JUST typing the slug line to this column gave me the chills: Rina0101—another day, another start to a brand-new year. You’d think, as you grew older, that the passage of years would be unremarkable, that each year blends and melts into the next, and that time would simply flow like a river, each day a [...]
NEW YORK—In the United States the media hailed her as an “American hero.” In the Philippines, Robin Lim is a “Filipino-American hero” who grew up in the Philippines with a Filipino mother and American father. On December 11, she was honored as CNN’s 2011 Hero of the Year. Her nationality is not the issue here. [...]
IT may not have been a really disappointing year but it was neither exactly the year we dreamt of. After the raised expectations of 2010, the year 2011 just seemed to get worse the further it went on. War raged on. Crimes continued to be committed with impunity. Strong winds blew with ferocity, and rains [...]
THE story is told about a man who posted and sent this Christmas message: “To all my inaanak (baptismal godchildren), in order to get a gift from me, please bring with you your birth certificate, baptismal certificate and your baptismal picture with me. Deadline for claiming gift is until Dec. 31, 2011 only.” * * [...]
AS the New Year dawns, I think we should all count our blessings and thank the Lord for every new day. As for me, when I retired from the Supreme Court in December 2006, I thought that my workdays were over and that I would just pursue my “APOStolate” tending my 10 wonderful grandchildren. Little [...]
COUNTDOWN to the first minute of the New Year was a game that my children loved to play when they were younger. The TV would be set to one channel where a digital clock shows the time. The whole family would gather in front of the television, in its conferred role as god of time, [...]
THIS Christmas season, thousands of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) will have had their constitutional rights violated at the world’s worst airport. I met Marc one Sunday evening at NAIA 1. He skipped dinner with his family, not wanting to risk a long Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) desk queue and miss the 10 p.m. flight [...]
ISLAMABAD—Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari abruptly returned to Karachi on the morning of Dec. 19, following a 13-day absence for medical treatment in Dubai, where he lived while in exile. The government issued no formal statement about Zadari’s health, but his supporters disclosed that he had suffered a mild stroke, which left him unconscious for [...]
The sooner we realize that disasters are never natural but always a product of hazard and history, that a people’s vulnerability is not a given of place but derivative from the past, the better we are likely to understand what fate might await us in a world of changing climate.
WE can’t spend the next 40 years repairing damage. There must be a way to avoid the repeated loss of lives, and sidestep annual economic dislocations.
As 2011 ended, SWS issued two reports, one on Dec. 26 about the perceived fairness of the administration’s treatment of Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo on the legal cases facing her, and another on Dec. 28 about the public sense of hope, rather than of fear, in greeting the coming new year. These were based on the [...]
