In recent months, China’s flurry of reclamation work and building of military installations on several of the islets and reefs in the disputed portions of the West Philippine Sea (WPS)/South China Sea (SCS) have set alarm bells ringing about China’s aggressive design to claim almost the entirety of the area as part of its national […]
The story of Mary Jane Veloso is Flor Contemplacion Part II but for the much happier ending: her execution by firing squad for drug trafficking having been held in abeyance by Indonesian President Jokowi Widodo at the eleventh hour. In the case of Contemplacion, which by the way happened twenty years ago, last ditch efforts […]
Readers of this ten-something-year-old column have likely observed that the essays I write are mostly political in nature; an outcome of my being a social activist from way back when. But once in a rare while yet for good reason, the theme becomes more personal. Then again as the feminists of the late sixties phrased […]
President Benigno S. Aquino III’s speech at the PNPA graduation was meant to write finis to the public uproar over the bloody, botched counterterrorist operation in Mamasapano, Maguindanao. Instead it only managed to further rile a people sick and tired of the finger-pointing, the obfuscation and lies about what really happened, the stonewalling about key […]
The failed coup in Venezuela last February and US President Obama’s declaration this March that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is a “national security threat” to the US have escaped most Filipinos’ notice. Understandably so, with the entire country preoccupied with another monumental blunder by the Aquino government that has cost scores of lives including […]
As of this writing, two marches are taking place on the 8th of March. One is the annual celebration of International Women’s Day led by the militant women of Gabriela with the spotlight on the critical role of women in the struggle against the beleaguered US-backed Aquino regime in order to put in its place […]
Aquino cover-up
The second address to the nation about the Mamasapano incident by President B.S. Aquino last Friday was more of the same glib BS. To the fallen 44’s relatives, the self-proclaimed “Father of the Nation” said he feels for them just as if he had lost 44 of his “children”. SAF Director Napenas is being set […]
Epic fail in leadership and intelligence
It was a rout – a massacre. On the early morning of January 25, forty four out of close to 400 elite, US-trained, Special Action Force (SAF) policemen were killed in a 12-hour firefight, in a remote barrio in Mamasapano, Maguindanao — a known rebel stronghold of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). They were […]
More than a year ago when Pope Francis had barely warmed the papal office in Rome, his words and style of leadership signaled something new and welcome to an estimated more than one billion Catholics the world over, many of whom had become estranged from the institutional church over the decades. He made known his […]
A day before International Human Rights Day, a long-delayed US Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), or simply put torture, on post-9/11 suspected “terrorists” held in “black sites” or secret detention sites hosted by certain US allies, was finally made public. But only a 500-page […]