HOTSPOT Pope Francis leaves in the same manner he first came out as the new pope in 2013, when he appeared at the central loggia of St. Peter’s wearing only the white papal cassock and greeting “good evening” in Italian. He immediately charmed Rome and the world by asking first for the...
HOTSPOT For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, Holy Week meant a near-total halt to everything. On Good Friday and Black Saturday, there’s no television, no radio, no newspapers, no school for the students, no work for the adults. Stores and the public markets are closed, as well. There’s no...
HOTSPOT This week, the most vocal supporters of an independent senatorial candidate accused lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders of “being selfish,” and belittled their struggles as “not important,” after a prominent LGBT thought-leader withdrew support over the candidate’s...
HOTSPOT Conflict is a tough, dangerous and complex field to cover. Julie S. Alipala did it for some three decades. Julie passed away in the morning of April 3 due to complications from endometrial cancer. She was 58. Those who follow the issues, and the journalists who cover them, would have...
HOTSPOT I could still remember it clearly. We were terrified by the pandemic, and forcibly held inside our homes by the world’s toughest and longest-running lockdowns. People we know were dying, even doctors and nurses. Both information and disinformation were running rampant online and offline....
HOTSPOT Since March 11, there has been some sort of “unfriending” campaign among political combatants in social media channels. Families and friendships have not been spared by the heated exchanges, and by calls for unfriending relatives and friends for the sake of perceived...
HOTSPOT “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” A friend shared this fitting quotation from a revolutionary philosopher on Tuesday morning as we began to witness a series of unbelievable events unfolding before our eyes. On March 11, 2025,...
HOTSPOT Which senatorial slate is fielding the most number of women for the upper house? Quite unsurprisingly, former President Duterte’s picks for PDP-Laban candidates are all men (including one accused of sex trafficking of women and children both here in the Philippines and in the...
HOTSPOT For those living under a rock, vlog comes from the words “video” and “blog,” while blog comes from the phrase web log. The title of this piece is a play on the theme of the Philippine Blog Awards many years ago — “one blogging nation” — which referred to Filipinos’ love...
HOTSPOT We would sometimes go to the province for summer vacation, but we were suddenly and hurriedly brought there in late February. The year was 1986. I can’t remember if Mama explained to us why. What was certain was that it was a free and early vacation, almost a month or two ahead of the...
HOTSPOT If voting were held today, President Marcos Jr.’s new electoral alliance is on-course to dominate the 2025 national and local midterm elections. Marcos himself boasted that he has been able to field candidates not just for the 12 Senate seats, but for all the over 18,000...
HOTSPOT It has gotten tough to react to current events these days, since everything is no longer as predictable and everything we used to view as permanent can now easily go away. This week, 215 members of the House of Representatives signed and endorsed the impeachment complaint...
