A window to transform our poorest regions
What adds to the tragedy caused by Super Typhoon Yolanda is the fact that the areas hardest hit, Samar and Leyte provinces, have been among poorest in our country. It is as if lightning struck a group...
View ArticleThe buck stops at the LGUs?
President Benigno Simeon (BS) Aquino 3rd had vowed to stay in Tacloban City until everything in the disaster-hit city is okay. When the Supreme Court ruled that the congressional pork barrel is...
View ArticleThe JPE vs. Miriam saga continues
We might as well enjoy it while it lasts. By this time, it is known to everyone that Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile and Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago have no love lost for each other. Fact...
View ArticlePacquiao has proof of tax payments
Manny Pacquiao’s promoter says he expects certified United States (US) tax paperwork for the Filipino boxing to be received by Philippine authorities “very soon” after they froze the fighter’s assets....
View Article‘YOLANDA’ DEATH TOLL HITS 5,500, COULD STILL RISE
THE death toll from Super Typhoon Yolanda has risen to 5,500 but only 512 of the victims were identified. Maj. Reynaldo Balido, spokesman of the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council...
View ArticleCabinet told: Start rebuilding plan now
PRESIDENT Benigno Aquino 3rd on Wednesday issued an “overarching” directive to his Cabinet to start working to rebuild areas struck by Super Typhoon Yolanda based an action plan being crafted by...
View ArticleEnrile answers ‘deranged’ Miriam
After weeks of silence, Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile on Wednesday fired back at Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago who had accused him of masterminding the pork barrel scam, bankrolling the siege in Zamboanga...
View ArticleCA: Freeze assets of PDAF ‘players’
THE Court of Appeals (CA) has ordered the freezing of the bank deposits of former lawmakers, Jessica “Gigi” Reyes, the former chief of staff of Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, the aides of Senators Ramon...
View ArticleTyphoon facts 2013
After Typhoon Yolanda, some truths stare us in the face. One is that we are too many and too poor. Because of these conditions, we live anywhere and everywhere. In uplands which should be reserved for...
View Article‘Yolanda’: Divining the message of God
This column’s November 18 article, “Why, dear God, did you allow Yolanda?” was just one among countless musings in recent weeks on what, God knows, is His message or motive in the super typhoon’s...
View ArticlePyrrhic win?
I am not unhappy that the Supreme Court did not include in its unanimous ruling last week the 1987-1992 Salonga-Gonzalez Senate, my Senate, in its reported directive to probe pork barrel use or abuse....
View ArticleSex sizzles in China’s bedrooms
GUANGZHOU: A Japanese porn star prepares for a performance in her dressing room, unruffled by furious arguments outside among impatient Chinese fans eagerly anticipating her show. Rei Mizuna was in...
View ArticleCOA has been politicized
The disclosure the other day that the Commission on Audit (COA) itself received last year P143.7 million from President Aquino’s scandalous “Disbursement Acceleration Plan” (DAP) funds is a body blow...
View ArticleHigh-altitude brinkmanship
It’s a dangerous game of brinkmanship China and Japan are playing over a group of small islands in the East China Sea. Beijing and Tokyo have long been contesting ownership of the cluster of five...
View Article