The military said today that an Italian priest has been abducted in Zamboanga Sibugay, in the southern Philippines, according to this report. The report identified the priest as John Carlo Bossi, parish priest of Payao town.
"The many ways for landlords to evade CARP, even as government reports increasing land distribution, shows how this so-called agrarian reform program is less about genuinely breaking the domination of landlords and rural elites over land than undercutting peasant resistance to land monopoly in the countryside through the implementation of spurious land reform," Ibon Foundation says.
Several of the country's largest business groups are opposed to the national broadband network, a project that aims to provide broadband Internet connection to the country's barangays, that they say "appears highly questionable." They ask: "Broadband for barangays of better education and health?"