When I was talking to the widow of Cris Guarin during the day of his funeral in General Santos City, the depressing thought flashed through my mind that the case of the first Filipino media person to be killed this year might end up as one more unsolved murder.
Successful revolutions are rare; successful reform is even rarer, claims Samuel Huntington in his classic “Political Order in Changing Societies”. Today, what can only be described as a serious enterprise at reform is unfolding in dramatic fashion in this country. Whether it will succeed will depend, to a great extent, on its leading edge, President Benigno Simeon Aquino III.
There are parts of Jakarta that look almost lovely in the evening. As we drive along glitzy Thamrin Boulevard to my hotel, the conversation almost inevitably drifts to events that shook this country over four decades ago. On October 5, 1965, the killings began in the immediate aftermath of a failed coup by renegade military [...]
Events in Libya and Syria have again brought to the forefront the question of armed humanitarian intervention or the “responsibility to protect.” Our hearts all go out to the unarmed demonstrators seeking to bring down corrupt dictatorships that are a plague on their people. In Tunisia and Egypt, the people rose and deposed dictators on [...]
