desaparecidos, surface Dexter and Bazoo!

desaparecidos under Marcos Jr.’s regime.

As I said, there is a lot of logic in this move to reschedule the school calendar year to prepandemic school year since it would be greatly beneficial and suitable to education given the detrimental impact of summer classes on the quality of education and even on the health welfare of both students and teachers.

Survey

Based on an online survey in March, 86.7 percent of public school teachers said their students were unable to focus on their lessons because of the “intolerable heat” in classrooms.

I can believe that since at home I hardly go out of my air conditioned bedroom because of the “intolerable heat.”

The online survey also showed 37 percent of the respondents said the heat had triggered existing medical conditions among teachers and students.

Four in 10 teachers had reported more students had been missing classes since the start of summer months.

The current calendar year has a detrimental effect on the country’s agricultural productivity because of the inability of the older students of families involved in agriculture to help their families during the planting season.

It was because of the COVID-19 health protocols that the school calendar was moved.

It is for all these reasons that I have cited that Vice President Duterte as education secretary should and must revert to the old calendar school year.

Similarly, President Marcos Jr. should consider all the factors to also revert to the pre- pandemic school calendar. Crazy and stupid

A proposal to correct the shortage of nurses working in hospitals as a result of thousands of Filipino nurses going abroad to seek greener pastures, higher pay and better living conditions. has created a conundrum.

There are proposals for government hospitals to hire “flunkers” of the nursing board exams.

Santa Banana, I call this crazy and stupid.

In the first place, “flunkers” obviously do not qualify to do the things a nurse has to do in the hospitals.

In that case, if government hospitals start hiring “flunkers” who will get the blame when something goes wrong? And would people go to government hospitals if the nurses hired are “flunkers?”

If ever the government allows “flunkers” to become healthcare givers, the country will be known as a country where nurses in hospitals are “flunkers,” and clearly unqualified to work since nursing students need to pass board exams to qualify them, Santa Banana, for the strenuous

MUMBAI, India—India’s first population clock, made up of 10 white numbered cards on a large green metal board, attracts curious passersby who watch it record the story of the world’s most populous nation.

The clock—manually updated every day according to projected estimates and akin to a cricket scoreboard in appearance—was first erected in 1982 when India was home to more than 684 million people, according to the 1981 government census.

That figure more than doubled in the following decades.

India grew rapidly to overtake China at the top of the population ranks with more than 1.42 billion people, according to a United Nations projection in April.

“An extra slot had already been made in the clock, expecting that we were going to cross one billion,” said Professor Chander Shekhar at the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, where the

And more often than not, the country had to depend not only on local aid from the private sector and foreign aid, and still the administration cannot see the imperativeness of a DDR. There had been outcries for a department with its own budget that should handle all these, including suitable evacuation centers in places where there is need for them, instead of school buildings which are often destroyed. The Albay evacuees are lucky that it is schoolbreak.

But, you can never predict the recurrence of calamities and disasters. Santa Banana, it looks like the government can never learn.

Delayed, canceled flights

Last week’s Senate investigation of some 3,000 complaints against the Gokongwei Cebu Pacific Air for delayed and canceled flights, mostly due to alleged lightning and bird strikes or maintenance problems brings to fore a second look at the “Air Passengers Bill of Rights.”

I have always maintained that when you buy an air ticket from the airlines, it is some kind of contract between the airline and the passenger to guarantee the proper time of departure and arrival.

Thus, when that contract is not observed, the airline must pay the penalty and when there are delays and cancellations, the airline must pay for not observing a contract of a carrier.

Unless, of course, the delays and cancellations of flights were due to some fortuitous event or some kind of force majeure like inclement weather or the inability to land or depart which could cause delays and cancellations.

The complaint against the Cebu Pacific is nothing new.

It also has happened with Philippine Airlines and also with another budget airline like Air Asia.

At most, delays and cancellations of flights are due to overbooking in which a ticketed passenger would be bumped off. This happened to my wife and myself years ago when we had a confirmed flight from Hong Kong to Manila via Cathay Pacific. We were bumped off because our flight was overbooked.

I was even told that Cathay Pacific bumped us off because they had to accommodate some Chinese bound for Manila.

I sued and won, getting a free flight from Cathay Pacific.

But, going back to delayed and canceled flights, there is an urgent need to take a second look at the “Air Passengers Bill of Rights” to make airlines pay for the meals and hotel expenses for delays and flight cancellations. Air flight can be risky.

Flight delays and cancellations could mean loss of business or even life and death. Thus, there’s a need for that second look at the “Air Passenger Bill of Rights.”

CASES of enforced disappearances in the Philippines are not at all new.

In fact, we have been dealing with the same experience, the same tale for decades now. The term ‘desaparecidos’ is Spanish for ‘disappeared.’

It was eventually used in Latin America during the Cold War to refer to their people who were forcibly disappeared.

To call a case an enforced disappearance, a prerequisite is for the perpetrator to be from the state force.

This ploy is often seen as a form of political repression.

Two months ago, two former student leaders in UP Baguio–Dexter Capuyan and Gene Roz Jamil “Bazoo” de Jesus–were abducted in Taytay, Rizal.

Bazoo de Jesus, 27, is from Bulacan.

He is currently an information and networking officer of the Philippine Task Force on Defending the Rights of Indigenous People.

Meanwhile, Dexter Capuyan, 57, and a Bontoc-Ibaloi-Kankanaey, was part of the list of alleged leaders of the CPP-NPA according to the Department of National Defense and Department of the Interior and Local Government.

This list initially had 600 people in it but it was cut down to eight.

Capuyan was one of the many removed from the list.

People also discovered that Capuyan was in a “Wanted” poster made by the Philippine National Police, stating Capuyan had a P1.8 million bounty on his head, making his family more concerned about his safety. Their case is seen as enforced disappearance since their family and colleagues believe the state was involved in their abduction.

The involvement of the state is not new when it comes to activists’ abductions after all. According to Beverly Longid, an IP rights advocate, the two were taken by men who identified themselves as part of the police’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group using three vehicles.

Individuals who were suspected to be state agents were also seen in close proximity to the two victims days before they went missing.

After two weeks though, the PNP ‘categorically denied’ any involvement in the disappearance of the two.

Just one year in, Capuyan and De Jesus are counted as the seventh and eighth

Ironically (or not so), the day they disappeared, April 28, 2023 was also the 16th anniversary of Jonas Burgos’ disappearance.

Jonas was a peasant activist who also completed his undergraduate studies in Baguio, specifically in Benguet State University.

He was abducted in Ever Gotesco Mall in 2007 and put in a maroon Toyota Revo with the plate number TAB 194; a plate number tracked to be in the military’s possession.

His disappearance is one of the most publicized cases in the Philippines.

In 2013, the Court of Appeals ruled the military and the government responsible for his disappearance. But there remained no accountability from the AFP.

The pattern silence silence serve the people

Since then, a lot has changed— administrations, laws, the political landscape.

One good change being the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act signed into law in 2012.

According to Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearances (FIND), this is the first and most comprehensive anti-enforced disappearance law in Asia.

The problem with it is that it is not implemented at all.

Since then, even more activists have disappeared and those who have been abducted continue to be missing.

The Commission on Human Rights has also called on the ratification of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance following the abduction of Capuyan and De Jesus.

The commission even stated the phenomenon of enforced disappearance affirms the continued vulnerability of activists