In 1960, the Philippines boasted a real gross domestic product per person of USD 1,124, sitting comfortably ahead of South Korea. Today, South Korea has skyrocketed past USD 37,000 while the Philippines struggles below USD 4,000. The Filipino household has spent the last six decades acting as the shock absorber
July 2, 2026
Voting in the University of the Philippines Alumni Association elections opened on June 18 and runs through August 6. Most members will not bother to cast a ballot. That apathy is the real story behind this election. The University of the Philippines trains a large share of the country’s judges,
June 25, 2026
Cura personalis – “care for the whole person” – is the phrase Jesuit schools stitch onto their banners and recite at every orientation. On the afternoon of June 8, 2026, two young men in the care of the most famous Jesuit university in the country drowned in the sea off
June 22, 2026
By Francis Allan L. Angelo Go to the La Paz market early, before the heat. The floor is still wet from the hosing and the batchoy stalls are just getting their cauldrons going. I have spent a lot of mornings there over the years, and that is where you actually learn what Iloilo is –
June 20, 2026
Ask anyone who sat in a Philippine public school classroom in the 1980s or early 1990s what they remember most, and the answer is rarely the lessons. It is the red ink. A 74 was a failure. There was no cushion, no transmutation table rounding you up, no administrative mercy.
June 11, 2026
For decades, the Philippines punched below its economic weight, exporting workers instead of products, talents instead of technologies. The Pax Silica initiative may finally be forcing a different answer. Last month, the Pacific Forum published a policy brief arguing that Manila’s entry into the Pax Silica initiative represents nothing less
June 6, 2026
I’ve covered Philippine politics long enough to know that the words “dismantling the oligarchy” usually mean someone else is getting the seats. Rodrigo Duterte said it louder than most — called them a cancer, illustrious idiots, sons of bitches sitting in their private planes while the meter ran. People believed
June 3, 2026
In the first week of May, Iloilo City logged 569 heat-related illnesses, up from 355 the week before, as the heat index pushed toward 54 degrees Celsius. In that same stretch, the Maasin Dam slid to red alert and the metro’s bulk water supply fell to 75.33 million liters per
May 30, 2026
Who builds a city’s water lines, and under what kind of contract, rarely makes the news. This month it did, when the question reached the floor of the Iloilo City Council. On May 13, Councilor Rex Marcus Sarabia urged Metro Pacific Iloilo Water to bring its pipe-laying work in-house and
May 29, 2026
There is a phrase that cuts through the legal thicket of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Senator Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa’s plea for a Temporary Restraining Order against his ICC arrest: judicial surrender. Associate Justice Amy C. Lazaro-Javier used those two words to describe what the Court’s majority did
May 28, 2026
There is a particular kind of legal argument that mistakes the dress for the person. It clothes itself in the language of rights — constitutional rights, due process, the sacred writ of liberty — and presents itself as the noblest of causes: a man defending his freedoms against an overreaching
May 27, 2026
Two men shook hands inside the Great Hall of the People last Thursday, and somewhere between the toasts and a walled tour of Zhongnanhai, the United States may have just agreed to a phrase it will spend the next three years trying to walk back. The phrase is constructive strategic
May 20, 2026