THE Supreme Court has come under a storm of controversy after withholding the promulgation of a draft decision upholding a verdict of the Commission on Elections that disqualified Jocelyn Sy Limkaichong from sitting as a representative of Negros Oriental province in the House of Representatives on the grounds that she is a Chinese citizen.
Limkaichong won [...]

ON JANUARY 20, the United States inaugurates the administration of Barack Obama, the first black president in its history, in the midst of the most devastating global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
His inauguration comes under unprecedented historic circumstances: He confronts the recession as the United States is fighting two wars—in Iraq [...]

IF there is anything that triggers a spontaneous combustion of public outrage, it is the arrogance of officials in positions of authority who behave as if they were above the law in their encounters with private citizens.
This arrogance of power was amply demonstrated most recently in the Dec. 26 alleged manhandling of businessman Delfin de [...]

THE blog community went up in arms on the side of the De la Paz family shortly after the Dec. 26 mauling of its members at the Valley Golf Club allegedly by two sons of Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman over a breach of golf etiquette.
Businessman Delfin de la Paz, 56, and his son Bino, [...]

THE military coup that seized power following the death of President Lansana Conte of Guinea in West Africa on Dec. 22 was a classic textbook model of a swift and bloodless power grab seldom seen in the history of coup-prone Third World countries in Africa and Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.
It stood on [...]

FILIPINOS shuttered the bad news of 2008 with a last spasm of violence in the alleged mauling of the De la Paz family members by the sons of Agrarian Reform Secretary Nasser Pangandaman and their bodyguards over an altercation involving golf etiquette at the Valley Golf Club on Dec. 26.
The golf club mayhem sparked a [...]

IN one of the longest Christmas holidays in living memory, Filipinos stepped into a vacuum of a stupor of two weeks beginning on Dec. 24, bracing themselves for the worst of the Great Recession in 2009, without any concrete plan to blunt its shocks except wishful thinking.
Within this vacuum, the government ceased to be visible. [...]

THE tedious biography of former Speaker Jose de Venecia may be viewed from many angles: as a literary output, whose contents are to be taken seriously; as a contribution to legislative statesmanship, which is what the book claims to be; as a belated whistle-blowing exercise on the alleged shenanigans of the administration of President Gloria [...]

IT was a day of infamy in the tortured saga of agrarian reform in this country.
On Wednesday, the Senate and the House of Representatives passed Joint Resolution No. 19 extending the 20-year-old Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) for six months after it expires at the end of 2008.
After that grace period, the fate of CARP [...]

THE economic or political outlook for 2009 is gloomy, or less gloomy, depending upon where one stands on the globe or how one would like to deceive himself.
There are more pessimists than optimists, but the Philippines is one of the few places where businessmen and government officials believe the country is lucky in that it [...]