The report provides powerful scientific evidence and guidance to governments around the world on how the tobacco industry uses and manipulates the media to encourage tobacco use and effective steps governments can take to protect the health of their citizens.

By Kang Wu, Fereidun Fesharaki, Sidney B. Westley and Widhyawan Prawiraatmadja

HONOLULU (Aug. 25) — Concerns about energy security affect economic performance and political stability all over the world, but nowhere are these issues more critical than in Asia and the Pacific - and oil is at the heart of the region’s energy challenge.
Countries in Asia [...]

By the Policy Study, Publication, and Advocacy
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)
Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the outcome of settling an armed conflict by addressing its fundamental roots toward a just and lasting peace. Unless the causes are addressed, any peace that is forged is just a means of preserving an unjust status quo leading to bigger tensions. The peace process can bring about a simulated peace -– but not the ultimate solution to the Bangsamoro people’s historic and just grievances.

(The report below is from The International Tobacco-Control Network and was prepared by Ronald M. Davis, M.D. in 1998. Dr. David was the director of the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention of the Henry Ford Health System in the United States.)
CONTENTS
1. Background and author’s qualifications
2. How tobacco [...]

Between February 4 and May 14, 2008, the Asian Legal Resource Center has been alerted to 17 murders in General Santos City and it is believed that this is not an exhaustive list. Seven of those murdered, including a 16-year-old boy, have been accused by the police investigators of having criminal records, being former detainees or persons involved in committing motorcycle robberies. In several other cases, the victims are persons illegally working as motorcycle taxis, who were killed when criminals stole their motorcycles.

For Mohagher Iqbal, the chief negotiatior of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Malaysia’s pullout from the International Monitoring Team (IMT) in the peace talks with the Philippine government means the negotiations are “shaky on the ground.” In this Q&A with Bulatlat, he explains the implications.

Asia Report N° TK 14 May 2008
The Philippines: COUNTER-INSURGENCY VS. COUNTER-TERRORISM IN MINDANAO
Executive Summary and recommendations
U.S.-backed security operations in the southern Philippines are making progress but are also confusing counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency with dangerous implications for conflict in the region. The “Mindanao Model” — using classic counter-insurgency techniques to achieve counter-terror goals [...]

Read the ICG’s report here.

The International Crisis Group says the U.S. and the Philippines “need to refocus energies on peace processes in Mindanao or they risk new hostilities between government forces and insurgents.” In a report today, it warns that security operations in Mindanao “are confusing counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism and risk pushing the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) – their target — into the arms of the broader insurgencies.”

Report on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances in the Philippines
Fact Finding Mission of Human Rights Now to Philippines
Human Rights Now
April 2008
Summary
In the Philippines, hundreds of social activists and human rights defenders have been unlawfully killed as well as subjected to enforced disappearances since [...]

“Arbitrary, unlawful, and extrajudicial killings by elements of the security services and political killings, including killings of journalists, by a variety of actors continued to be a major problem. Concerns about impunity persisted.”

Opening Remarks by Haruhiko Kuroda
President
Asian Development Bank
At the European Commission
10 March 2008
Brussels, Belgium
I. Introduction
Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
I am honored to be here today to open this important conference on European and Asian Integration: Achievements and Challenges, jointly organized by the European Commission and the Asian Development Bank.
Asia’s export-orientation continues to be the foundation [...]

The phenomenal growth of the outsourcing industry in the Philippines, particularly call centers, has led some quarters to suggest that the government abandon the manufacturing sector and shifts its attention to the services sector. But as Josef T. Yap and Fatima Lourdes E. del Prado of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies argue, it is a foolhardy thought. “To strengthen and accelerate the growth of the manufacturing sector, there is a need to consider measures to expand the manufacturing base,” they write in this paper.

By James Fallows
Atlantic Monthly

If the problem in the Philippines does not lie in the people themselves or, it would seem, in their choice between capitalism and socialism, what is the problem? I think it is cultural, and that it should be thought of as a failure of nationalism.

The Arroyo Imbroglio in the Philippines

Over the course of Arroyo’s seven years in office, an already crisis-prone democracy has faced an unusually high number of travails… As the Philippines suffers one political crisis after another, its longstanding democratic structures become increasingly imperiled.

By Paul D. Hutchcroft

(Paul D. Hutchcroft, professor of political science at the University of [...]

By Renato Constantino
In the histories of many nations, the national revolution represents a peak of achievement to which the minds of man return time and again in reverence and for a renewal of faith in freedom. … It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that almost always the leader of that revolution becomes the principal hero of his people. There is Washington for the United States, Lenin for the Soviet Union, Bolivar for Latin America, Sun Yat Sen, then Mao Tse-Tung for China and Ho Chi Minh for Vietnam. … In our case, our national hero was not the leader of our Revolution. In fact, he repudiated that Revolution.

By Jose Rizal
The evil is not that indolence exists more or less latently but that it is fostered and magnified. Among men, as well as among nations, there exist not only aptitudes but also tendencies toward good and evil…. The evil is that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence… an evil that increases in direct proportion to the square of the periods of time, an effect of misgovernment and of backwardness, as we said, and not a cause thereof.