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The Ampatuans and their associates had 597 bank accounts, 500 hectares of real property assets, 130 motor vehicles, 420 firearms, and a private army many hundreds strong. Their…

Until they were charged with the murder of 58 persons on Nov. 23, 2009, the Ampatuans lived in mansions, traveled with a retinue of armed escorts in a convoy of black SUVs, flew…

Two days after the Ampatuan Massacre occurred on Nov. 23, 2009, a team of journalists, lawyers, and a forensic expert flew to the site to extend immediate humanitarian assistance…

At least one in five victims of drug-related killings in Metro Manila in 2016 and 2017 were beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), our field and database…

President Duterte has appointed a new election chairman and three commissioners — all of them from Mindanao. By 2022, Comelec will be run entirely by Duterte’s appointees. Mostly…

The procurement woes of the Comelec in the May 2019 elections had a backstory in an audit report the year prior. It continues to pay monthly rental for warehouse services without a…

Problems with procurement, logistics, supply chain management, tight implementation schedules, and bad — really bad — project management. A series of unfortunate events turned the…

Across the Philippines’ 81 provinces, from 30 to over 50 percent of voters failed to vote for party-list groups in May 2019. Many voters missed the names of party-list groups…

Secure and digital — two words that spell out what SD cards should exemplify. But in the May 2019 elections, 4,650 SD cards of the 85,769 units deployed were found to be defective…

It’s a case of two failed biddings, and then a third negotiated one. The procurement of ballot paper and marking pens as a bundled contract for the May 2019 elections was one that…

Most of the candidates are from the administration-backed Hugpong ng Pagbabago (HNP) and the Liberal Party’s Otso Diretso. The number of candidates covered by the overview/scan…

WHILE election laws seeking to ensure equal opportunity among candidates are in place, much of the airtime and print-ad space in this year’s campaign still ended up getting…

In the bustling offshore gambling industry in the Philippines today, a conservative estimate of 100,000 people work. About 90 percent of them are mainland Chinese.

The biggest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investments in the Philippines these days is the online or offshore gambling industry.

WHEN PROVIDING Official Development Assistance or ODA, Western donors typically require the recipient states to adhere to international political norms, such as the ratification of…

RICHARD JAVAD Heydarian, a resident commentator of GMA Network, has repeatedly pointed out that China has fooled the Philippines into giving up the South China Sea in exchange for…

THE YEAR 2019 marks the second decade of Indonesian media’s reform era. Although strongman Soeharto stepped down as president of Indonesia in 1998, it was only in 1999 that reforms…

THE ROUGH and tumble world of politics is supposed to be the territory of male journalists in Indonesia, but many of their female counterparts say they are not only being assigned…

TIMOR LESTE’S ranking in the latest press-freedom index of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) leaped by 11 places from the previous year, but those on the ground do not feel any…

THE ABSENCE of independent media and shrinking civic space have effectively deprived the citizens of Laos of timely and qualitative information, including those that are critical…

IT WOULD be almost impossible to discuss media freedom in Vietnam without first reviewing the country’s political situation over the past year.