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Next Sunday is the lunar new year, which gives an excuse to those who haven’t given year-end and Christmas holiday gifts yet to catch up. Then, too, it’s always a topic for conversations around the Chinese zodiac…
Last weekend, right before New Year’s, I received news about an acquaintance who ran over and killed someone on the highway in Tagaytay at 2 o’clock in the morning. He was DUI, driving under the influence of…
I’ve told the story many times over about how, until I became UP Diliman chancellor in 2014, I was your typical nerd who knew virtually nothing about sports. I have to admit it wasn’t just ignorance, but…
It was my first, and I hope the last, time to get COVID, more than two years into the pandemic. I was going to title my column “To hell and back” but no, bad as it was,…
This was a terrible time last year, the COVID-19 death toll climbing since its start early in 2020, and peaking, in the Philippines, around the month of September with the deadly Delta strain. COVID-19 raised a new…
I first got my GSIS (Government Service Insurance System) retirement pension after I turned 65 in 2017. At that time, I opted to get a five-year lump sum since I was still serving as UP Diliman chancellor…
I recently stumbled on a YouTube post showing a government press conference. Sitting shoulder to shoulder were several officials to be interviewed. None had masks on. It was a classic example of a common misconception around COVID-19…
I recently received a text telling me that my account had been put “temporarily on hold” and that I needed to verify my account. There was a link given, which I dutifully clicked and which brought me…
It’s safe, or, depending on who you ask, safer now; you can end your self-imposed self-quarantine and start traveling, and get back to your usual routine in life and work … without worrying about hungry ghosts. I’m…
During Rodrigo Duterte’s last month in office, we had a bit of good news with our Supreme Court ruling in the case of Ona vs. the Philippine Tobacco Institute, Inc. that tobacco products are health products and…
It’s been two years since the COVID-19 pandemic and there’s a growing dangerous sense of complacency, spread in part by a word that’s taken on magical meanings: endemicity. It doesn’t help that the word ends with, well,…
More than 40 summers ago, I was sent off with a volunteer group to one of the most remote areas in the Philippines, so remote that I read about a concrete road to that town just completed…
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