The evidence has been right in front of our eyes for some time but we have failed or refused to heed the message. Airline tourist arrivals that have hardly grown in 40 years, cruise ship passengers who hardly spend anything, a downtown where a lot of the major businesses are now T-shirt shops, few if any businesses downtown east of East Street North, declining purchasing power and salaries with increased inflation, etc. These problems began before Ingraham and Christie but continued during their regimes. Time for some new ideas about how to progress this country beyond the Stafford Sands economic model.

Demolished the Post Office building and replace it with what? I've said in these columns before that the Government owns a number of buildings and complexes in the East Hill Street/Parliament Street area that are in various stages of decay. Yes, a decision needs to be made about what to do with the Main Post Office Building but it is not alone. The Government also needs to decide what to do with the Rodney Bain Building on the the corner of Parliament and Shirley Streets, plus the Royal Victoria Gardens complex which has pretty much been abandoned except for the car park after all of the courts there moved to South Street. You also have the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building just east of Government House that probably needs maintenance work, to say nothing of Government House itself. This is a lot of valuable real estate just sitting around in various states of need for repair. What is going to be done with any or all of them?

We are about 20 or more years behind on completing the WTO application process. Monopolies don't help us although the deaf, dumb and blind governments that we keep electing haven't figured out how to turn workers into business owners, and tenants into land owners. It's time we got on with the process and stopped listening to the visionless who want to hold onto the old days where Christmas ham and turkey reign supreme. Does Evans yet have union representation at Cable Bahamas or the Bridge Authority? Does Ferguson yet have union representation in Baha Mar or any recently opened hotels?

Do we need or want another monopolist group managing both our freight terminal and our cruise ship port? If Minnis them want to empower people, then allow us all to become part owners of the economic vehicles in this country and not put them all in the hands of a select few.

And we wonder why we have a problem with unlicensed guns and ammunition getting into this country? This incident demonstrates how porous our borders are and how defective our border defences are. The Prime Minister says he wants a report. He should not have to request reports of exceptional or unusual matters from each Ministry as and when they occur but should be getting regular reports on the goings-on at each Ministry from his Ministers. He needs to watch the Prime Minister's Questions on C-SPAN where the UK's Prime Minister is able to answer parliamentary questions regarding the affairs of any government Ministry or agency. We could be invaded by a bunch of terrorists using wooden boats that cannot be detected by radar coming up on the south side of New Providence and we have no constitutional right to search for them, maybe unless we declare a state of emergency. What a country!

This is a growing Bahamian trend for family disputes over a deceased person's affairs to be played out in public particularly where the deceased has two "families" - a current spouse or live-in partner fighting with a former spouse and/or adult children. It is worse than sad, it is disappointing. If he were alive, Sir Arlington would be highly disappointed to see his survivors fighting over his body and his assets in public like this.

URCA's letter makes no sense and is laughable in the extreme. If the application was "ineffectual" as the licence was granted to 2 individuals instead of an incorporated company as required by the Communications Act then URCA has failed to comply with its own law and the licence was no licence so there was no licence to sell. An "ineffectual" licence is no licence at all. And the nonsense about having the power to "vary any licence granted to a licensee if it is necessary to comply with the laws of the Bahamas" is just that, more nonsense. If the 2 individuals supposedly owning the licence was "ineffectual" in law then they could NOT be licensees and URCA has no power to assist their breach of the law. Makes you wonder if these people know what they are doing.

If only Bay Street's decline was as simple as tee shirt shops and low end merchants. Due to poor traffic design and parking issues, many stores and businesses moved away from Bay Street. People only came out there to bank, go to court and go to work; they stopped coming out there to shop except maybe when John Bull is having a sale. Stores like the food store, pharmacy, shoe store, hotel, movie theatre, hardware store, clothing store, night clubs, restaurants and others that used to be on Bay Street closed down due to declining sales, crime, high rents, high renovation costs, high import costs, real property taxes, changing tastes and changing demographics. Bay Street property owners don't get the kind of tax evasion breaks from government that hotels, manufacturers and certain industries get. Then the bumsels moved in, sleeping around the courts and other buildings. The government itself is one of those guilty of neglect. Look at the state of the Rodney Bain Building (formerly the E D Sassoon Building), the Royal Victoria complex, the General Post Office building. Pollution from the smoke generated by cruise ships has added to the decline coupled with the general dirtiness and congestion downtown. What the Minister should do is put a few "secret passengers" on one or more of the cruise ships that dock here and let them report and/or record their experiences when they get off the cruise ship in Nassau. He will be surprised at what he learns. Tourists have to be given a reason to spend their money because they are getting something of value or memorable in returrn. It's expensive to shop in Nassau. What are cruise passengers getting when they disembark in Nassau? From what I've seen hanging around the dock on occasion, I would not get off the ship when it docked in Nassau.

Congratulations to both of these ladies for making it to the final. Not everyone in a final is going to medal but those that do can only do so because they are in the final. Ms Gaither is young enough that she has opportunities to return to more finals in the future and hopefully medal then. Mrs Uibo has added to her cache of medals and hopefully will return to future finals and win medals of other colours. They are both to be congratulated for the fruits of their hard work and their coaches congratulated for preparing them to get to this position. Well done and much future success.

No he's just distancing himself from the PLP in case some new idiot in the government is prepared to hire him as a "consultant" and until he's best able to determine how strong the wind is blowing in its current new direction and whether it's for more than the next 5 years.