'Tis the season...

This is the time of the year when charitable contributions flow more freely. It was that way on December 7, when banker Alberto Vallarino delivered his annual Mothers Day gift baskets to patients at the Instituto Oncologico Nacional. The nation's main cancer hospital has moved to the old Gorgas, where the baby in our cover photo was the first child born at the former US Army hospital since the conversion. Look for the cover story about the new incarnation of Gorgas Hospital on the science page, which now also encompasses our former health page.

Over the weekend of December 15-17, another hospital was the beneficiary as the 20-30 Club's annual telethon raised more than $3 million for the construction of a new maternity unit at Santo Tomas.

This is, however, also a season of inflamed passions in many parts of the world. By watching CNN you would have seen and heard much about the passionate conflict following this year's ultra-close US presidential election, to the detriment of all other news reporting. On December 16, for example, DeKalb County sheriff-elect Derwin Brown was assassinated. CNN barely reported the story, which took place in Atlanta. They did, however, run more recaps of the Florida election cases. It seems like a weird concept of newsworthiness to me.

I find my own passions inflamed by the way that the American election was decided. My problem is with the process, especially when I view it in terms of legal precedent.

The more immediate question down here is what the Bush administration will mean for Panama. The two principal issues are whether there will be more US pressure for Panama to take sides in Colombia's civil war, and whether progress toward the Free Trade Area of the Americas will resume under a GOP administration. Though the Republican Party includes frothing-at-the-mouth types who say that the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army runs the Panama Canal, the incoming secretary of state, Colin Powell, is anything but a fanatic. It is quite possible that US-Panamanian relations will improve under Bush's and Powell's guidance.

Our news section tells tales of inflamed passions here and in the Holy Land. Lately Joe Cross has been covering things other than his usual boxing, and in the process he was injured in a recent street battle outside the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. You can read all about it and look at the pictures herein. Meanwhile in Panama, riot police and bulldozers moved in to evict squatters from Mocambo Abajo, and Willy Carrera covered the fallout.

Also on the news page, we have added links to all of Latin America's English-language newspapers that can be found online, plus an even longer listing of newspapers from the English-speaking Caribbean.

Over on our business page, there is Willy Carrera's take on this year's Christmas sales. Some are predicting, and everybody is hoping, that an upturn during the holiday season will be a springboard for economic recovery after a difficult year.

Also in the business section, we see one aspect of US-Panamanian relations in Clinton's lame duck days, in the form of demands issued by the OECD, a group of wealthy nations of which the United States is a part. As the price of getting off of the OECD's "tax havens" blacklist, Panama would have to abrogate some of its constitutional privacy protections and repeal its banking and corporate secrecy laws.

With this issue we have changed webmasters, and also a few other things. We have added a humor page to make a space for Sparky the Wonder Dog, whose column appears on the back page of our print edition. We have combined the business and economy pages, and the travel and lodging sections.

Because tourist season is getting underway, our travel page covers more things than usual. Check out Aeroperlas commuter flights as a cheap and interesting way to see the canal, the party that Panama Jones threw for Princeton Review, and the Norwegian Wind's call at Cristobal.

The opinion and editorial pages are being split up in our new online configuration. The editorial was written on December 10, the anniversary of the 1948 promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The subject of human rights is also touched on the review page, where you will find a link to Human Rights Watch's annual report. This issue's opinion columns include Earl Watson's look at Christmas season in Florida, legislator Teresita Yániz de Arias's take on political patronage and attorney Miguel Antonio Bernal's lament about the Ombudsman as an institution. In our letters box Dr. Steve Foster, the controversial missionary, gets his say.

The community page and the calendar cover various items of interest as usual, but what may this issue's most important story about Panama's English-speaking community is over on the arts page, where the Theatre Guild of Ancon's recent production of "A Christmas Carol" is reported.

This issue comes in a month with five Fridays, which will give me a week off and you a three-week wait until the next issue. When we next appear on the weekend of January 6-7, The Panama News will begin its seventh year of publication. Between now and then, let's all have some peaceful and joyous holidays.

Eric Jackson

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