Thirty-nine years ago, President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, allowing him to rule the country for 13  years.

I was then a 19-year-old Ateneo college dropout heading the Manila and Rizal organization of the Communist Party of the Philippines, then a rag-tag band of dreamy-eyed baby-boomers (founder Jose Sison was then 33 years old, the legendary Kumander Dante, 29).   The party’s analysis was that the Plaza Miranda bombing of the opposition rally a year earlier had intensified “the split within the ruling class,” so much so that Marcos would soon declare a hated martial law—and create a revolutionary situation chaotic enough for the communists to take over power.

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Using diplomatic language, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao unexpectedly asked President Aquino to apologize for the massacre of August 23 last year of eight Hong Kong tourists in a hostage situation bungled by his government, diplomatic sources say. Mr. Aquino was caught flatfooted, as his foreign affairs officials had said they were sure the issue was a “dead one.”

Though stated in a roundabout way, Wen’s message was unmistakable, and wasn’t even made confidential, the sources say, pointing to the official account by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mr. Aquino’s September 1 meeting: “Wen urged the Philippine government to attach importance to the requests of the government and people of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and properly handle the aftermath of last year’s incident in which tourists from Hong Kong were held hostage in Manila.”

The main request made by the victim’s relatives was for Mr. Aquino to formally apologize for his government’s blunders in the hostage crisis.  The other two requests were for cash compensation, and for the government to file criminal cases against officials who bungled the crisis.

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This paper’s Talk of the Town last week, which Manuel Alcuaz’s piece, “Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Elections,” was, well, a ghost story. According to the editor’s introduction, there was this “rediscovery” of Alcuaz’s paper submitted way back in 2006.

“By coincidence or serendipity,” the introduction said, was the piece found, and when the editor decided to run it he was surprised (now you can hear that “X-Files” theme in the background) to learn that Alcuaz had passed away. Not only that, you are supposed to have gooseflesh. According to the introduction, when the editor called up the number in the cover letter to talk to Alcuaz, the phone company message was the number had yet to be assigned. (Reality check: The news on the death of Alcuaz, the fire-brand Linggoy’s brother, and a personality in the IT and management circles, was widely circulated in cyberspace, and reported in several newspapers the day after he died on July 24.)

The political ghost story peddled: A patriot whose article didn’t see print in 2006 has reached out from the great beyond to expose the 2004 electoral fraud committed by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Alcuaz’s ghost extricated it somewhere and put it on top of the editor’s pile of letters.

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