And the politicians are giving us a circus as a warm-up. Willy Carrera takes a peek at both subjects, with his Travel section piece on Carnival preparations in the capital and his part in the collaborative lead News section story about bribery allegations arising from the Legislative Assembly.

Our Travel section is bigger than usual as Carnival approaches --- Earl Watson and a group of retiree athletes went to Chiriqui and while there paid a visit to the Boquete Flower and Coffee Festival, and I went out to the National Stadium to catch the PROBEIS All-Star Game and report on the transportation problems associated with that fine baseball venue. Earl and I sort of did the same thing, in a way --- we each did two stories from one outing, one for the Sports section and the other for the Travel pages.

The Business news this January is still mostly bad, but there are good signs as well. There had been many fears that the events of September 11 would cripple cruise ship tourism this year, but that sector of our economy is booming. There is a construction slowdown, but a number of developers are pressing ahead with their projects, creating or maintaining precious jobs in a stricken economy. Variations on that tale are found in both the story of a woman who's thinking of retiring here and in the Business & Economy Briefs' mention of changes in the Bern organization's business.

What else could our Editorial be about this time, other than the unfolding bribery scandal that has captured the public's imagination? Alright, I know --- we could go along with the politicians and pretend that little or nothing is amiss, but then The Panama News wouldn't be a serious and independent newspaper.

In the Opinion section Amnesty International gets into the down side of the War on Terrorism, we get a Latin American viewpoint about democratizing the media and I consider Panama's experience with privatized urban garbage collection services. In the Letters a reader explains why she doesn't believe the US Embassy's spin on a proposed binational tax information sharing system. The News section includes a long piece by the Committee to Protect Journalists about colleagues who were killed in the line of duty last year.

We have a Science feature this time, a continuation of our coverage on the recovery and research effort at the site off of Nombre de Dios that may be the remains of one of Christopher Columbus's ships. The Arts section has a little bit of a Hindu flavor this time, the Community section contains a plug for Panama's Girl Scouts and on the Dining page I visit Panama City's only African restaurant.

In January I had a temporary teaching job and sold some books, and various other projects are in different states of development. Still, the paper's situation remains severe and we can use all the help that our readers may want to provide.

With this issue we're changing our logos and a bit of the layout and adding some features. This process will continue. The changes don't require a lot of money, but they do take a lot of my time, much of it spent learning on the job. The hopes are that the paper will be more interesting and our book sales and other commercial aspects of this site will be enhanced.

One of the changes that will be coming in future issues is the addition of Spanish-language content to this site. It won't be a translation of our English articles. To start we'll just add links to a few choice Spanish sites. For many of our readers who live in the US, the Spanish content is something to skip over, but the great majority of Panama's present English-speaking community is bilingual and thus it makes sense for us to include some Spanish content.

(If you have never noticed, The Panama News Online has long had links to Latin America's other online English-language newspapers and to a lot of periodicals from the English-speaking Caribbean. Also, our Fun page gives you, in addition to Sparky the Wonder Dog's advice, links to comic strips, editorial cartoons and crossword puzzles from English-language publications around the world. Over the next few issues we will be updating and augmenting those links.)

I hope that you like the changes, and that you enjoy this issue. I hope that, despite all the negative things that we have to report, those of you who don't live on the isthmus will find enough that is positive about Panama to make you want to come back for a visit. Maybe I'll see you if you're going to be down here for Carnival or the cayuco races.

Eric Jackson
the editor

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