As many as 23,000 cops are to be deployed for security during President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s State of the Nation Address on July 22. Maj. Gen. Jose Nartatez Jr., the chief of the National Capital Region Police Office, rejects criticisms of “overkill.” He mentions a number of protesters; it’s uncertain if the number includes those...
Category: Opinion
Post
Transcending borders: alternative approaches to territorial disputes
The rapidly unfolding reconfiguration of societies in the world today brings into question long-held systems of thought and action with respect to international relations, state-citizen interactions, concepts of national identity, territoriality, and national sovereignty. States are becoming less and less able to assert their notions of national sovereignty in the face of globalizing actors and...
Post
Asian Development Bank has a chance to get the ‘do no harm’ principle right
The board of directors of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is currently reviewing the draft of a proposed Environmental and Social Framework (ESF), which outlines new operational policies to better address environmental and social risks in the bank’s projects. This proposed framework seeks to update ADB’s 15-year-old Safeguard Policy Statement to ensure the relevance of...
Post
Sara Duterte’s breakaway
Vice President Sara Duterte telegraphed her imminent pullout from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s Cabinet on June 12 in as succinct a declaration as could be desired in response to reporters’ questions about the state of the UniTeam. In saying that their alliance was formed only for the 2022 elections and that they are no longer...
Post
Lines and limitations
Time was when lines were clear. Like the lines between right and wrong, man and woman, God and the Devil. But now it is all about ambiguity, gray zone tactics, the hybrid world of virtual and real reality combined. Where are the lines? Some are purely illusory, like the infamous 10-dash line drawn by halfwits...
Post
Spectacle at the Senate
It’s not as though such a spectacle hasn’t happened before, whether in the Senate or in the House of Representatives. But a week after the fact, bits and pieces of information regarding Juan Miguel Zubiri’s removal as Senate president by his peers continue to keep it grist for the mill, as well as to demonstrate...
Post
Time, through the looking glass
Before the advent of clocks and calendars, our mirror image was already a clever way to signify the passage of time. Our body is a stand-alone time-teller. True, it cannot show us the numbers on which the long hand and short hand fall. It cannot tell us how much time has passed, but it certainly...
Post
How to take back what’s ours
Surely many Filipinos were startled by footage shown on ANC last week of a Chinese Navy helicopter hovering perilously low over Sandy Cay last March 23. On the ground were Filipino marine scientists doing research on biodiversity and inspecting the apparently poor state of the corals at the sandbar about two nautical miles from the...
Post
Is the American empire unraveling?
We are not witnessing the last days of the American empire. Its crisis is real, but its trajectory of decline is likely to be protracted and uneven. After the fall of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, the United States stood at the apex of the unipolar world, unrivalled both politically and economically. Some...
Post
Guns snuff out lives and hinder national development
Civilians will now be allowed to own semiautomatic rifles as a result of the amendment of the implementing rules and regulations of Republic Act No. 10591 (or the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act), the Philippine National Police has announced. According to Britain’s The Guardian in 2012, citing data from the United Nations Office on...