The UN Security Council issued a benign statement of concern over Myanmar’s violent crackdown against peaceful protestors. Asian countries need to step forward and strongly condemn the regime.

By Klaus Dahmann – Pinning hopes on the United Nations Security Council is often pointless. Once again, the council has left the impression that when its authority is needed the most, the highest UN committee remains divided. What sounds good on paper–the task of protecting world peace–has proved in practice to once again be a sham. Myanmar is the most recent example of this. (more…)

By Gaby Tabunar – The letters OFW stand for Overseas Filipino Workers. Roughly ten percent of the country’s 80 million people have gone abroad to work, earning much more than they could make here.

A whole bureaucracy is built around this migration. One agency processes more than a thousand applications of workers who want to work abroad. (more…)

President of the Philippines Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is introduced before a panel discussion, Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007, at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

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The 12-hour long Senate hearing on the controversial $329-million government broadband contact with ZTE Corporation apparently took its toll on panelists and resource speakers as tempers flared up near the end of the proceedings Wednesday night. (more…)

Romulo Neri, former National Economic and Development Authority head, on Wednesday confirmed allegations that Commission on Elections Chairman Benjamin Abalos Sr. offered him money to favor ZTE Corp.’s proposal for the national broadband network (NBN) project of the government. (more…)

BY MICHAEL AMON and RIDGELY OCHS – Elmer Jacinto arrived from Manila at Kennedy Airport in November 2005 to pursue a nursing career, a symbol of the Philippines’ best and brightest.

The top scorer on the Philippines’ national medical exam, Jacinto had prompted an agonized national discussion in his country when he, like thousands of other skilled Filipino workers, decided to leave his homeland to make more money. (more…)

By RAPHAEL BARTHOLOMEW
QUEZON CITY — Senators, foreign diplomats, cabinet ministers, a smattering of Forbes’s 40 richest Filipinos, movie stars and enough professional basketball players to play five-on-five. They are the elite of Philippine society, and they all gather at Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City to watch the men’s basketball rivalry between the universities Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle. (more…)