I congratulate journalist Raissa Robles for the painstaking research behind what she puts in her blog, raissarobles.com. I wish more journalists would follow in her footsteps instead of taking the easy (and reportedly more lucrative) path of basing their news reports on what are clearly press releases from interested parties (as indicated by the fact...

Selling the country as a tourist destination has been in the news for some time. At last, the Tourism Department claims that it has found the magic taglines: “It’s more fun in the Philippines.” Those words invoke whatever pleasant experience one might imagine about the country, perhaps “sun, beaches, natural beauty, historic churches, golf courses...

Philippine public infrastructure lags behind its ASEAN-5 neighbors by at least a decade. At the same time, the country is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. Whether we like it or not, the country will be visited by some two dozen typhoons of varying severity. The country will be exposed to the...

Year-on-year January headline inflation rate fell to 3.9%, slightly lower than the December 2011 rate of 4.2%, and the average inflation rate of 4.8% for the entire year of 2011. Again, for the laymen, this does not mean that prices are falling. On contrary, they continue to climb but a slower rate.

It is a popular if seldom openly expressed belief that a democracy gone bad cannot heal itself. Democracy can and many times does fall into a quagmire where all the democratic avenues of accountability have been effectively compromised and all the dominant social forces believe that their best bet is upholding the status quo. It...

It warms the cockles of my heart to see how two of our most senior citizens are belying, in the most dramatic manner, the conventional belief that growing old is equated to being a burden to society and/or the end of one’s usefulness to it -- people who should just be put out to pasture,...

I can’t remember which senator said it—that there are actually two trials going on: one inside the Senate session hall, and another one outside it, the latter at a faster pace. While the senator did not go into specifics, I am reasonably certain that he was alluding to the trial by publicity being conducted...

Thousands of Filipino families were held in suspense in the month of January. Young people of age took college entrance exams some months earlier. By the second week of January, all the results were released. Based on the number of test applicants, the most sought admission in the nation to college is the University of...

The Philippine economy grew by 3.7% in 2011, down from 7.6% GDP growth in 2010. That kind of growth is nothing to be proud of. But to add insult to a job-challenged and starving people, administration officials called the modest economic expansion as inclusive.

If the paper written in 2007 by Deputy Ombudsman for the Visayas Pelagio S. Apostol is accurate, Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales is not only sitting on a gold mine of information that can root out the corrupt among the highest government officials, but also the equipment that can get at that gold mine with ease....