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Shoot from the hip

Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, said he doubts Venezuela and Colombia will be able to completely smooth over tensions - even with help from international mediators such as Fernandez.

“I think it's going to be very hard to repair relations given the deep distrust between both sides,” Hakim said in a telephone interview. “Chavez is so unpredictable, always shooting from the hip, and Uribe has some of those same characteristics.”

Chavez Hopes To Ease Tensions With Colombia, AP, February 26, 2010.

2. SIR – Professor Dylan Jones-Evans’ daft solution to Wales’ economic problems (“Carwyn must cut public sector to allow private firms to grow”, February 20) is perhaps to be expected from “the professor who shoots from the hip”.

The public sector in Wales is proportionately too large claims the professor. Well, if the private sector in any part of the country is small, then mathematically the public sector must be comparatively large, but it does not follow that it is too large.

Mr Jones-Evans is also distressed to learn that average wages in the public sector are now higher (or rather less low) than wages in the private sector, a reversal of the natural order of things, apparently. This inevitably follows from two decades in which the higher-paid private sector jobs in coal, steel and manufacturing have been abolished leaving a private-sector workforce increasingly dominated by low-paid retail and catering jobs. Whose fault is that I wonder?