The current tussle between the concessionaires and President Rodrigo R. Duterte (PRRD) stems from two arbitration awards by separate arbitration panels in favor of Maynilad Water (P7.4 Billion) and Manila Water (P3.4 Billion), in July 2017 and November 2018. The claimed amounts allegedly represent their accumulated losses after the Regulatory Office under the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) refused to grant their petitions to raise their tariffs from 2014 to 2018.

Now THAT we know that there is problem with our national power grid, it being run by state-owned company of China, and how to solve it (https://www.bworldonline.com/investigating-the-grid), we turn our attention to our problem with water.

In my past columns, comparative metrics on ASEAN agriculture were discussed. They included growth, diversification, export patterns, and total factor productivity, among others. These factors happen to influence rural poverty reduction.

Leprosy or Hansen’s disease, ketong in Tagalog and aro in Ilongo, was a dreaded disease. People with the disease, or even just suspected of having it, were avoided, even ridiculed and ostracized. And the Culion leper colony in Palawan became the national dumping ground of people with leprosy, even those without the disease but who were victims of witch hunts by some politicians or envious neighbors.

DO WE, humans, want to continue living well and safely on this planet? Humanity faces an existential threat -- the whole world is beginning to see.

The year 2019 marked the golden year of our grade school class. In 1969, we graduated from elementary school, perhaps unaware then that we would be caught up in the vortex of turbulence all around us.

The President unleashed a torrent of expletives on the two Metro Manila water concessionaires for supposedly “onerous” contracts. I tried to understand why. After all, this major privatization, undertaken in 1997 during the Ramos administration to respond to a water crisis, was a celebrated case of a working public private partnership and was awarded multiple times for the transparency and design of the bid process and for its success in addressing the core problem of poor water services provision, especially its inclusive business model of connecting millions of poor communities. The concession agreements were subsequently extended during the Arroyo term in recognition of this success and in order to enable more investments in water and sewerage services to be done, pursuant to the Clean Water Act.

The year 2019 will be a banner year for Philippine tourism. If we are to go by the trends from January to September, the Philippines is poised to surpass its 8.2 million visitor target, clocking in a growth rate of 14.37%. At this pace, we are likely to supersede the 12.5 million arrival target by 2022.

The story starts with Martial Law President Ferdinand Marcos. When he became president in 1965, the total external debt was $600 million; by the time he was ousted in 1986, it had ballooned to $26 billion -- a 4,300% rise, according to the Ibon Databank, cited in an article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer of Nov. 24, 2016.

A “new dawn for Philippine healthcare” is how the World Health Organization described the enactment in February 2019 of the Universal Health Care (UHC) Act.

TESTED for the first time by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a presumably representative population of 15-year-old Filipino students put the Philippines last in reading comprehension among 79 countries. They hardly fared any better in science and mathematics; they were rated second to the last at 78^th place.

As with the Philippines, a republican democracy essentially keeps the passing passions and dominance of the majority in check by adhering to certain principles, the upholding of inherent individual rights, and the principle of checks and balances.