Rep. Satur Ocampo and Rep. Liza Maza of the Makabayang Koalisyon ng Mamamayan (Makayaban) announced today that they have joined the Nacionalista Party ticket as senatorial guest candidates in the 2010 elections. They also said they are supporting the candidacy of Manny Villar for president and Loren Legarda for vice president.
In this audio clip, Edita Burgos, the mother of missing activist Jonas Burgos, talks about her recent trip to Europe where she brought her campaign to force the Philippine government to surface her son. She also talks about the human-rights situation in the Philippines and why President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is a “bad mother” to the Filipino people. 
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Poor Education
Multisectoral groups held a protest in front of the US embassy last December 7, marking the first day of the international climate change negotiations. The protesters called for genuine and immediate actions to make accountable the world’s biggest polluters, headed by the United States, cut down their greenhouse gases emissions and pay for their environmental…
By JANESS ANN J. ELLAO
The failure of investigators to secure the crime scene, the apparent contamination of forensic evidence, and the weak rebellion case filed against the perpetrators have led people to believe that there is a high probability that the Ampatuan clan would walk away with the murder of 57 people, even as the case has generated a strong international concern.
By ALEXANDER MARTIN REMOLLINO The Ampatuans’ rise to the peak of political power was in no small part due to their ties with the military. In a most ironic twist, the military proposed the extension of martial law in Maguindanao until the 2010 elections purportedly to teach the Ampatuans “how to run peaceful and credible elections.”
A former chief of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), who is also one of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s most trusted men, is one of the directors of a big mining company that operates in a number of provinces, among them Bukidnon, which is one of the provinces where several indigenous-peoples’ communities are suffering under a reign of terror perpetrated by the military and paramilitary groups.
When it comes to human rights and democracy, the Arroyo government never fails to provide ironies.