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President Rodrigo Duterte is absolutely right. The Balangiga bells, seized by United States Army soldiers from the Catholic church of Balangiga town, Samar in 1902, “are part of our national heritage,” and should be returned to the Philippines. Mr. Duterte made the...
Never mind the 2017 Duterte State of the Nation Address, which was replete with profanities, self-serving claims of current and future progress on various fronts, among them the regime’s brutal and failing war on drugs, and justifications for the use of...
“There is a time of reckoning” for everyone, said President Rodrigo Duterte’s chief legal counsel, Salvador Panelo. “Sooner or later,” he intoned, “the law will catch up on (sic) those who use power or wealth to shield themselves from the majesty of the law.”...
The latest rants from the perplexing region of Duterte Land have understandably provoked the same outrage, anger and exasperation as most of their antecedents have been doing during the last 12 months. One of them was an open threat to imprison the critics of the...
The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) have launched an online means of identifying and guarding against the spread of fake news. They’re using Fakeblok, the Google Chrome plug-in which...
Some critics of United States global policy say that the US not only supports the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS); it also created it (see, for example, www.global research.ca). Although that claim was hooted down as part of his disinformation campaign,...
Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez is quite right. To be of any use, any discussion or debate on terrorism and terrorists -- specifically to determine if an incident in which dozens of people are killed is an act of terrorism or not -- can only be meaningful if the...
Is President Rodrigo Duterte preparing a coup d’etat à la Marcos against the Republic and himself as a democratically elected president? It was a joke, but like Mr. Duterte’s other off-hand remarks and past one-liners, it had an edge of seriousness in it....
The Philippine delegation to the third cycle of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) co-chaired by Senator Alan Peter Cayetano and Deputy Executive Secretary for Legal Affairs Menardo Guevarra has a credibility...
He’s the commander-in-chief of the “war” on drugs and drops the word “kill” so often some think that’s the limit of his English vocabulary. He’s the last person in these isles of violence one would expect to be a pacifist. But he sounded like one last April 9....
In 1987 Corazon Aquino filed a libel complaint against the late columnist Luis Beltran for saying that she hid under her bed during a coup attempt by military goons who thought her soft on communism. She went on to break precedent by testifying against him in...
The argument that such values as human rights and the right to life are alien to Asian culture and impositions from the West, is not new. But not since the Martial Law period (1972-1986) and only recently has any Filipino functionary or politician demanded that...
At about the same time that the peace panels of the Philippine government (GPH) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) were concluding back channel talks in Utrecht, the Netherlands, during which they agreed to return to the negotiating table,...
About extrajudicial killings (EJKs) in Davao city there have been rumors for over a decade. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) looked into them in 2003 and found that the killing of dozens of people, most of them male, and under both...
The 31st anniversary of EDSA 1986 was marked -- the government didn’t exactly celebrate it -- with both chaos and indifference. The disorder was evident in the differences in the various groups’ and even the government’s separate and conflicting activities to...
“Low key” is how this year’s commemoration of the February 1986 civilian-military uprising known as EDSA 1 is being described by the Duterte regime. There will be none of the “Salubungan” (the meeting of the key leaders of the mutiny and defecting police and...
The campaign by President Rodrigo Duterte and his allies in Congress for the restoration of the death penalty is replete with irony. Capital punishment is supposed to discourage criminality while at the same time insuring that those who commit certain crimes get...
The unfortunately named Magdalo group -- the Magdalo was the Katipunan faction that murdered Andres Bonifacio and Antonio Luna -- identified with Senator Antonio Trillanes IV has a point. It doesn’t do anyone any good for the Philippine government (GPH),...
Almost always inaccurate are generalizations about any group, whether a race, a social class, an ethnic community, a profession -- or, for that matter, a government agency and its personnel. There’s always someone who’s an exception to a rule widely presumed to be...
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