The new year as a season of possibility is looking better and better for the Philippines.
Better than the SWS surveys that said that most Filipinos are looking at 2019 with optimism, and that more Filipinos rate themselves as poor, is Bloomberg’s upbeat report on the Philippine economy.
The climate change debate has become more complicated as the United Nations continues to double down on its forecast of climate catastrophe in response to near-global rejection of its warning.
The situation will intensify this December as nearly 200 countries meet for COP 24 in Katowice, Poland (the curious acronym stands for Conference of the Parties) to discuss a global plan of action against climate change.
To comprehend the complex arguments and abstruse terminology of the climate debate, I have been helped by the advice of one scientist who said it is essential to grasp the difference between weather and climate.
I have been lately mesmerized by the awesome power of words, even just a single word to alter the perception of reality, or trigger outrage.
In the arcane world of natural disasters, names matter a great deal—not only because of history and science, but because people need them in order to remember or mourn what and whom they have lost.
I thought of writing this essay on population at this time when our thoughts are turned towards both the dead and the living with equal reverence.
“Wars are always clarifying” is a line that I jotted down from a column in the New York Times that was written two years after the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. The subject was ostensibly “9/11” and the war on terrorism that it set off (Thomas Friedman wrote the line).
A new university research study has added a twist to the saying, “honesty is the best policy,” which has been immortalized by the Holy Bible, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin and countless mothers.
First read
In “The Interpreter” op-ed column in the New York Times, Max Fisher reported that President Obama, during his final year in office, spent time in acknowledging United States’ misdeeds in various countries that he has visited.
First Read
Having expounded on the “rule of law” in my previous column (“Rule of law: The principle Duterte has not trampled on,” Manila Times, September 6, 2016), I feel bound to also do the same on the subject of “human rights,” especially because the issue has driven a wedge in Philippine –American relations, and has momentarily unhinged Philippine standing in the United Nations.
First Read
Because in the first draft of this column, I used the word “Draconian” to describe the unprecedented measures that President Duterte has adopted in his war on drugs, I was led by my research to the story of Draco, from whose name the word was taken.
‘Whatever else shall pass away, this must remain’ THIS is the standard that I privately apply to the inaugural addresses of Presidents and Prime Ministers, in this country or elsewhere. Oftentimes, the speeches just perish on the page or on the computer monitor. But a few remain and grab mind and heart, eliciting occasional recollection and quotation.