FINANCE officials of the Group of 7 (G-7), the world’s wealthiest industrial countries, pledged over the weekend to take “all necessary steps to unfreeze credit and money markets” to end the biggest upheaval to hit the global financial system since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“This is a period like none of us has ever […]

MY heart broke because I couldn’t be present at the Oct. 3 fund-raising event for Oscar D. Francisco (Oca to his friends), but I told myself that I would do my part to help him. The affair was held at Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Monument of Heroes).
Oca’s name is not about to be etched on […]

PRESIDENTIAL aversion to untrammeled dialogue with the international press came to a head on Thursday when Malacañang aborted a scheduled press conference with the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (Focap).
The scrapping of what would have been a free-wheeling encounter with Focap plunged President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s often hostile relations with the media to its lowest […]

IT WAS A BIG but not a glitzy, showy affair. Definitely not for the loud society pages but more for the art critics maybe. From the invitation to the event, the book, the food and drinks to the renderings in sculpture and painting, and most of all, the music — everything suggested muted elegance. Perhaps […]

ON SEPTEMBER 10, former defense secretary Avelino Cruz Jr. stirred up public anxieties about a creeping authoritarianism, with a warning to the nation to be “vigilant and fight any attempt” to impose emergency rule if hostilities in Mindanao escalate and ignite terrorist attacks in other parts of the country.
The warning was followed by a flurry […]

“My knife is my wife,” Dr. Jose “Ting” Tiongco told me 12 years ago. “My fascination with surgery has been total I have forgotten to get married.”
Ting is a brilliant surgeon, one of the passionate doctors who blazed a trail in healthcare cooperatives in Davao and later in the rest of the Philippines. Twelve years […]

WRITING for the Financial Times (Sept. 20-21), Chrystia Freeland said that on Sept. 15, 2008, “the era of Ronald Reagan officially came to an end.”
The sunny confidence in the superiority of the American way, she said, “has been undermined now not only by Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib but also by the fact that this financial […]

THE Bush administration unveiled over the weekend a plan authorizing the government to take over $700 billion in worthless assets and bad debts held by failing institutions in the largest financial bailout ever taken by any American administration since the Great Depression.
Declaring that the United States was facing “unprecedented challenges,” President George W. Bush said, […]

THE Philippine government started its midyear economic road show on Wednesday at the worst possible time. The briefing by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her economic management team sailed head-on into the full fury of the “Black Monday” financial upheaval on Wall Street that saw the collapse of two of the leading US investment houses: Lehman […]

I INVITED myself to the factory. The company does not need media exposure or publicity. It doesn’t sell its products here. In fact, the owner requested that there would be no mention of his name (let’s call him “Mr. K”), the company’s name, the brand names, etc. It was I who was interested to know […]