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...
Category: Opinion
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End Israeli apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza, and free Palestine
I am 82, I deserve to retire. Words don’t flow freely anymore. Political passions have to make way for naps and junk novels. But political events have a way of stirring passions. More than 7,000 Palestinians dead from 6,000 bombs raining down their heads! I can’t stay quiet in the face of this. Many profound,...
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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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Pity this nation
Ours is a country of failed institutions. Let us cite two of many—Congress and the Commission on Elections (Comelec). Congress is responsible for producing legislation to ensure that the spirit of the Philippine Constitution is upheld. Yet, 36 years after the ratification of the Constitution, there is yet no enabling law prohibiting political dynasties. The...
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What to Know: Are confidential funds secret funds not subject to audit?
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...
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Yes, we have no tomato, we have no tomato today
Friends and I have been comparing online what we were spending on food, what we were scrimping on, what little joys and luxuries we decided to do without. And we all agreed about making these sacrifices during these times, but what about the greater number of indigent Filipinos? What were they eating given the rising...
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The greatest source of economic and social inequality
Holding title to property is the greatest source of economic and social inequality. Holding no title of any kind, whether to property or to social or academic standing, is a sure indication of being on the fringes, a ticket to poverty. Being king or emperor, or general or president, or doctor or attorney or engineer—titles...
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Norma Rae, Sister Stella L, and newspaper union organizing under martial law
They said it couldn’t be done. It was martial law, after all, and among many freedoms suppressed by Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s repressive regime (1965-1986) was the right to organize a legitimate union. Strikes were banned, and only government-friendly unions were recognized. But a hardy group of journalists at the Journal group of publications (Times Journal,...
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Detention, ‘town arrest’ under martial law
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...
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What’s the endgame for electoral fraud?
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...