PRESIDENT Duterte on his frustra­tions with the Commission on Audit: “Ihulog sa hagdan.” Push them down the stairs. COA Commissioner’s advice to audi­tors: “Avoid the stairs.” Presidential Spokesman Sal Panelo at­tributed Mr. Duterte’s threat to his usu­al hyperbolic language, a result of the agonizingly meticulous care with which state auditors study every peso and […]

    SHE belongs to the universe now, but she is ours first, with Australia also claiming her as their own. Catriona Gray, Miss Universe 2019, can’t help it. She’s a child of a third culture. Her mother Filipino, her father Scottish. With blood of the Philippines and Scot­land flowing in her veins, she was […]

    OUR “heirloom” Christmas orna­ments packed away, suddenly the living room looks so empty, al­most as bare as the calendar on the wall. (The year 2018 came and went, and still no win for Jess Arranza in his fight to save Uniwide owner Jim­my Gow from his money managers, whose “betrayal” cost him a […]

    THE miracle of Quiapo is not the traditional, etched-in-stone show of faith and fervor by a multitude of devotees willing to risk their lives to venerate a miraculous image, the Black Nazarene. The miracle is that, if we wanted to, we could clean up the plaza and make it look like a pi­azza, […]

    GENDER equality demands that girls be acknowledged as bul­lies, too. Their bullying can be just as cruel, in the form of verbal-psy­chological abuse. I’ve seen girls bullying girls and heard stories of such incidents hap­pening in “exclusive” schools where the rule is to be prim and proper, most of the time anyway. But […]

    WHEN I was a kid, the trip to Baguio on four wheels was all of four to five hours. Today, a hundred years later, it’s still five to six hours, all those expressways, NLEX, SCTEX, TPLEX notwith­standing – with the accompany­ing tolls to pay at the traffic-stop­ping toll plazas – as if there […]