Columnists

BC Cook A FIERCE debate rages among historians and archaeologists about how North and South America came to be inhabited.  We all agree that mankind first populated the Eurasian and African landmasses then spread to Australia and the Americas at a later time.  But how and when did that happen?  And…

THE U.S. invasion of the NMI in 1944 obliterated the islands’ thriving economy. For the next 30 years, government — big government — became the main “industry.”  A 1966 report commissioned by the Interior Department stated that under the U.S. administration, many islanders “were employed in governm…

BC Cook LAST week we discussed various issues related to shipwreck exploration and exploitation.  Numbering in the millions, these wrecks are the objects of great interest by families, historians and governments.  They are also the source of potential uncountable riches.  What are we to do?  Over t…

“THE Northern Mariana Islands are experiencing their most challenging economic status since the birth of the Commonwealth in 1978.  By definition, the CNMI is in an economic depression unmatched even by the Great Depression of the United States in 1929-1933.” That’s from the federally funded, 249-p…

These are excerpts from an essay I wrote sometime between 1995 and 1996 for the CNMI History class I was required to take for my teaching certification.  Offered today in response to calls for public comment in the Public Hearing re: Exclusive Management Contract with Marianas Global for Managaha. …

ALTHOUGH the depreciation of the yen has affected the willingness of Japanese people to travel abroad, there will still be more than 10 million Japanese traveling abroad in 2023 (the number before the epidemic was 20 million). But among these 10 million of visitors to Saipan is almost negligible. W…

BC Cook THREE million.  That is the estimated number of shipwrecks on the ocean floor.  They range from the Titanic which sank a century ago to a Phoenician sailing vessel four thousand years old. The question for us is: what do we do with them?  In recent years the United Nations has sponsored tre…

Ambrose M. Bennett THE TRUTH of the matter is that it is OUR Economy falling off a cliff and this Governor and the next Governor will continue to be faced with stewardship rebuilding our Economy.  The stewardship over the need to rebuild our Economy, that has obviously been decimated by nature &…

IN November 2008, Variety informed its readers that more than 4,000 local residents had already moved to the states because of the economic crisis. This was according to a federally funded report conducted by Malcolm D. McPhee & Associates and Dick Conway on the economic impact of federalizatio…