On the shoulders of people with exceptional talent is the burden of exceptional responsibility. Those who step up to the plate and live up to this responsibility become exceptional people.

At the Libingan on All Saints Day, a widow and her daughter prayed before the plain white cross that marked the grave of a young officer, who more than four decades ago was killed in action in Jolo, at the height of the Mindanao war over the dictator Marcos’s inconsistent strategies for peace. There are few officers like him, the widow’s best friend, a general’s wife, once told her. Surely without malice, she added: it might as well be that your husband died early; who knows what he might have become, had he lived some years more?

In the Philippines, nearly a year after President Trump first sketched his Free and Open Indo-Pacific policy at the 2017 APEC CEO Summit, uncertainty about how the United States will operationalize its vision lingers. Beijing’s vaunted infusion of capital, and influence across all dimensions of Philippine society, including through its multi-billion dollar investments into key Build, Build, Build infrastructure projects, has amplified this uncertainty. Indeed, the common refrain in Manila is that while the United States remains a good friend, China will always be the Philippines’ watchful, at times menacing, northern neighbor.

There is a caravan of an estimated 4,000 men, women and children from Central America hiking hundreds of miles from their home countries to Mexico and from there to the United States. The “invasion” is one of the main themes of the alarmist rhetoric of President Donald Trump in his desperate effort to drive his voter base to the polls to save the Republican party from decimation in the November 6 mid-term elections.

WE DO NOT HAVE party politics. Ideologies or political platforms seldom define parties and the members they attract. After the proliferation of our multi-party system, the party acronyms have become a blizzard of alphabets in various dialects, which also include party list agglomerations and citizen action groups. Remember the August 21 Movement (ATOM)? Always, the party is defined by who organized it and the candidates it is promoting, including common ones from yet other parties.

THE DIFFERENCE between globalization and globalism might seem obscure and unimportant, but it matters. Globalization is a word used by economists to describe international flows of trade, investment and people. Globalism is a word used by demagogues to suggest that globalization is not a process but an ideology -- an evil plan, pushed by a shadowy crowd of people called “globalists.”

The Comprehensive Tax Reform Program seeks to implement a fairer, simpler, and more efficient tax system. Toward this end, it has implemented relatively lower tax rates under Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law and also targeting to lower tax on corporate income under Tax Reform for Attracting Better And High-quality Opportunities (TRABAHO). Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of increasing other tax rates.

The Duterte government is known for political environmentalism and recycling -- it recycles its heavily tainted officials, sacking them from one post only to be given another post in another government agency. The Bureau of Customs in particular is becoming more known as a “blinded” facilitator of multibillion pesos worth of imported shabu smuggled into the country.

On Oct. 17, 2018, House of Representatives Speaker Gloria Arroyo spoke before the delegates to the 139^th International Parliamentary Union (IPU) General Assembly at the Centre for International Conference Geneve in Geneva, Switzerland. Mrs. Arroyo was head of the Philippine delegation to the IPU assembly.

THE government’s accelerated move to impose rice tariffs and lift quantitative restrictions on rice imports is touted to ease inflation. It comes with a heavy price in the long term, however, as it puts in peril the livelihood of millions of Filipino rice farmers. Amid runaway inflation triggered by its regressive tax reform program, the Duterte administration, in an unprecedented and probably Constitutionally questionable move, issued Administrative Order (AO) 13 ahead of the passage of a Rice Tariffication Bill. The President himself even declared that the country can now import as much rice as it wants.

In our primary and secondary school, some boys had surnames like Aquino, Araneta, Arroyo, Cojuangco, Laurel, Lopez, Roxas, Tañada, Tuazon, and the like. These...

Secretary Ramon Lopez of the Department of Trade and Industry is among the hardest working Cabinet members we have today. Under his purview is the unenviable task of attracting foreign investments, shepherding local industries to global competitiveness, creating international trade opportunities and protecting local consumers from unfair trade practices, among many others.