One of our relatives just came back to visit from Canada, and she is looking to recruit people to work with her in Alberta. I said no thank you, since my Hispanic (adopted) son already was working in nearby Alaska, along with other Hispanics and Filipinos, and he said if he changed jobs, he preferred […]

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Sometimes making peace just makes things worse, as can be seen in the Philippines.
President Arroyo has been under a lot of pressure by Muslim countries and the United States to make peace with the remaining Moro (Muslim ethnic) group in Mindanao. The MNLF made peace years ago, but the MILF only had a tentative […]

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With all the worries about burning coal or oil to make electricity, some countries are turning to technology to harvest other sources.
Here in the Philippines, the government has announced that it plans to build a tidal power generator near Cebu to help generate electricity for our central islands.
From the Manila Bulletin:

The Philippines’ quest for energy […]

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President Arroyo is due to give the state of the nation report next week, and years of controversy and scandals are catching up with her.
The latest polls show that she has a low approval rating and a credibility gap: a recent GMA poll notes that only 14% of the public expect her to tell the […]

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Last week, Human Rights Watch issued a paper on the mistreatment of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.
It should be noted that such abuse is not limited to Saudi, nor only with Arabs.
Last week a maid accused a former Philippine envoy to the United Nations of taking her passport away and keeping her locked up. The […]

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Weeks after 800 plus people lost their lives, questions about the ferry and about it’s cargo continue to linger here in the Philippines.
The first question is why did the ferry leave port when Manila was under a Signal one and the destination port was under a Signal two.
Well, part of this is because the ship […]

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I get my news from CNNInternational and ABS CBN.
But most of the time I get it from the internet.
Sometimes, like yesterday, when it was our town’s turn for a “rolling brownout” we don’t get news except for the radio (i.e. the internet and cable tv goes off), and since I can’t follow fast Tagalog news […]

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What do you tell a board of Inquiry when your company has suffered not one but four ferry disasters over the last twenty years?
You tell them it’s God’s fault. From the Inquirer:
 “I am taking the initiative of filing this marine protest to report the unfortunate tragedy that befell MV Princess of the Stars and to […]

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The good news is that our rice fields (in central Luzon) weren’t ruined by Typhoon Frank. Most of our fields are well drained and the plants were low enough not to be destroyed by the wind, which was only moderate in our rice growing area.
But our organic vegetables, especially those being harvested, were blown down. […]

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We got hit by Typhoon Frank over the weekend.
Original reports said that the typhoon was to stay off the East coast, only hitting the Visayas, but it turned west and hit the center of the islands.
I had to sigh when the CNNInternational newsreader kept trying to make the Manila correspondent spin the typhoon as unusual, […]

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Last week, a top ABS-CBN reporter and her newscrew went to interview the AbuSayyaf, to see their side of the story. Accompanied by a local University Professor and “peace activist”, they were promptly kidnapped.
No surprise there. The AbuSayyaf has kidnapped lots of “High profile” people to raise money to pay their men and make bombs. […]

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Today’s LA Times has an article about Air New Zealand planning to use biodiesel for their planes. Biological sources of fuel have gotten a bad reputation, with activists correctly pointing out that some (especially corn based ethanol) results in food shortage and increase in food prices.
But if you ask the farmers, the real reason for […]

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Journalism here in the Philippines is quite competitive, but the bad news is that if journalists are too aggressive, they put themselves in danger.
This seems to be what happened to an ABS-CBN news crew who disappeared yesterday.
Drilon, her team and Dinampo went missing Sunday after leaving a college hostel in Maimbung town. Drilon and her […]

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Here in Luzon, our major contribution to global warming is the rotting vegetation in the flooded rice paddies.
Right now, our workers are busy in the fields, flooding and mulching to prepare for planting. It’s an ancient form of organic farming: the water kill the weeds, and you mulch and turn it a couple times, then […]

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A couple months back, Jun Lozada testified on TV about the ZTE deal that would have granted a broadband contract to China that was greatly overpriced, some say by $130 million…and lots of people suspect that the excess money will go to gifts to various people to thank them for helping get the contract.
Since then, […]

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Dr. Sally Satel in the Wall Street Journal is proposing that we pay for kidneys. She got hers from a friend, so she is aware of the problem of waiting for a kidney first hand.
However, when she laments that the Philippines is the latest country to “get tough” on organ transplants from paid donors, one […]

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Archbishop Cruz, an outspoken critic of those who exploit the poor and of those guilty of corruption, has himself been arrested for libel because of an article he wrote four years ago.
The Bishop claimed that women working for PAGCOR (Philippine Gaming Commission) were told to go to a birthday party for the first Gentleman, and […]

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I’ve had it up to here with the MSM, especially the NYTimes and it’s clone, the International Herald Tribune. Today’s IHT has an article on how reporters in India were aghast that Bush “Blamed” the rice shortage on Indians eating too much.
But of course, he never said such a thing, and shame to the IHT […]

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End Impunity in the Gambia- Editor MBai Presents Scary And Disturbing Piece To The Ghana Based Africa Legal Aid NGO!!!
End Impunity in the Gambia- Editor MBai Presents  Scary And Disturbing Piece To The Ghana Based Africa Legal Aid NGO!!!
 
The impoverished nation of The Gambia, is currently witnessing untold human rights, social and political crisis. Faced […]

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Way to go, fellahs.
After 104 years, some bureaucrat in the depths of the Vatican finally noticed that the LDS church was collecting baptismal records from far and wide for their geneology collection…And (gasp! Horrors!) once in awhile, a good member of the LDS church will undergo a ceremony to baptise his ancestors so that they […]

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Rice prices have skyrocketed from 18-25 pesos/kg to 24-32 p/kg at the local Palenke.
For farmers and workers who average 100 pesos a day (roughly two dollars), this puts a strain on their budget. So to prevent rice riots, the President is planning to allow poor people to buy subsidized food, and because of the worry […]

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We just delivered more rice from the “second harvest” to the rice mill for storage and milling later. We don’t worry about a shortage of rice: We grown our own, a gormet organically grown rice for the upscale Manila market.
But not everyone is so lucky.
Here in the Philippines there is a rice shortage.
It came on […]

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The usually staid Wall Street Journal has an AP article about how the Philippine government is planning to regulate a growing black market in buying kidneys from poor people in Manila. The headline reads:
Philippine Health Chief Orders Eradication of Kidney Black Market
Ah so. It’s already against the law, since it was made illegal by […]

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Here in the Philippines, it’s “Tag-init”, the hot season that lasts from now until the monsoon hits in May.
Since a lot of our power is hydroelectric, that means less power available at a time when everyone has their airconditioner on.  The result is loss of electricity. Brownouts are not uncommon here: The electricity has been […]

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Ah, the BBC is rewriting Christianity again, making Judas a good guy so we can “understand” him.
Frank Deasy…(said) “I’ve always had a problem with Judas in ‘Passion’ stories in that he suddenly and inexplicably betrays Jesus,” he said.”I was keen to develop a psychological reality to Judas’s portrayal.”
Nigel Stafford-Clark, who produced the BBC1 series, said […]

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My nieces, like many Filipina nurses, has worked in Saudi. On arrival, their luggage was searched and the inspector instructed them to throw away their rosaries.
I guess, like Dracula, he was afraid to touch the object for fear of contamination. So the women were ordered to throw the rosaries away themselves: an action which to […]

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This article is a second release of this musing. It was published last June, but should have another revisit by Catholic readers. In light of the recently listed “sins” that include those against the environment. HJMN
There are always ways that the Catholic Church can join in the environmental movement in small but yet effective ways. […]

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There is another scandal starting to rear it’s head here in the Philippines: The possibility that the Arroyo government exchanged claims of Philippine sovereignty to China in exchange for loans.
In a single word: Petroleum. The scattered Spratly island area of the South China Sea is claimed by VietNam, China and the Philippines.
[…]

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The Atlantic Magazine, which took a left turn after Michael Kelley was killed covering Iraq, has now hit the bonkers stage.
The right wing blogosphere is up in arms at their slander of American troops as sociopaths, a blogpost discussing an alleged rape of a Japanese woman by a Marine…
a reminder of one of the less […]

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Here, the case against President Arroyo continues to build slowly. The latest corruption story is about a contract with a Chinese company to supply broadband coverage here that was canceled last year after an outcry about kickbacks being involved in granting the contract.
Usually what happens at this point is that witnesses decide to take a […]

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