Editorial cartoon, June 17, 2013
Only a year and a half ago, the world crossed a historic threshold: Global population breached the 7-billion mark.
Any way you look at it, the increases in water rates by the two water concessionaires, Maynilad and Manila Water, are too much and unconscionable. Imagine, Maynilad is increasing its rates by P8.25 per cubic meter, and Manila Water slightly lower. To the average household, that would be an increase of P250 a month. That’s highway robbery! Many poor families earn less or only slightly more than that.
The good news is that we have a president who won’t be cowed by bullies. President Benigno Aquino III made it abundantly clear in his Independence Day speech last Wednesday.
Buhay and An Waray partylist groups are being stripped by the Commission on Elections of congressional seats already awarded to them. The seats are being reserved instead for the Senior Citizens party-list group. Understandably Buhay and An Waray are crying foul. What will happen to them?
In his memoirs “From Third World to First—The Singapore Story: 1965-2000,” Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew recounts that when the island state was forced out of the Federation of Malaysia, his first concern was to build an armed forces from scratch. There existed the danger presented by Malaysian armed units stationed within Singapore.
The hypothesis, nay, the generally favored conclusion, is that there was no Catholic vote in the last elections. The point has been belabored in several commentaries.
The May 13 elections went like a roller-coaster gone awry. It blasted off squeakily, accelerated as knots and bolts snapped, took a loop (bumping off riders), then halted in its tracks. Something was amiss: an error in the operating computers, absence of safety devices, power outage. Unruffled, the operator called it a perfect ride.
Please allow me to set the record straight regarding Conrado de Quiros’ June 11 column (Inquirer, 6/11/13).
I am one of those whom Dr. Jose Rizal called the hope of the motherland. I voted in the last elections. I pay my taxes. I read the newspapers and constantly update myself on what’s happening in our society.
There was a time when a comprehensive agrarian reform law seemed out of reach, the very definition of an impossible dream. In the late 1980s, much of the turbulent debate over the fate and future of the first Aquino administration’s centerpiece land reform initiative revolved around a practical question: Would it even become law?
