LuisTeodoro.com

In accusing a Filipino general of colluding with the Abu Sayyaf bandit group, Gracia Burnham has joined at least two other former hostages who have made the same claim.

Former Abu Sayyaf hostage Raul Recio agreed with Burnham that there was indeed Abu Sayyaf-military collusion, as claimed by Burnham in her newly released book on her captivity by the Abu Sayyaf, In the Presence of My Enemies.
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US President George W. Bush last week fell short of declaring the US war on Iraq over, but only because the US military did not want to release the 6,000 prisoners of war it is holding. Instead Bush declared victory by saying that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” and that “in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
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To mark World Press Freedom Day, which falls on May 3 each year, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released on April 30 a list of the 10 worst places in the world to be a journalist. In the Philippines it was commemorated with the shooting death of a broadcaster and the ambush of another.
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The 500-person “humanitarian mission” the Arroyo government insists on sending to Iraq may not have any legal basis at all in that no one asked for it: not the U.N., not the Iraqis who now have no government to call their own, and not even Iraq’s current overlord, the United States.
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During the all-too brief period (was it two weeks?) when the Philippines could still claim to be free of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the government made it a point to invite the tourists who were abandoning Hong Kong, China and Singapore by the tens of thousands to come to this country.
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The brutality of the torture and murder of Oriental Mindoro human rights activists Eden Marcellana and peasant leader Eddie Gumanoy, the disappearance of filmmaker and Cultural Center of the Philippines awardee Virgilio Catoy, and the abduction of the group they were with last Monday are reminiscent of the worst excesses of the martial-law period.
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President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared a state of lawless violence in Davao City and surroundings last April 2. Apparently, however, it’s not only Davao or just other parts of Mindanao that’s in that state. There’s also Mindoro, where early this week two human rights activists among five who had been abducted were murdered.
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