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Surely, the increasing number of self-declared poor among our people is a cause for national concern. The government’s poverty-reduction program definitely needs serious evaluation, what with the contributory negative causes such as calamities, both natural and man-made, that come aplenty every year. This negative trend notwithstanding, two positive developments at the beginning of the new year provide us reasons to cheer up.
More than 473 million young people, nearly one-fifth of all children in the world, suffer from the worst level of violence since World War II (1939-1945). This, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, as lucidly reported by The Guardian.
Considering the devastations wrought by recent typhoons in many parts of the country, an activist group has urged Marcos Jr. and his family to pay their P203-billion estate tax deficiency that fell due 25 long years ago.
All these evasively general, vague statements are surely covering up something much bigger. The Filipino people are entitled to know.
Discreetly flown into the country last April, the Typhon mid-range capability missile system was deployed during the 39th Balikatan US-Phl joint military exercises, held a few days later (April 22 to May 10).
On Oct. 4, the Sandiganbayan Second Division granted a motion by Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his mother – in behalf of the Marcos Sr. estate – to dismiss an ill-gotten wealth civil case against them. Supposedly, because of the “inordinate delay” in its prosecution, justice was being done to them.
I was one of those who spent long years behind bars. Brutal physical and psychological torture was inflicted upon my body and mind. I survived by staying silent – as did others who refused to submit to the demands of our torturers.
A series of academic lectures that were apparently meant to upgrade, and hopefully deodorize, the legacy of the sitting President’s late father was held this week in Laoag City. The exercise, however, seems to have provoked a negative backlash in social media.
At a global forum in Manila in May, President Marcos Jr. warned that “if by a willful act” committed by China a Filipino is killed in the West Philippine Sea, it would be “very close” to an “act of war” that could cause the Philippines to invoke the 1951 Phl-US Mutual Defense Treaty.
Some time ago, a distinguished patriot, someone I am proud to call a friend and noble kababayan, marked his 90th birthday and showed us all that a long life may diminish certain of our powers, but only deepens wisdom and affirms the strength of experience.
Throughout his first two years in Malacañang, President Marcos Jr. has stayed silent on the issue of continuing the GRP-NDFP peace talks, which his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, had resumed in 2016 and then backed away from in 2019.
Like fishermen struggling in the waters of the open sea after the capsizing of their boats, human rights workers are crying out to be rescued from the Philippine government’s apparent determination to stop them from carry out their legitimate, and necessary, work.
Now operating from Basa Air Base in Floridablanca, Pampanga are MQ-9A Reaper drones from the United States military. Employed primarily by the US Marine Corps for collecting military intelligence, the unmanned aircraft are used secondarily (but even more troublingly) to strike against “dynamic execution targets.”
It has been 36 years since president Corazon Aquino created the Presidential Human Rights Committee, in a much-hailed move that signaled to the Filipino people that her administration was firmly committed to the protection and promotion of human rights.
For almost six years, red-tagging has been a major component of the bloody counterinsurgency campaign – initiated and implemented by the Duterte regime and sustained by the Marcos Jr. administration – through the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).
This month, on May 17-18, the International Peoples’ Tribunal, a quasi-judicial forum periodically convened in Europe, will focus on the Philippines for the sixth time since 1980.
The Marcos Jr. administration appears to be “slowly but surely allowing the country to be dragged into the massive US-led military build-up against China, threatening to engulf the whole region in war.”
Engraved in golden letters on the granite Wall of Remembrance at the Bantayog Memorial Center in Quezon City are the names of the heroes and martyrs who fought with the people against the long Marcos dictatorship.
In an interview on Bloomberg TV last Wednesday, as reported in another national daily, he made two related comments that could represent important government policy stands. First, regarding China’s increasing aggressive moves against Philippine vessels in the West Philippine Sea; second, about the United States’ repeated assurance of its “iron-clad” defense commitment under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.
Growing up in Sta. Rita, Pampanga, where I was born into a rice-farming family eight decades back, I enjoyed watching seasonal farmworkers do their tasks during the planting and harvesting seasons.
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