The scarcity of hard currency and deep cuts in foreign assistance have brought Haiti to a point of complete economic stagnation. Hurricane David and poor crops have curtailed exports drastically. What mother nature has left undone the president has completed, diverting internal revenues from the treasury, which are converted into available dollars and transferred to private bank accounts abroad. At a popular estimate the Duvalier family is worth more than $500 million, cash.

Firm evidence of treasury looting was first provided by World Bank Report No. 1243HA of September 25, 1976, revealing that $45.5 million in government revenues for fiscal 1975 were unbudgeted and could not be accounted for. In 1977, according to a report prepared by the U.S. embassy staff in PortauPririce and published by the U.S. Department of Commerce in Foreign Economic Trends (No. 77-148), the “unbudgeted receipts amounted to 60 million in FY/77 and [were] projected at 69 million in FY/78.” Now Jack Anderson provides an update. “Baby Doc,” he says in his column of March 29, “has been stealing millions of dollars in loans provided by the International Monetary Fund.” And what is more, Michele, the president's bride of a year, has been drawing a monthly allowance of $100,000 from the treasury under her husband's authorization.

The Bolivian coup of last July violently interrupted a two-and-a-half-year experiment in democracy that was showing heartening signs of success. Indeed, following twelve years of military rule, democracy had begun to reopen the developing society's doors to some new possibilities for social change – possibilities that were brutalized by the military's seizure of power.

The new regime soon gained international notoreity as news leaked out of cocaine smuggling by top junta members; of the Argentine military's technical and material assistance to the coup; and the unprecedented, for Bolivia, scale of human rights violations and repression accompanying the military takeover. Despite Bolivia's reputation as a chronically coup-ridden country, it has become apparent that, in many ways, this coup is different.

A strange assortment of lobbyists is converging on the British Parliament at Westminster. They include partisans of French language and culture in Quebec, support ers of local control over oil and gas resources in Alberta, and advocates of native rights in the Yukon. Since it has been assumed for many years that Canada is an independent country, one is justified in asking why any of this is the business of M.P.s from Birmingham, Glasgow, and Londonderry.

The business is the Canadian constitution, and, legally speaking, there is no more appropriate forum for it. The Canadian constitution–more precisely the British North America Act of 1867 as amended–is a statute of the United Kingdom, and its amendment is within the authority of the body that enacted it.