LAST week, I spent an hour with journalism students at the University of the South Pacific during their Friday Forum session; a talanoa session during lunch-hour. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) works mainly through its programmes with 14 Pacific island countries but this was an invitation we wouldn’t have missed. We anticipated sharing our…
It was 6pm on a day in March 1996. And Kevin Riria Malopo, a landowner at Gold Ridge, Solomons’ only commercial gold mine outside the capital Honiara, remembers it well. He along with another landowner, Stephen Moffat, were the last hurdle in the development of Solomon Islands’ first commercial gold mine. Up to that point,…
Deep sea mining (DSM) is the new frontier in extractive mining. For the companies involved, as well as the governments that own the mining rights, it offers substantial profits. However DSM is still experimental in nature, with potentially vast adverse environmental effects. It also makes use of new technologies that have yet to be tested.…
As a regular writer of this page, I too would like to acknowledge and commend our government, including the various ministries and members of the parliament who were directly involved in this festival, chairperson and members of the organizing committee, other subsidiary committees and their members, the police department and officers, the different groups of…
Self commendation is no praise, but for the Festival of Pacific Arts (FOPA) Organizing Committee to have a sense of gloom and doom and constant self-condemnation; with a sense that they have failed the Region, Solomon Islands and our people by not producing the best, may have been just becoming paranoiac on the part of…
Transparency Solomon Islands (TSI) in its ongoing efforts to raise people’s awareness on corruption would like to share a success story of a complaint handled by the TSI Advocacy & Legal Advice Centre (ALAC). John was very worried when his wife, Mary, was ordered to resign from her work as a shopkeeper and they were…
Solomon Islands for the last 10 or so years had come under a lot of suspicion concerning its security as the result of the recent ethnic tension. That was when our beloved country was shadowed and even flooded with army personnel from the region commonly known as the “Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands”, RAMSI,…
This Paper (Solomon Star) just recently has carried a story about the people of Lord Howe and Ontong Java Atolls wanting to build a church building even when the islands are facing the unpredictable threats of the rising sea level. As I read the story and think over the people’s intention to construct a church…
The public outcry of SIEA unreliable power supply will continue unless SI government is serious of considering alternative interventional plan from its current setting. We know that the supply of electricity is significant for the proper development both in Honiara and provinces to meet modern living standards and to facilitate its economic development. The reliability…