There is something perverse in the way the leaders of Sigaw ng Bayan are peddling the shift to a parliamentary system. They advertise it as if it were a miraculous cure for all our problems. They claim that it will treat political instability and end political adventurism among our soldiers; that it will spur economic … Read more
Profiting from test leaks is probably as old as testing itself. Advances in the technology of retrieval and duplication of information, coupled with the heightened competitiveness in almost all professions, may have made resort to it easier and more tempting. Even so, we may assume that the methods and principles for preventing it and managing … Read more
The state of national emergency that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared on Feb. 24, 2006 was supposed to have lasted only one week. But events in the last six months suggest a different conclusion: emergency rule may have, in fact, become Ms Arroyo’s paradigm of governance. In various parts of the country today, the military conducts … Read more
All over the Arab world and beyond, it is Hezbollah that is on everyone’s lips these days — not the Al-Qaida, not the Taliban, not the Hamas. Israel’s army, the most powerful in the Middle East, is not fighting the Lebanese national army. It is fighting a militant armed group inside Lebanon that is possibly … Read more
I do not share the view of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) that impeachment cannot yield any truth unless it is performed according to fair rules and with the common good in mind. I believe that the impeachment of any president, no matter how it is conducted, can be an important source … Read more
I had a hard time following Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s recent State of the Nation Address. It wasn’t just because the indiscriminate applause that punctuated nearly every sentence was interfering with the flow of her hour-long speech. It was more because the whole speech was making no sense to me until I began to pay more … Read more
At the heart of the nation’s current crisis is the failure of its political system to put to rest persistent doubts about the right of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to continue exercising the powers of the presidency. The principal cause of this failure is the system’s inability to protect its institutions against abuse by a reckless … Read more
My brother Pablo David, better known as Father Ambo, became a bishop on the same day the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines put out a pastoral statement that puzzled many people. The statement touched on a range of issues, but it was the bishops’ position on impeachment that was eagerly awaited. Many rightly thought … Read more
In the 1880s, scores of Filipino students started to arrive in Europe to study. Many of them were sent abroad by their parents to keep them from getting into trouble with the Spanish Government in Manila that had become more repressive in its vain effort to pre-empt the revolutionary tide. Many went to Europe to … Read more
“The fight against the Left remains the glue that binds,” Gloria Macapagal Arroyo told her Cabinet the other day, after ordering the budget secretary to release an extra P1 billion to boost the renewed effort to crush the communist insurgency. Whoever fed her this wrong and dangerous line is setting the stage for fascist rule. … Read more