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Opinion

Jolo on my mind

  The first filtered photographs that did the rounds of social media came to me as a shock. The explosion ripped the old wooden pews like these were matchsticks, leaving long shards of wood and the occasional metal from God-knows-what scattered across the tiled floor. What...

Suffer the little children

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” — Novelist James Baldwin Let’s begin with the fact that child crimes are real. And if we’re not careful, this could explode into a full-blown...

Children and incarceration: A question of sanity

Does the Filipino child deserve incarceration? The House committee on justice has recently approved a bill that would lower the age of criminal liability from 15 to nine. RA 10630 is supposed to amend the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006 (RA 9344)....

Trigger warning

A long a narrow pavement behind the garage of our old home, on a cold night too distant to recall in detail, I stood to give the stars a sidelong glance, poked a 9mm semiautomatic Llama at my temple, and pulled the trigger. Nothing....

Our run-off to the Graphic’s centennial

This June, the Philippines Graphic magazine turns 92 as a magazine title. On our 100th anniversary, the year 2027 (God willing I live that long), I would have reached my 63rd year on this benighted planet—roughly 20 years of which would have been spent...

5 Things I need to do in 2019

The New Year heralds hope. Well, at least, that’s what we all want to believe. Kinda like kicking off a new beginning after the previous 365 days of nonstop pain in the bleep. Call it our personal reboot, the time for some self-examination, and...

Random Pickings

Children and Politics: Where the rubber burns the road

Raising children: it’s not for the faint of heart. To me, the most agonizing of parents’ responsibilities to their kids are not the steady string...

A little lesson in journalistic accuracy

In journalism, there are two ways—and these must be achieved simultaneously—to guarantee accuracy. First, go hot on the trail of the facts, thereby securing backdrop,...

Offending onions

Have you ever seen anyone go bat-crazy because of words? I know I have. It was a cool January afternoon when I first heard my...

Art amid slaughter

Roughly 700,000 children put at risk due to a previous administration’s decision to use a highly-criticized dengue vaccine. More than 10,000 killed in Duterte’s...