PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House We, Dagupeños, are proud of the appointment by US President Joe Biden of Filipina-American Camille Calimlim-Touton as deputy commissioner of the US Bureau of Reclamation. Calimlim-Touton’s parents, Carl Calimlim and Marlene Bangsal, are...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House We are saddened by the turn of political events in the US days before the inauguration of former Vice President Joe Biden as president on January 20, three days from now. The intensity of the venomous atmosphere, violent protests and...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House News reports have it that the question/debate surrounding the actual height of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, has finally been resolved. It is 8,848.86 meters or 29,032 feet, the Nepali government announced a few days ago. We...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House The killing last of week of Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in the country’s capital Tehran has added fuel to the fire of tensions in the already precarious situation in the Middle East. We hope Iran, Israel, which is...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House In February, 2010, in Seoul, we proposed to then Foreign Minister Yu MyungHwan the establishment in Manila of a Philippines-South Korea University, following our much earlier discussions with then Korean Ambassador in Manila, HE Choi...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House We are still pushing our old “Billion Trees” program for the Philippines and hopefully for other countries which we launched when we had the good fortune, by God’s grace, to be elected five times as speaker of the House of...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House The United Nations celebrates its 75 th founding anniversary this year in the midst of the raging coronavirus plague, which has infected more than 40 million people and claimed more than one million human lives worldwide, devastated the...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House In our previous column, we discussed our founding and launching in Manila in September, 2000, of the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), to serve as a forum for dialogue, understanding, and cooperation on issues...
PEACE-MAKER Jose de Venecia Jr. Former Speaker of the House We are saddened by the recent passing of our old family friend, spiritual adviser, and shepherd of the Roman Catholic flock in the archdiocese of Lingayen-Dagupan for 18 years, from 1991 to 2009, Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz. He was such...
PEACE-MAKER We wish to pay tribute to the late senator and foreign affairs secretary Raul Manglapus, whose 21 st death anniversary last July 25 we quietly commemorated. We were in Carmel, California in 1998, having accepted an invitation to speak at a forum organized by Paul Burgess Fay Jr. who...
PEACE-MAKER Tomorrow’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) by President Rodrigo Duterte, his fifth, is both unprecedented and crucial in the midst of the raging COVID-19 pandemic, which, as of this writing, has infected more than 72,000 of our countrymen and claimed more than 1,800 lives, and...
