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Mob rule builds up anew EDITORIAL 05/17/2011

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Mob rule builds up anew

EDITORIAL
Click to enlarge
05/17/2011
The voluminous Sandiganbayan decision approving the plea bargain agreement between former military comptroller Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia and the prosecutors said a lot about Noynoy and his allies’ lack of respect for legal procedures as they would rather appeal to the emotions of the public when it comes to delicate legal issues.

Solicitor General Jose Anselmo Cadiz was also on the Sandiganbayan’s back since the start of its deliberation on the Garcia case, seeking its intervention in the case which was handled from the start by the prosecutors in the Office of the Ombudsman..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110517com1.html

The good news FRONTLINE Ninez Cacho-Olivares 05/17/2011

 The good news

FRONTLINE
Ninez Cacho-Olivares
05/17/2011
Finally, we may yet get rid of the Jurassic ways of fiscals in determining a complaint and elevating it to the courts for trial.

Reports say that the Supreme Court is now considering amendments to the rules of court that would require a higher standard of evidence before a suspect can be indicted.

Thus far, too many complaints based on mere affidavits would be enough for the prosecutors to state that there is probable cause, which immediate result is for the complaint to reach the courts, where years and years of litigation follow. This is especially true in libel complaints, where mostly government officials file complaint after complaint against journalists who are their critics, and as a way of harassing them and making them shut up in their criticisms.

In most cases, the fiscals hardly ever dismiss the libel complaint outright, and merely on the basis of the complaint affidavit, which generally has attached to it, the photocopy of the article which the complainant claims is libelous, even when clearly it is not..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110517com2.html

Film shows no happy ending for N. Korea refugees FEATURE 05/17/2011

Film shows no happy ending for N. Korea refugees

FEATURE

05/17/2011
SEOUL — North Korean refugee Jeon Seung-Chul, battling terminal stomach cancer in South Korea in 2008, had a final request for a film student friend: make a movie about my life even if I never get to see it.

Park Jung-Bum has done just that with The Journals of Musan, a raw and gritty look at a refugee’s struggle to survive in the new world of South Korea.

“This is like my letter for Jeon Seung-Chul,” said Park, whose former college roommate died later in 2008 at the age of just 30.

“Seung-Chul went through so many hardships to come to the South...only to die so young. I felt I had to do something for his memory.”.... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110517com3.html

Zombie economics and the comp-ad meme AN OUTSIDERS VIEW Ken Fuller 05/17/2011

Zombie economics and the comp-ad meme

AN OUTSIDERS VIEW
Ken Fuller
05/17/2011
James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State (2008), to which I referred two weeks ago, sets out to demolish a number of damaging myths, arguing that tax-cuts don’t work, monetarism is discredited and dead, and, as we saw in the previous column, that US efforts to achieve a balanced federal budget or a trade surplus are pointless and impossible under the current global financial regime. Much of this is, of course, directed at a US audience, but some of his attacks on recent dogma are of relevance to the Philippines.

He points out that the Washington Consensus, “a set of universal precepts of sound money, balanced budgets, deregulation, privatization and free trade,” has virtually crippled those countries which have embraced it most fervently and is now “almost universally repudiated in principle and increasingly evaded in practice.” Well, I could be wrong, but I don’t think most Philippine opinion-formers, let along policy-makers, have yet joined this chorus of repudiation. The same can be said regarding the doctrine of “comparative advantage” (or comp-ad, as we’ll call it)..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110517com4.html

‘Divide et impera’ VIEWPOINTS Archbishop Oscar V. Cruz 05/17/2011

‘Divide et impera’

VIEWPOINTS
Archbishop Oscar V. Cruz
05/17/2011
Time and again, it is clearly and repeatedly said that there is smoke in Malacañang. And as the saying rightly goes, where there is smoke, there is fire. And where there is fire, there is danger. In other words, there are open talks that Malacañang is presently occupied by two antagonistic political factions. The “Samar” and the “Balay” are the expressed titles mentioned dividing Malacañang occupancy.

Meant to house but one executive family, the said house is pitifully divided between two antagonistic sections. Intended for the use of but one administrative body, therein are instead two closely organized groups with one continuously trying to outdo or undo the other. This is an open secret.

And this is not only shameful to the two groupings but also damaging to multi-million Malacañang constituencies who dutifully pay them and who are wherefore expected to serve them — not to fight among themselves..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110517com5.html

From palace to prison for India’s high and mighty focus 05/17/2011

From palace to prison for India’s high and mighty

focus

05/17/2011
NEW DELHI — India’s notorious Tihar Jail in New Delhi is currently home to a clutch of VIP inmates suspected of corruption as police win rare permission to go after the “big fish” in recent cases.

The forbidding complex, home to militants and murderers, offers little in terms of comfort for its new white-collar guests, who are forced to share tiny cells with basic toilets in sweltering heat.

Prison chief Neeraj Kumar told AFP that the powerful connections of his new charges, which include the country’s former telecom minister and the head of the Indian Olympic Association, have won them no special treatment.

“It’s just a speculation in the media that we have a VIP jail,” Kumar said from his office at Tihar where 11,700 inmates, including 470 women and 500 foreigners, are squeezed into facilities designed to hold half this figure..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110517com7.html

Extreme makeover: Are humans reshaping Earth? FEATURE 05/17/2011

Extreme makeover: Are humans reshaping Earth?

FEATURE

05/17/2011
LONDON — If alien geologists were to visit our planet 10 million years from now, would they discern a distinct human fingerprint in Earth’s accumulating layers of rock and sediment?

Will homo sapiens, in other words, define a geological period in the way dinosaurs — and their vanishing act — helped mark the Jurassic and the Cretaceous?

A growing number of scientists, some gathered at a one-day symposium this week at the British Geological Society in London, say “yes.”

One among them, chemistry Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, has even suggested a new name: The Anthropocene..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110517com6.html

Suspected smuggler’s black book lists political kingpins By Charlie V. Manalo 05/17/2011

Suspected smuggler’s black book lists political kingpins

By Charlie V. Manalo 05/17/2011

Prominent political names and members of the Armed Forces were found on the list of a suspected smuggler of luxury vehicles and guns yesterday during a hearing of the Customs subcommittee of the House committee on ways and means sparked by a report of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the vehicle theft in the United States saying some of the stolen vehicles surfaced in the country.

During the hearing, Allan Lynnard Bigcas presented a so-called “black book” containing an account of his business dealings. The black book contained names and aliases of alleged provincial officials in Mindanao whom authorities believed to have had business deals with Bigcas.

Among those included in the list were a certain “Noah Dimaporo, Mayor Ali, Mayor Dimaporo, Boy Plaza, a certain Pepe and certain Colonel Pimentel.” Two certain Jalosjoses were also included on the list..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110517hed2.html

Spratlys conflict involving US not likely: envoy By Michaela P. del Callar 05/17/2011

Spratlys conflict involving US not likely: envoy

By Michaela P. del Callar 05/17/2011

An American diplomat yesterday said the chance of an armed conflict breaking out in the disputed Spratlys in the South China Sea that would prompt Washington to help its ally, the Philippines, is remote or may never happen.

Ambassador David Carden, visiting US Permanent Ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), however, stressed that Asian countries with overlapping claims should involve other stakeholders like the United States to try to resolve the problem despite China’s objection to foreign intervention.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during an Asean Summit in Hanoi in 2010 called for unfettered international access to the waters and articulated the need for the bloc “to have a mechanism in place to resolve its disputes and to bring in stakeholders,” Carden said..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110517hed3.html

Palace turns biblical on RH but bishop blasts Lacson By Aytch S. de la Cruz 05/17/2011

Palace turns biblical on RH but bishop blasts Lacson

By Aytch S. de la Cruz 05/17/2011

While Malacañang suddenly turned biblical over the Reproductive Health (RH) bill debate saying that it will retaliate by giving bread to those who throw stones against it, some Catholic bishops lambasted Sen. Panfilo Lacson, an ally of President Aquino, for alleging that the Church uses the pulpit to cam-paign against the controversial bill.

“You have no right to dictate us what to do on RH bill issue... Priests use the pulpit particularly on issues involving life,” Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelles said in a radio interview.

For his part, Sorsogon Bishop Arturo Bastes said it is the Church’s obligation to inform the public about the ill effects of the bill to health and morality.

“We are obliged to because that’s against the truth. He (Sen. Lacson) has no right to tell us what to do. We are the preachers of the God’s words,” Bastes said..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110517hed6.html

DepEd ready to adopt new curriculum 05/17/2011

DepEd ready to adopt new curriculum

05/17/2011
With the aim to improve the quality of education, the Department of Education has expressed readiness for the mandatory kindergarten curriculum and additional two years in high school once the bill is approved in the Senate.

DepEd Assistant Secretary Tonisito Umali yesterday made the disclosure during the weekly “Kapihan sa Diamond Hotel.”

Umali said the basic education program would now be 13 years from the existing 10 years which was formulated in 1926.

In the new curriculum, children aged 5 must be enrolled in kindergarten before being admitted to first grade in elementary, while in high school an additional two years would be added to the existing four years making it to six years..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/nation/20110517nat5.html

MILF to rescue Sino trader kidnapped by KFR gang 05/17/2011

MILF to rescue Sino trader kidnapped by KFR gang

05/17/2011
The secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) is considering the launching of rescue operation against a kidnap-for-ransom gang now holding a Filipino-Chinese businesswoman under captivity at an MILF-controlled area in Maguindanao province.

MILF spokesman for military affairs Eid Kabalu said the secessionist group is mulling over rescue operation as part of their commitment to the Ad Hoc Joint Action Group (AHJAG) agreed upon with the government under the ongoing peace negotiations.

“At present, we are contemplating an action…our responsibility to take positive action is given (under AHJAG) whenever there is this kind of incident,”Kabalu said.

“The Ad Hoc Joint Action Group functions to isolate and interdict criminal elements operating in Mindanao and so the mandate of MILF is given whenever things like these happen…we have basis to act on the issue like kidnapping,” Kabalu explained..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/nation/20110517nat2.html

San Juan solon calls on private colleges, universities to refrain from hiking tuition By Gerry Baldo 05/17/2011

San Juan solon calls on private colleges, universities to refrain from hiking tuition

By Gerry Baldo 05/17/2011
A lawwmaker from San Juan City yesterday called on private colleges and universities to refrain from increasing tuition given the current economic hardships brought about by the unabated rise in the prices of petroleum products.

According to San Juan City Rep. Joseph Victor “JV” Ejercito, educational institutions should defer implementation of tuition hike, saying parents have enough burdens to carry with the cost of living becoming exorbitant.

This statement was in reply to the recent announcement of the Commission on Higher Education (Ched) that 282 private colleges and universities are to actualize tuition increments this coming school year.

“Private institutions should put into mind the ongoing and simultaneous price increase of basic commodities,” Ejercito said. He is a member of the House committee on youth and sports..... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/metro/20110517met3.html

Lawmakers want stiffer penalties imposed on reckless PUV drivers, negligent operators By Charlie V. Manalo 05/17/2011

Lawmakers want stiffer penalties imposed on reckless PUV drivers, negligent operators

By Charlie V. Manalo 05/17/2011

Two lawmakers from the Visayas have raised the urgent need to review the country’s penal laws that are related to road accidents as they noted there might be a need to impose stricter penalties on public utility vehicle (PUV) drivers and operators involved in fatal accidents.

This, after veteran journalist was killed in a vehicular accident late last week on a major thoroughfare in Quezon City dubbed a “killer highway.”.... MORE

SourceThe Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/metro/20110517met1.html

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