Come to the fair
(and buy lots of books)!

July has been a brutal month for our business, and many other Panamanian businesses. But there have been seeds of hope sprouting. Panama News Books is coming out with three new selections, two coloring books by Janet Levi and my little book for Panamanians who are learning English. The coloring book whose cover is pictured above is a little Kuna-English dictionary of sorts, and I could imagine that soon there will be a demand in Panama for a Kuna-Spanish version. See the Arts section about Janet's new coloring books, which can be ordered for $3 plus postage by email to editor@thepanamanews.com or to jrlevi@cwp.net.pa or visit Janet's Website at www.batealady.com.

These new publications come just in time for the August 1-5 Central American Book Fair, to be held at ATLAPA. We badly need to sell some books at this event, and have reasonable hopes that we will do so.

Meanwhile, La Prensa is more or less claiming the right to pirate my book "90N: dispatches from Panama 1994-2000." My complaints about their use of three of my photographs from the book led to this odd "apology," not for stealing my work (in violation of Panamanian and international copyright laws) but for not more promptly informing me that they were stealing from me. They more or less said they were doing me a favor. Read all about it in the Business section.

In the business briefs, there is still plenty of bad news, but this time we also have a number of positive developments to report. Does this mean that the economy is turning around? I sure hope so.

We journalists are often accused of playing up the bad, either to attract attention or out of ideological motives. There may be some folks who do that, but I try very hard to play the news straight-up, and because I live in the society upon which I report I hope that the news is good. My position in this little publication is different than that of most reporters or columnists, in that I both report the news and write opinion pieces. Thus people pretty much know my biases, and that inevitably leads to charges that I slant the news to fit my opinions. The realities are that I voted for Martin Torrijos the last time around, but wished that I had a better set of choices; and that I'm for democracy and wish Mireya Moscoso well for the good of the country, but give her administration mostly failing marks so far. I really do hope that her performance improves, because a country with an ailing economy is depending on her. Now I am sure that there are folks on all points of the political spectrum will take this to mean that I'm a slimy yellow journalist with the ethical standards of a reptile, and some who say that this comparison is unfair to reptiles. Such are the slings and arrows of life, and I still like what I do. Anyway, it makes me feel a bit better as a citizen of Panama to have more good things to write in this issue's news and business summaries.

The American presence in Panama plays large in this issue's News section. I went to a book presentation at the University of Panama, where anthropologist Gloria Rudolf got more or less a heroine's welcome. We also have a little photo and caption of an event that may have big significance, the first time since 1999 that Panama has seen US military uniforms at a public event, in this case two Minnesota Air National Guard bringing computers to the Escuela Estado de Minnesota and working the enthusiastic young crowd. American military presence is a controversial issue here on the isthmus, but at the same time US military personnel are popular and a lot of Panamanians would like to see them return on a permanent basis. Moreover, it seems like every other day I hear from an American veteran who has just retired down here, or who plans to do so, so it seems that Panama and Panamanians are also popular with a lot of the troops.

I got my first experience in a kayak the other day. Read all about it in the Outdoors section. On the community page, the West Indian part of Panama's English-speaking community that has relocated to the US announces its annual fair in Brooklyn. The other part of that dispersed Anglophone community, the Zonian one, is at the same time having its annual reunion in Florida.

Meanwhile, here at my sister's and brother-in-law's farm on the beach in Las Uvas, the monkeys are eating the mangoes. It's one of their perks of living in a slightly troubled paradise.