Politics

Digos Radioman?s Murder: Curiouser and Curiouser

Armando PaceTwo months after the fatal shooting of Armando Pace, a hard-hitting radio commentator in Digos City, the case remains in limbo.

By Cheryll D. Fiel
davaotoday.com

DIGOS CITY ? He was called the ?Jun Pala? of Digos, a fire-breathing broadcaster who earned another moniker, ?Rakman,? because of the sheer firepower (rak-rak!) of his radio commentaries.

He feared nobody and never hesitated attacking anybody, even sometimes on a personal level. Armando Pace, the 55-year-old broadcaster from AM station DXDS-Radyo Ukay in this city, certainly made many enemies. And just like Pala, he was felled, on July 18, by an assassin?s bullet. He was said to be the first radioman in Digos to have been murdered.

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Neglected Japanese Descendants Sought Via Poll

The Philippine government and Japan have no record of the number of neglected Japanese descendants in the country ? many of them are in Davao — because their birth certificates show their citizenship as Filipino. Worse, some Japanese fathers refuse to recognize these children as from their blood despite the Filipino mother declaring otherwise.

By Patricia Marcelo
ofwjournalism.net

QUEZON CITY ? Some rely on just their surnames to carry them to Japan and, hopefully, a better life. A group here wants to help.

Since August, the Federation of Nikkei-Jin Kai Philippines Inc. is undertaking a poll of Shin-Nikkei-jin (Japanese descendant) in the Philippines who were abandoned by their Japanese fathers.

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Self-Serving Interests at Stake in Cha-Cha

The advocates of constitutional change, most especially former President Fidel Ramos, House speaker Jose De Venecia and President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, cannot claim to be sincere adherents of constitutional principles when their track record in governance says otherwise.

By the Policy Study, Publications and Advocacy (PSPA) Program
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)

MANILA — The advocates of constitutional amendment are in their last-ditch efforts to rush the approval of their project following the junking of their petition by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) last week. Considering the brains behind this exercise, their political motives and the means they have used to clinch their objective, all the more is there reason to oppose it and to shy way from complacency.

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Who?s Behind the Bombing Experiment?

AMIRAH ALI LIDASANThis has been the question nagging me for days now as I follow the story of an anti-terror expert who ran an experiment of bringing explosive materials and who passed through the security personnel of an airline carrier and two major airports in the country, airports that had, in the past five years, survived bombing attacks from ?terrorists.?

The authorities, from airport security to Davao City officials to Malaca?ang, are after the head of Samson Macariola, the anti-terror expert who showed to a journalist his feat of testing the security measures of the airline and the Manila and Davao airports by carrying real explosives and assembling them inside the airplane.

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