MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Between the President and his Vice President, this is how they summed up the state of education: We have failed our teachers. We have failed our students. Might we assume that the two highest officials of the land were referring to our public school system, not the...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza To cap her graduation from the House of Representatives, Rosemarie (Baby) Arenas received the ASEAN Interparliamentary Service Award last November in Cambodia. No similar award in the Philippines, where we have more than 300 members sitting in the Lower House? Baby’s...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Don’t look now, there’s one more Chinese festival coming up. Sen. Imee Marcos was right, greeting the Year of the Rabbit with her Chinese friends and neighbors in San Juan on Jan. 22 and 29, as if in preparation for the coming of spring on Sunday, Feb. 5, day 15 in...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In onion there is strength. It was a good ploy of President-Secretary of Agriculture Marcos to import onions when the local supply was going at ₱600 to ₱700 a kilo, a matter of supply and demand. Now, with the arrival of imported onions and their being pitted against...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza There will be 150 million of us by the year 2050 – it’s flying toward us at the speed of a jet plane. By that time, warns Jun Palafox, “we will need 100 new cities, otherwise existing cities and emerging metropolitan areas will be congested worse than Metro Manila...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In my book Chinatown Is Not A Place (2020), I tried to explain why Chinatown is not a place. It’s many things and not just one place. (For one thing, as pointed out by a worldly-wise friend, every other country in the world has a Chinatown.) The celebration of Chinese...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In the standard greeting “Kung Hei Fat Choi” (Cantonese) or “Kiong Hee Huat Tsai” (Fookien) with which to welcome the Chinese New Year, not a single one of those four words says anything about happy or new or year. In fact, the first two words mean...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza It’s the 19th day of 2023 going by the Gregorian calendar. On the lunar calendar it’s three days to go before the new New Year, this one belonging to the Water Rabbit, a gentle cuddly creature on which hopes are pinned for a calmer year with few or no cataclysmic...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Jun Palafox, urban planner non pareil, has seen the future and it reads 2050. Twenty-seven years from now, there will be 150 million Filipinos. What are we doing now to prepare comfortable, safe, and secure airports for them? “The cities of this century will be...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Back in the day, a Hollywood movie called Crowded Skies was dubbed a flop, a disaster movie that turned out to be a disaster. Today, after what happened on the first day of the new year to our air traffic system and then on Jan. 12 to a similar failure in the US, could it...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza There are two angry ladies in the Senate. Senator Cynthia Villar to resource persons from the Department of Agriculture: “Maybe BAI stands for Bureau of Animal Imports? And what have you done in the last 25 years to increase dairy production?” Senator Imee Marcos to...
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza In the US where he practiced law before returning to the Philippines, Rep. Paul Daza was more than familiar with the common usage of “deadbeats” to refer to useless members of society who live off other people without paying their dues, do not meet their obligations...
