I WOULDN’T really have bothered with UP Professor Jay Batongbacal’s little-read post on social media, which, disgracefully for an academic, hurled cheap ad hominems against me. But so far, his has been the only reply to my columns that point out that the Maritime Zones Act, signed by President Marcos Jr., has given up the Kalayaan Island Group, which, ironically, his father annexed from the Spratlys and made part of our territory in 1978, through Presidential Decree 1596.

Batongbacal’s post gives us a chance to further expound on my past columns on the issue and to explain why the much-vaunted 2016 arbitral ruling in the Philippine suit against China has been stupidly used by our pro-US leaders to jettison the KIG and taken off our map.

For starters, I was shocked that Batongbacal claims that “no country, not our competing neighbors in East Asia nor those outside the region, has recognized PD 1596, whether its claim to land territory nor the waters enclosed within.” That is a lie.

THIS episode will go to down in the Congress’ history as the depths of depravity the House of Representatives has sunk into.

Never before has the House served its Speaker’s ambition — for hundreds of millions of reasons, as they say — to succeed his cousin, President Marcos, in any form of government possible, an agenda which requires the total demonization of former president Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, a shoo-in to be the country’s next president, Vice President Sara Duterte.

But what makes the House so perverted is that its so-called quad committee (the joint sessions of four committees) hearings have been both orchestrated by International Criminal Court (ICC) operatives and for the ICC’s benefit, sources in Congress disclosed.

Last of two parts

JUST two days after President Marcos, Jr. signed into law the 2024 Maritime Zones Act, which he said “aligned our laws with the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea” (Unclos), China tightened and formalized its control of Scarborough Shoal, which President Aquino III lost in 2012* after being fooled by the US into leaving it during a stand-off with the Chinese.

It is a development that is a seismic shift in Asia’s geopolitics: China now officially has an island closest to the Philippines, which it can transform into a military facility. Scarborough would be its territory farthest from the Chinese mainland.

The Chinese formalized it by issuing the geographic coordinates for the baselines of the shoal (which it calls Huangyan Dao; Bajo de Masinloc to us) as defined by Unclos’ Section 2.

New law ditches KIG and Scarborough
First of two parts

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr. last week signed into law the so-called Maritime Zones Act. The law effectively gives up the Kalayaan Island Group that his father in 1978 annexed out of the Spratlys Island Group and made part of the Philippines’ sovereign territory.

The elder Marcos’ one-man rule allowed him to issue in 1978 Presidential Decree 1596, which annexed a hexagon in the disputed Spratlys and called it the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG). The decree provided the precise geographic coordinates defining the hexagon, just as the 1898 Treaty of Paris defined the Philippine territory, unchallenged by any country.

Marcos Sr.’s decree did not declare sovereignty over each individual feature there, e.g., Pag-asa Island, etc., but over the entire area, including islands, reefs, seabed and its waters within the hexagon, and made it a municipality of Palawan. China and Vietnam’s claims of sovereignty over the Spratlys — called Nánshā Qúndǎo by the former and Quần đảo Trường Sa by the latter — are similar but cruder since they didn’t and haven’t defined the baselines of these archipelagos they claim.

US PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump’s landslide victory may have pulled humanity out of the brink of thermonuclear war and the consequent extinction of our species.

That may sound too much of an exaggeration and a giant leap to a baseless conclusion. Consider, however, where we are now though, and you might agree with me.

First, Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, which has claimed 42,000 people, has been going on for a year now, and the war has expanded into the West Bank.

The Israelis have taken the war to Iran, Lebanon and Yemen, claiming these have been the bases for the Palestinian missile and drone attacks against them. The US has continued financing the Israelis by an astounding $23 billion since the war began in October 2023. This has convinced Iran and other Muslim states that the US is secretly supporting Israel’s plot to exterminate or force out of Gaza all 2.2 million Palestinians.