ANALYSIS TAIPEI: Taiwan and China were “stuck” in negotiations on their trade pact, the island’s premier said Saturday, in the latest sign that the two sides may miss this month’s deadline for concluding the agreement.

The economic advisers of President Aquino, if drawn from the same cloth and mind set of the Arroyo advisers, would feed him tons upon tons of hogwash about agriculture.

Vice President Noli de Castro has expressed his wish for Vice President-elect Jejomar Binay to prioritize housing and the welfare of Filipino workers overseas.

The first business of the new administration, according to President-elect Benigno Simeon Aquino 3rd, is to identify all the problems besetting the country to arrive at the correct solutions. “I want to emphasize that wrong identification of the problems leads to wrong solutions, so there has to be correct identification,” the next president told the…

Combined military and police forces have arrested a ranking leader of the communist New People’s Army (NPA), military authorities said yesterday.

Islamist militants in the island province of Basilan in Mindanao beheaded two loggers they abducted just hours earlier, police yesterday said.

The government of Jordan has waived at least $7 million or around P315 million worth of exit fees for the speedy repatriation of runaway overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), an official said. Michael Ang, honorary consul of Jordan to the Philippines, disclosed that the said amount has reduced the number of distressed Filipino workers housed in…

There are lessons P-Noy can and should learn from Barack Obama. They were both elected during an extraordinary time as the anti-thesis of very unpopular incumbents. People were voting not so much for them but for what they symbolized… full of hope that the change being promised would simply materialize if they elected them to…

A campaign to stop the use of mercury is bound to fail unless the government pursues it vigorously and provides it with adequate support. An environmental group raise this concern on Friday noting that the Budget department has yet to release the funds earmarked for the campaign three months before the deadline for the mercury…

CEBU, Philippines – A twelve-man team from the World Bank and AusAID has lauded the government’s anti-poverty program for being efficient and the best ongoing initiatives.

CEBU, Philippines – Stones and cups of hot water were literally flying at midmorning yesterday outside a Mandaue City furniture firm, the subject of a workers’ picket for two weeks now.

MANILA, Philippines – Negotiations are underway to boost the bilateral trade between Russia and the Philippines from $200 million to $2 billion, Sen. Edgardo J. Angara disclosed the other day.

MANILA, Philippines – The Ecumenical Voice for Peace and Human Rights in the Philippines has brought the “Morong 43” incident to the United Nations Human Rights Council and urged the body to monitor the country’s compliance to obligations and pledges to human rights instruments.

They have been on the job since Nixon administration, stocking vending machines, making chocolates, and polishing bowling balls. They could have retired years, even decades ago.

PHILIPPINE banks spent an increasingly large amount of their earnings in 2009 for executive pay, the package having grown by more than 10 percent during the year to P74.4 billion, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) said on Friday.

DESPITE the robust growth in exports, the World Bank believes that the country’s export growth is still 5 percent below its level prior to the onslaught of the global economic crisis. World Bank Chief Economist Eric LeBorgne said Philippine exports have not yet fully recovered from the global financial crisis. He said it was natural…

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY — An international human rights monitoring group has appealed anew to president-elect Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III to end the outgoing administration’s “culture of impunity.”

Two months ago, consumers of MERALCO could no longer contain their surging protest over the 2nd Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) approval of a new round of increase for MERALCO’s distribution charges – i.e., distribution, supply and metering (DSM), under the ERC-initiated new rate setting methodology called Performance-Based Regulation (PBR) which replaced the tested Return on…

MANILA, Philippines – It’s final. Contingency projects of export enterprises given special incentives last year have been extended for two more years. The contingency projects aim to help them keep their workers while getting battered by a global trade slump.

MANILA, Philippines – Death is no exit for erring government officials being probed for administrative offenses like grave misconduct, dishonesty, and the like as their cases still would not be dismissed, a recent Civil Service Commission (CSC) circular said.

Among people in their 20s, high rates of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections are reported Over the last few decades, the period between the time when young adults leave their parents’ house and when they settle down to start families has grown substantially. In 1970 21 percent of 25-year-olds were unmarried; by 2005, the…

Last week’s pronouncement of President-elect Benigno Aquino III that he will identify “the real” problems hounding Filipinos in order to map the present status of the country may as well be answered by the Department of Education with its litany of woes as it leads this Tuesday the opening of the school system for 2010-2011.

Bonn, Germany—Use of wind energy in Asia, including the Philippines, is on the rise as governments face increasing energy demand, climate change and unsteady prices of non- renewable-energy sources such as coal, crude oil, natural gas, said the Belgium-based Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).

BAGUIO CITY: Reproductive health (RH) activists and health department leaders are looking forward to the possibility of the reproductive health bill being passed in Congress, especially with the proclamation of President-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino 3rd.

MANILA, Philippines – Up to 30,000 local and overseas jobs are up for grabs in the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE)’s job fair today as part of the 112th Independence Day celebration.

A non-government organization has called on the new administration under President-elect Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III to give full attention in stemming the rising number of child labor cases in the Philippines, as the country joins the celebration of the World Day Against Child Labor today.

MANILA, Philippines – Human rights defenders have called on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to urge president-elect Sen. Benigno Aquino III to fulfill his campaign promise to promote human rights and prosecute the perpetrators of human rights violations in the Philippines.

MANILA, Philippines – When classes open on June 15, the burden of coping with congested classrooms and the perennial lack of textbooks, chairs and other school equipment will once again fall on public school teachers, the Teachers Dignity Coalition (TDC) said.

As many as 5 million Filipino children aged 5 to 17 are forced to work under dangerous conditions. A non-government organization released the figure Friday to illustrate the point that child labor is rampant in the Philippines despite the law banning the use of minors as workers.

The United Nations (UN) identified eight priority areas needed to be worked on so as to achieve the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.