The Philippines as refuge

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo In the past days and hours, I have been receiving updates on the Muslim Rohingya refugees who continue to sail in droves from Burma’s (Myanmar’s) Rakhine State to Southeast Asia. They are unwanted even in their country of origin and they are looking to distant shores where they can live in safety and peace. Much has been written about who they are, why they are, where they come from. The...

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Remember 1991's garments factory fire

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo With 72 persons dead—the majority of them women—in last week’s fire in a slipper factory in Valenzuela, I could not help but recall the fire in 1991 that claimed the lives of 19 women workers in a garment factory in Mandaluyong. I interviewed some of the survivors and next of kin of the victims and wrote a Sunday Inquirer Magazine feature article (“Death by Fire at a Garments Factory”) on...

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FOI: soon or never

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo More than 14 years and three presidents ago, or since the 12th Congress, freedom of information advocates have been pushing for the FOI bill’s passage. It’s been an uphill trek, with lots of rock slides and turnbacks, and on the part of the lawmakers, dillydallying and last-minute disappearing acts. If the FOI bill were a cardiac patient in the emergency room, it would have had several near-death...

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Canada's trash still here after two years

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPIION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo Despite cries of “Return to sender,” “Nimby” (not in my backyard), “Take back your garbage” and protest actions by environmental groups against the 50 containers of trash that arrived here from Canada in June to August 2013, the foul, toxic and disease-causing cargo is still here. Are Philippine authorities so uncaring that something as undesirable as foreign garbage would be allowed to sit...

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