LANDSCAPE Honorable ladies and gentlemen, many of you do not know me because you were not yet in office when I was working for the late Mayor Alfredo S. Lim. If memory serves, some of you I already know like Councilors Josie Siscar, Lou Veloso, Roberto Asilo, Uno Lim, Joel Chua, DJ Bagatsing, Mon...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta It is cheaper to kill them in a plane crash, a private plane crash, he said, rather cavalierly with a half smirk. There is no evidence, no smoking gun because the plane crashes, that is your smoking gun. He is John Perkins, retired chief economic adviser, and his...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta From a distance, I am watching how you are restoring Manila’s historical contours, deftly melding the past with the present, to assure a brighter future for the city of our birth (we are both Manila-born). Behind the City Hall, the Bonifacio monument with the...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Sometime in 2018, the Office of the President issued Executive Order (EO) 55 which had a rather quirky title: “…constituting a steering committee for the commemoration of the Quincentennial of the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines, the victory of...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Two decades ago, when I had a business of my own, I realized that my 13 employees had no idea of time. Although I had taught them to arrive punctually at work, none of them gave time an economic value since its only manifestation was the intensity of the sun, scorching...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta You are cordially invited to join the webinar “The Aromas and Flavors of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Route” this evening at 6 p.m. Kindly look for the link online. I lived in Mexico for 18 years, the longest I have been away from the motherland. Except for the...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta In a recent palaver (via Zoom) my friends and I were wondering about the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the educational system, now that private and public schools are closed and distant learning, the alternative, is not available to the majority. When that spirited...
Gemma Cruz Araneta LANDSCAPE From Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, my mother: “I asked (Imelda) whether she and the President watched Ninoy’s funeral on TV, and she said, yes, they’d done so, together, in his bedroom. And that they’d been crushed, struck dumb by the enormity of what they were seeing...
Gemma Cruz Araneta LANDSCAPE At low tide, a sliver of white sand appears where Manila Bay meets the American embassy. In a wink, it is filled with naked street children and their scantily clad elders — dwellers of parks and sidewalks who want to escape the heat. They have probably heard of...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta While we were talking about unscrupulous people who steal ideas with impunity, I asked Atty. Daniel Hofileña, expert in the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, about the fate of the HOCUS paintings. None of these are for sale and the next best thing to...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta During a weekly zoom session with former classmates, one of them complained that she saw an almost exact copy of a Manansala she had inherited, in an on-line catalogue of an auction house. Another one detected a perfume of fraud when a copy of her own painting was for...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta At this writing, the venerable Senate of the Philippines and the House of Representatives are about to have a bicameral meeting about what to do with the P162-billion pandemic fund provided by the Bayanihan 2 bill. I was informed that P10 billion has been earmarked...
