LuisTeodoro.com

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s future plans are the current topic of the day in Philippine politics. Some observers–and their number is growing–now say, as this column has been saying since February, that she will run in 2004 despite her December 2002 announcement that she won’t

The current speculation is based on both the results of her visit to the United States and on how she was received in Washington. In this hard-nosed view, the support for her and her policies US President George W. Bush displayed has earned her enough points to boost her approval ratings for the rest of the year and perhaps even beyond. »

Two things have concerned former Marikina mayor Bayani Fernando since he became chairman of the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA): traffic and sidewalk vendors. Even his focus on sidewalk vendors appears to be a component of his concern for Metro Manila traffic. One of his stated reasons for clearing the capital of sidewalk vendors is their impeding not only pedestrian movement but also the flow of motor vehicles, especially in the narrow streets of the city of Manila. »

The Arroyo state visit to the United States is a public relations triumph for both guest and host, as both had most likely hoped and anticipated. The public relations bonanza it is reaping for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and George W. Bush indeed suggests that as state visits go, this one was not so much meant to firm up relations between their two countries but to serve each other’s domestic agendas.
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Dean Armando J. Malay, who was a journalist for over 40 years, and who died last week at the age of 89, was one of the pioneering faculty members at the College of Mass Communication, then Institute of Mass Communication (IMC), of the University of the Philippines. In his May 16 to 18 wake at U.P., his former students, many of them now editors in the country’s leading newspapers, recalled how, together with the late Hernando J. Abaya and IP Soliongco, he shaped their development as journalists. »

The representatives of environmental and other nongovernment organizations are into the 22nd day of—appropriately enough—a hunger strike to protest the government’s approval of the nationwide distribution of Bt corn seeds for planting.

The strikers are asking Department of Agriculture Secretary Luis Lorenzo Jr. to withdraw his department’s approval for Btcorn. From President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo they’re asking a review of the process that led to its approval, as well as a call for farmers not to plant the seeds.
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Most Filipinos have neither the time nor the interest to think about the University of the Philippines, between SARS, the country’s economic decline, its peace and order problems and the day-to-day difficulties of survival in this archipelago of uncertainty.

Some Filipinos do have UP on their minds at this time of the year. Other than its students, these include not only those who graduated from it in April, but also the 4,500 incoming UP freshmen this June. Both groups share the same hopes: that a UP education will lead them to a brighter future or, in the case of those from elite and professional families to begin with, at least enable them to live in the manner to which they’re accustomed.
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An elephant runs down Metro Manila’s busiest thoroughfare and People Power venue, EDSA. A town mayor refuses to allow the burial of the ashes of a SARS victim, perhaps in the belief that the virus survived the fires of cremation.

Men crazed by hunger attack strangers with knives and die in the usual hail of police bullets. A journalist dies in an ambush, and another is unceremoniously wounded in the rear, both events taking place in broad daylight and within spitting distance of a police station, while two others are hauled off to jail on libel charges.
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