EMPLOYEES and customers peer inside the Glorietta mall after City Hall enforced a temporary closure order on Glorietta 1, 3 and 4 to allow city engineers to make a thorough inspection and make the place risk-free. At left, Ayala Land president Jaime I. Ayala fields questions on the Glorietta 2 explosion. He said data they shared with police probers indicate that none of the factors listed as having possibly contributed to Friday's blast—no ventilation, high temperature, defective pump and diesel tanks at the basement —were present before the tragedy occurred. --NONIE REYES

AYALA Land Inc. (ALI), owners of Glorietta mall, declared Wednesday “there was nothing out of the ordinary” in their operations that could have caused the tragic Friday explosions that killed 11 people and injured more than a hundred. Company officials issued the statement a day after police said both foreign and local experts working on the case were close to reaching consensus that the most probable cause of the blast was the toxic soup of substances at the mall basement.

THE country’s manufacturing output slumped to a year-on-year decline of 4.7-percent growth in August 2007, according to the latest monthly integrated survey of selected industries (Missi) released by the National Statistics Office (NSO) Wednesday.

SOME compressed natural gas (CNG)-fired buses will now be plying from as far as Batangas and Laguna to Manila with the government’s Natural Gas Vehicle Program for Public Transport (NGVPPT) finally getting a green light after several years of delay.

GENEVA—The Group of 33 (G-33) bloc at the World Trade Organization (WTO) has assured civil-society organizations (CSOs) that it will insist on the inclusion of two safeguards in farm-trade agreements as member-countries struggle to conclude the Doha Round of negotiations within the year.

DAVAO CITY—A robust information and communications technology (ICT) sector may turn in earnings that approximate the current level of remittances of overseas Filipino workers in only three years, a local executive of the business chamber here said.

SHARIAH-compliant banking products and activities are seen to rise in the coming years in the Philippines, according to the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP).

THE Vienna-based International Peace Foundation (IPF) that will bring Nobel laureates to the member-countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) for a series of dialogues for peace has expressed concern on the worsening situation in military-ruled Burma and the continued detention of Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

THE Supreme Court (SC) has issued a ruling affirming the decision of the Court of Appeals (CA) which nullified the writ of preliminary injunction issued by a lower court enjoining the government from collecting toll fees for the use of the Coastal Road that connects Metro Manila to Cavite.

THE case of two missing students of the University of the Philippines (UP) and a Bulacan farmer became the first test case for the writ of amparo which the Supreme Court earlier adopted as one of the legal remedies to combat the rising number of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances in the country.

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JAIME AUGUSTO ZOBEL DE AYALA, Philippine chairman of the “Bridges” project, and Washington Sycip, honorary chairman, grace the press conference launching the seven month speaking tour that will bring Nobel laureates for economics, peace, physics, chemistry and medicine to the Philippines and Thailand. --NONIE REYES