HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz An American president once famously described America as a shining city on a hill. But in 2021, that description seems to have passed with time and circumstance. More facts are coming out of all the videos and documentation coming out of the US Capitol siege. The...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, and other American leaders have called it an insurrection and domestic terrorism. In a phrase familiar to survivors of US military interventions worldwide, it was an attempted coup d’etat. We never imagined seeing anything like it in...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz No one can top the achievements this year by Filipino doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers. They should be Filipinos of the Year for 2020 in any credible list. Every patient who recovered from COVID-19 is a result of the collective efforts of entire teams of doctors,...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz One of the most graphic and most gripping accounts of the first Christmas and Jesus’ early childhood comes from evangelist Matthew. And if I may add, most relevant especially now. The first part of Matthew’s chapter two is already quite familiar: the traditional “Belen”...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz The Philippine Bar Association this week said it is concerned that certain courts have become “warrant factories”. While the country’s largest voluntary lawyers’ group did not specify the particular courts, its statement indirectly referred to the mass arrest on Human...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Mass vaccination against the coronavirus started this week in the United Kingdom, with a Filipino nurse administering the vaccine. Many Filipinos could only say: “Sana all.” Some time earlier, the Japanese Parliament passed a law ensuring that all residents of Japan, citizens...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz I’m sorry to break it to you, but this seemingly difficult time is a great time to be a progressive. The avalanche of fake news about the nature and objectives of activism and all sorts of social engagement even by non-activists provide us an opportunity to explain and to...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Ever wondered how and why TV, radio, online and print media, including this newspaper, get to decide what is news at any given time or day? What’s the criteria? What’s in an event or a person that they make it to “breaking news,” “nagbabagang balita,” or live...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz The 2021 budget for President Duterte’s anti-communist task force, known as NTF-ECLAC, is P19 billion, which some say is only a tiny fraction of the P4.5-trillion total national budget for next year. Many would argue it is a total waste of taxpayer money and clearly a...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Having dozed off a bit earlier than usual on Wednesday night, I woke up at around 2 a.m. of Thursday to haunting sounds of typhoon Ulysses’ howling winds. Like many others, it was nearly impossible for me to go back to sleep. The next few hours, we watched friends on Facebook...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz As I write this, it is still uncertain who between Joe Biden or Donald Trump won the Nov. 3 elections. Their leads in the remaining battleground states are shrinking. Third World countries are known to give delayed election results, but not the United States of America. But here...
HOTSPOT Tonyo Cruz Who wouldn’t sympathize with parents Francis and Relissa Lucena who went to the Supreme Court to beg that their daughter Alicia Jasper (AJ) Lucena, a full-time activist, be returned to them? As far as I know, this was the first such case that parents of an activist went to...
