TACLOBAN CITY — A seaman who returned to the country last October 17 has revealed that 10 Filipino seafarers are still awaiting repatriation back to the Philippines after their ship was stopped by the Nigerian government from sailing back to their port of origin due to a violation of a local law. Read the rest of this entry »

SAYS RECRUIT CONSULTANT

MANILA, Philippines—The closure of 177 nursing schools that have failed to pass a single graduate in the nursing licensure exams will address the glut of some half a million board passers in the country, recruitment consultant Emmanuel Geslani said in a statement Monday. Read the rest of this entry »

HUA HIN — Asian leaders barely mentioned Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi at a weekend summit, making a mockery of the region’s grand claims for its new rights body, analysts said. Read the rest of this entry »

MIAMI — Driven by fluctuations in oil prices, and seduced by the prospect of easing climate change, experts are ramping up efforts to squeeze fuel out of a promising new organism: Pond scum. Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the lingering problem of corruption in government, the Philippines is poised to secure an additional $5.5 million grant from a US government aid agency to allow the government to conduct studies on investments and cost estimates of projects that will best benefit the marginalized, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has said. Read the rest of this entry »

HUA HIN, Thailand: Asian leaders heard competing plans from Australia and Japan for a massive European Union-style bloc covering half the world’s population as they wrapped up their annual summit on Sunday. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented his counterparts at the meeting in Thailand with his vision for an Asia-Pacific Community, possibly by 2020, as the region seeks to boost its global influence. Read the rest of this entry »

The Supreme Court has awarded an ailing seaman $60,000, or some P3 million in disability benefits for work-related illness that he contracted while serving as crane operator for a cement-carrying international vessel. The High Court Second Division, in a ruling written by Associate Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales, affirmed an earlier ruling by the Court of Appeals ordering the manning firms, Wallem Maritime Services Inc. and Scandic Shipmanagement Ltd., to compensate Eriberto Bultron for his work inflicted illness. Read the rest of this entry »

For domestic industries to fully recover from damages caused by typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng, the Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI) said that the government must invoke an article of the Asean Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA) that would temporarily exempt the country from the zero-tariff regime beginning next year under the Asean Free Trade Area-Common Effective Preferential Tariff (AFTA-CEPT) scheme. Read the rest of this entry »

People nowadays expect the state to guarantee a measure of social equity—to help the needy and to prevent undue discrepancies of wealth. Social progress has come to be measured by the spread of distributive justice. And this a society achieves when no individual in it lacks the critical minimum of material means that the society as a whole accepts as fair and just. Read the rest of this entry »

MANILA, Philippines – Deep Ocean Power Philippines Inc. (DOPPI), a joint venture between Filipino and American investors, is expected to build the first ocean power facility in the country in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »