The Filipinos thought they were flying to Dubai. One of them told a fellow passenger how excited he was about his new job as a telephone repairman at a hotel in the emirate. It was only after liftoff from Kuwait, when the captain made an announcement, that they learned their destination was, in fact, Baghdad. Then all hell broke loose.

Overseas Filipinos are up in arms because of the appreciation of the peso and are now considering, according to this GMANews.tv report, reducing their remittances to the Philippines in order to “show some muscle” and impress on the Philippine government that they have had enough. The OFWs want to peg the exchange rate for these remittances to P50 to the $1.

COMMENTARY | By Roland G.Simbulan

No administration can match the frequency and methodical manner in which extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances have occurred during the six years of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. But because there was sustained impunity, with the perpetrators not only still unpunished, but even promoted or even commended, they occur again and again with their own dirty rules.

Clarita Gragasin, 61, traveled to the Koronadal market on May 10, 2003. She was sitting in a rickshaw tricycle when a bomb detonated about five meters from her. Shrapnel from the bomb killed her instantly. © 2006 John Sifton/Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch: Since January 2000, radical armed Islamist groups in the Philippines have carried out over 40 major bombings against civilians and civilian property, mostly in the south of the country. They have killed civilians indiscriminately — Christians and Muslims, men and women, parents and children — and left behind orphans, widows, and widowers. Hundreds of other victims have suffered severe wounds, burns, and lost limbs. In all, the bombings and other attacks have caused over 1,700 casualties in the last seven years, more than the number of people killed and injured in bombing attacks during the same period in neighboring Indonesia (including the 2002 Bali bombings), and considerably more than the number of those killed and injured in bombings in Morocco, Spain, Turkey, or Britain.

“Today, we raise the bar in our campaign against terrorists who kill, bomb and maim to enforce an ideology of evil,” the President said. “Talk is cheap. It is action that counts. I ask the public to give the Human Security Act a chance.”

Outgunned. Members of the MILF in Maguindanao. (Photo by Carlos H. Conde)

The Philippine military has a sordid history of complicity with the same insurgent groups it ostensibly fights, which includes a long-standing practice of selling weapons to the rebels, said Eliza Griswold, a journalist who has covered South Asia extensively; her stories have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic and other major publications. “The United States has supplied the Armed Forces of the Philippines with high-tech weaponry that some members of the [Philippine military] have gone on to sell to the insurgents,” she said. Read the story

“The vague language of the Human Security Act invites the government to misuse it,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “The Philippine Congress should repeal or revise the act to comply with human rights standards.”

As the Human Security Act takes effect today (Sunday), Press Secretary and Presidential Spokesman Ignacio R. Bunye reiterated the government’s assurances that human rights and civil liberties will be protected.

While stressing her administration’s determination to pursue the peace process to attain permanent peace in Mindanao, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said today the government will not allow groups or people committing “barbaric acts to hide under the negotiating table.”

Activists led by Bayan and its allied groups have been mounting protest actions against the Human Security Act, the Philippines’s anti-terrorism law that is set to take effect tomorrow, July 15. Critics said the law is the most repressive piece of legislation ever crafted by the Philippine congress. (Photo by Arkibong Bayan)

“To this day I have never been called to any criminal investigation concerning any specific crime of terrorism. In Europe or anywhere else in the world, I have never been accused of committing any kind of crime before police authorities or the courts. In the Philippines, I have never been charged with the crime of terrorism,” Jose Maria Sison says.

As the country’s fiscal position remains susceptible to another crisis, the Arroyo government will likely try to impose new taxes at the latest by 2008, according to independent think-tank Ibon Foundation. “This is the inevitable result of its refusal to address revenue losses from trade and investment liberalization, revenue losses from corruption and big-time tax evaders, and grossly bloated expenditures from unconditional debt servicing,” the institution said.

President Arroyo is likely to trumpet in the upcoming State of the Nation Address (SONA) her administration’s ability to attract more foreign investments into the country by creating a more investor-friendly climate. But independent think-tank IBON Foundation says that the Arroyo government’s foreign investment-resource extractive- and cheap labor-led approach raises false hopes for job creation.

Negros Occidental, the first Philippine province to embrace a 100% renewable energy target, today renewed its strong commitment to help stop climate change with the launch of the Electric Jeepneys in Bacolod City by GRIPP (Green Renewable Independent Power Producer) and Greenpeace.

The Royal Netherlands Embassy in Manila issued a statement this afternoon saying that, contrary to what Jose Maria Sison and the National Democratic Front may have impressed on the public, Sison is still on the terrorism list of the European Union. The embassy said the judgment of the European Court of First Instance concerns an old terrorism list, not the new terrorism list adopted on June 29, 2007. Sison, who lives in exile in Utrecht, is the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the NDF’s chief political consultant.

By CHERYLL D. FIEL | Davao Today

Rodrigo Duterte, the tough-talking mayor of Davao City known for his uncompromising stance on crime, has created an “Anti-Hoodlum Unit” that will go after gang members and abusive cabbies. He said the unit can shoot these “embarrassments to the city” with shotguns if necessary. “I warn you,” he said last week. “You bring out the worse in me.” He also warned child advocates to get out of his way and to stop pampering juvenile delinquents.

The Black & White Movement condemns in the strongest possible terms the beheading of ten marine soldiers following a firefight with members of the 8th Marine Battalion Landing Team (MBLT). “It is an inhuman and barbaric act that has no place in any civilized society and we ask that all means be exhausted to bring the perpetrators to justice”, says BnW lead convenor Enteng Romano.

Tourism and commerce are expected to surge once peace and prosperity in the countryside is restored with the implementation of the Human Security Act of 2007, Malacanang said today.