis has been designated an ESS according to the standards and guidelines as set out by the ESS rules 2001 because of the following characteristics: 
1. It is indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago
2. To prevent the species from facing extinction.
3. The bird is protected under the Conservation of Wildlife Act and along with the Caroni Swamp, is recognised as having international importance.
4. The Scarlet Ibis appears on the country’s Coat of Arms and the one dollar bill. 
5. The species is found in habitats along the west and south coasts of Trinidad.

Author : Historian ANGELO BISSESSARSINGH.
In the series of articles, " FROM THE PEN OF NAIPAUL" written by Local Historian Angelo Bissessarsingh an attempt is made to put into perspective, the world of Naipaul as he made his homeland famous through his works. This article and the ones to follow are VMOTT's tribute to a famous son of the soil " Sir Vidia Naipaul " .
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Sir Vidia's Naipaul father,Seepersad Naipaul died quite suddenly in 1953. An unobtrusive man with a penchant for written drama he spent years as a correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian Newspaper, after contributing his first article in 1929. His desire to write evocative stories set in the world that he knew saw no fruit until these sketches were published long after his demise.
Seepersad Naipaul might have spent his life in relative obscurity but for one posthumous event. In 1961, his son, then a moderately successful novelist, Oxford-educated and living in England penned one of the great works of modern literature. A House for Mr Biswas stands immortally from the genius of Seepersad’s son, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul as one of the outstanding literary works of our time.
Based largely upon his father’s biography, Sir Vidia took the seemingly hapless, tragic hero, Mohun Biswas and created a new Odysseus. Long considered by critics to be the finest living writer of the English sentence, Sir Vidia to those of us who have been exceedingly fortunate to have met him is interchangeably supercilious, disdainful, engaging, acerbic or simply nonchalant.
He distances himself from his Trinidadian roots and has long been loath to reconnect to the landscapes of his early novels which show that in spite of his denial, Sir Vidia is indelibly a son of our soil.
From 1957 until 1961 and then again in 1967 with A Flag on the Island, he has shown us how deeply he grasped the nuances of being born and raised in the society that at once clung to its somewhat prejudiced identities while attempting to forge ahead in a changing environment that would trade the long-cherished mores of colonialism for something of a different stripe.
The books which earned Sir Vidia's his fame are familiar to many schoolchildren today—The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, the ever-delightful Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas—are all stories which have overlapping elements. The NGO founded by Prof Kenneth Ramchand, Friends of Mr Biswas is the custodian of all things Naipaul, situated as it is in the home Seepersad bought in St James and here is where the spiritual nexus can be felt most intensely.
It was a time of war and Trinidad was being turned upside down by the arrival of thousands of American soldiers who brought chaos in their wake. These books show a life before, during and after the Yankees came. Who could forget Edward, Hat’s brother of Miguel Street, who was the archetypal Trini young-blood of the period falling under the American spell:
“Edward surrendered completely to the Americans. He began wearing clothes in the American style, he began chewing gum, and he tried to talk with an American accent. We didn’t see much of him except on Sundays, and then he made us feel small and inferior. He grew fussy about his dress, and he began wearing a gold chain around his neck. He began wearing straps around his wrists, after the fashion of tennis-players. These straps were just becoming fashionable among smart young men in Port of Spain.”
In continuing the theme of constant paradigm change, The Suffrage of Elvira comically assesses the ground level impact of electoral politics during its infancy in postwar Trinidad. This book was serialized some years ago by the Trinidad Guardian and was a hit, introducing a new generation of readers to a scenario that at once had shades of déjà vu—“Elvira, you is a bitch!”.
The rich descriptiveness of Trinidad enshrined in "A House for Mr Biswas" and "The Mystic Masseur" provides at once a kaleidoscope into the period as well as the sundry historical characters made memorable by the master writer himself. Sir Vidia’s eyes for detail opens a spectrum to us which only our senior citizens can remember with any clarity.
Scanning some old newspapers a couple of years ago, I became indelibly aware of just how connected the Nobel Laureate Naipaul had been to Trinidad and in spite of his rejection of the place of his birth, he exhibits a keen understanding of the place and its people. Thus, over the next weeks, we will learn that ‘Red Rose Tea is Good Tea’, be dosed on Sanatogen and live in the Trinidad of Naipaul.

Veteran broadcaster June Gonsalves has passed away at the age of 91.
She died at her Anderson Terrace, Maraval home on Friday evening.
Gonsalves, the widow of the late national goalkeeper Joey Gonzales, leaves to mourn her two children, Teresa and Gerard. 
She suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last seven years.
Gonsalves joined Radio Trinidad in 1956 and has the distinction of being the first female programme director of a Trinidadian radio station, a post she took up in 1964.
She resigned in 1970 and served as secretary to the late Archbishop Anthony Pantin until his death in 2000. That same year, she became the first Trinbagonian woman to be named a Dame Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great.
She also hosted a number of programmes, including a Catholic religious programme, “The Catholic Forum of the Air.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has extended condolences to the family of novelist and Nobel Laureate, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who died Saturday at his home in Britain, six days shy of his 86th birthday.
“This proud son of T&T established himself as an icon in the literary arts on the global stage and his world-renowned achievements caused his birthplace to shine in a positive light,” he said in a statement issued shortly after news of Naipaul’s death.
Rowley said the Nobel Laureate was “unwavering in his resolve to tell his stories as he saw fit. Moreover, his strength of character was responsible in no small part for his renowned success.
“His literary works will always remain a testimony of his strength and amazing talent as well as ensure that he will never be forgotten. May he rest in peace,” Rowley said.
Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar described Sir Vidia’s works as inspiring and uplifting.
“For people of my generation, the children of the post-Colonial society that was Trinidad and Tobago, a society and people struggling to find and assume our identity after centuries of being ruled as marginal addendums to a social, economic and political framework that previously treated us as merely tolerated outcasts, Sir Vidia’s work was inspiring and uplifting.
“Like so many of my local and regional contemporaries, I would have been raised on books from Europe and England which described and deified people, cultures and civilisations that essentially reflected all that I could never be, until, as teenager and young adult I read Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr Biswas.
“And it was in these works, still so dear and personal to me, as they also are undoubtedly to many other of my countrymen and women, that Sir Vidia’s greatest contribution to my country and the world became not only clear, but inspiring in the greatest possible way,” Persad-Bissessar said.
His widow, Lady Naipaul who described Sir Vidia as “a giant in all that he achieved” said he died “surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavour.”
Locally, people took to social media to post their tributes to Sir Vidia.
Columnist Ira Mathur shared a photo of her son at an event with the Nobel Laureate during his 2008 visit to T&T and wrote on Twitter: “I heard of his death in the middle of a family celebration. Something shattered in me. The greatest writer in the English Language dead at 85. #Walcott, now him. #CaribbeanLiterature. Thank you for the words #SirVidia.”
On Facebook, Nigel A Campbell recalled his encounter with the renown writer:
“The UWI SPEC hall was ram, and all I thinking was, ‘if I don’t get up early to join that line, he might only sign a few books and leave.’ So you could imagine the scramble when his readings were over, and the announcement was made to form a line for signings. So here I was in the line with my ratty copy of the first American edition of his first novel, The Mystic Masseur. (US$5 on eBay in 2001. Some people don’t value “old books”) I nearly left the book in my car thinking that he wouldn’t want to sign an old book.
(My pal Afra and his mother said, ‘nah bring it.’)
“So you could imagine my horror when Vidia wife, Nadira, grab the microphone and said, ‘Sir Vidia won’t be signing old books, only new books purchased at the event.
“At this point, I was three from the front of the line. Someone earlier handed him random pieces of paper to sign so they could have his signature. He get vex or she get vex, I ain’t know who to blame now.
“I turned to my right, and his agent Gillon Aitken standing next to me, watched me dead in my eye and said, ‘don’t worry, he will sign that.’
“Aitken shepherded my book to the author. I smile inside.
“We reach the man, he flip it, he turn it back to front. He said, ‘I haven’t seen this in a long time.’ He glanced at me. He was not impressed, I guess, as he said nothing to me.
“He signed it quickly and pushed it aside and looked to the next person in line. I was still rambling to him, “thanks for your presence, for your writing,” but he moved on.
“Now that he is gone, my $5 investment has taken on a new significance. An encounter that lasted all of 30 seconds maximum is now an heirloom. (My daughter likes to write.) Thank you, Sir Vidia. RIP.”
Sir Vidia, who was born in Chaguanas on August 17, 1932, wrote more than 30 books, won the Booker Prize in 1971 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, following the late St Lucian Derek Walcott who won the award in 1992.
The Nobel Prize in literature committee awarded Sir Vidia for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.
“Naipaul is a modern philosopher. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony,” it added.
Sir Vidia, who as a child was read Shakespeare and Dickens by his father, was raised a Hindu and attended Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad. He moved to Britain and enrolled at Oxford University in 1950 after winning a government scholarship.
His first book, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1951 and a decade later he published his most celebrated novel, A House for Mr Biswas, which took over three years to write.
The editor of the Mail on Sunday, Geordie Greig, a close friend of Sir Vidia, said his death leaves a “gaping hole in Britain’s literary heritage” but there is “no doubt” that his “books live on”.
His first wife, Patricia Hale, died in 1996 and he went on to marry Pakistani journalist, Nadira. Source: The Guardian

​There will be a national consultation on the decriminalisation of marijuana. 
Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley confirmed the consultation which was announced last week by Attorney General Faris Al Rawi as he sought to clarify the government's position on the matter during a media conference at the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard Headquarters at Staubles Bay, Chaguaramas, on Friday.
Rowley had previously said marijuana decriminalisation was not a priority for the government.
However, he told reporters that he did not mean the issue would not be given any attention.
“The priorities that this country has are many.  Because something is not a priority that does not mean that it is not going to be attended to. There are other situations that we have to give priority to, but it did not mean that we are not going to address it,” he said. 
Rowley said the government could not take any decision on the matter based on the opinions of one person or group and the entire population must be engaged.
Last week, marijuana advocate Nazma Muller hand-delivered a petition to Rowley calling for marijuana legalisation. The petition was signed by more than 10,000 people. Muller later met with the AG on the matter. 
“On matters of this nature, we are not going to respond to the decibels of an individual or the self-importance of an individual or a small group and make a decision on that basis," Rowley stated.
"We are going to make a decision on the basis of national consultation. And that decision ought to be a balanced position where all of us in the country will feel that our points of view were taken into account."
The Prime Minister added that he was glad the issue has been raised and he urged the public to participate in the conversation in a civil manner.
“I am happy that there are persons who have raised it and who are prosecuting it in the public domain. We join the conversation and I now invite the national community to join the conversation but as you do so, do it with some civility and common sense and it doesn’t mean that your point of view is the only one that matters or the only one that makes sense.”
Source: The Loop, July 30, 2018.

Full Circle Animation Studios, a Trincity-based design studio, is making waves internationally.
Just recently, the company completed work on Season Three of the popular HBO animated series—Animals—which features guest appearances by celebrity actors and performers RuPaul Charles, Usher, Aziz Ansari, Wanda Sykes and Raven-Symone.
The series is an American animated comedy created by Phil Matarese and Mike Luciano.
The first two episodes were independently produced and presented at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015.In May 2015, HBO picked the series up with a two-season order, which premiered on February 5, 2016.
The series was renewed for a third season on May 19th, 2017.
Full Circle’s managing director Jason Lindsay told Express Business last week that in November last year, the company was contracted by Big Jump Entertainment in Ottawa, Canada to produce the animation for the HBO series, which premieres on August 3 2018.
He described the partnership as a major accomplishment, not only for Full Circle but for the local animation industry.
This is the first time that an animation studio from Trinidad and or the Caribbean has been contracted by an international studio for a full season of a TV show on a major network he noted.
He said the contract with Big Jump will open doors for Full Circle, given that Big Jump is one of the main production studios in Canada.“It’s a company we had always admired and looked forward to working with. I believe that post-airing, we will get a lot of visibility and we will be able to add to our showreel. It will not doubt create other opportunities outside of that relationship.”
(A showreel is a short piece of video or film footage showcasing an actor or presenter’s previous work.
Source:  Full Circle Animation, August 10, 2018

​Archbishop Jason Gordon says the Catholic Church views Saturday’s Pride Parade as a demonstration of Trinidad and Tobago’s democracy at play.
Hundreds of people, decked in rainbow coloured clothing, marched along Tragarete Road, Port-of-Spain calling for equality and love over hate.
The parade ended at Nelson Mandela Park in honour of murdered transgender woman 'Sasha Fierce' who was gunned down at the location in December 2017.
Fierce, real name Keon Allister Patterson, was found on a pile of garbage near the park.
Speaking in a recorded statement which was released on Monday, Archbishop Gordon said the event was necessary as all members of the public deserve a fair chance to live among each other equally.
“We are a democracy and one of the things of a democracy is that people have a right to protest whenever they believe that their rights are not being upheld or violated. The fact of a pride parade in Trinidad and Tobago is a testimony that the democracy of Trinidad and Tobago is alive and well. The LGBT+ community has several areas where they have, I think, legitimate concerns for their rights and that has to be taken seriously by the country and by the government and by the people of Trinidad and Tobago.”

Trinidad and Tobago stamped their name at the Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Games over the weekend in Barranquilla, Colombia, winning six medals and setting new records at the competition. 
Olympic swimmer Dylan Carter won two gold medals for swimming, breaking two of CAC's records, with times of 48.95 and 23.11. Fellow swimmer Joshua Romany won bronze with a time of 24.05. 
In cycling, trio Nicholas Paul, Kwesi Browne, and Njisane Phillip won gold with a combined time of 43.873 seconds, a new games record, well ahead of Venezuela (44.578 secs) and Colombia (44.172 secs) which got silver and bronze respectively.
Cyclist and reigning Caribbean Road Race and Time Trial champion, Teneil Campbell, won bronze in the Women’s Scratch Race (10,000 metres/40 laps). The medal for 20-year-old Campbell is the first ever at the CACSO Games by a women’s cyclist for this country in their first ever appearance as well.
Earlier on the same track, the duo of Costa sisters, Alexi and Jessica as well as Christian Farah and Alex Bovell missed out on qualification to the Women’s Team Pursuit (4,000m) medal round. The T&T women combined for a time of 4:51.022, a new national record, for the fifth spot.
Olympian, Felice Aisha Chow secured T&T’s first ever women’s medal in rowing, competing in the Women’s Singles Scull contested over a distance of 2,000 metres.
Chow, who competed at the Rio Olympics in 2016 crossed the finish line in nine minutes, 26.24 seconds for silver behind Cuban, Yariulvis Cobas (9:13.05 mins) while Mexico’s Naiara Arrillaga took bronze in (9:41.22 mins).
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Trinidad and Tobago stamped their name at the Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Games over the weekend in Barranquilla, Colombia, winning six medals and setting new records at the competition. 
Olympic swimmer Dylan Carter won two gold medals for swimming, breaking two of CAC's records, with times of 48.95 and 23.11. Fellow swimmer Joshua Romany won bronze with a time of 24.05. 
In cycling, trio Nicholas Paul, Kwesi Browne, and Njisane Phillip won gold with a combined time of 43.873 seconds, a new games record, well ahead of Venezuela (44.578 secs) and Colombia (44.172 secs) which got silver and bronze respectively.
Cyclist and reigning Caribbean Road Race and Time Trial champion, Teneil Campbell, won bronze in the Women’s Scratch Race (10,000 metres/40 laps). The medal for 20-year-old Campbell is the first ever at the CACSO Games by a women’s cyclist for this country in their first ever appearance as well.
Earlier on the same track, the duo of Costa sisters, Alexi and Jessica as well as Christian Farah and Alex Bovell missed out on qualification to the Women’s Team Pursuit (4,000m) medal round.
The T&T women combined for a time of 4:51.022, a new national record, for the fifth spot.
Olympian, Felice Aisha Chow secured T&T’s first ever women’s medal in rowing, competing in the Women’s Singles Scull contested over a distance of 2,000 metres.
Chow, who competed at the Rio Olympics in 2016 crossed the finish line in nine minutes, 26.24 seconds for silver behind Cuban, Yariulvis Cobas (9:13.05 mins) while Mexico’s Naiara Arrillaga took bronze in (9:41.22 mins).
In hockey, teenager Shaniah De Freitas netted two goals, as T&T women’s hockey team battled past Barbados 2-1 to improve to a perfect 2-0 round-robin record at the Unidad Deportivo Pibe Valderrama. However, it was the Barbadians who struck first in the 17th minute through Keisha Boyce after a 0-0 first quarter.
De Freitas, 18, playing in her sixth international match for the ‘Calypso Stickwomen” drew T&T level five minutes later from the penalty spot and with two minutes left in the match she was on spot to score again to earn her team a deserved win.
Olympian Andrew Lewis had a mixed day on Saturday as he placed second in the fourth of his Laser Radial races before a 16th placed in race five while Kelly-Ann Arrindell was fifth and ninth in race four and five respectively.  
Source: The Loop, July 30, 2018

A tale written in Trinidadian Creole that was inspired by the true story of a family who cremated a baby in the wilds of the island, has been plucked from more than 5,000 entries to win the Commonwealth short story prize.
In Passage, Kevin Jared Hosein writes of a man who hears a story in a bar about a family living away from society, and sets out to find them. “A man is so small in the wilderness, believe me. The way how people is now, we ain’t tailored to live there. So when Stew say he stumble across a house in the middle of the mountain, my ears prick up. I take in every word as he describe it. A daub and wattle house in the middle of a clearing, walls slabbed with sticks and clay and dung and straw, topped with a thatch roof,” writes Hosein, in Trinidadian English Creole, a choice he had initially thought would put people off.
“Originally I was afraid – I didn’t think people would understand the Creole,” the Trinidadian author told the Guardian. But the novelist Sarah Hall, who chaired the award jury, said Passage was “immediately and uniformly admired by the judges”.
“It balances between formal language and demotic, ideas of civility and ferality, is tightly woven and suspenseful, beautifully and eerily atmospheric, and finally surprising,” said Hall. “It is, in essence, all a reader could want from the short story form; a truly crafted piece of fiction that transports the reader into another world, upends expectations, and questions the nature of narratives and narrative consequence.”
The annual prize is awarded to the best piece of unpublished short fiction from the Commonwealth. Stories can be submitted in Bengali, Chinese, English, Malay, Portuguese, Samoan, Swahili, and Tamil, with 5,182 stories entered from 48 countries this year.
Hosein, who received his £5,000 award in Cyprus on Wednesday night, first learned about the true story behind Passage when he was 15. “People were aware there was a family living along a trail – they had older living customs that wouldn’t be acceptable today. Their baby died, and they had a custom to send its spirit off by cremating the body. That is what drew attention to them, and the two parents were put in an asylum, and the older children into a foster home,” he said.
“The last thing on the news was that when the children were brought into society and saw a television, they couldn’t stop screaming. I remember it hanging in my head as a child for a long time. People just wrote it off as madness, but I thought it had more to it than that and I wanted to explore it.”
AdvertisementA science teacher as well as a writer, Hosein was a Caribbean regional winner for the Commonwealth prize in 2015. “Winning in 2015 was pure validation – I didn’t really put my writing out there before that,” he said. “But just the fact that I made it on to the shortlist told me that my work could resonate with people outside my region. You always have that doubt: ‘Am I really good?’”
This time, “I just felt pride – not just in me but in my country … There is not much opportunity in the Caribbean to make a name for yourself. I think the prize has helped with that,” he said.
Hosein is the author of three novels: The Beast of Kukuyo, which won him the Burt award for Caribbean literature, The Repenters, which was shortlisted for the Bocas prize, and Littletown Secrets.

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​Chaguramas last week...  Look at the beautiful scenery in Trinidad.. sad to see this