Job insecurity. A protester wears a mask during a protest as hundreds of foreign domestic workers, including Filipino maids and Filipino nongovernment organizations, march on a downtown Hong Kong street Sunday. They are condemning the government’s plan to scale back monthly employer fees as a threat to domestic-worker jobs. --AP

Subsidies: No impact on ratings

THE fuel and food subsidies for which the administration has been criticized—for using scarce resources for unsustainable remedies—did not boost the public’s perception of top government leaders, it turns out.

‘Same old nonsense from admin’

AS far as the mainstream opposition is concerned, President Arroyo’s appearance on Monday before the joint session of Congress to deliver her State of the Nation Address, or Sona, stands for “Same Old Nonsense from [the] Administration.”

50% text rate cut seen likely

MOBILE-phone operators are expected to cut by half the rates of short message service (SMS) from the current P1 per SMS sent to one network from another, a move which might just put discussions to limit the cap on interconnection charge to a definite close.

BIR gets grant to boost RATE

HELP is coming to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), which has its hands full catching fixed-income earners, the self-employed and professionals who collectively evaded paying P180 billion worth of taxes in a six-year period.

Raffles apartments sell briskly

CASH flowed in eight hours in a thousand-square-meter hotel room here as the country’s wealthiest snapped up apartment units, the cheapest of which is more than a quarter of a million dollars for a one-bedroom unit.

Informal meetings between G-7 countries at WTO hit

INFORMAL meetings involving only the Group of Seven (G-7) countries at the mini-ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) were assailed at the weekend by nongovernment organization (NGO) Rice Watch Action Network (R1).

Dreaming in English

IN her Introduction to Stories, Kerima Polotan said: “Life scars the writer but he is not without weapons of vengeance. The art [of writing] is a prism that he can use to refract human experience. That one can write about something gives him courage to endure it; that he has written about it gives him, if not deeper understanding, some kind of peace. In other words, the writer is first a human being before he is anything else, prone, like much of mankind, to fits of joy and pain. What happens to those around him—and yes, to him—is legitimate material, but only if he is able to illumine it with a special insight.”

DA needs P15B more to sustain rice subsidy

AN additional P15 billion is needed for the government’s rice subsidy, according to Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap, who estimated that the government can keep subsidizing rice to the tune of 55 percent of the market until the end of this year.

Don’t blame global factors alone: FSGO

FORMER senior government officials who have parted ways with President Arroyo expect her to pin the blame for increasing difficulty mostly on global factors when she delivers her State of the Nation Address (Sona) on Monday. Still, they said, she cannot escape accountability for the things that have made life worse in the past seven years since she became president by people power, promising reforms.

WB prods DENR to improve pace of disbursements

THE World Bank has urged the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to improve its loan disbursement and implement a review of its three-year forward plan for the National Program Support for Environment and Natural Resources Management.

Neda, ADB prepare for country programming exercise The National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) recently held a wrap-up meeting for the 2008 Consultations Preparatory to the Country Programming Exercise for 2009-2010. The initial talks were held in line with the ADB’s effort to align the new Country Programming Strategy with the government’s Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016. This would require extending the current strategy up to 2010 and preparing a Country Operations and Business Plan for 2009-2010. Photo shows (from left) Ambassador Marita Jimenez, ADB Board executive director; Claudia Buentjen, senior governance and capacity development specialist of ADB; Neeraj Jain, country director of the Philippines Country Office of ADB; and Neda Deputy Director General Rolando Tungpalan.