Monthly Archives: December 2010

CEBU, Philippines – The Visayan Electric Company Employees Union is contemplating to file another notice of strike amidst the alleged defiance of the management to the order of Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz for the payroll reinstatement of the union president.

The country director for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on Wednesday welcomed results of a recent survey that showed nearly seven of 10 Filipinos standing behind the controversial reproductive health (RH) bill pending before Congress.

THE proposal to phase out public utility buses which are 10-year-old and above has received a big boost from clean air advocates led by Cabinet officials, lawmakers and various nongovernment organization leaders, as they push for the use of green vehicles to help stop the alarming state of outdoor air pollution in Metro Manila and…

PRESIDENT Benigno Aquino 3rd promised a reform budget for 2011 but debates and deliberations indicated that it was a stagnation budget, Sen. Joker Arroyo charged on Wednesday.

MANILA, Philippines – The Philippines has overtaken India as the world’s number one country for shared services and business process outsourcing (BPO), according to IBM’s Global Locations Trend.

MANILA, Philippines – Profitable business process outsourcing companies in the Philippines will enjoy multi-billion-dollar profits and will continue to help pump prime the local economy in the years to come, President Aquino predicted yesterday.

MANILA, Philippines – Manila Police District (MPD) policemen fired tear gas and used water cannons yesterday to disperse a rally by drivers and operators of motorized pedicabs (kuliglig) protesting the mayor’s order banning them from major roads in the city.

Most, if not all, private schools in the Philippines are members of one or more of the following professional associations: Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP), Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities (PACU), Philippine Association of Private Schools, Colleges and Universities (PAPSCU), Association of Christian Schools, Colleges and Universities (ACSCU), and Technical-Vocational Association of…

(Part III and concluding article on IVETA-CPSC Regional Conference) Are we Filipinos generally bashful, lethargic and fainthearted? Do parents and teachers have to always prod our children to greet relatives or friends whenever they meet them? How about the adults who generally avoid greeting foreign visitors? Are we different from other Asians? The Japanese automatically…

LOTTO CRAZE: When I wrote last Sunday about the Grand 6/55 Lotto whose jackpot had soared to P741 million and the bettors were going crazy, my email feedback also climbed 10 times and my Yahoo inbox groaned.

MANILA, Philippines – Discrimination against sufferers of AIDS in the Philippines hampers efforts to curb the spread of the disease, said the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).   

MANILA, Philippines – Finance Secretary Cesar Purisma is the Aquino administration’s richest Cabinet member with a net worth of over P252 million while Education Secretary Armin Luistro is the least moneyed with only over P89,000.

MANILA, Philippines – Mayors belonging to the League of Municipalities of the Philippines (LMP) backed yesterday the Reproductive Health (RH) bill, saying they wanted their constituents to have an informed choice.

Yesterday’s blog entry was entitled: ‘The so-called bail-out: The EU and Ireland in a sado-masochistic relationship’. In fact the support being provided is a mixture of EU, national government and IMF support, and I used ‘EU’ as a short-cut.

After weeks of speculation and debate the deed has now been done. Ireland has received an overdraft facility of just under €70 bn provided jointly by the EU and the IMF in exchange for a tough austerity package.

Manila – People with HIV/AIDS suffer from stigmatization and discrimination in the Philippines, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) official said Tuesday.

DR. MARIO Miclat’s “Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions: A Novel” (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2010) reveals in rich detail many of the covert factors that contributed to the growth of one of our country’s biggest problems: the Communist Party of the Philippines.

NEW YORK, United States—A United Nations report unveiled Wednesday paints a gloomy picture of the performance of the global economy next year, with growth projected to be a meager 3.1 per cent, followed by 3.5 per cent in 2012—rates that are insufficient to spur the recovery of the jobs that were lost during the economic…

The adage that Filipino families put top priority on education — after basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter — is often held up as an example of traditional values that we can be proud of as a people and that holds us in good stead in our endeavors, nay struggles, to achieve a…

Civil society around the world has been galvanized by the Québec Government’s plans to underwrite a new chrysotile mine in the Canadian town of Asbestos. Outrage has been expressed by asbestos victims’ groups, trade unionists, politicans, academics and concerned citizens. Opposition to the new mine has been aired in newspaper articles, the academic and trade…

PARIS, France—The financial cloud hanging over the eurozone darkened Tuesday, with the euro falling and Italy hit by rising borrowing rates as EU measures to control sovereign debt left investors uncertain and anxious.

MANILA, Philippines – Education for all. That is EFA, and with its success, the Education Department is hoping that by 2015 it would entrench the department’s crowning enterprise: The Alternative Learning System (ALS).

MANILA, Philippines—An official of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines cast doubt Wednesday on the Pulse Asia survey showing that nearly seven out of 10 Filipinos support the Reproductive Health Bill pending before Congress.

A consensus has emerged among economists that the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program of President Benigno Aquino III should be given a chance to work, just as it did during the administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. In Bicol, for example, several local governments have already received their CCT through the Department of Social Welfare and Development,…

MANILA, Philippines—Metro Manila is the “7-11 of disasters.” The National Capital Region topped cities in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) “most at risk” of flooding and earthquake, according to the latest ASEAN risk assessment synthesis report.

MANILA, Philippines – The commitment to enter into the Performance Governance System (PGS) pathway for good governance, coming from the very top, necessarily is broad-brush. At such a high level, the decision can only be generic, remaining at a mainly abstract level. That decision – with the commitment behind it – needs to be brought…

A FRAMEWORK designed to guide development plans for Mindanao for the next 10 years was presented yesterday to President Benigno S. C. Aquino III in Malacañan Palace.

MANILA, Philippines – A state university professor fears that tuition increases may hit more than 300% next year at the campuses of the University of the Philippines and 112 other state universities and colleges (SUCs) nationwide to augment  budget cuts amounting to billions of pesos for 2011.

THE COUNTRY’S biggest business group yesterday warned that power supply will have to be increased if the economy is to sustain growth.

MANILA, Philippines (2nd UPDATE) – The Philippines would soon overtake India as the call center capital of the world, a recent study by Everest Research Institute showed.