GMA is looking for envi TV host

GMA7 Public Affairs is currently looking for a host for its new program which will seek to promote environmental awareness. Interested applicants should be:

For Male Host:

Good-looking with good body built
At least 5'7 in height
18-30 years old
Sporty
A nature-lover
An animal lover
An environment advocate
Has wide experience exploring/saving the environment
Smart and opinionated
Confident
Has excellent communication skills in both English and Tagalog

For Female Host:

Beautiful
Physically fit
At least 5'2 in height
18-27 years old
Sporty
A nature-lover
An animal lover
An environment advocate
Has wide experience exploring/saving the environment
Smart and opinionated
Confident
Has excellent communication skills in both English and Tagalog

If you think you got what it takes, kindly e-mail a comprehensive resume (and state your environment related experiences) with at least three photos (close-up and whole body) at hipchick17f@gmail.com. Qualified applicants will be privately called for an audition. Submission ends on October 5, 2007.

Waiting for people power in Burma

After twenty long years, there's again a people power movement to oust the repressive military junta in Burma.

These are highly emotional times in Burma. Triggered by rising fuel costs, monks for the past days have been marching, calling for an end to military rule, which has isolated the country and depressed the local economy. The leading opposition leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, is still under house arrest, but is now reported to have been moved by the military out of her house and transferred to prison.

The military has also started to attack the monks with tear gas. Many people around the world fear that soon the military will start shooting them, as it did in 1988.

Filipino friends of the Burmese people, led by the Free Burma Coalition, are planning to join the Burmese people in protests. Here are the tentative dates, hope you could join any one of them:

*Friday, September 28 *- solidarity picket in front of Burma Embassy at
10:30 am sponsored by Partido ng Manggagawa (PM)

*Saturday, September 29* - solidarity activity at the Quezon Memorial
Circle - 8888 faces for a free Burma photo campaign booth (to be
confirmed) sponsored by IID and FBC

*Monday, October 1* - solidarity picket in front of Burma Embassy at
10:30 am sponsored by Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP)

*Tuesday or Wednesday, October 2 or 3* - solidarity picket in front of
Burma Embassy at 10:30 am sponsored by Alliance of Progressive Labor
(APL) - final date to be confirmed

*Tuesday or Wednesday, October 2 or 3 *- solidarity picket in front of
Burma Embassy at 10:30 am sponsored by Akbayan Citizen's Action Party
(AKBAYAN) - final date to be confirmed

(some of the pickets may be staged at China Embassy or DFA.

If voting were held today, JPEPA would be junked

The Daily Manila Shimbun, the Philippine Daily Inquirer,and GMA 7 report on the rather disastrous turn of events for the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) when it defended the JPEPA during the first hearing for the agreement's ratification in the Philippine Senate.

In separate media interviews after the hearing, Senators Enrile,Defensor-Santiago, Roxas said that the government was unable to make a sound defense of the JPEPA. Senator Roxas was "underwhelmed." The Junk JPEPA Coalition was more prepared than the government officials, according to Senator Defensor-Santiago. This was despite the fact that there was a full ensemble of top government officials defending the JPEPA (Secretary Favila, Usec Aquino, Secretary Gary Teves,etc)versus only one from the Magkaisa Junk JPEPA COalition: Atty Golda Benjamin of the alternative legal group IDEALS.Senator Enrile said that the pro-JPEPA panel was resorting to scare tactics to bully the senators to vote for JPEPA, the agreement's merits being incomprehensible to ordinary Filipinos.

Also, the invited Japanese panelist, the VP of the Japanese chamber of commerce, did not help the case of the pro-JPEPA panel, with senators pouncing on his casual remark that the Philippines "does not have a good image" in Japan. Senators Gordon and Enrile asked if JPEPA will improve that image and bring in the investments from Japan.

You can see the report of GMA 7 below:


For the latest Philippine news stories and videos, visit GMANews.TV

Philippine security and Chinese ZTE Broadband

There are many compelling reasons why the ZTE Broadband project should be scrapped; today's Manila Times editorial outlines most of them. But what is never mentioned is that the project, which will build the Philippine backbone for multi-media interconnectivity among government offices, might endanger Philippine national security by potentially allowing China unfettered access to government information.

China is indeed interested in information. Recently, there were reports that the government and military networks of Germany, Britain, and the United States sustained cyber attacks by Chinese hackers testing information technology defenses. Now, there's this news saying that France sustained similar cyber attacks from China. The attacks targeted the French defense ministry's public Internet site.

What was the purpose of such attacks? Critics say motives for such hacking include stealing of secrets or confidential technology, probing for system weaknesses and placing hidden viruses that could be activated in a conflict.

So far, no official complaint has been made to China for those attacks. The governments concerned are only saying the the attacks can be traced back to China, but not necessarily to the People's Liberation Army.

US State Department officials believe that that every telecommunications company in China is linked to the Ministry of Post and Communications and/or the military. There is, therefore, a distinct possibility that China could be bugging our proposed ZTE broadband network, wiring our government offices directly to Chinese intelligence. The ZTE broadband scandal may not solely be about who got how much bribes. Perhaps the stratospheric bribe offers from ZTE could be explained by the fact that China has political and strategic interests in the completion of the project.

Full circle for Chairman Abalos

If Chairman Abalos does not resign, he may very well be impeached. And it seems he has no intention of resigning because he's digging in and declaring a position of absolute innocence.

Iloilo Vice Governor Rolex Suplico will be filing an impeachment complaint against Chairman Abalos next week and, despite this report that claims the Speaker will not use his clout to promote the impeachment complaint, one can not reasonably expect the Speaker to block Abalos's impeachment with the same energy and stamina he blocked the impeachment complaint against President Arroyo since his own son is an aggrieved party in this deal. When someone is implying your son is a liar, it's hard to be totally neutral. Blood, after all, is thicker than anything.

The knives are out. The people who failed to get Chairman Abalos for the Mega Pacific deal are probably lining up to get him this time. And the stars are starting to align against him: the business groups calling for his resignation, Church members calling for Neri to testify "to save his soul," allegations of sexual marathon with nubile Chinese women, and, in an interview today on the radio, a distressed Abalos complaining that his wife and children are being ostracized by their peers.

All this is bad for the Philippines and also bad for China. First, there was the contaminated White Rabbit. Second, there's the perception China's taking over some of Philippine agricultural land. Now, a Chinese company is corrupting our government, offering scandalously high bribes for a project that has an indefensible rationale.

Sa pintig ng cursor, ideolohiya

From Richard Ernacio of the Tinig yahoogroup:

Inaanyayahan kayo ng LIKHAAN: UP institusyon ng malikhaing pagsulat (UP ICW) na dumalo sa "lecture" ni Dr. ROLAND TOLENTINO na pinamagatang "SA PINTIG NG CURSOR, IDEOLOHIYA)" na gaganapin sa SEPT. 14 (BIYERNES), 2:30 pm sa VARGAS MUSEUM. ITO AY WALANG BAYAD

Si dr. tolentino ay kasalukuyang guro sa UP Film Institute at associate sa fiction ng UP ICW.

A salve to one's solitude

The sad death of another student desiring of acceptance to a fraternity has reminded me once again how despite all the affectations we may assume, in spite of all the sophistication we from time to time want to convey to the world, we are all, deep inside, just a solitary people needing the warmth of other people's friendship.

How else would you explain the deep aspiration for a seemingly intelligent young man to subject himself to physical torture just to belong to a clique he can call his own?

Aristotle wrote that a man who doesn't need the companionship of other people, who doesn't feel the need to join the polis, is either a god or a beast. Yet, irony of ironies, the ideal good life outlined by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, is one that is meditative, a solitary pursuit.

How does one join other people in various human pursuits and still retain the space to privately pursue a meditative life? If you pursue the warmth of human companionship, you, surely at one point, are bound to be disappointed, even brutally hurt and disillusioned. Friends betray each other, lovers part for newfound love, an apprentice trumps his master, a UP pledge sometimes get beaten to death all in the hope of human friendship and fraternity.

Really, what is the value of a human relationship attained thus? It must needs be better to be a hungry wolf that hunts the world in solitude. You may not be Aristotle's solitary god, but a troglodytic beast will survive in the wild best.

One more time with feeling

Not content with having heard them at the House of Representatives, some in the opposition want to replay the Hello Garci tapes - this time around in the Senate. Senator Miriam Santiago, Senator Joker Arroyo and Senator Richard Gordon are rightly opposing this recidivist move, with Senator Santiago even threatening to bring the issue to the Supreme Court should the Senate majority insist.

You see, we may all loathe the president and relish each time we see her flailed in public, but the Anti-Wiretapping Law or RA 4200 is unambiguous in its language that: Any communication or spoken word, or the existence, contents, substance, purport, effect, or meaning of the same or any part thereof, or any information therein contained obtained or secured by any person in violation of the preceding Sec.s of this Act shall not be admissible in evidence in any judicial, quasi-judicial, legislative or administrative hearing or investigation.

Just because we all want to see President Arroyo ousted does not mean we should be free from all legal impediments to do whatever we wish. That is the mistake we made at Edsa Dos.

2008 International Postage Stamp Design Contest

The Bureau of Post of the Republic of Korea is inviting participants to the 2008 International Postage Stamp Design Contest to increase public interest in postage stamps at home and abroad, as well as to find more creative ideas for stamp design.

The competition is divided into two categories:

• Youth category for those 17 years and below with the theme “The Mailbox of the Future”
• General category (no age restriction) with the theme “A Happy Nation that Nurtures Kids”

Application forms may be downloaded from the web page of Korea Post: www.koreapost.go.kr

Application period: July 2 to September 21, 2007

For more information, contact +82 2 2195 1255 Fax: +82 2 2195 1299
Email: vogelruf@mic.go.kr

from the NYC website: www.youth.net.ph

The Chinese as migrant worker in the Philippines

Two weeks ago, I was at the UP University Press Bookstore looking for Nick Joaquin's biography of Senator Angara when, while browsing the shelves, I came across Bai Ren's Lagalag sa Nanyang translated from the Chinese to Filipino by Joaquin Sy.

Lagalag sa Nanyang (Nanyang Piaoliuji) is an autobiographical novel, a Bildungsroman, told by A Song, a boy from a small village in China who left the country in 1932 when he was only ten years old to look for work in the Philippines. He took on the jobs of apprentice in a Chinese dry-goods store in the Visayas, newspaper boy in Binondo, salesman of katol (anti-mosquito coils), and later translator of English news reports for a local Chinese publication in Manila.

Lagalag sa Nanyang chronicles the hardship experienced by A Song as a poor migrant worker in the Philippines, how he had to scrimp in order to eat and send remittance to China, how he deliberately spent each centimo as though it were a whole peso.

The novel has such a huge impact on me because I imagine that my maternal and paternal grandfathers must have had the same experience as A Song's. They came here about the same time A Song left China for the Philippines. At the beginning of the novel when A Song was describing the boat packed with Chinese all bound for the Philippines and all vomiting because of the violent seas, I imagine the boat where the brother of my maternal grandfather perished somewhere near Batanes, almost reaching the Philippines.

A Song fell in love in the Philippines, was brokenhearted here and, at the end of the novel, left the Philippines to join the Chinese resistance against the Japanese in World War II. Lagalag sa Nanyang is such a sad and lonely book it is likely you'll find yourself in tears in several episodes. The last time I felt as heartbroken reading a novel was more than ten years ago with George Eliot's Silas Marner.

I've finished reading Lagalag sa Nanyang today and it has become one of my favorite novels. The novel has such huge love both for the Philippines and China. I wish I could thank Joaquin Sy myself for translating this wonderful book. If you have a Chinese-Filipino friend, do him a favor and give Lagalag sa Nanyang as a gift.

Money to burn

For the past week, I was too busy to blog and was too preoccupied with JPEPA and a new campaign we launched this week about another onerous Philippine loan that financed a failed white elephant project of the Department of Health.The Philippine Star, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Malaya and the BusinessMirror reported on the campaign launching.

The loan is roughly a US$ 2M obligation every year for the Philippines until 2014. The loan was incurred by the government to pay for medical waste incinerators that we are no longer using today because of their unacceptably high emissions plus the incinerator ban declared by the Clean Air Act of 1999.

We will be paying 100 million pesos every year for the defunct incinerators. What is sad about this is that the total 2007 budget of the DOH to address its backlog in infrastructure is just about 400 million pesos. The incinerator loan is one-fourth of that total budget for infrastructure.

And now, of course, we have another white elephant project in the offing: the ZTE broadband project. The ZTE broadband deal is such an atrociously bad deal that Secretary Neri should not have been simply demoted as CHED Chairman; he should have been banished from public service forever instead.

Everyday Islam photo contest

Photographers are invited to send entries to a photography contest that aims to depict Muslim integration in the Philippines, following the legacy of UK’s renowned photographer and Muslim convert Peter Sanders.

Sponsored by the British Embassy in partnership with Newsbreak, the competition has two categories: professional, for those who earn a living from photography or are hobbyists who have participated in photo contests; and amateur, for those who do not earn a living from photography and who may submit photos taken with their mobile phone cameras.

Each entry must consist of one (1) full color, 8” x 10” photograph, accompanied by a caption. The photographer should not put his name or any distinguishing marks on the photograph. A separate paper containing the caption and the name and contact details of the photographer should be submitted with the photograph. Contestants are requested to submit as well the original or raw files of their entries.

A contestant may submit as many entries as he or she desires. Employees of the British Embassy and Newsbreak and their relatives up to the fourth degree of consanguinity are not allowed to participate in the competition.

Entries should be received by Newsbreak before or on August 31, Friday. They may be hand-carried or mailed to Room 1402-A West Tower, Philippine Stock Exchange Centre, Exchange Road, Ortigas Center, Pasig City.

A board of judges composed of professionals chosen by the British Embassy, the British Council, and Newsbreak will pick two winners in each category, or a total of four winners. In the professional category, P25,000 awaits the first prize winner, and P10,000 the second prize winner. In the amateur category, the first and second prize winners will receive P15,000 and P5,000, respectively.

Winners will be announced in the last week of September as the Peter Sanders exhibition tour starts its Mindanao leg. Winning entries will be featured on the British Embassy and Newsbreak websites.

Ownership of the photographs shall remain with the photographers, but the entries shall be made part of the British Embassy’s photobank, which it can use at no extra cost for future projects related to its Engaging with the Islamic World program.

Invitation to a forum on regional literature

Mga Suliranin ng Panitik Mulang Rehiyon

Inaanyayahan ang lahat na dumalo sa Mga Suliranin ng Panitik Mulang Rehiyon, isang talakayan na inihahandog ng Linangan sa Imahen, Retorika, at Anyo (LIRA) sa pakikipagtulungan ng UST Center for Creative Writing and Studies. Gaganapin po ito sa UST Thomas Aquinas Research Center Seminar Room A sa ika-21 ng Hulyo, mula ala-una hanggang alas-singko ng hapon. Ang talakayan pong ito ay dadaluhan ng manunulat na mula sa labas ng Maynila, tulad ni Abdon Balde, Jr. na galing Bikol, at Jose Bragado na isa namang Iloko. Ito po ay walang bayad at bukas sa publiko. Magbibigay po ng sertipiko sa mga makapag-aabiso ng kanilang pagdalo bago ang naturang pangyayari. Mangyari na lamang pong makipag-ugnayan kay Nanoy sa 0918-2442553, di kaya magpadala ng e-mail sa liraworkshop@gmail.com.

Everyone is invited to attend Mga Suliranin ng Panitik Mulang Rehiyon ( The Challenges of Literature from the Regions), a forum brought to you by Linangan sa Imagen, Retorika, at Anyo (LIRA) in cooperation with UST Center for Creative Writing and Studies. The forum will be held at the UST Thomas Aquinas Research Center Seminar Room A on July 21, from 1pm-5pm. The speakers who will be attending the forum are writers from outside of Manila, like Abdon Balde, Jr. who hails from Bicol, and Jose Bragado who is an Iloko. The forum is free and open to the public. Certificates will be given to those who will confirm their attendance before the event, those interested may course their requests or inquiries through Nanoy at 0918-2442553 or liraworkshop@gmail.com.

Magkaisa Junk JPEPA press con

The Magkaisa Junk JPEPA Coalition, of which I am a part, held today a press con at Miriam College. It was nice of former Vice President Tito Guingona, Rep Risa Hontiveros, Philippine Nurses Association (PNA) President Leah Paquiz and Atty Tanya Lat to have all come. Read about the event at the Magkaisa Junk JPEPA Coalition blog.

Senator Pimentel is okay with repeal of Human Security Act, notwithstanding his voting for it in the Senate

During a Kilusan sa Makabansang Ekonomiya (KME) summit held at Maryhill School of Theology in Quezon City this morning, Sen. Nene Pimentel was justifing his participation in the Senate debate on the Human Security Act (pdf). The original version of the law, he said, was so atrociously bad that had he kept silent, never introduced his many amendments, and simply voted nay, the Human Security Act now would have been a lot more draconian.

All of Sen. Pimentel's amendments seem to be quite reasonable: the maximum of three days of detention without judicial warrant of arrest (rather than the originally proposed three months!); the Executive Secretary (rather than the unsuable president herself)as chair of the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC); suspension of the law three months surrounding any election; designation of a Court of Appeals division to review decisions made by the ATC; the P500,000 per day penalty for unlawful detention; the requirement for probable cause, etc.

Sen. Pimentel, however, categorically said, he would welcome if the Human Security Act is repealed or voided. Anyway, since the crimes in the Human Security Act are already designated as crimes in the Revised Penal Code, there's really no pressing need for it. The military, even sans the law, is also quite capable of forcefully abducting people in the streets.

Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:

"Oh, you mustn't pray for that either," said Alyosha, horrified. "Why do you want freedom? In freedom your last grain of faith will be choked with weeds. You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul. As the Apostle Paul wrote: 'Why all these tears?'

Book Donation at Asian Development Bank (ADB) Library

The ADB Library recently weeded books from its collection and is inviting government/state academic and research libraries to avail of these books, on a first-come, first-served basis. The books are mostly in the subject areas of economics, business, management as well as other areas of social sciences. Books are for pick-up at the ADB Library, located at No.6, ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila. If interested, please call Riza Villafana at telephone number 632-4270, Gina San Buenaventura at 632-4272 or Nelia Balagapo, associate librarian, at 632-4914.

Unknown pleasures

The Philippines Star reports today that a man in Plaridel, Bulacan is being hunted down for, take this, raping a chicken -- apparently a prized Texas breeder. The aggrieved owner said that the hen was gasping for breath when he caught the man and the hen in flagrante delicto. The hen was so traumatized by the whole incident it subsequently died-- of multiple lacerations, needless to say.

Some people may be reminded of that teenage flick American Pie, where the lead actor attempted to make love to an apple pie, but the most celebrated description of such unconventional desires can be found in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, wherein the teenage Portnoy made love to a liver (beef, I think, for the family was Jewish), which his mother served for dinner later. Read the book, or ( as de rigeur in reading such dirty novel)just the relevant passages, and see how Portnoy agonized over the dinner table that night. For how can you eat something you've just made love to? That's practically cannibalism, definitely not kosher.

Given the slow-as-molasses turning of the wheels of justice in this country, the man from Bulacan who raped the hen may never be meted punishment for his gallinaceous indiscretion. What did Karl Marx say? To each according to his needs -- right. All I know is that somewhere in a coop in Bulacan, a rooster is plotting vengeance.

The cost of joining the yen bloc

Mr Roberto Romulo's op-ed "Time to strengthen RP capacity for trade negotiations," which appeared on the Philippine Star last June 28, hit the nail right on its head when it called for an inter-agency trade negotiating body that would oversee the country's trade negotations and ensure that they are well synchronized with and supportive of domestic policies.

However, Mr. Romulo's endorsement — in the very same article — of the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) seems to fly in the face of his own trenchant analysis.

The reasons he set forth in favor of an inter-agency negotiating body—i.e. the need to build national consensus and develop local expertise in articulating the country's trade interests—are, in fact, the very same bones that those who criticize the JPEPA have been picking on.

Mr Romulo wrote that our present ad hoc negotiating teams, composed as they are of co-equal governmental bodies, cannot make objective decisions because of their naturally divergent mandates and constituencies. This is precisely why the toxics waste brouhaha in the JPEPA had to happen. The DENR vigorously opposed the inclusion of wastes, but the DTI, a co-equal body but the lead negotiator, nevertheless went ahead. Even President Arroyo, as former DENR Secretary Mike Defensor acknowledged, was not informed of the waste trade provisions when she signed the JPEPA in Helsinki.

The JPEPA was also negotiated without "a sustainable national consensus," because the details about the agreement were so jealously guarded by the DTI that one civil society group felt compelled to petition the Supreme Court to (quite embarrassingly) ask for a copy.

It is important to remember that a bilateral agreement such as the JPEPA is not a free trade agreement. It lowers the tariff barriers between Japan and the Philippines to the exclusion of all others. While much is made of the forecast that the JPEPA will improve the Philippine GDP by 0.09 %, nothing is said about how the JPEPA will impact on our other equally vital economic relationships with the United States, the ASEAN or Japan's competitor in the region, China.

If we join the yen bloc that Japan is building in the region, how exactly will it impact on, to use the colorful words of John Maynard Keynes, the "separate [trade] blocs and all the friction and loss of friendship they must bring with them?" It is a distinct possibility that rather than creating and expanding trade, JPEPA might just be diverting it toward Japan, to the detriment of our political friendship with other countries.

We must negotiate our bilateral trade agreements with extreme caution and not fool ourselves that by virtue of those agreements alone we are expanding the sphere of freedom in commerce. Mr Romulo's proposal for an inter-agency negotiating body is a big step toward the right direction, but free, fair and expanding trade can only be achieved by an inclusive process that will deliberate on exactly where our national trade--and political--interests lie.

Don't count on numbers

UP Professor Felipe Medalla during a colloquium organized by Foundation for Economic Freedom(FEF), a report of which event you can read here, was talking about how the growth statistics being bandied about by the government may not be real.

Medalla pointed out that that there is a persistent discrepancy between GDP figures on the one hand and figures for consumption, tax collection, investment, government spending and exports (i.e the components of GDP). He further noted that considering the country's historical record, if the official growth rates being churned out by the government were true we would have been experiencing high inflation and interest rates.

According to the disappointingly short write-up by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation of the event, Medalla concluded that the official statistics have become too, er, optimistic.

Optimistic? I think Prof Medalla minced his adjectives here. A forecast may be said to be opimistic alright, but a GDP, although an estimate in some aspects, is not a forecast and therefore the right adjective should have been unreliable, or spurious, or phony. Not optimistic.

Whenever a SONA is made by the president, so many people dispute the wonderland that she paints in her speech. A more substantial refutation of GMA's hallucinatory SONA could probably be had following Medalla's lead.

President Arroyo, through Garci, padded election tallies; she also solved the classroom shortage by a simple re-definition of what constitutes a shortage (and voila ! a classroom for every pupil). I think it would at least be funny to know she is pole-vaulting the country to First World status by the sheer strength of her imagination, which she probably got at (the aptly named) Assumption.