Flights of fancy Just as our local officials are scrambling for an international airport in the province, there came a hard slap on the country’s civil aviation industry, hitting both the national governing agency and the private sector. The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has downgraded the Philippine’s aviation…

Taxing the text The estimate is about P42.2 billion every year. That is what the national govern ment, based on calculations by the National Tax Research Center, projects to generate if every text message sent were taxed 50 centavos. The substantial amount is not surprising. The Philippines, after all, has…

A new synergy for our children’s future The best news that the country received with guarded optimism for 2008 so far was the decision of President Gloria Arroyo to create the Presidential Task Force on Education (PTFE), specifically to draw up a “coherent master plan” for the improvement of education…

Year of promises, promising year Once again we say goodbye to another year. It was not the best of years for the country nor the province in terms of leaps in economic development at the ground level despite the national government’s repeated boasting of stable and improving   indicators. In fact,…

Christmas Cheer We are a people who never fail to rank high in global studies on the happiness index. And during Christmas time, we Filipinos, the biggest Catholic population in Asia, are extra cheerful. Our high tolerance level and penchant for humor even in the grimmest of situations shines through…

Managing a million A million pesos may sound like loose change in the big political landscape but that is definitely big bucks at the barangay level. Speaker Jose de Venecia’s one-million endowment to every barangay in his district, which will come from his  Priority Development Assistance Fund — more popularly…

Being Billionaire It must be stupefying for the people of Pangasinan, especially the poor, to learn that their province is a “billionaire” interms of its Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA). And not just a billionaire, mind you, but the top billionaire in the entire country in those terms. Truth is, it…

Quick Response Mother Nature was quite furious this week. The people of Dagupan bore much brunt with the triple effects of strong winds coming from the northeast following heavy downpour brought on by super typhoon Mina, flooding as the rivers swelled from high tide, and the intensity 5.8 earthquake on…

Crime Season The Christmas season, which informally begins in the country after the All Saints’ Day observance at the start of November, is very well both the best and worst time in the country. The best because somehow the air becomes festive, what with all the decor and holiday tunes….

Real threat Avid followers of the nightly teleseryes on national television were abruptly interrupted from their blissful viewing Tuesday night. The disruption proved to be shocking: a breaking news story on a bomb blast at the Batasan Pambansa complex in the capital Manila. Suddenly, all the fantasy and fictional drama…