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NEWS IN BRIEF
FOR GENERAL DISTRIBUTION
Top News in the Print Media: The JIS, The Gleaner & The Observer
From the Overseas Department, Jamaica Information Service
Thursday October 02, 2003
?CRUSH EXTORTION? COMMITTEE
The Gleaner: The Consultative Committee which is charged with overseeing the implementation of the recommendations of the National committee on Crime and Violence yesterday expressed deep concern about the growing problem and effects of extortion in Jamaica.
It was established by the Ministry of National Security.
According to a news release from the committee, serious concerns were expressed about the "pervasiveness of extortion in both urban and rural Jamaica", which it said has "become a common feature of doing business in many commercial areas and on construction sites, including roads and bridges."
The committee is, therefore, calling on "the entire political leadership of the country to publicly denounce all acts of extortion, and to encourage their constituents to support the security forces in enforcing the laws of Jamaica."
SPOT MARKET WEIGHTED AVERAGE RATE
CURRENCY -- PURCHASES -- SALES
___US$ _______59.5122____59.7502
__CAN$_______42.9249____44.4991
___GB£ _______96.5990____98.5622
JA ?UNDER FISCAL PRESSURE?
The Gleaner: Bear Sterns, the United States-based investment banking and securities brokerage firm, yesterday said that Jamaica is barely holding on to its fiscal situation and debt management.
The damning assessment comes after the release by the Ministry of Finance and Planning of fiscal numbers for the month of August which show tax revenues up by 21 per cent and expenditures up by 15 per cent. However wages are up eight per cent with programme spending also on the rise by seven per cent.
Commenting on these numbers, Gregory Fisher, senior managing director of Bear Stearns, said: "This is reflective of considerable fiscal restraint by the Ministry of Finance. However, interest expense is up 32 per cent, reflecting higher debt stocks and higher interest rates this year on floating rate debt. Interest took up an incredible 47 per cent of total expenditures and 67 per cent of revenues. We know of no other country with these ratios.?
CHURCH BACKS GG
The Observer: The church has thrown its support behind Governor General Sir Howard Cooke's calls for a new approach to fighting crime, and is expected to preach anti-crime messages to its flock during the course of this month.
This move comes as Sir Howard on Monday declared October anti-crime month, the proclamation coinciding with the launch of Inter-faith Fellowship Day--designed to foster greater unity among religious groups.
"With the need to identify new approaches to solving Jamaica's crime problems, we have merged the launch of anti-crime month and Inter-faith Fellowship Day in order to draw attention to the need for spiritual guidance in the solution to our problems," the Governor General explained.
Both events, he said, will be celebrated annually.
COMBINE EFFORTS TO FIGHT HIV/AIDS
The Observer: Representatives at the Caribbean US Chiefs of Missions Conference on HIV/AIDS in Port of Spain, Trinidad concluded Tuesday that regional co-operation was the only way to tackle the pandemic in the region.
The conference was hosted by the US Embassy in Port of Spain, with support from the US Department of Health and Human Services/Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
It provided an opportunity for high-level participants to provide status reports on decisions made at the April 2002 US Chiefs of Mission Conference on HIV/ADS held in Port au Prince, Haiti as well as to plan future direction and co-operation on stigma reduction, prevention and control and care and treatment.
BREAST CANCER IN YOUNG WOMEN UP
The Observer: Some local doctors have reported an increase in the incidence of breast cancer among pre-menopausal women, and at least one medical practitioner has warned that the problem could become a public health issue.
"Clinicians in Jamaica have observed an increase in the incidence of breast cancer among pre-menopausal (20-49) women in recent times," said Dr David Hunter of the Cornwall Regional Hospital. "It is worrying that a significant number of the women are pre-menopausal... It is a potential health problem."
He was addressing the second Pan Caribbean Conference put on by the Caribbean College of Family Physicians at the Jamaica Pegasus in Kingston over the weekend, and was speaking about 'a retrospective review of breast cancer cases in Western Jamaica'.
JIS NEWS
Thursday October 02, 2003
PM ENDORSES UN CONVENTION
Prime Minister P. J. Patterson deposited several Instruments of Ratification, when he met with United Nations Legal Counsel, Hans Corell, at the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York, on September 29.
The Instruments included: the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime; Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children; Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Air and Sea; and the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition.
The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime recognizes the growing incidence of transnational organized crime and seeks to combat such crimes through greater international co-operation. The Protocols, all of which supplement the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime, address issues that are of particular concern to member states and were adopted by the UN Millennium General Assembly on November 15, 2000.
NEW WATER SUPPLY PROJECTS PROGRESSING
The Ministry of Water and Housing through the Rural Water and Sanitation Programme is seeking to pioneer a new approach of executing water supply projects in Jamaica.
Funded jointly by the Government of Jamaica and the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) at a cost of US$12.5 million over a four-year period, the programme, now in phase one, is being piloted in four communities ? White Horses, Botany Bay, Pamphret in St. Thomas; Gravel Hill in Clarendon; Cotterwood in St. Elizabeth; and Mile Gully in St. Mary.
Giving an update on the programme, one year after its launch in October 2002, Donovan Stanberry, Chief Technical Director of Water at the Ministry of Water and Housing, says that over the past year, the Ministry has been actively engaged in capacity building in the selected communities, as it relates to both mobilising and sensitising residents about the new approach to delivering water.
MEDICAL MISSION TO VISIT MO?BAY
Sixty volunteer doctors and nurses from Atlanta in the United States will be visiting St. James next week to participate in the 10th annual Atlanta/Montego Bay Sister Cities Health Fair.
The event will be held at the St. John?s Methodist Action Centre in Montego Bay.
The health fair, to be held from October 4-9, will headline a week of activities to mark the 23rd anniversary of Montego gaining city status. Thousands of persons from western Jamaica are expected to participate in the celebrations and also benefit from medical check-ups.
The team of medical specialists in the areas of ophthalmology, gynaecology, dentistry, podiatry, paediatrics and internal medicine, will be led by Jamaica?s Honorary Consul in Atlanta, Vin Martin, who has headed several successful health missions over the past 10 years.
Contact: Celia Lindsay
For further information about any of these news items, contact the Overseas Department at
[email protected]
. The Jamaica Information Service web page address is
www.jis.gov.jm
.Telephone: (876) 926-3740-8 / 926-3590-8, Fax: (876) 926-6715
COMMENTARY
Thursday October 02, 2003
THE OBSERVER
IS MR PATTERSON NOT SHAMED?
PRIME Minister has, in chest-thumping fashion, declared his willingness to call in the army and shut down the planned inner-city housing projects if contractors fall under pressure from extortionists.
And we are supposed to cheer. Mr Patterson is being bold and tough.
The prime minister, however, is missing a fundamental point. Or, he has chosen to ignore it. That the extortion around construction projects, about which he is so concerned, is not an end in itself.
And neither is it a problem to be dealt with only through law enforcement. It is substantially a political issue that also demands a political solution.
Should Mr Patterson, or anyone else for that matter, discount this nexus between extortion and politics, they should consider what is being strongly speculated as the motive behind Tuesday's brazen, daylight triple murder in Temple Hall in rural St Andrew.
The prevailing theory is that they were shot dead because political opponents were fearful of the possibility of losing their control over distribution of jobs on a road project. If, indeed, this assumption is true, it is not the first time that such violence has surrounded public sector infrastructure projects. Not so long ago, several persons were killed during the reconstruction of the Washington Boulevard in Kingston because of rivalry over jobs and the insistence that work should be done only by persons from the community within which the job was being done. Private building projects, too, are not immune from such stresses.
This issue, extortion on job sites, has its roots in our failure to ensure sustained economic growth, and, therefore, our inability to meet the aspirations of many of our people, as well as in the way we have managed our political process.
This lack of growth and anaemic economic activity has meant that jobs are at a premium and that the country's limited resources are largely accumulated in the hands of the Government. Politics, as the popular phrase goes, has become the vehicle for the distribution of "scarce benefits" as well as the spoils of power. It is one method by which political leadership has maintained its control of power.
At the same time, we have, particularly over the past three decades, spawned a politics of exclusion, with the creation of so-called garrison communities and exclusive political zones which are off limits to people of a different political persuasion. These zones used to be enforced by the political musclemen who, while they retain loyalty to party, these days often act with independence.
This process has created a nasty, and sometimes deadly, cocktail.
There is the quasi-independent and independent "don" who, among other things, engages in extortion and there is the politically-aligned community leader, who may be less trenchant, but who enforces the will of the party and/or politician in the community.
So it is these groups, who are sometimes euphemistically called liaison officers, who divvy up jobs for projects within a community. Selection may have little to do with skill, competence, expertise or experience.
The upshot is that freedom is removed from those who are charged with carrying through a project to select the best skills, and the need to rotate the workforce leads to cost escalation. The country also pays a price for inefficiencies and incompetence. That price, when the bargaining for the spoils breaks down, may include people's blood.
Our wonder is that Mr Patterson is not shamed by this. That while he talked he has not shown the will to break the political culture to bring it to an end.
============================================
THE GLEANER
CITY OF THE APATHETIC
KINGSTON IS fast becoming a city of the apathetic. The latest case in point is that of Det. Sgt. Gladys Brown-Campbell who was mugged, slashed and stabbed several times by a robber on a busy street in downtown Kingston on Monday.
According to the news report, several persons witnessed the robbery and knife attack on her, but not one lifted a finger to help the female victim, even while she was struggling with her assailant on the ground.
Is it that the Jamaican people have grown too callous, too inured to violence to react in defence of an obvious victim, too individualistic, too apathetic or just too scared to help? Is it that those people who witnessed the attack on the gutsy detective did not recognise her need for help? Just the weekend before at a ceremony at the Norman Manley Law School, UWI, Mona, she was presented with the Certificate of Legal Education, qualifying her as an attorney-at-law, the first policewoman in Jamaica's history to so equip herself.
The barefaced attack on the plucky detective calls to mind one of the most egregious examples of bystander apathy anywhere. It occurred 39 years ago in a middle class area of Queens, New York, on the morning of March 13, 1964. It involved 28-year-old Kitty Genovese, a bar manager who, while returning home from her job, was attacked repeatedly by a man who eventually stabbed her to death.
At least 38 people in their apartments nearby saw her being attacked or heard her screams and her pleas for help but none called the police even from the safety of their homes. The one person who alerted the police to the attack, did so some 30 minutes after the attack began. It took just two minutes for the police to arrive at the scene but by then, Kitty Genovese was dead. If anyone of those persons had called the police earlier, her life might have been saved.
Of course the fear factor must weigh heavily in making up one's mind whether to assist a person who is seemingly at the receiving end of the violent behaviour of another and as the saying goes, self-preservation is the first law of nature.
We cannot legislate to force citizens to be 'good Samaritans' but the frequency with which such brazen attacks occur nowadays and in the most public of places, must be of concern to the majority of us, the law-abiding citizens.
We have to recognise that if we continue to stand on the sidelines so as not to "get involved" then sooner or later the criminal elements will be so emboldened that they will systematically target us one after the other as their next potential victim. It is time to translate our collective responsibility as law-abiding citizens into action.
FOR GENERAL DISTRIBUTION
Top News in the Print Media: The JIS, The Gleaner & The Observer
From the Overseas Department, Jamaica Information Service
Thursday October 02, 2003
?CRUSH EXTORTION? COMMITTEE
The Gleaner: The Consultative Committee which is charged with overseeing the implementation of the recommendations of the National committee on Crime and Violence yesterday expressed deep concern about the growing problem and effects of extortion in Jamaica.
It was established by the Ministry of National Security.
According to a news release from the committee, serious concerns were expressed about the "pervasiveness of extortion in both urban and rural Jamaica", which it said has "become a common feature of doing business in many commercial areas and on construction sites, including roads and bridges."
The committee is, therefore, calling on "the entire political leadership of the country to publicly denounce all acts of extortion, and to encourage their constituents to support the security forces in enforcing the laws of Jamaica."
SPOT MARKET WEIGHTED AVERAGE RATE
CURRENCY -- PURCHASES -- SALES
___US$ _______59.5122____59.7502
__CAN$_______42.9249____44.4991
___GB£ _______96.5990____98.5622
JA ?UNDER FISCAL PRESSURE?
The Gleaner: Bear Sterns, the United States-based investment banking and securities brokerage firm, yesterday said that Jamaica is barely holding on to its fiscal situation and debt management.
The damning assessment comes after the release by the Ministry of Finance and Planning of fiscal numbers for the month of August which show tax revenues up by 21 per cent and expenditures up by 15 per cent. However wages are up eight per cent with programme spending also on the rise by seven per cent.
Commenting on these numbers, Gregory Fisher, senior managing director of Bear Stearns, said: "This is reflective of considerable fiscal restraint by the Ministry of Finance. However, interest expense is up 32 per cent, reflecting higher debt stocks and higher interest rates this year on floating rate debt. Interest took up an incredible 47 per cent of total expenditures and 67 per cent of revenues. We know of no other country with these ratios.?
CHURCH BACKS GG
The Observer: The church has thrown its support behind Governor General Sir Howard Cooke's calls for a new approach to fighting crime, and is expected to preach anti-crime messages to its flock during the course of this month.
This move comes as Sir Howard on Monday declared October anti-crime month, the proclamation coinciding with the launch of Inter-faith Fellowship Day--designed to foster greater unity among religious groups.
"With the need to identify new approaches to solving Jamaica's crime problems, we have merged the launch of anti-crime month and Inter-faith Fellowship Day in order to draw attention to the need for spiritual guidance in the solution to our problems," the Governor General explained.
Both events, he said, will be celebrated annually.
COMBINE EFFORTS TO FIGHT HIV/AIDS
The Observer: Representatives at the Caribbean US Chiefs of Missions Conference on HIV/AIDS in Port of Spain, Trinidad concluded Tuesday that regional co-operation was the only way to tackle the pandemic in the region.
The conference was hosted by the US Embassy in Port of Spain, with support from the US Department of Health and Human Services/Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
It provided an opportunity for high-level participants to provide status reports on decisions made at the April 2002 US Chiefs of Mission Conference on HIV/ADS held in Port au Prince, Haiti as well as to plan future direction and co-operation on stigma reduction, prevention and control and care and treatment.
BREAST CANCER IN YOUNG WOMEN UP
The Observer: Some local doctors have reported an increase in the incidence of breast cancer among pre-menopausal women, and at least one medical practitioner has warned that the problem could become a public health issue.
"Clinicians in Jamaica have observed an increase in the incidence of breast cancer among pre-menopausal (20-49) women in recent times," said Dr David Hunter of the Cornwall Regional Hospital. "It is worrying that a significant number of the women are pre-menopausal... It is a potential health problem."
He was addressing the second Pan Caribbean Conference put on by the Caribbean College of Family Physicians at the Jamaica Pegasus in Kingston over the weekend, and was speaking about 'a retrospective review of breast cancer cases in Western Jamaica'.
JIS NEWS
Thursday October 02, 2003
PM ENDORSES UN CONVENTION
Prime Minister P. J. Patterson deposited several Instruments of Ratification, when he met with United Nations Legal Counsel, Hans Corell, at the United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York, on September 29.
The Instruments included: the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime; Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children; Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Air and Sea; and the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition.
The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime recognizes the growing incidence of transnational organized crime and seeks to combat such crimes through greater international co-operation. The Protocols, all of which supplement the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime, address issues that are of particular concern to member states and were adopted by the UN Millennium General Assembly on November 15, 2000.
NEW WATER SUPPLY PROJECTS PROGRESSING
The Ministry of Water and Housing through the Rural Water and Sanitation Programme is seeking to pioneer a new approach of executing water supply projects in Jamaica.
Funded jointly by the Government of Jamaica and the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) at a cost of US$12.5 million over a four-year period, the programme, now in phase one, is being piloted in four communities ? White Horses, Botany Bay, Pamphret in St. Thomas; Gravel Hill in Clarendon; Cotterwood in St. Elizabeth; and Mile Gully in St. Mary.
Giving an update on the programme, one year after its launch in October 2002, Donovan Stanberry, Chief Technical Director of Water at the Ministry of Water and Housing, says that over the past year, the Ministry has been actively engaged in capacity building in the selected communities, as it relates to both mobilising and sensitising residents about the new approach to delivering water.
MEDICAL MISSION TO VISIT MO?BAY
Sixty volunteer doctors and nurses from Atlanta in the United States will be visiting St. James next week to participate in the 10th annual Atlanta/Montego Bay Sister Cities Health Fair.
The event will be held at the St. John?s Methodist Action Centre in Montego Bay.
The health fair, to be held from October 4-9, will headline a week of activities to mark the 23rd anniversary of Montego gaining city status. Thousands of persons from western Jamaica are expected to participate in the celebrations and also benefit from medical check-ups.
The team of medical specialists in the areas of ophthalmology, gynaecology, dentistry, podiatry, paediatrics and internal medicine, will be led by Jamaica?s Honorary Consul in Atlanta, Vin Martin, who has headed several successful health missions over the past 10 years.
Contact: Celia Lindsay
For further information about any of these news items, contact the Overseas Department at
[email protected]
. The Jamaica Information Service web page address is
www.jis.gov.jm
.Telephone: (876) 926-3740-8 / 926-3590-8, Fax: (876) 926-6715
COMMENTARY
Thursday October 02, 2003
THE OBSERVER
IS MR PATTERSON NOT SHAMED?
PRIME Minister has, in chest-thumping fashion, declared his willingness to call in the army and shut down the planned inner-city housing projects if contractors fall under pressure from extortionists.
And we are supposed to cheer. Mr Patterson is being bold and tough.
The prime minister, however, is missing a fundamental point. Or, he has chosen to ignore it. That the extortion around construction projects, about which he is so concerned, is not an end in itself.
And neither is it a problem to be dealt with only through law enforcement. It is substantially a political issue that also demands a political solution.
Should Mr Patterson, or anyone else for that matter, discount this nexus between extortion and politics, they should consider what is being strongly speculated as the motive behind Tuesday's brazen, daylight triple murder in Temple Hall in rural St Andrew.
The prevailing theory is that they were shot dead because political opponents were fearful of the possibility of losing their control over distribution of jobs on a road project. If, indeed, this assumption is true, it is not the first time that such violence has surrounded public sector infrastructure projects. Not so long ago, several persons were killed during the reconstruction of the Washington Boulevard in Kingston because of rivalry over jobs and the insistence that work should be done only by persons from the community within which the job was being done. Private building projects, too, are not immune from such stresses.
This issue, extortion on job sites, has its roots in our failure to ensure sustained economic growth, and, therefore, our inability to meet the aspirations of many of our people, as well as in the way we have managed our political process.
This lack of growth and anaemic economic activity has meant that jobs are at a premium and that the country's limited resources are largely accumulated in the hands of the Government. Politics, as the popular phrase goes, has become the vehicle for the distribution of "scarce benefits" as well as the spoils of power. It is one method by which political leadership has maintained its control of power.
At the same time, we have, particularly over the past three decades, spawned a politics of exclusion, with the creation of so-called garrison communities and exclusive political zones which are off limits to people of a different political persuasion. These zones used to be enforced by the political musclemen who, while they retain loyalty to party, these days often act with independence.
This process has created a nasty, and sometimes deadly, cocktail.
There is the quasi-independent and independent "don" who, among other things, engages in extortion and there is the politically-aligned community leader, who may be less trenchant, but who enforces the will of the party and/or politician in the community.
So it is these groups, who are sometimes euphemistically called liaison officers, who divvy up jobs for projects within a community. Selection may have little to do with skill, competence, expertise or experience.
The upshot is that freedom is removed from those who are charged with carrying through a project to select the best skills, and the need to rotate the workforce leads to cost escalation. The country also pays a price for inefficiencies and incompetence. That price, when the bargaining for the spoils breaks down, may include people's blood.
Our wonder is that Mr Patterson is not shamed by this. That while he talked he has not shown the will to break the political culture to bring it to an end.
============================================
THE GLEANER
CITY OF THE APATHETIC
KINGSTON IS fast becoming a city of the apathetic. The latest case in point is that of Det. Sgt. Gladys Brown-Campbell who was mugged, slashed and stabbed several times by a robber on a busy street in downtown Kingston on Monday.
According to the news report, several persons witnessed the robbery and knife attack on her, but not one lifted a finger to help the female victim, even while she was struggling with her assailant on the ground.
Is it that the Jamaican people have grown too callous, too inured to violence to react in defence of an obvious victim, too individualistic, too apathetic or just too scared to help? Is it that those people who witnessed the attack on the gutsy detective did not recognise her need for help? Just the weekend before at a ceremony at the Norman Manley Law School, UWI, Mona, she was presented with the Certificate of Legal Education, qualifying her as an attorney-at-law, the first policewoman in Jamaica's history to so equip herself.
The barefaced attack on the plucky detective calls to mind one of the most egregious examples of bystander apathy anywhere. It occurred 39 years ago in a middle class area of Queens, New York, on the morning of March 13, 1964. It involved 28-year-old Kitty Genovese, a bar manager who, while returning home from her job, was attacked repeatedly by a man who eventually stabbed her to death.
At least 38 people in their apartments nearby saw her being attacked or heard her screams and her pleas for help but none called the police even from the safety of their homes. The one person who alerted the police to the attack, did so some 30 minutes after the attack began. It took just two minutes for the police to arrive at the scene but by then, Kitty Genovese was dead. If anyone of those persons had called the police earlier, her life might have been saved.
Of course the fear factor must weigh heavily in making up one's mind whether to assist a person who is seemingly at the receiving end of the violent behaviour of another and as the saying goes, self-preservation is the first law of nature.
We cannot legislate to force citizens to be 'good Samaritans' but the frequency with which such brazen attacks occur nowadays and in the most public of places, must be of concern to the majority of us, the law-abiding citizens.
We have to recognise that if we continue to stand on the sidelines so as not to "get involved" then sooner or later the criminal elements will be so emboldened that they will systematically target us one after the other as their next potential victim. It is time to translate our collective responsibility as law-abiding citizens into action.