Bermuda tourism story.

On the one hand, air visitor arrivals were down once again. But hotel occupancies in the month were above eighty percent.

The same pattern -- lower arrivals and higher occupancies -- is likely to occur in July and August, Bermuda's traditional high season.

A decline in total arrivals might seem to be a bad thing. It means that less money is being paid in taxes, tourism-related businesses will have fewer customers and the economy as a whole suffers.

But the hotel industry, like any other, must obey the laws of supply and demand. The fact that so many hotels have closed in the last few years means that the supply of hotel rooms is shrinking to meet the reduced demand from visitors.

That means that hotels should be in better financial shape now than they have been in years and it may mean that the end of tourism's long decline may really have been reached.

Bermuda's hotel industry is not so different from any other industry in this sense. Downsizing and restructuring are not unusual for failing industries and companies until they reach a size where they can deliver their products efficiently again.

It is to be hoped that Bermuda will now be able to rebuild the sector, with the renovations of the Castle Harbour Hotel coming and the possibility that Club Med will find a new operator.

This would be good for Bermuda which needs a second pillar of the economy to give it some diversity from international business.

It is not necessarily a bad thing if Bermuda does not add more hotel rooms. It would be better to have a lean and efficient hotel industry which delivers a good product to its guests and makes a reasonable profit than a flabby, sub-standard money-losing mass tourism sector.

DRUGS IN PRISON EDT Drugs in prison The Police and the Prisons Service may claim that there is a silver lining in the grey cloud of last week's botched drugs raid on Westgate, but members of the general public can be forgiven if they have a hard time seeing it.

There is no dispute that drugs are finding their way into the prisons, and it is likely, that some of them are being brought in by prison officers.

Hence last week's raid, which would have seen inmates' cells and officers' lockers searched. But a delay at the gate meant that anyone who needed to get rid of any drugs could have done so, and indeed the raid ended up yielding very little.

It is also disturbing that prison officials believed that there was a gun somewhere in the premises -- the reason why armed emergency response team officers were called in.

Leaving aside the obvious question of how a gun got into the prison in the first place, how could prison officials put the Police at risk by then refusing the ERT entry? By Friday, the gun no longer seemed to be a problem. What happened to it?