New journalism EDITORIAL 03/08/2011

New journalism

EDITORIAL

Click to enlarge

03/08/2011
It started as a challenge. A group of journalists considered 11 years ago what was then a dream of most in the profession: The forming of a newspaper that would be run entirely by journalists, from its management to its editorial content.
A media run purely by those who toil for it is a rarity in the Philippine scene and rarer still are those that thrive for very long.
At the time when it was formed until now, the newspaper industry is dominated by publications managed by major business and political interests.
The Daily Tribune was, however, born right at the precipitous moment when Philippine politics was on the verge of a turmoil..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com1.html

All eyes on the Senate FRONTLINE Ninez Cacho-Olivares 03/08/2011

All eyes on the Senate

FRONTLINE

Ninez Cacho-Olivares

03/08/2011
With a Senate impeachment trial of Merceditas Gutierrez looming, given that the House of Representatives is ensuring that probable cause will be its conclusion, all eyes will now be on how fair or unjust the Senate will be in resolving the case against the Ombudsman.

Although the Senate will hardly admit it, its members earned for itself a black mark when the anti-Erap senator-judges, unable to get the numbers for a conviction, played dirty and threw out all rules and the Constitution during the impeachment trial of the former president, and brought the issue to the streets in a coup by the elite who tried to disguise as a popular and democratic people power revolt.

What is going for Merci today is that her impeachment trial will be headed, not by a shameless Chief Justice who was part of the coup plot to unseat Estrada, but an independent and legal eagle, Senate President Juan Ponce-Enrile. With him sitting as a presiding judge, one can expect fairness in his rulings on whatever motions that come his way..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com2.html

Battle on paradise Philippine island PIPELINE 03/08/2011

Battle on paradise Philippine island

PIPELINE

03/08/2011
PUERTO PRINCESA — For tourists the Philippine island of Palawan seems like paradise, but for environment activists it feels more akin to a battlefield.

Murders and threats on what is promoted as the Southeast Asian nation’s last ecological frontier are emblematic of a struggle across the country, where dozens of environment campaigners have been killed over the past decade.

Father-of-five “Doc” Gerry Ortega became the latest casualty in late January when a hitman shot him in the head while browsing in a second-hand clothes shop along one of the main roads of Palawan’s capital city, Puerto Princesa.

“He received a lot of death threats,” Ortega’s wife, Patty, 48, told AFP in an interview at a cafe just a few hundred meters from where he was killed..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com3.html

International Women’s Day NO HOLDS BARRED Armida Siguion-Reyna 03/08/2011

International Women’s Day

NO HOLDS BARRED

Armida Siguion-Reyna

03/08/2011
The first National Women’s Day was held in the United States, in 1909. There had been variations of the observance elsewhere such as in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland in 1911 and in Russia, on 1913, before the United Nations Charter proclaimed gender equality as a fundamental human right in 1945.

Since then, the UN campaign for the advancement of women’s rights has moved toward what has been acclaimed as “four clear directions,” specifically, the “promotion of legal measures; mobilization of public opinion and international action; training and research, including the compilation of gender desegregated statistics; and direct assistance to disadvantaged groups.” It has become a “central organizing principle” of all work done in the UN “that no enduring solution to society’s most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world’s women.”

Hereabouts, it was the current president’s mother, President Corazon Aquino, who signed Proclamation No. 224 on 1 March 1988, “Declaring the First Week of March of Every Year as Women’s Week and March 8, 1988 and Every Year Thereafter as Women’s Rights and International Peace Day.” And she didn’t stop there..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com4.html

Another Libya? AN OUTSIDERS VIEW Ken Fuller 03/08/2011

Another Libya?

AN OUTSIDERS VIEW

Ken Fuller

03/08/2011
In the recent dispute concerning what might have happened if Ferdinand Marcos had not been deposed in 1986, President Aquino is reported to have said that the Philippines would have become another Libya. But if Libya is such a basket case, one struggles to understand the presence there of tens of thousand of OFWs. Did all those Filipinos really choose to work in a country where conditions were worse than in their own?

A piece by David Rothscum (“The World Cheers as the CIA Plunges Libya into Chaos”) on Global Reseach provides some clarification. Libya, he says, has the lowest infant mortality rate and the highest life expectancy rate in Africa. As food prices rose, the Libyan government eliminated all food taxes. The proportion of the population described as malnourished is less than five percent.

“Libya,” says Rothscum, has “the highest gross domestic product… at purchasing power parity… of all of Africa,” and “the highest Human Development Index of any country on the continent... In Libya, a lower percentage of people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.”

This outsider could be wrong, but it seems to me that many Filipinos would probably settle for something like that..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com5.html

China’s huge labor pool shows signs of drying up focus 03/08/2011

China’s huge labor pool shows signs of drying up

focus

03/08/2011
SHANGHAI — As one of the more than 200 million people in China’s huge migrant workforce, Lu Jun has had to hustle for jobs his entire life, but suddenly he finds he has more choices and bargaining power than ever.

Lu, whose skin is tanned and his navy suit jacket faded from the sun, says he is standing taller these days as he surveys his many options at a state-funded job fair in Shanghai following the annual Lunar New Year holiday.

“Nowadays it’s not easy to find an experienced worker like me,” the 25-year-old Lu, who worked at a package printing factory in the eastern province of Anhui for five years, said proudly.

China’s vast worker pool, which has powered the explosive growth of its labour-intensive exports over the past decade, is tightening up, analysts say. That means that, while dissatisfied migrant workers are still seen as a source of potential unrest, power is tilting from employers to employees like Lu..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com6.html

Lie vs truth VIEWPOINTS Archbishop Oscar V. Cruz 03/08/2011

Lie vs truth

VIEWPOINTS

Archbishop Oscar V. Cruz

03/08/2011
A lie by any other name remains a lie. Deception. Falsification. Prevarication. Invention. Misrepresentation. All these and other impressive variance of the same reality still say one and the same thing: Lie. Perhaps — just perhaps — it might help those present in the Senate hearings and the general public witnessing the proceedings, to better understand what has been really going on there for some time when the so called “Resource Persons” as put to task by answering direct and clear questions addressed to them – either by telling lies or invoking this or that right. Incidentally, there is no right to lie.

The very first thing that comes to mind and begs for understanding is that lying is a hard option; a difficult recourse — precisely when the liar knows the truth not only on sublime human reason but also on base human instinct inherent to the persons concerned, goes against the nature and intent of lying. Reason: Lie disturbs the liar just as truth pacifies him or her..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com7.html

Noy orders LP solons Impeach Merci By Aytch S. de la Cruz 03/08/2011

Noy orders LP solons Impeach Merci

By Aytch S. de la Cruz 03/08/2011

In complete disregard for the separation of powers principle, President Aquino yesterday ordered his Liberal Party (LP) congressmen and allies not to fail in impeaching Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, telling them that the choice on the issue of whether or not to impeach Gutierrez is “very simple” as it is a choice to have the system remaining rotten or to continue treading his claimed “straight path.”
“The choice is very simple: Leave the system rotten or… to continue treading the straight path,” Aquino told his LP allies.

Aquino appears determined to have the defense walls of the Ombudsman collapse as he gathered House of Representatives LP lawmakers yesterday to ensure that the impeachment complaints filed against her progresses to get rid of the “stumbling block” in his government’s drive against corruption.

Aquino, who serves as LP’s chairman, met with his party mates behind closed doors at the residence of their party president, former Sen. Mar Roxas, where he delivered a speech, saying that “Everything that will happen in this government shall be reflected on me since I am the chief. Insofar as we, as a party in power, are concerned we should be all together in this (move to get rid of the Ombudsman). Should the (prosecution) system fail further, it is going to be our fault.”.... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110308hed1.html

Study impeach vs SC justices carefully spokesman By Benjamin B. Pulta 03/08/2011

Study impeach vs SC justices carefully spokesman

By Benjamin B. Pulta 03/08/2011

Supreme Court (SC) spokesman Midas Marquez yesterday said efforts to impeach magistrates of the high court should not be done whimsically and urged lawmakers to insulate the tribunal from mundane arbitrary partisan politics.

“There appears to be concerted efforts to bring the court down,” the SC spokesman told reporters in an interview.

Marquez cited the threat of a congressman to file an impeachment complaint against the high court justices in the majority who had voted to issue a status quo ante (SQA) on the House justice committee hearings on the impeachment charges against the Ombudsman, which resulted in a delay in impeachment proceedings.

The high court described the reported charges on questions of the SQA as based on “trivial questions.”.... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110308hed2.html

Finance chief, partners hold sway over Customs 03/08/2011

Finance chief, partners hold sway over Customs

03/08/2011
What does Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima, Customs Commissioner Angelito Alvarez and former Customs Commissioner Alberto Lina have in common?

The three share seats in the board of many companies they mutually own and a source said the trio now lords its over at the Bureau of Customs.

A source who provided The Tribune documents showing the interlocking interests of the three in at least five companies said Purisima, Alvarez and Lina now virtually control the Bureau of Customs and have made the agency “their own business operations.”

The source added the strong business connections of Alvarez and Purisima were the main reason for President Aquino to keep Alvarez as head of Customs despite the controversy generated by his alleged scores cheating in an Alabang Golf Tournament..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110308hed3.html

8 million faces left to draw 03/08/2011

8 million faces left to draw

03/08/2011
Artist Jason Polan won’t be running out of live models any time soon — in trying to draw every person in New York, he’s got at least eight million more to go.

The plan may sound crazy, but Polan, 28, is serious.

Every day he’s out there with ink pen and sketch pad, posting the results on www.everypersoninnewyork.blogspot.com. Three years into the project, he’s up to about 14,000.

“I know I’m going to fail, I won’t draw everybody, but I enjoy trying,” he says..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110308hed6.html

US urges restraint as Aquino raises Spratlys oil probe to Asean By Mario J. Mallari 03/08/2011

US urges restraint as Aquino raises Spratlys oil probe to Asean

By Mario J. Mallari 03/08/2011

The United States called for restraint among claimant-countries of the disputed Spratly group islands on South China Sea following last Wednesday’s harassment of a Philippine exploratory vessel by Chinese patrol boats at the Reed Bank.

“We urge restraint on all sides. We urge that the South China Sea issue be resolved in the negotiating table,” US Ambassador Harry Thomas said during a chance interview at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City.

Thomas cited the 2002 Code of Conduct among claimant-countries for them to resolve the dispute through peaceful negotiations.

“We believe that the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) states and China should sit down according to the 2002 Code of Conduct,” he added..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/headlines/20110308hed5.html

GMA ally charged with abduction of teen boy By Benjamin B. Pulta 03/08/2011

GMA ally charged with abduction of teen boy

By Benjamin B. Pulta 03/08/2011

Criminal charges were filed before the Department of Justice (DoJ) against a Siquijor lawmaker with close links to former President Gloria Arroyo for allegedly intervening in a case involving the abduction of a teener during last October’s SK (Sangguniang Kabataan) elections.

Rep. Orlando Fua Sr. now faces criminal charges before the Department of Justice in connection with the alleged abduction.

The complaint was filed by police Insp. Philip Silva, chief of police of Larena town, Siquijor.

He claimed the lawmaker tried to wield his influence over the police in seeking the release from police custody his political supporter, Homer Sagaral, who was accused of illegally detaining a 15-year-old boy whose name was withheld for being a minor..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/nation/20110308nat1.html

9 OFWs refuse to leave Libya By Mina Diaz 03/08/2011

9 OFWs refuse to leave Libya

By Mina Diaz 03/08/2011

Nine overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Jalu, Libya refused to join hundreds of fleeing Filipinos and other nationalities to escape Libya through the border of Egypt.

If I go home, there will be no work and my family may die of hunger. I will stay until the peace situation here would improve. It’s difficult to live in the Philippines, these were the words of Ernesto Jalumandi, an oil piper in Jalu, Libya who opted to stay there as he relayed it with Teodoro Mahabos who arrived in the country yesterday on board of Gulf Air GF 154 flight.

Mahabos, a native of Eastern Samar, was among the 23 OFWs from Libya that arrived yesterday at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Mahabos and Jalumandi worked as oil piper at the Addiar Oil Services Co. in Jalu, Libya, about 600 kilometers away from the Egyptian border.

He said he did not know the full names of the other eight Filipinos that opted to stay in Libay since they have worked on the oil fields..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/nation/20110308nat3.html