By Carlos H. Conde |  As far as Malacanang is concerned, journalists can be pests. They can provoke people — especially hot-tempered and arrogant people like Arroyo — into doing something silly during a press briefing, like raising their voice, respond condescendingly to reporters or, heaven forbid, throw a cellphone at one of them. Or worse, Arroyo can be painted into a corner on questions about her legitimacy and all the scandals facing her and her people.

By Renato Reyes Jr.  |  The government admission of lower growth targets, slower export growth as well as vulnerabilities in foreign direct investments and speculative investments show that the Philippines is not totally shielded from the US financial meltdown.

Analysis |  Having produced only disastrous results, economic management can no longer be left in the hands of an elite corps of bureaucrats and technocrats who ape models purposely to make corporate profits bigger at the expense of workers, farmers, and other marginal sectors.

By Renato Reyes Jr.  |  Over the past 50 years, the MDT has benefitted the US primarily. The MDT has allowed the US to make the Philippines its neo-colonial outpost in South East Asia, having used the country during the US wars of aggression in Korea and Vietnam. The MDT made possible the existence then of US military bases and the existence now of the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Mutual Logistics Support Agreement.

By Fr. Shay Cullen
Thousands of villagers in Darfur have been shot, bombed, burned, raped and reduced to starvation by the attacks of the Chinese supplied army and militia forces of the Sudanese government. These are acts of genocide and crimes against humanity. Two million people or more have been driven from their lands and homes, [...]

By Michael Hudson | What happened on September 18-19 took years of preparation, capped by a faux ideology crafted by public-relations think tanks to be broadcast under emergency conditions to panic Congress — and voters — right before the presidential election. This seems to be our September election surprise.

By Fr. Shay Cullen

When I asked 13 year old Jonathan to draw a picture of himself in jail he drew a stick like figure of a small boy hanging half way up the bars of a prison cell. Behind him a bigger figure was hitting him with a stick. That was his punishment every time [...]

By Robert Sutter
Robert Sutter (sutterr@georgetown.edu) teaches at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. These findings are explained in The United States in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield 2008), where Sutter reviews interviews and consultations with 175 officials from 10 Asia-Pacific countries. He writes the chapter on China-Southeast Asia relations in Comparative Connections, the [...]

The successive oil price reductions should have amounted to some relief for us Filipinos. However, we have yet to feel the relief of having oil prices slashed. For one thing, the minimum fare still stands at PhP 8.50.

By Fr. Shay Cullen
Retired Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo laid aside his miter and took up the sash of the presidency of Paraguay last April 20. He is the first bishop of modern times to be elected to high office and he ended the dictatorial 61 year rule of the Colorado party of the former dictator [...]

CMFR: If no information can be obtained because of executive privilege, then no information vital to the exercise of the sovereign right of the people in a democracy to decide on policy and other governance issues can be made available.

By Carlos H. Conde
About the only thing that is different in the present war are the names of the military commanders running it. Everything else remains the same — the displaced civilians, the suffering children, the fragile peace process, and the ever-burning desire of the Moros to attain self-determination.

Frankly, I cannot imagine a post-Firefox browser that does not have the capability to run add-ons or extensions.

By Carl Baker
Any peace settlement in Mindanao will require a serious rethinking of sovereignty in the Philippines and a lot of creative thinking about how to accommodate the interests of all parties.

With the delay in the release of the implementing rules and regulations of Republic Act 9504 (which amends the income tax law), this government is obviously not sincere in providing relief to minimum wage earners. What else can grass do for a dead horse, other than to cover its carcass?

By Nandy Pacheco
Ang Kapatiran Party
“If we are what we are today – a country with a great number of poor and powerless people – one reason is the way we have allowed politics to be debased and prostituted to the lowest level it is in now.”

Wired magazine has the lowdown on how Google Chrome came to be. Titled “Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web,” the story offers an inside view of Chrome’s genesis and why Google has just re-ignited the browser wars.

Still watching the Repubs and feeling uncharacteristically drained of energy; something about the spectacle is deadening. I can’t even take seriously the debate about Sarah Palin, the shrill outcry of “sexism!” whenever her credentials as a politician and/or as a soccer mom are questioned. Seems to me that there’s sexism in here, all right, but everybody misses what it is, exactly.