After ten years of being a columnist, and nine years of being an editorial writer for TODAY newspaper, the time has come to move on. Starting on Monday, I will be a columnist and contributing editor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

I received a copy of Frank Ephraim / Escape to Manila from the University of Illinois Press today. I’ll be writing a column about it, but this early on, let me say it’s a fascinating book about the Jewish community in Manila during World War 2, particularly the Jews who found refuge from Nazi persecution [...]

This is the title of a manifesto of sorts I wrote for Poormojo’s Almanac(k), which is an online literary magazine which everyone should read. The essay can be found here. Other pieces that have come out in Poormojo’s can be found here and here.

There’s an old Charlie Chan joke that goes, the detective was looking at the body of a stab victim and observed, “ah, so, the clot thickens.” Senate President Franklin Drilon who was a former Secretary of Justice, has observed that the birth certificate of Fernando Poe Jr. and his parent’s marriage certificate -both submitted by [...]

Comelec denies plea to disqualify Poe – Jan. 23, 2004 has pronounced Fernando Poe, Jr. qualified for office. When all is said and done, the efforts to disqualify him will go down in political history as one of the most botched attempts to do a hatchet-job on a candidate since the effort to turn people [...]

create your own visited country map or write about it on the open travel guide

Professor Felipe Miranda has a good column in the Star today. And not just because he’s remarkable dispassionate about my grandfather (though that was a pleasant surprise). Miranda often tends to be grim but when he’s playful, he manages to have a stronger wallop than when he’s just plain old serious. I am tempted to [...]

The coverage on ANC of the Senate Committee hearings featuring a shifty-eyed Director of the National Archives, was extremely frustrating. Those who didn’t sound stupid sounded ignorant, those who didn’t sound ignorant or stupid sounded disingenous, and so on. Regardless of the truth -and the truth is something extremely subjective in the end, in any [...]

There’s a wesbite focusing on Fernando Poe, Jr. , particularly on the citizenship issue, with many columns by noted columnists being reproduced. The question in my mind, though is: granted his supporters are angered by the citizenship issue, still, how many of them will actually go to the streets and man the barricades in case [...]

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can read Apolinario Mabini’s La Revolucion Filipina here. This is the parapgraph I referred to in my previous entry: To sum it up, the Revolution failed because it was badly led; because its leader won his post by reprehensible rather than meritorious acts; because instead of supporting [...]