Dear Reader
Belated birthday greetings to our Prime Minister, William Marlin, who celebrated his 67th birthday on Saturday, October 21st, 2017.
However, we do not know if ''celebrate' is the right word to use as we do not think the prime minister would be in a celebratory mood with all the issues plaguing the country and the discussions surrounding the conditions the Dutch government wants to impose on the St. Maarten government for accepting recovery aid from the Kingdom.
As the Prime Minister points out in his position
statement issued yesterday evening, people are wondering what the St. Maarten government has to hide by not agreeing to implement the Integrity Chamber per the wishes of the Dutch government in The Hague.
Nonetheless, this view is incorrect as work is being done by the Council of Advice on reviewing the draft law on the Integrity Chamber. We expect this to be sent back to Government any day now.
That the Prime Minister has certainly kept himself busy with work over the weekend can be seen in the
news that the interim report by the work group National Recovery Plan (NRP) has been presented by his person to the President of Parliament, Sarah Wescot-Williams, and that this report will be published this afternoon on the Government's
sxmemergency.org website at 3pm.
Jeff Boyd of Marine Management & Consulting at the Yacht Club at the Port De Plaisance marina has written an urgent letter to the Council of Ministers and the Members of Parliament concerning the plight of a barge, crane and tugboat that were brought to St. Maarten to remove sunken vessels and to assist with the rebuilding of the marina.
Read the letter online here. You can view a
video of some of the sunken vessels at the PDP marina made specially for Today News Online by
clicking on this link here. You can then see for yourself what Jeff Boyd is talking about.
The political commentaries flooded into our inbox this weekend with letters from
Michael Ferrier about the flagpole project commissioned by the Minister of Infrastructure (VROMI); from
Elton Jones about the orchestrated sabotage and political spin to embarass the St. Maarten government; while
Wycliffe Smith points to the legislative technicality that lays the blame on Parliament for delaying the process in receiving hurricane aid from the Kingdom govenrment.
As mentioned in our
Friday edition of the Today email newsletter, the polls in the newsletters are meant to increase the interactions with the readers to get their opinions on the trending topics of the day. We were certain many of you are curious about the results of these polls. So from today we will publish these starting with the results of our first poll held on Saturday, September 2nd, 2017 with the question: "
Are you prepared for Hurricane Irma?" Here are the results:
Yes - 29.6%
No - 7.4%
Maybe - 14.8%
Not sure - 7.4%
Kind of - 7.4%
Waiting to see how things develop first - 33.3%
Note that one third of the 29 respondents indicated that they were waiting to see how things developed first. Well, we all know all too well now how things had developed. It is a scary thought that percentage-wise so many people (70.4%) could not give a definite answer about their preparedness for hurricane Irma. The outcome certainly showed that indeed many on St .Maarten were not ready for a storm of that magnitude nor took precautions for the aftermath.
In the meantime, do enjoy reading and viewing the rest of this edition. You can email us via
info@today.sx if you wish to advertise as well or register for a subscription in support of our work online at
http://www.today.sx/registration.
