IN August. it was touted as a momentous victory in President Duterte’s war against illegal drugs— the interception by a combined team of the Bureau of Customs (BOC) and Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) of 355 kilograms of shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) hidden inside the hollow chambers of two magnetic scrap lifters at the Manila International Container […]

I’M starting to believe that we do have a rule of law, even if the axe falls on the mighty, and the rich. Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission commissioner Greco Belgica and several other citizens have filed at the Office of the Ombudsman 274 counts of malversation against former President Benigno Aquino 3rd, his budget secretary Florencio […]

THAT title of course is a paraphrase of British playwright George Bernard Shaw’s aphorism, a rather harmless barb to deflate pompous professors’ egos: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” However, in our country since the 1970s it has been a phenomenon that has had terrible and bloody consequences for our people. It partly […]

THE following is the introduction to a report titled “The Killing Goes On” of Western NGO, Amnesty International (AI), very slightly redacted for purposes that will be revealed towards the end of this column. AI report starts “At least 550 people, all of them unarmed, have been killed by government or government-backed forces in the […]

TOP-ranked officials of the Philippine National Police (PNP) in the Noynoy Aquino administration, who were the commanders of the PNP’s campaign against illegal drugs, were themselves involved in that heinous crime. They were getting hundreds of millions of pesos in protection money from big-time drug dealers and recycling confiscated illegal drugs to sell to the […]