The Commission on Elections (Comelec) as well as the poll watchdogs have a full plate as the country prepares to hold three elections in the next two years. While everyone is gearing up for the barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections (BSKE) on Oct. 30, preparations are also already underway for at least two elections in...
The use of confidential funds (CF) by the Office of Vice President Sara Duterte, concurrently the secretary of education, continues to be in the news and in social media posts. While most of the comments dwell on the P125 million in confidential funds supposedly spent in an 11-day period in December 2022, among the other...
It was a comfortless humid night in July 1974 in Zamboanga City when agents of the National Intelligence Security Agency (Nisa) arrested me. I was then a philosophy undergraduate student and an activist at the University of the Philippines Diliman. I was visiting my mother’s hometown to attend the funeral of my maternal grandmother, Isabel...
Electoral fraud, also called vote rigging, voter fraud or election manipulation, involves illegal interference in the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. Through the TNTrio’s scrutiny of hard data coming from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) itself and...
Rice farmers and retailers are incurring heavy losses from the price cap imposed starting on Sept. 5 on regular-milled and well-milled rice even as it brings temporary relief to consumers. Executive Order No. 39 (EO 39) set the price of regular-milled and well-milled rice at P41 and P45 a kilo, respectively, amid soaring prices of...
Representatives of Smartmatic met with the future first lady before the May 9, 2022, presidential election, violating their contract as the automated election system (AES) provider for the Commission on Elections (Comelec), according to a motion to disqualify the company from involvement in the 2025 polls. The submission to the Comelec on Sept. 11 is...
(Third of three parts) Family and fossils: My cousin Isko and my first precious find, Family and fossils: My grandchild Meg and a treasure trove I have in my hand a fossil—the remains of an ancient creature called a trilobite. This animal-looking rock resulted when the trilobite was buried and minerals replaced its body parts....
(Second of two parts) The Philippines is finally going after plastic producers, but some companies are not cooperating Tucked in a corner of the Dultra family’s garage are sacks full of used plastic packaging. There are water bottles and bubble wraps—remnants of the family’s daily living consumption. “Our family has made a practice of keeping...
Multi-awarded television journalist and documentarist Atom Araullo filed a civil suit claiming P2 million in damages against former anticommunist task force spokesperson Lorraine Badoy-Partosa and Jeffrey Celiz for allegedly Red-tagging him and jeopardizing his safety. Araullo said Badoy-Partosa and Celiz, anchors of a program on SMNI television network, made “a series of unsubstantiated accusations and...
(First of two parts) Environmental groups in the Philippines have long advocated for a single-use plastics ban, and hundreds of proposed laws and resolutions were filed in Congress in the past decade to support the call. Nothing prospered. Instead, Congress required the country’s biggest plastic-producing companies to pay to collect and recycle their materials. The...
