PinoyWeb

Before NY, Arroyo entourage dined in Washington for $15k

Before the controversial New York dinner where they spent $20,000, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her entourage dined on "lobster, steak and fine wines" in Washington and spent $15,000 for the meal, a Washington Post blog reported on Wednesday. It also said an "unidentified woman opened a handbag stuffed with cash" and paid for the tab. The information came out in a popular blog called The Reliable Source by Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger. The Washington Post is the newspaper of rec...

World Bank: Governance in RP worsened since 1998

MANILA - The Philippines has regressed in key areas of governance over the past ten years, data from the World Bank showed. The multilateral lender's Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), a research project initiated in the late 1990s, revealed that the country's performance worsened last year compared to 1998 in five out of six dimensions of governance. These areas include voice and accountability (-0.20 from 0.39), political stability and absence of violence (-1.41 from -0.17), regulatory ...

Philippines is a leading shabu producer – United Nations

The three-story house in Pasig City was called "Malacañang," a notorious shabu den, its moniker perhaps a symbol of the drug’s status in the criminal world. Even though the house’s alleged owner has been in the custody of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) for over two years, this Malacañang continued to operate. When the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) finally raided the drug “palace," around P2.5 million worth of suspected methamphetamine hydrochloride -- b...

WHO declares swine flu pandemic, first in 41 years

GENEVA — The World Health Organization told its member nations it was declaring a swine flu pandemic Thursday — the first global flu epidemic in 41 years — as infections climbed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere. WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl stressed, however, that "Phase 6 doesn't mean anything concerning severity, it is concerning global spread. . . . Pandemic means global, but it doesn't have any connotation of severity or mildness." In fact...

Indonesian Military Plane Crash Kills At Least 97

An Indonesian military plane has crashed, killing at least 97 people.  As Daniel Schearf reports from The military transport plane crashed into homes near an air force base Wednesday morning as it was coming in for a landing. Over one hundred military personnel and their families were on board the Hercules C-130 plane when it went down in an area of East Java. Witnesses reported seeing parts of the plane falling from the sky and hearing explosions. Indonesian television showed burni...