WELL, TO be precise, 99,900,177, according to one forecast. That makes our country the 12th most populous nation on earth. Ours is the fourth most crowded place on earth after India, Bangladesh and Japan (on a list that excludes such exceptional cases such as Monaco, Singapore and Malta.)

It is a staggering figure. President Aquino presides over a nation nearly double the number of Filipinos when his mother assumed power in 1986. Since 2008 when the Reproductive Health Bill was filed in Congress, there are 4 million more Filipinos. And while Congress debated on the bill, which would empower Filipinos to choose whether to have children or not, and going by surveys that 36 percent to 44 percent of births in the country are unwanted, there have been as many as 1.8 million unwanted births in the past three years.

Worse, it is the poor who mostly have these unwanted births, as they do not have access to contraceptive information and means. (How can a laborer earning P200 a day afford condoms sold at P30 per pack?) While Congress debated and the Catholic Church threatened fire and brimstone against its supporters, our country produced 1.8 million more poor Filipinos.

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MAYBE IT’S because another year is passing this month for me, but I can’t but be awed by some people who are decades older than me: Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, 86, former President Fidel V. Ramos, 84 and Sen. Joker P. Arroyo, 83.

These octogenarians are the living Filipinos I admire most, and to paraphrase a child’s compliment (revised for my phase of life): I’d like to be like them when I grow up (to my 80s). They certainly inspire me to look forward to my coming decades. I hope our new generation of leaders will emulate their patriotism and political wisdom.

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WE OFTEN tend to forget that our country is part of the planet, and that the economies of nations—even their culture and politics—are getting closer and closer to each other, affecting each other more and more. The state of our nation will always be affected by the state of the world, just as it had always been.

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY. President Aquino is lucky in that he assumes office in precisely the period when the state of the world economy is looking better. After the slowdown triggered by the global financial crisis that started in the United States in 2007, the global economy is expected to pick up in the first year of the Aquino II presidency.

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This type of hurricane is a very strong tempest, so many and so strong hitting these islands that neither Virgil nor Ovid nor any other poet I have read can describe its destructive power. These occur very often and we suffer so much, that even after experiencing them, it is difficult to believe these can happen.—F. I. Alzina, a Jesuit missionary in Philippines, 1668

IT HAS been our nightmare since our nation emerged. Out of the 192 countries in the world, ours has the dubious distinction of being the nation worst hit by typhoons. I do not refer just to the frequency of typhoons per year, or the destruction wrought by a one typhoon in a particular year.

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Talk about an attack, almost literally, on the Catholic Church.

Just a few weeks ago, police in the Belgian city of Bruges raided the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church and the residence of the recently retired Cardinal of Belgium to gather evidence to bolster accusations of child sexual abuse committed by the clergy.

The investigations accelerated with the resignation, after admitting to having sexually abused a young boy, of the Bishop of the city of Bruges – a center of Catholicism in Protestant Europe, a pilgrim’s city where stands Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child sculpture and the awesome Church of Our Lady.

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A RECENT TIME MAGAZINE COVER STORY ON the World Cup 2010 games observed: “One reason why football is the world’s most popular game is that it is just so accessible, you can play anywhere.”

That’s not exactly true. Basketball is the more accessible game for one major reason: a basketball court is 10 times smaller than a football pitch, and therefore much easier to find.

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WITH THE WORLD CUP 2010 MADNESS AT ITS height, when European capitals stand still as their national teams compete, you are likely to ask yourself: “Are we so different that we don’t play the game everyone’s playing around the world?”

It’s not a trivial question. Nearly one billion human beings are said to be watching the World Cup 2010 games, and we’re not. We’re very strangely not participants in what an American columnist termed as the “human family at play.” If football, as a historian pointed out, is “the new religion,” then we Filipinos are weirdly the fringe group atheists. And it’s a game we Filipinos can dream of excelling in some day, unlike the tall man’s game, basketball, in which we are genetically handicapped so that we’ll never stand out.

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