LANDSCAPE By July, it will be seven years since the Philippines took the world by surprise by winning its case against People’s China at the Arbitral Tribunal in The Hague. Our team of diplomats and lawyers was headed by Mr. Albert F. del Rosario, Department of Foreign Affairs secretary during...
LANDSCAPE More accurately, it has been six centuries, but if you start counting from 1953 when the Philippine Legation opened in Mexico City, it is indeed a 70-year relationship, a Platinum anniversary the legation was elevated to an embassy on July 25, 1961, and in 1964, Mexico and the Philippines...
LANDSCAPE Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist, astronomer and polymath declared that the earth revolves around an immovable sun and not the other way around. In the 15th century, that was definitely heretical because it contradicted what was written in the Holy Scriptures. Poor Galileo was almost...
LANDSCAPE Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia–MAPHILINDO– was formed in Manila by virtue of an eponymous declaration signed in 1963 by Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman of the Federation of Malaya, President Diosdado Macapagal of the Republic of the Philippines and President Sukarno of the Republic...
LANDSCAPE Seventy-eight years ago, in February 1945, at Yalta, Crimea, leaders of the Grand Alliance – Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt – were re-configuring the world. They had defeated Adolf Hitler, were in the process of shredding Germany while installing an...
LANDSCAPE Jose David Lapuz, Knight Grand Cross of Rizal, was the last of that inexorable breed of orators. He had the voice for it; he was a baritone and had he chosen the opera instead of the academe he could have excelled in villainous roles like the Conti di Luna in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.”...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Recently, the phrase “Unidentified Flying Objects” a.k.a. UFOs has acquired a different meaning, it no longer refers to enormous flying saucers of unknown origins, manned by extraterrestrials who plan to invade the planet Earth or to capture homo sapiens specimens...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Those acquainted with infrastructure say that there are two types, the horizontal consisting of roads, bridges, waterworks, sewerage systems, flood control, land traffic, and the vertical which are structures above ground like houses, schools, hospitals, markets, public...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta The unfortunate Jullebee Ranara, a Filipina domestic helper or kasambahay, could not afford to raise her four children so at age 35, she went abroad to seek greener pastures. (Where is the father of her children?) Jullebee ended up in Kuwait, perhaps she was inveigled...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta Does Miss Universe, R’Bonney Gabriel, know that Texas was once Nuevas Filipinas? Don’t you think it is serendipitous that a half- Filipino Miss Texas should win the Miss USA and Miss Universe titles? It was the eminent Bicolano historian, Dr. Domingo Abella, who...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta “Gone with the wind,” a movie based on a novel by Margaret Mitchell was produced in 1939, before I was born. The protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, was the headstrong daughter of a wealthy plantation owner and slave holder who survived the American Civil War. Some...
LANDSCAPE Gemma Cruz Araneta “David Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier,” was the title of a movie produced by Walt Disney in 1951. No, I did not get to see it. My mother assiduously protected her children from Hollywood’s harmful influence, unlike an aunt who bought Crockett coon caps for my...
