Lifestyle checks or investigations into the net worth and assets of over 400 officials — to check if these are commensurate with their incomes — make up a gargantuan task that is way, way beyond the resources of this tiny, nearly token anti-corruption entity. I don’t think Luna knows what he is talking about. (more…)

Her column’s title, which I never thought a decent broadsheet would ever publish: “7 ‘deadly plagues’ from China.”

What did she want to tell her readers? That the 2019 novel coronavirus is one of seven plagues China has deliberately brought on the Philippines, and soon on all mankind? Worried that her readers might not get the gravity of her assessment, she herself wrote: “‘Seven plagues’ has a biblical, apocalyptic ring to it. I am not being whimsical or facetious. The words also serve as a wake-up call.”

It is certainly shocking — or maybe not — how a supposedly religious person, purportedly an activist for noble causes would condemn a nation of 1.4 billion souls, whose nearly 30,000 people are afflicted, with and over 500 killed by the disease and about 61 million of banned from going out of their homes. Has racism and opposition to President Rodrigo Duterte steeled her heart so much, she cannot even write a sympathetic word for her fellow human beings?

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That is so patently false: we have had only two 2019 novel coronavirus acute respiratory disease (2019-nCoV ARD) cases so far, both involving two Chinese who came from Wuhan, one of whom died the other day. The Health department’s latest official bulletin reports that only 48 individuals are being monitored to determine if they have been infected with the virus.

There is no way for anyone, journalistically or linguistically, to claim that even just these 48 persons are “nCoV patients.” They are not patients. Period. The dictionary definition of a “patient,” as any English-speaking person knows, is a person receiving or registered to receive medical treatment for a disease. But these 48 haven’t been infected with the virus, they haven’t received treatment for anything.

The Philippine Star itself revealed its stupidity — or nefarious intention to disseminate fake, alarmist news — when it reported that out of these 80 supposed nCoV patients, there were “74 who may have come into contact with the victim.” Some 66 have been advised to “undergo home quarantine for 14 days,” while eight are “people under investigation.”

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The author is Bien Manlutac, an internist at prestigious hospitals in Manila. He should be the next health secretary.

Because of the topic’s extreme relevance at this time I am devoting this column’s space to his Facebook piece, which was entitled, “Should we push the panic button on the 2019-nCoV threat in the Philippines?” (more…)

He may or may not succeed in terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement with the US and the more crucial Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. His advisers may even succeed in convincing him that it may not be timely to cross the US at this time. It will certainly be at some economic and national security cost, we have to admit.

We also cannot after all underestimate the Americans’ ruthlessness — despite all their lip service to peace and the rule of law — in getting back at nations and world leaders they have concluded is their enemy.

They even invaded Iraq, killed its president and created the chaos in the Middle East that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had coddled Osama bin Laden and helped him in the 9/11 attack. And the US got to fool the world at the time, claiming that the invasion was necessary to save the world since Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction” — an allegation totally proven as a lie today.

The likes of US citizen Maria Ressa, Rappler, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and Vera Files will undoubtedly get a boost in their finances from CIA-linked entities like the National Endowment for Democracy to intensify their anti-Duterte attacks. We cannot discount the possibility that the recent targets of Duterte’s wrath — the Ayalas and the Salim (Manny V. Pangilinan) conglomerate — will decide to go all out against President Rodrigo Duterte to take him out. After all, their conglomerates are under threat and the US is a powerful ally.

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Evading the constitutional ban on the slightest participation of foreigners in media, Salim’s Hong Kong-based First Pacific has managed to build up what could arguably be the biggest multimedia conglomerate in the country that includes the Philippine Star, Business World, TV5, two dozens of radio stations and cable TV company Cignal.

In the interview, the failed two-time putschist called President Rodrigo Duterte a “psycho.” He claimed that toppling him should be the Filipinos’ crusade now.

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I write this piece not to denigrate the nobility of FQS participants but to demythicize that period and to lay bare its reality. After all, as the cliché goes, the truth will set us free.

The FQS was in fact the hijacking of Filipino student power by the fledgling Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) led by Jose Ma. Sison, who had broken away two years earlier from the pro-Moscow Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). Sison had been the head of the PKP’s Youth Section and his experience in that task made it easy for him to hijack the FQS’ unleashing of student power during that period.

Despite paying lip service to Marxist theory that the “proletariat” would be the vanguard of the Revolution, Sison since his founding of the CPP believed that the student sector could be the spark for the revolution. He therefore focused his first circle of cadres into organizing that sector. Thus the main organization of Sison’s CPP in its early years was the Kabataang Makabayan (Nationalist Youth) that focused on organizing cells at the University of the Philippines (UP) and then in the University Belt. This is in contrast to the old PKP that focused on organizing peasants in the countrysides. (more…)

His rating has risen from the 76 percent in the first SWS poll during his presidency in September 2016.

Of course we don’t have similar data about the popular support for pre-EDSA presidents, but it is safe to say that all these presidents — even the CIA-backed Ramon Magsaysay, whom the elites disdained — couldn’t have had such a phenomenal 82-percent satisfaction. I suspect though that support for the strongman Marcos in 1976, four years after he imposed martial law when the economy surged at an average of 7 percent, approached that of Duterte now.

Add the 10 percent “undecided” on his performance — which means they’ll likely go with the majority when push comes to shove — Duterte has the backing of 92 percent of the nation. This is nothing short of phenomenal.

One way of putting Duterte’s 82-percent satisfaction rating in context is to compare this to the SWS net satisfaction ratings of all presidents since Cory Aquino at similar periods of their presidency, at their midterm. (Net satisfaction is percent of those satisfied minus dissatisfied. However, this psychologically underestimates popular support. For instance, while 82 percent of those surveyed were satisfied with his performance, 10 percent were not, so his net rating is 72 percent. This, however, could be easily mistaken that only 72 percent are satisfied with him.) (more…)

The utter failure of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) to issue an emergency alarm in the early hours of January 12, which I wrote about last Monday, is just one symptom that this entity is so unwieldy and has little authority to confront what has been our country’s geological bad luck.

We are in the so-called “Ring of Fire (its scientific term, the Circum-Pacific Belt), a major area in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean characterized by active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. The majority of the earth’s volcanoes and earthquakes take place along the Ring of Fire. We are also smack in the path of typhoons generated in the Pacific Ocean, that a 2006 United States government study concluded that our country is the worst hit by this terrifying natural phenomenon, in terms of both frequency of occurrence and extent of destruction.

With natural disasters so obviously the biggest, really inescapable, threat to our people, guess what has been the state agency assigned to tackle this? (more…)

The emergency alert system the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council (NDRRMC) operates didn’t work last Sunday to warn residents that could be affected by Taal’s eruption.

I was an eyewitness to this as I happened to be in Tagaytay that day playing golf at the Splendido Golf Club, whose coffee shop had a spectacular view of Taal Lake, when the volcano exploded.

The day, month, or even year a volcano erupts is of course unpredictable, as our volcano experts have emphasized in their briefings, since, unlike typhoons, the explosive magma’s movement towards the surface cannot be seen, and can only be surmised by its effects, such as earthquakes, changes in the land’s elevations, and cracks on the earth’s surface.

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