Monthly Archives: August 2010

MANILA, Philippines – Senators were shocked over revelations that the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) has P3.5 billion in investments in 12 losing companies even as it earned P96 billion last year and handed out P6 million in salaries and perks to each member of its board.

A group of accredited Hong Kong recruiters in the Philippines assured that Hong Kong employers have not trimmed their job orders for Filipino workers as an aftermath of the Monday hostage-taking incident at the Quirino Grandstand in Manila.

THE MOVE to expand our basic education to 12 years from the present 10 is not about quantity versus quality. It is about quality, period; or, more accurately, it is about the low quality of our education system. Philippine education is plagued by two major ills—the high attrition rate of our students and their low…

GOVERNMENT RHETORIC routinely exhorts the citizens to exert themselves for greater competitiveness. Politicians discourse on how business corporations, labor unions, even universities and their-students, must strive to become globally competitive.

WASHINGTON, D.C: Philippine garment exporters and major American textile millers are pushing for United States legislation granting duty-free imports of Philippine-made garments that would mutually benefit these industries. Dubbed as “Save Our Industries Act of 2010,” the bill seeks to eliminate tariffs of certain Philippine-made garments that use American textiles and yarns for 10 years.

HANOI – Economic ties between the United States and Southeast Asia are “a high priority,” an embassy spokesman said Saturday despite the absence of US officials from a key regional trade meeting.

TORTURE is not a new phenomenon. The Romans, claiming intellectual superiority over the world’s multitudinous races, chained and caged their captives, sold them on a slave market, and sometimes trained them for gruesome combat as gladiators in their ancient coliseums. Jesus Christ was not spared. He was scourged with a horse whiplash, crowned with thorns,…

An association of domestic manufacturers is pushing for the establishment of a department that shall oversee local industries, separate from another one that would focus on foreign trade. In a statement on Friday, the Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI) said it “is set to draft a bill establishing a separate Department of Industry—distinct from the…

Some 200 settlers, depicting fairies and other mythical creatures, gathered in front of the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission (PRRC) office in Quezon City on Friday calling for the implementation of the proposal by Palafox Architects for the housing program along esteros Metro Manila waterways.

The Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) and the Department of Education (DepEd) have agreed to resolve all issues of public school teachers through a Memorandum of Understanding. The agreement was reached during the first wave of dialog between the two agencies.

A COMPREHENSIVE integrated urban transport system within 20 years is the vision of Chairman Francis Tolentino for Metro Manila hoping to make the lives of its residents and visitors easier and comfortable. This what Tolentino revealed in his message before former judges and justices who attended their regular in-house forum, Kapihan sa Klub.

The Philippines called for a broader cooperation among member countries of the United Nations (UN) to fight against piracy off the coast of Somalia

OVERSEAS Filipino workers (OFWs) employed in United States military facilities in Iraq “may continue working there until their contracts expire,” the Department of Foreign Affairs said Thursday night. The department had sent a high-level inter-agency committee to Iraq to assess the security and ensure the well-being of the Filipino workers there.

WATER pollution is claiming the lives of 18 to 25 Filipinos a day. In a year, 4 million people die from water-related diseases, which make up 31 percent of all illnesses in the country. One child dies every 20 seconds because of dirty and polluted water.

MANILA, Philippines – Research group International Data Corp. (IDC) said it sees 2010 as the springboard for faster growth of the hardcopy peripherals (HCP) market in the Philippines in the coming years.

MANILA, Philippines – The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) named the electronics industry as one of its top priority industries and promised to bring back the $1-billion investments the country enjoyed during the industry’s prime in 2007.

MANILA, Philippines – From the world’s text messaging capital, the Philippines is once again in the global limelight for having the highest percentage of users that watch videos over the Internet.

MANILA, Philippines – Education Secretary Armin Luistro yesterday denied allegations of the department’s employees union that he has illegally appointed several new officials and added an excessive number of consultants to the detriment of the department.

Public works and public employment programmes (PEPs) have long been considered a staple of social assistance. For the most part, though, they have been designed as ‘safety nets’ in the context of counter-cyclical programme interventions and responses to shocks where the objective has been to provide income support for the unemployed in the form of…

MANILA, Philippines—About 70 percent of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities by 2050. Some experts are concerned that as cities continue to grow and prosper, they become less and less habitable for families.

PRESIDENT Benigno Aquino III said Friday he has created a Public-Private Partnership Center that will serve as a one-stop shop for P180 billion worth of private-sector funded projects lined up for next year.

Why do men beat their wives? Why would a man tell a woman that he loves her and then proceed to beat her? You might say that he really doesn’t love her. Perhaps you’re correct. If he does love her, it surely isn’t in the traditional sense of the word. You don’t hit the woman…

LEGAZPI CITY, Aug. 25 — Health authorities fear some 15,000 new cases of Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV) will emerge by Christmas of this year as the Philippines accounts for five newly-confirmed HIV-positive Filipinos every five hours.

The Philippines is surrounded by water, and we get plenty of rain. But, guess what, we have a water crisis. And guess why, management or, should I say, the lack of it. Inaction by the two administrations since that of Fidel Ramos.

While state workers constantly complain about the restrictive rules of the Government Service Insurance System in the grant of benefits, top executives of the pension fund are enriching themselves through fat compensation.

President Aquino has set his austerity program in motion, ordering the abolition of task forces and Cabinet-level positions without portfolio, imposing a moratorium on new hires and reducing subsidy to state corporations.

Dumaguete City (27 August) — Negros Oriental is the first province in Central Visayas that has passed the Reproductive Health Ordinance that supports the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce maternal and infant mortality rate.

Successful family planning led by women is among keys to increasing the poor’s share in economic growth MANILA, Philippines—Backers of the long-unsettled Reproductive Health Bill now pending in the 15th Congress has found a supporter in the World Bank.

RIYADH — Saudi Arabia’s leading supermarket chain has broken the country’s strict taboo on women working in public with a pilot program of women cashiers, a company official said.

EVEN SMALL businesses have to adapt to unavoidable changes in climate and help mitigate their adverse effects, experts said in a forum organized by the Institute for Small-Scale Industries at the University of the Philippines (UP) in Diliman early this month.