RECENT WIRE REPORTS bannered Vatican’s latest pronouncement: Pollution is now a sin. Yes, Virginia, it is now a sin to pollute, according to Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, who was described by Reuters as “the Vatican’’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance.”
“If yesterday’s sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a […]

THE OUSTER of Jose de Venecia as House Speaker last month signaled not just the downfall of the ruling Lakas-NUCD but also the relegation to the dustbin of its supposed soul – Christian Democracy. It signaled the end of discussions on the ideology that the late Raul Manglapus, statesman and diplomat, introduced into Philippine politics. Lakas-NUCD […]

POLICIES ARE important to governance. Without policies, governments can’t protect, bring order and help their constituents live peacefully together. All the functions of governments – to make laws, to provide services and to keep order – involve policies. Laws, executive orders, and even the parliamentary rules of order that govern the enactment of laws, are sets […]

WHILE THE Iloilo River is not as grand as the Chao Phraya River in Thailand, there are similarities between the two bodies of water. Both navigable, they have become septic tanks for homes, industries and hotels in cities with sizes respectively proportional to their length and breadth. The 11-km Iloilo River, actually an arm of the […]

LIMITING the entries of public utility jeepneys to the city proper area through a one-month traffic experimentation will hit two birds with one stone. First, it will decongest traffic in our narrow streets. Second, it will improve air quality in the city and contribute to efforts at averting global warming.
Traffic congestion has been one of the […]

IF THE public realm is the physical manifestation of the common good, then Iloilo City’s common good is, essentially, not good. What we see in our public realm reflects how we as a people value the common good. Considering that Iloilo City has a serious garbage problem, then we too, as a people, have one. And […]

POLICY EXPERT Owen Byrd wrote an interesting précis on why our society and the environment in which we live in are wearing down, and proposed what should be considered to arrest such erosion. Byrd used the tool that architects use in looking at the world, that is, by dividing space into two types: the private realm […]