LuisTeodoro.com

Filipinos are having the time of their lives over the latest events in politics, politics being, next to the movies, the national pastime in the country of our despair. The text joke brigades are at it as usual, contributing millions of words to the stream of SMS (text) messages that daily flood the airwaves and which have enriched Globe and Smart beyond their wildest dreams.
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AS Senator Gringo Honasan is reported by only too willing media to be hiding, now in Baguio City, later in Tuguegarao, and then in the Iglesia Ni Cristo compound in Culiat, Quezon City, expect his approval ratings to rise among the impressionable
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The attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad was not only the worst in UN history, killing 17 people including chief of mission Sergio Vieira de Mello, and injuring scores of others.
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Far from spontaneous, the Magdalo Group of military officers’ takeover of Makati’s Oakwood Hotel seems to have been part of a failed, amateurish and frightening attempt at restoring naked authoritarian rule through a junta.

Their supposed idealism has been tarnished by their association with some of the worst politicians in the country. They brought no proof to either Oakwood or the Feliciano Commission hearings on their allegations of corruption in the military and its involvement in terrorist acts in Mindanao.
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In 1893 an artillery captain in the French Army was accused of treason. Alfred Dreyfus was charged with providing Germany with a list of secret French military documents. He was convicted in 1894, reduced in rank and transported to Devil’s Island to serve a life sentence. But Dreyfus’s story did not end with his conviction. “The Dreyfus Affair” instead dragged on for 12 years before being laid to rest in 1906.
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IN 1989, a libel suit filed by then President Corazon Aquino against Philippine Star columnist Luis Beltran alarmed press freedom groups. In a column on the failed 1989 coup, Beltran had playfully (and inaccurately) described Mrs. Aquino as the first commander-in-chief in the country’s history to hide under a bed during the attempted assault on Malacanang by Gringo Honasan’s putschist gang.
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Only after the presumed fact has the government of Fidel Ramos (1992-1998) been accused of wrongdoing, and that’s in connection with, among others, its contracts with Independent Power Producers, and the so-called Centennial scam.
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