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Richard Fifer's Petaquilla strip mine was begun in defiance of environmental laws that require an environmental permit --- the company, run by a former governor of Cocle with charges of embezzling public funds pending against him, sued in the Supreme Court, arguing that its concession exempts it from the laws --- but to make a gesture it held a "public hearing" in Coclesito on December 14. The notification was illusory, but the company bussed in a cheering section and the results of that hearing were presented to the National Environmental Authority (ANAM). Various neighbors and environmentalist groups protested and ANAM voided the hearing and its results. The thing is, by the law Petaquilla was supposed to have its hearing by December 17. But along with the "hearing" ANAM also quashed the deadline, so it seems that Petaquilla may go through a repeat of the process.

General Manuel Antonio Noriega's latest motion to block his extradition from the United States to France failed on January 9 when Judge Paul Huck held that there was no new evidence that the former dictator's rights as a prisoner of war would be disrespected by French authorities. Various appeals may delay things for various months, but it appears that Noriega is bound for France to face money laundering charges. Meanwhile, after Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro took a dive on submitting papers with US authorities requesting that Noriega be sent here and then lied to the Panamanian people about it --- a political maneuver unpopular with both those who want to see the ex-dictator stand trial here and those who want him freed or held under token house arrest --- the Foreign Ministry now assures us that they're pressing the case to get Noriega back here.

See just what the PRD's alliance with right wing US extremists gets them. Despite the protection given to former "patriot" militia shill "Rex Freeman" and the funding Freeman's publisher in Panama, Don Winner, gets from PRD Frente Empresarial leader Arturo Melo, that hasn't kept right-wing gringos from attacking the National Assembly's website. The legislature's web page was defaced with an American flag and English-language slogans directed against assembly president Pedro Miguel González. Emails purporting to be from González's address, also in English, were sent out to brag about the hacking. "Freeman," who was for many years a "patriot" militia radio shill in Colorado, saw his moment of fame when he "revealed" on his radio show that the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing couldn't have been committed by Timothy McVeigh, and actually was ordered by --- Bill Clinton. Now the Torrijos administration has given him permanent residency despite his problems with Costa Rican authorities, and allows him to offer unregistered banking services over the Internet.

In a mid-December poll taken for and published by La Prensa by the Dichter & Neira polling firm, President Torrijos received "good" or "very good" performance ratings from 58.9 percent of those surveyed. This was a small drop in support from the same time the previous year, but still an extraordinarily high approval rating for a president at this point in an administration. The Dichter & Neira polling method doesn't allow for a neutral opinion and excludes the indigenous comarcas and remote rural areas, which means that it tends to show more dramatic swings in opinion that do polls using other methods. That's because without a neutral option the "broad but shallow support" phenomenon is masked and because the most populous of the indigenous areas, the Ngobe - Bugle Comarca, has since the 1980s been the most volatile swing vote area in national elections.

When the legislature comes back in session in March, they have some parks legislation with fine print that would give the unelected Vivian Fernández de Torrijos substantial new political power to aid her developer friends and fend off environmentalists and advocates of responsible urban design. A proposal to create a Network of Nature and Recreational Parks of Panama would make the first lady the head of a National Parks Foundation and also of a National Recreation Council. Given that the Torrijos administration's policy has been the privatization of public beaches and the commercial development of national parks, what she'd do in her new roles can be reasonably extrapolated.

Former President Mireya Moscoso is a member of the Central American Parliament, and thus immune from criminal investigation or prosecution. Under a pro-corruption decision of the Supreme Court a few years ago, when a person with immunity from prosecution or investigation commits a crime in league with a person who has no such immunity, then the immunity extends to the non-protected person. The Comptroller General has finished an audit of the "private" foundations into which the Moscoso administration diverted aid to Panama from Taiwan and on the basis of the findings prosecutors believe that the former president's sister, Ruby Moscoso viuda de Young, who served as first lady in Mireya's administration, diverted some of that money to improve her house. Thus prosecutors of the Public Ministry have asked the high court to lift immunity from investigation and prosecution against the former first lady and several other persons. This is not the first request to lift either of the Moscoso sisters' immunity, but a prior request to open a case against them about the embezzlement of funds for the Tucan children's museum has languished in the court's files for more than a year without a decision.

One of the benefits of being Housing Minister Balbina Herrera's daughter is all the special deals on public assets. As in a 78.49 square meter beachfront lot on the Portobelo district's Isla Grande for $39.25 for Yirania Periñán Herrera. "Don't mess with my family," was wannabe Panama City mayor Balbina Herrera's response to questions about it from El Siglo.

The infighting in the PRD is also going to express itself in a mayoral primary. At a press conference with former President Ernesto "Toro" Pérez Balladares, businessman Noel Riande announced that he'll be running for mayor of Panama City in the PRD primary. Most of the attention was on Toro, who plans to run against the current mayor, Juan Carlos Navarro, in the presidential primary, rather than Riande, who intends to challenge Housing Minister Balbina Herrera for the mayoral nomination. Meanwhile, in the internal party races, Toro is in a contest for the party presidency with Balbina. Toro's vitriolic attack on Navarro included a claim that in his years in office the current mayor hasn't built any sidewalks. In 2006 Riande, of the Riande hotels family, bought RCM television in the midst of the canal referendum campaign and immediately ordered that the "no" campaign would no longer be allowed on that channel. Later he hired Toro's former press director Dorita de Reyna as the station's news director.

As a part of his campaign for the Panameñista Party nomination for president of Panama, on January 2 party leader Juan Carlos Varela noted the 77th anniversary of the coup by the Arias Madrid brothers, at the head of a group called Accion Comunal. That organization advocated the expulsion from the isthmus of all Panamanians of West Indian, Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry, regardless of whether they were born here. It was very impressed by the European fascists of the time but took its dress code from the United States --- they used to dress up in KKK-style white robes and hoods. The US government wouldn't accept Harmodio Arias as the president installed by the 1931 coup, but in elections the following year he won a resounding victory. In 1940 his brother Arnulfo, who led the group that broke into the Palacio de las Garzas and put a gun to the head of President Florencio Arosemena, was elected president but was deposed in an October 1941 coup, as the US government wasn't willing to tolerate a Nazi sympathizer as president of Panama.

Now that the Electoral Tribunal has removed at least 90,000 names from the voter lists for 2009 --- mostly for not having voted in recent elections but also for being registered in the wrong place --- there are more changes to scramble the poll lists. Partly giving in to pressures from legislators who occupy their seats on the strength of votes from people who don't actually live in their circuits, the tribunal has authorized people to vote where they don't live if they are kept away from their residences for health or educational reasons. PRD deputy Freidi Torres had been promoting a policy of letting people vote where they have family, economic or social ties but don't actually live, but it didn't get passed in the last legislative session. PRD deputy Franz Wever has filed a suit in the Supreme Court to accomplish similar aims.

It will be awhile before the public realizes just what the National Assembly did in the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve. In the September to December session it passed 51 laws, most of them at the very end of the session. The most consequential legislation in the holiday rush was the abolition of the Judicial Technical Police and the transfer of most of its powers and personnel to the Ministry of Government and Justice and maybe the most trifling was the creation of National Harmonization Council for Development, wherein the PRD and its allies talk to one another so that President Torrijos can deceptively claim that he consulted the public about his special interest economic policies.

Six individuals are now under arrest in the schools embezzlement scandal after the January 10 arrest of businessman Ricardo Giovanni Kangas Velarde in Arraijan. Kangas is accused creating dummy companies and of using them to cash checks written against the Equity and Quality Education Fund (FECE) account. By all accounts most of the proceeds from the arrangement went to corrupt officials in the Ministry of Education, but several people who were involved have told prosecutors that everyone who participated, including those who cashed the checks, got a cut of the action.

One of the people fired but not criminally charged in the growing school embezzlement scandal, former San Miguelito region deputy director of education Yoaira Perea Bermúdez, has given up her immunity from investigation and prosecution by dropping out of a race to be a delegate to the March 2 PRD convention. The PRD-controlled Electoral Tribunal has in an unprecedented move given immunity to candidates for PRD internal party offices and, as most of the people involved in the San Miguelito part of the scandal are part of Housing Minister Balbina Herrera's political entourage and some of them are among the more than 15,000 candidates for some 4,200 PRD party offices, this has been a legal obstacle to the prosecutors' investigations.

No need to pack your bags and run if you live in Boquete, El Volcan, Cerro Punta or environs. The volcano is not in the process of erupting. However, an analysis of seismic activity that peaked last May indicates that the Volcan Baru is neither dead nor totally dormant, as the tremors were caused by the movement of tectonic plates and hot gasses deep under the volcano. These tremors are not signs of an imminent eruption, area residents were assured. Volcan Baru last erupted about 800 years ago, but uncertainties about when it might erupt again have apparently not affected high real estate prices in the popular retirement area.

Panama's environmental laws prohibit the destruction of mangrove swamps, which play crucial roles in coastal marine ecosystems. Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped the Torrijos administration from awarding tourism development concessions that encompass and would allow the destruction of Anton district's Boca Nueva, Los Azules and Arenas Blancas mangrove swamps. Cecilia Jaén de Morcillo, the representante from the town of Anton, is leading a movement to get these concessions canceled.

What a New Year's surprise! When the folks who work at a BANISTMO branch in El Dorado came to work on January 2, they found half a million dollars missing from the vault and a hole in the ceiling. The thieves who cut a hole from above actually set off the bank's alarm system, but the security guard who answered the call didn't look up at the ceiling and figured it was a false alarm so didn't report it.

Two Colombian women have been arrested and charged with the December 13 stabbing death of attorney Juan Carlos Dudley, who was vice president of the Colegio de Abogados bar association. Dudley was stabbed about 150 times with the file of a toenail clipper (which has not been found) and robbed of valuables. The crime took place at a pushbutton on the Transistmica. It's not clear whether the death was a case of premeditated murder for the purpose of robbery or a particularly weird sex, drugs and sadomasochism session that got way out of hand.

On the morning of January 9 members of the SUNTRACS construction workers' union who dislike the idea of moving observances of the Day of the Martyrs from that date to January 7 to make a long weekend expressed their displeasure by blocking the Four Corners intersection of the Trans-Isthmian Highway and Randolph Road for about 45 minutes. It caused a monumental and, some Colon Free Zone merchants complain, costly traffic jam.

The criminal element has made driving on the Centennial Bridge across the canal just a bit more dangerous. Thieves stole the cable that provided the electricity for the bridge's lights.

Sony, a female harpy eagle who was one of the main attractions at the Summit Zoo, has died. She was rescued back in the 1990s by a work crew from the Ministry of Agricultural Development that was assigned to the Darien, suffering from a wing injured by shotgun pellets. People at the zoo nursed her back to health and she became one of the best known animals in the collection when the harpy eagle exhibit was built.