HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz I started using Clubhouse last February 17, when my Indonesian friend Chichi Utami nominated me. Within minutes, our group of former bloggers from across Southeast Asia started a room which lasted for about an hour. As a frequent user, moderator and club founder, I’ve found...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Filipinos love to talk. In the past months, more Filipinos seem to be gravitating towards audio drop-in chat apps which allow users to talk with one or more other users all at the same time, and about any topic that they’re interested in. The more familiar of the two most...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz The House of Representatives this week failed the nation’s public school teachers as the chamber passed the so-called Bayanihan 3 bill. While the House inserted and approved the P54-billion pension fund for police and military pension that is totally unrelated to the pandemic...
HOT SPOT Tonyo Cruz As they loudly claim that aid is coming, the Duterte administration and Congress have quietly made a P54.6-billion insertion into the Bayanihan 3 bill that is supposedly all about pandemic response. The P54.6-billion amount is not small. It is larger than many items in the...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Last February 15, Filipinos woke up to news that the police violently raided the Lumad Bakwit School in Cebu, and arrested seven teachers and students. Resorting to red-tagging, authorities claimed that the students and teachers there had all been “kidnapped” by communist...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz For the past few weeks, Facebook has become a sea of black-and-white photos, plain black profile pics, eulogies and announcements of deaths of relatives and friends due to COVID-19. The pandemic has reached our inner circles, and can no longer be denied as a deadly threat to our...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Results of a survey conducted by the Alliance of Concerned Teachers reveal the immense impact of the Duterte administration’s program on online education on the nation’s public school teachers. With 6,731 public school teachers as respondents, the ACT survey from March 29 to...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Who would have thought that Filipinos themselves would provide a ray of hope amid the gloom and doom of the pandemic? But that’s exactly what has been happening for days now, with the setting up of community pantries in Metro Manila and in many parts of the country. The...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Say what you want about the political situation, but there have been 1,092,484 new voter registrations for the first two months of 2021. At this time of gloomy prognostications about the possible outcomes of the 2022 elections, the seeming avalanche of new voter registration...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz The 10,000 kilometers between France and the Philippines won’t matter tonight as Paris-based Filipino singing sensation Aliènette performs live from the French capital tonight for her people and fans worldwide in an online concert dubbed “Gabi ng OPM.” But it won’t be on...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Nimfa Lanzanas is a model mother. Eversince the government imprisoned her son Edward, she attended court proceedings and also joined relatives of other political prisoners in a common cause. Exactly what crime Nanay Nimfa has committed, only the government knows. But on what...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz There’s a lot to unwrap in the Regional Law Enforcement Coordinating Committee (RLECC) of the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) Resolution No. 04 directing the conduct of Oplan Tokhang-style operations against “left leaning personalities in the government, media, and...
