EDITOR’S NOTE: The detained former senator Leila de Lima was granted bail by Judge Gener Gito today, Nov. 13. Gito is the presiding judge of Mandaluyong City Regional Trial Court Branch 206, which will now hear the last of the three drug cases filed against her. The other two have been dismissed. CoverStory is republishing...
Author: Rosario A. Garcellano (Rosario A. Garcellano)
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Innocents dying in ‘a tragedy of war’
A bit of recent CNN footage on Gaza partially shows three children laid out on their back, their tiny legs and feet looking vulnerable. It takes only seconds—blink, and you miss it—but the fleeting footage of the small corpses is a graphic display of Israel’s relentless moves to wipe Hamas off the face of the...
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When public money is spent confidentially
The Office of Vice President Sara Duterte has denied her involvement in the recent disruption of traffic on Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City purportedly to allow her convoy to pass unhampered. By then the video showing all sorts of vehicles at full stop on the busy avenue had, in the common parlance, gone viral, accompanied...
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Death by drowning in Laguna de Bay
Friday on ANC, the skipper of the Aya Express, Donald Anain, recounts what happened in the waters of Laguna de Bay off Binangonan, Rizal, on July 27. Snippets of the tragedy were reported by some survivors a day earlier, more or less jibing with Anain’s account of how, buffeted by strong winds, the motorized banca...
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What’s the full story behind the ‘Love’ tourism rebrand?
Exactly who are behind the scandal that threw the monkey wrench into the “Love the Philippines” rebranding campaign of the Department of Tourism? The people need to know. The nagging question requires an answer so the guilty can be made accountable and the red-faced DOT led by Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco can begin to pick...
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Memory machine
So Lyra up and did what she said she had long planned. One evening last week she came home laughing and gleeful from a jaunt with a friend, toting a shiny black box marked “Motorino” and daring her sister and me: “Guess what! Guess what!” But I was distracted and annoyed by breaking news on...
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When Arroyo’s ‘favorite companion’ picked up the dinner tab in New York
The Philippine power structure continues to highlight intriguing peaks and valleys, and attentive observers are recalling long-ago details after Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ’s “demotion” from her lofty post as senior deputy speaker of the House of Representatives. Time was when Leyte Rep. Martin Romualdez, now speaker of the chamber, was deemed a “favorite...
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In the trenches of the law
“See you in the trenches,” the human rights lawyer and law professor Ted Te said at the tail end of a brief online post addressed to the passers of the 2022 bar examination, whose names were released by the Supreme Court last April 14. Te’s message evoked in the attentive observer, not the glamorous, de...
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Hail and farewell: Luis V. Teodoro
The public intellectual Luis V. Teodoro was not known to be ailing, which was why his many friends and admirers could not immediately come to grips with word that he had passed, felled by a heart attack. How could that bodily treachery occur in someone who watched his health as carefully as he watched the...
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Merrymaking gone south, or a portent of things to come
Almost a month into 2023 and the rain still won’t stop in certain parts of the country, as though portending a bad time ahead despite the lunar new year’s promise of “a year of recovery.” The “shear line,” or the point where the cold northeast monsoon meets the warm easterlies from the Pacific—a relatively new...
