Monday, May 10,  was the Philippines’ first fully automated national and local elections. A few days before my brother told me to withdraw as much as I can from my payroll account in the event the election fails and the country is thrown into chaos. So as you can see, everyone was tense. I, on the other hand, was excited because this would be the first time I would vote.

The polls opened at 7AM but I woke up at 9. And since the school is just five minutes away from the house, I decided to walk.

A few meters from the entrance of the school.

And while campaigning ended two days ago, these people, kept on handing out crap.  It looks like a fiesta.

Time I went in: 10:08AM.

After finding my precinct, I had to line up. I thought this was the whole line. Not.

Almost there.

Turns out the whole room was a waiting room. Crap.

After about an hour in the waiting room, they led us to the real voting room.

I could smell the ballot paper.

Well hello, my fellow voters.

And hello PCOS machine. I filled up my ballot in less than two minutes.

One hour and thirty minutes later, I was done.

Can’t remove the damn thing.

His is a story we’ve heard, seen, and read many times before: born in the province and raised in the slums, abandoned by his mother, raised by his blue-collared father, walked to school, realized he could run, did so without shoes, was seen by a talent scout, earned a scholarship, ran in a marathon, created a marathon, and became a millionaire. It’s a story we know all too well. But this one is different: he wears an afro.

Tall, lanky, and with skin brown from spending afternoons under the sun, Rio dela Cruz, 27, is a child of the streets. A native of Bato, Camarines Sur and the youngest of 14 children, dela Cruz was barely a year old when his mother left the family leaving all parental and nurturing duties to Rio’s father and grandfather. This led to his first foray into entrepreneurship: harvesting kopra at an uncle’s farm for two Pesos a day. With mounting problems on how to sustain their large family, it seemed like the obvious thing to do was simply run away from it all. While Rio didn’t exactly do that, he did however, learn to run. “Ever since I was a child, my basic game was running,” he recalls.

It was upon taking the train to Manila in 1985 that the young Rio saw the world beyond the rickety corners of their shanty, and the vast expanding space before him. With an allowance of one Peso a day, dela Cruz began attending public school, enduring the daily three-kilometer walk. However his ideal mode of transportation was running. “During my elementary days, I would always observe my friends. They were engaged in running,” says dela Cruz. “I thought to myself: ‘I think I can do that.’ Then later on my PE teacher invited my two classmates to try out for the team.” As luck would have it, the other guy didn’t make the cut so Rio took it upon himself to approach the coach. “Sabi ko (I said), ‘Can I try out? Then I removed my shoes and began to run. I was first, and that was the start.”

With advice from his coach the following year, dela Cruz shifted from being a sprinter to a long distance runner. “Back then,” he recalls, “I was running barefoot every time since I couldn’t afford to buy running shoes.” Thanks to a generous neighbor, he received his first pair of running shoes. And although they were a few sizes too small, he managed to make it work for him by cutting the front end open, exposing his toes. All the while the lanky kid with the afro was beating more senior athletes with years of running experience under their belt. Soon, the coach of the University of the Philippines (UP) took notice and offered dela Cruz a slot on the varsity track team.

College proved to be a turning point in his career. After being named Rookie of the Year and winning two silver medals in 2001 in his freshman year, dela Cruz began breaking and establishing records, winning more medals, and soon joined the National Team in his second year in college. In 2004, popular sporting brand Nike noticed the running kid with an afro and signed him up to become an endorser. “Two months before my graduation, UP hired me as a coach for the track team.” It was also during this time that dela Cruz began to teach running one-on-one. His clients, company presidents and CEOs, actors and socialites, made him the running coach to the country’s running elite. And Rio became Coach Rio.

“At that time, I was already thinking of organizing races myself.” With a challenge from his then girlfriend that he couldn’t do it, the then 25-year-old dela Cruz took it upon himself to prove her wrong. Armed with nothing but his experience as a racer and a little over a hundred thousand Pesos of his own money, dela Cruz took to organizing his own race. It was a one-man team–from producing registration materials, designing flyers, looking for sponsors, creating the race route, applying for permits, delivering registration forms, and even creating jerseys. “I based it on experience. Since I always race, I already had an idea on what the basic needs of a runner are in an event.” And in August of 2007, the grounds of the University of the Philippines was swarmed by nearly two thousand runners participating in The Great UP Run. The result was an event worthy of its name. “That was where it all began,” dela Cruz says, “the notion that if Coach Rio organizes a race, it’s a quality event.”

Now, in only two years’ time this veteran of over twenty races in more than four countries, has managed to make himself and his full head of hair a brand that holds quality and world-class racing events popular amongst the country’s running community. To put it into perspective, his last race, the 2009 Timex Run held last November, drew in over 4000 participants and cost 5.7 million Pesos. “After that event, I felt challenged to do better. I really think I can do better,” says Rio.

And better, he did. In 2007, dela Cruz established Entraineur, an events and sports management company that handles corporate accounts. In 2008, he launched Finishline.ph together with business partner Vince Mendoza, an online sports management company that organizes races. And just last year, he launched Run Rio Incorporated which holds dela Cruz’s own running series called The RunRio Trilogy–a yearly triple combination of three major running events, and RunRio Sportswear–Rio’s own running apparel brand.

The success of dela Cruz in such short a time is nothing short of stunning. “I think what they like about me is my enthusiasm as a runner to create a good race,” he says, “And then, of course, the innovation I put in my races, because if you get stuck in the usual or traditional event, nothing will happen. My technique is to bring innovation in my races and create quality events. That’s the key to my success.”

Currently, dela Cruz is training for the Holy Grail of marathons, the Boston Marathon in April of this year for which he qualified, and the New York Marathon in November. But for this kid from the province, the ultimate dream is as big as his afro and as far as the kilometers he’s run: to find himself at the starting line in the city with the same name as his: the 2016 Rio Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The barefoot-running kid with an afro has become the running guru still with an afro. However, he now makes it a habit to slip on some shoes when he runs. When asked how many pairs he now has, “More than a hundred pairs,” he answers matter-of-factly. And how many of those did he buy himself? “Not one.”

PHOTO CREDITS
www.runrio.com

I did an interview once as a requirement for one of my journalism classes in college. While I’d ask the usual questions of “What are the difficulties in your line of work?”, “What’s your most memorable interview?” and other pageant  questions, all those would lead up to “Have you ever received any death threats?” And the most interesting answer I received was that someone actually sent him a death wreath. Interesting, creepy, and very The Godfather.

I never got to interview Marites Vitug. I did, however, get to read her stuff. Marites Vitug is to Philippine journalism as Pavlov is to classical conditioning and salivating dogs.

***

Marites Vitug, author of the controversial Shadow of Doubt: Probing the Supreme Court, has received death threats, reports ABS-CBN News.

The veteran journalist reportedly received two intimidating text messages days after the successful release of her book.

The first message about the pen being mightier that the sword had added text which read: “But the sword kills faster than the pen.”

The second message coming from the number 09091348825 read: “Kaya pala maraming napapatay na journalists dahil katulad mo. May katwiran pala si Ampatuan na pagpapatayin ang mga journalists. Sana nakasama ka dun, malay mo malapit na. (Your kind is one of the reasons why journalists are being killed. Ampatuan has valid reason to kill those journalists. I hope you were one of them. You’ll never know, it could be sooner.)”

Vitug told ABS-CBN News that the threats came after the publication of her book Shadow of Doubt, which dissects the inner workings of the Philippine judiciary.

In an email to SPOT.ph, Vitug disclosed: “I did not expect a death threat. I expected those who were offended by the book [to launch] a campaign to discredit me. I expected criticism. But I am not surprised by this threat because the culture of accountability has not yet seeped into a number of our government institutions. Public officials don’t do the right thing and expect to get away with it. When journalists dig up the truth and write about these public figures, they intimidate and scare us off. They shouldn’t be bothered at all if they have nothing to hide.”

Vitug stated that she doesn’t know the identity of the person or groups that sent the messages, but she is certain that her book was what prompted them.

In any case, Vitug has the support of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP).

In a statement released to ABS-CBN News, the NUJP praised Vitug for her courage in unveiling what is considered one of the “most mysterious” branches of government in the country: the Supreme Court. “[This] is the role journalism plays in any genuine democracy—that of stripping away the mystique that often surrounds the way government and its instrumentalities work so that the people may judge whether that government is true to its mandate to serve them,” said the NUJP.

Meanwhile, Vitug said that she is simply “keeping her cool but staying alert.” “(A journalist’s) best protection is to bring the threat out in the open,” she explained.

To date, Shadow of Doubt’s first printing editions have been sold out. Newsbreak is currently reprinting the book. This Friday, March 26, 3,000 copies of its newsprint edition will be out. Then, on Monday, March 29, they expect 2,000 copies of its hardcover edition to be delivered.

FROM: Spot.ph

I’ve always admired Anderson Cooper. While Katie Couric has some journalistic chops, I think she’s gone to the corporate dark side. Anderson Cooper has the classic hard-hitting journalist attitude, but as his appearances on shows like Regis and Kelly have proven, has some angst and biting sarcasm that the people of my generation thrive upon.

There’s a video of Anderson on YouTube covering the Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans where, in the middle of his interview with a government official, he cuts her off and begins chastising her for taking the advantage of the air time to make herself look good and place the blame on other people. While the media strive to be unbiased, in the face of events like Katrina, and now, Haiti, you have to take a side.

From Anderson Cooper’s blog:

As things got really out of control, I saw a looter on the roof of the store they’d broken into throw what I think was part of a concrete block into the crowd. It hit a small boy in the head.

I saw him collapse. More chunks of concrete were being thrown at the looters on the roof. The injured boy couldn’t get up. He’d try and then collapse again. Blood was pouring from his head. He was conscious but had no control over his body. I was afraid someone on the roof would see him lying there and throw another cinder block piece onto him. I was afraid he’d get killed. No one seemed to be helping him.

I ran to where he was struggling, and picked him up off the ground. I brought him to a spot about a hundred feet away. I could feel his warm blood on my arms. I stood him up, but he was clearly unable to walk. He wiped his bloody face, and I tried to reassure him.

In journalism, there is such a thing as “off the record.” I first heard it when I was interviewing a member of the President’s cabinet for a requirement in one of my journ classes. We were talking for about half and hour, when I asked him how it was working for the government. He took my recorder on the table, looked at it, and pressed the stop button, saying, “This is off the record,” and continued talking. I was a bit peeved at the fact he took my recorder without asking me, but was excited at the fact I was going to get some juicy government gossip. As my current editor once said, “off the record” means “for your information only.” It will only serve as a background to the whole issue and cannot be credited to whoever said it.

I have never encountered a subject (yet) who has requested to remain anonymous, probably because I’m in a business magazine and not a hard-hitting broadsheet. The only thing entrepreneurs want to keep secret is their capital, which I still ask (for reference), but don’t publish. But really, when you’re talking to the press, expect everything to get published, even what you’re wearing–it’s a great intro device, clothes.

Meanwhile, this is a perfect example of failure to protect your source’s identity. See, even the BCC makes mistakes. Anonymous fail!

Sorry, Abu Ibrahim.

I haven’t been paying attention to the news lately because–and this excuse is true–I haven’t found the time. For someone working in the media, this is unacceptable. I understand that a magnitude 7 earthquake hit Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I’ve seen the web reports on the lack of international aid, the rampant looting, the damaged buildings, but most of all, the dead, the dying, and the survivors. Local news hasn’t been that thorough as the focus has been on Filipinos working in the area, occasionally touching on the plight of the Haitians.

Perhaps being a third-world country ourselves prevents us from acting too altruistic, or at least feeling altruistic towards the people of Haiti. But that’s no excuse. I’m a visual person. It’s hard to imagine that on the other side of the world, this is going on. But it is.

Haitians survey the damage to a building that collapsed onto a road in downtown Port-au-Prince , Haiti (REUTERS/Hans Deryk)

A mob of Haitians reach out as goods are thrown from a nearby shop in the downtown business district on January 17, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Georges Boutin of Fort Lauderdale, Florida (with hacksaw) and daughter (right) Pier Boutin of Lenox, Massachussets use a hacksaw to amputate a woman’s leg in Port Au Prince General Hospital. It was the first surgery at the country’s largest hospital since the earthquake. (Globe staff photo/Bill Greene)

A Haitian mass grave receives unclaimed, unidentified bodies in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince January 16, 2010. (Olivier Laban Mattei/AFP/Getty Images)

Men stand near a burning body left in the street in Port-au-Prince, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010. U.N. peacekeepers patrolling the capital said popular anger is rising and warned authorities and aid organizations to increase security to guard against looting after Tuesday’s earthquake. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Looters steal a bag of another looter who lies dead, shot by the police on January 17, 2010 near the Hypolite Market in Port-au-Prince. (Olivier Laban Mattei/AFP/Getty Images)

A man pulls the body of an earthquake victim from a coffin in order to steal the coffin at the cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Friday, Jan. 15, 2010. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

People walk on a debris-covered street in Port-au-Prince January 17, 2010. (REUTERS/Daniel Aguilar)

PHOTO/CAPTION CREDIT
Boston.com

Rhoel Dinglasan, a Filipino entomologist and biologist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland has discovered a new vaccine against malaria. I’m no med student or doctor, but for millions of people–children–in Africa, this could save their lives. As an aside, how can you not mistake the name Rhoel for Filipino? I’m just saying.

Dinglasan has found an antigen, called AnAPN1, that causes humans to create antibodies that prevent transmission of malaria by mosquitoes. Get enough of these antibodies into mosquitoes, and you lock the disease up there and prevent it from infecting us. Sounds good, but how do you implement such a strategy? You can hardly vaccinate the mosquitoes themselves. Instead, you put the AnAPN1 into their food source: us. A mosquito that bites an inoculated person would pick up the antibodies and then be sidelined from the malaria-transmission game.

Continue reading here.

When I was a journalism student, there were few people I looked up to. While I have nothing but deep respect for and am truly grateful to all my journalism professors, I still have this vile feeling towards them, which perhaps stems from the fact that they managed to make me feel, ummm, less than adequate, every time they returned my papers with their corrections, which, according to some, had a semblance to menstruation–the red ink from their pens penetrating every page, reducing my elaborate story on the President’s State of the Nation Address into a children’s story.

Run-on sentences, like the one before this, and euphemisms like “less than adequate,” were their favorite and my weakness. The idea is to make everything simple to understand. Guide the reader, but don’t spoonfood him. Back then, Maria Ressa was still working for CNN. She’s now the Head of ABS-CBN’s News and Current Affairs.

Blowback: The Massacre in Maguindanao – Maria Ressa

You can’t escape the laws of physics. Newton’s third law of motion states: “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the world of governments and their security forces, it’s called blowback – a term first coined by the US Central Intelligence Agency in classified documents to describe US and British covert operations in Iran in 1953. They helped overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh, setting in motion a chain of events which inspired the revival of Islamic fundamentalism around the world.

Blowback happened again in Afghanistan in the late 80’s when the US funneled more than $3 billion, through Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, to build up the Afghan resistance against the Soviets. That sowed the seeds for 9/11 and the major terrorist attacks in Southeast Asia from 2001 to 2009. Among the key beneficiaries was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who helped train Osama bin Laden and thousands of Southeast Asian militants including the founder of the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, some of the Bali and JW Marriott bombers.

Blowback happened in Maguindanao in the southern Philippines – where warlords with private armies funded by the state wield political power.

It’s a complex situation: the power structure of government is a thin overlay on top of a complex social hierarchy based on families or clans. These clans periodically clash – feuds known as rido, which can be ignited by the flimsiest of reasons – a quarrel over women or a verbal slight. Clans became the foundation of electoral politics and determined the distribution of power and resources.

Add the fight against Muslim insurgents, first the MNLF or Moro National Liberation Front. Now it’s the Moro Islamic Liberation Front of MILF, which provided training and sanctuary to numerous Islamic militants, including members of Jemaah Islamiyah, Al-Qaeda’s arm in Southeast Asia.

The Ampatuan family’s rise to power began in the Marcos era, when it closely allied with the military to fight the Moro National Liberation Front or MNLF. When the MNLF signed a peace agreement with the government in 1996, the enemy changed to the MILF, now the largest Muslim insurgency in the country.

Read the whole story here.

PHOTO CREDITS
www.pep.ph

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour talks to ABS-CBN’s Maria Ressa

With machinations almost Shakespearean in nature, the generations-long feud between two political clans in Buluan, Maguindanao—a rural area located in the southern part of the Philippines—has risen to heights in what observers can only describe as a “gruesome massacre” “unequalled in recent history.”

On Monday, a group of at least 36 people, mostly composed of women identified with Buluan vice mayor Dato “Toto” Mangudadatu and 12 journalists, were abducted and later killed by close to a hundred gunmen allegedly led by members of rival Ampatuan political clan. As of Wednesday, the number of bodies found rose to 52.

More than the fact that helpless and unarmed journalists were killed, is the fact that all people in the group were helpless and unarmed.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has placed Maguindanao under a state of emergency, ordering the Philippine National Police to go after the perpetrators.

Four days after the filing for candidacy was opened and at six months before the elections, this is the first election-related crime to hit headlines. Shakespeare had it better. Clearly, we’re in a tragedy.

PHOTO CREDITS
Associated Press (Aaron Favila, Noel Celis)
www.worldphotos.com
www.wn.com

In the late seventies, then first lady Imelda Marcos, with support from her husband, then President Ferdinand Marcos, launched the Nutribun Feeding Program. It was a high-budget feeding program for all public school students in the country who were suffering from malnutrition due to poverty. Basically, the Nutribun was a vitamin enriched pandesal. They would give out these power packed buns to the school children in hopes of a healthier future. Suddenly, the program was stopped and never again spoke of. What happened to the Nutribun?

Conspiracy theorists say the reason why the Nutribun Feeding Program was terminated was because they were feeding more than what was agreed upon to the kids. It turns out that the power-packed pandesals contained more than just flour, wheat, MSG, and vitamins. It contained estrogen as well. Estrogen, for those who have gone through Biology, is the steroid compound that functions as the primary female sex hormone. While estrogen is present in both men and women, they are found in women in significantly higher quantities. They promote the development of female secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts, and are also involved in the thickening of the endometrium and other aspects of regulating the menstrual cycle.

Now, there’s nothing bad about estrogen. It’s what makes women women. However, one must remember that a majority of the public school students who were ingesting the Nutribun were also young boys. It turns out Imelda’s little nutrition experiment was a population regulator as well. When men take in estrogen, thus increasing their estrogen levels beyond that of their testosterone’s, they too develop female characteristics, more prominent than that of their male’s. In a word, the children were slowly turning gay. The supposed theory: When these now gay boys grow up and become gay men, they will not engage in sexual intercourse with females–only with men–therefore reducing the booming birthrate and slowing down the Philippine’s population growth. We can only assume that some years later, the once little boys, who were little boys no more, came “out” into society with less of something they should have, or more of something they shouldn’t have, with a whole new perspective on life. If they were the least bit healthy, I have no idea, but probably not.

Then in 2005, the Nutribun made a comeback. While scanning the front page of Philippine Daily Inquirer, I just had to laugh when I saw, “Gov’t to feed 7.5M pupils with NutriVEN.’ Dubbed as “the most extensive mass feeding program in Philippine history,” it’s the Nutribun reincarnated. However, instead of a vitamin-enriched pandesal they’re giving vitamin-enriched noodles, hence the acronym, VEN. So aside from flour and other secret ingredients that the public school children will be ingesting, the students will also be smothered in MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) for which instant noodles are known. These chemicals disguised in the form of powders, sweeteners, and flavorings then induce diseases in the uninary and digestive system that may be life-threatening in the long run. With a budget of Php 1.5 billion, the government believes that it will put an end to the country’s problem of malnutrition and make the school a place where hunger for knowledge and food are both satisfied. Nicely put.

And now, nearly forty years after the first buns were launched, the Nutribun has been reincarnated into Nutripan; -pan meaning pandesal. With the Inquirer’s headline saying “‘Nutripan’ now sold in Marikina schools”, the third coming of the buns has zeroed in on several public elementary schools in Marikina City. According to the report, the project “aims to establish bakeries on school campuses that mainly produce pandesal fortified with iron and Vitamin A. The objective is to provide proper nutrition to students at a lesser cost.”

I hope they’re whole wheat.