CORONAVIRUS is spreading at an accelerating rate, but inappropriate quarantines and travel bans could cause more havoc than the disease itself. The World Health Organization (WHO)has a duty to protect human health, but also an obligation to protect the world’s citizens from the human rights violations or unnecessary economic hardship that panic could cause. So far, they’re doing a good job of striking this tricky balance.

It should be more than evident by now that much like its predecessors, doing nothing until things get worse, and then blaming everyone else except itself is what passes for the Duterte regime’s principle of governance. As the last three years of its benighted rule have amply demonstrated, it has neither a sense of urgency nor purpose except power and self-aggrandizement. Only indifference, if not contempt, is what it has for the people it should be serving. But have Filipinos, particularly President Rodrigo Duterte’s die-hard, fact-resistant, untutored hordes, even noticed?

“Sleep, perchance to dream.” -- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Of the troubles besetting legal education today, the growing self-centeredness of many law students is most wearisome. The puffed self-conception of being superior to other students, with problems and studies so hard they’re entitled to special status, is not only annoying but problematic. It poses a profound obstacle not only to legal education but also to the legal profession’s development itself.

WITH MITT ROMNEY the sole Republican voting to remove the president from office, the Senate fell well short of convicting Donald Trump on two articles of impeachment today.

JUST AS THE trade war gloom that weighed on Japan’s machinery makers was lifting, the coronavirus struck. Now what? Any answer must account for the new reality: Supply chains in China are increasingly unstable.

FOR CENTRAL bankers around the world, acting locally now means thinking about China.

Our Constitution says that all economic agents, including corporations, shall contribute to the common good in order to achieve our country’s vision of a rising quality of life for all. More than 30 years after the ratification of the fundamental law, easily one-third of Filipinos are poor despite the official poverty rate now falling below 20% and healthy economic growth at nearly 6%. The World Bank reports that the country has one of the most persistent poverty problems in the region. And the concentration of wealth among the very rich continues to worsen every year.

I worry that we are leaving our children, and their children, a world far worse than what we inherited from our predecessors. There is no doubt in my mind that there will be a tipping point at some time. When, where, and how, no one can predict. But, going by what is currently happening around us, it seems that point is nearing.

Consumers in the Philippines continue to be penalized by high inflation. In 2018 when the TRAIN law was implemented, the country was the “inflation valedictorian” among the big and stable economies in East Asia with 5.2%. Last year, six economies had inflation rates of below 1% and yet the Philippines had 2.5%. In January, our inflation rate spiked to 2.9%.

STORIES IN New York claim that the way fathers in the apparel trade initiated their little sons into cutthroat business was by making them stand on a tall table and asking them to jump. “Jump,” they used to say, “trust me I will catch you!” And when the kid jumped the father would step aside and let the kid come crashing to the ground. “Never ever trust anyone in this business and that includes your father,” he’d admonish.

ONE SURPRISING knock-on effect of the UK’s departure from the European Union, which became official last week, was to bind the bloc’s 27 remaining members closer together. The British had expected the red-carpet treatment from national governments desperate to keep selling Italian prosecco, German cars, and French wine. They were instead shown the door by a united EU more focused on preserving the integrity of the single market, avoiding a return to a hard border in Ireland and settling the UK’s bill.