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 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...
HOTSPOT Like many of my friends, I was surprised by the recent Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) rally that appeared to be against the impeachment process being initiated against the Vice President. Then, many were surprised to find out that a group called “National Coalition for the Family and the...
HOTSPOT This week, I had the opportunity to visit Bacacay, a small town in Albay. The town’s patroness is St. Rose of Lima, formerly the principal co-patroness of the Philippines alongside St. Prudentiana until 1942, when Pope Paul XII declared the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of...
HOTSPOT Perhaps one of the first big political frustrations of my college contemporaries happened nearly three decades ago. It wasn’t about a presidential election, but the selection of our paper’s editor-in-chief. Going into the selection process, we were confident that our aspirant had the...
