ON SUNDAY NIGHT, there was widespread rejoicing when the South Korean film Parasite received the Academy Award for best picture along with several other awards. Not only was this the first such win for a movie in a language other than English, but to many it represented a long-sought victory for Korean popular culture.

WHAT HAS not been said yet about the Lauren Greenfield documentary? Is there anything more to say? The Bloated One who allowed herself to be caught by Greenfield displaying the core of her psychosis -- lust for return to power -- took up valuable real estate in public discussion. In light of the coronavirus crisis and a still restive Taal Volcano, paying any more attention to Imelda Marcos and family is a matter of resource allocation.

Any idea or initiative, no matter how good or useful, can be prone to abuse. And this is on the part of either the people proposing or implementing the initiative, or the people that are intended to benefit from it. Worse, the negative consequences of such an initiative at times outweigh its benefits, or have unintended economic or social costs.

“Well, she looked at me/ And I, I could see/ That before too long/ I’d fall in love with her” -- I “Saw Her Standing There” by The Beatles

“How to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done... To an ordinary man, however, his own preference... is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety...” -- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Ch. 1 Introduction

HER PALMS were sweaty and her throat was dry. She clenched her notes and the clicker with shaky hands. As she reached the microphone, she was afraid that the audience would hear her heart -- it was thudding wildly in her chest.

FOR FACTORIES to reopen, people to get back to work and the coronavirus to stop spreading, China needs tens of millions of face masks each day. And yet the country’s sprawling bureaucracy is sending out mixed messages about its ability to provide them. The repercussions have been felt even in Hong Kong, where throngs of panicked shoppers cleared the shelves of masks and, more perplexingly, toilet paper last week.

IS THE WORLD losing its collective mind about the coronavirus (now called COVID-19 by the World Health Organization)? So far 1,115 people have died from the infection -- all but 45 of them at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan province, and only two of them outside China.

As early as Dec. 31, 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of the steadily increasing number of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. Over the next three weeks, researchers connected the spread of the outbreak to a market in Wuhan City and identified the cause of the contagious and potentially fatal respiratory disease to be a new type of coronavirus, which is now infamously known as the Novel Corona Virus (2019-nCoV).

During the senate hearing reviewing the 1999 Philippine-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin, Jr. discussed the adverse consequences of the agreement’s abrogation. He enumerated the security, trade, and economic benefits that the VFA has provided the country since 1999. The VFA is a Status of Forces Agreement, which provides the legal regulatory mechanism for the treatment of US military and civilian personnel during military exercises and conduct of Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations in the Philippines.

Perhaps his dosage of the powerful pain killer Fentanyl has peaked, because it looks like President Rodrigo Duterte has gone on a wild rampage of using his powers to demonstrate his machismo against icons in business and international politics. First, it was against the water concessionaires: the Ayalas’ Manila Water and Metro Pacific’s Maynilad Water. This was followed soon enough by his foreign policy statement when the US visa of his friend Bato de la Rosa was canceled, that he would abrogate the Visiting Forces Agreement, a part of the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States of America. Rappler, the online independent media company, continues to be under threat. And now, it is the ABS-CBN franchise which he has vowed to cancel.

Several years ago, I listened to a talk given by an editor of the San Francisco Examiner on how to package a story to give it half a chance of being published in the US papers. The session was held at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco on the initiative of FilAm community leaders who had bewailed the lack of presence of Filipinos in the mainstream media.