“If the ‘matuwid na daan’ continues, in a generation’s time we’ll be a First World country,” an emotional President Aquino said in his final State of the Nation Address last July. More of the same rhetoric on our “great leap forward” to modernity will surely make it to the airwaves as the Aquino administration hosts the Economic Leaders Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) in Manila on Nov. 18-19.
As Benigno “NoyNoy” Aquino entered his final year in office, the question of how to assess his legacy has gained greater salience. Both his opponents and supporters have powerful arguments to present.
The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.
Burma’s boatpeople ‘faced choice of annihilation or risking their lives at sea’
Emma Graham-HarrisonThousands of members of the Rohingya, a Burmese minority group, are now adrift in the Andaman Sea, with aid groups fearing ‘boatloads of corpses’. They were carried or staggered ashore, some paralysed by malnutrition, others little more than walking skeletons, burnt and dazed from weeks at sea on boats the UN has called “floating coffins”.