It’s been 10 years now since the UN Millennium Summit of 2000 when nations signed on to the Millennium Declaration that promises to free humanity from poverty, hunger, and other forms of deprivation and to enlarge our basic freedoms. The promises were specified in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to be accomplished by 2015, using 1990 as baseline.

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In my younger years as a social activist around the 1970s I came across and got fascinated with a Chinese saying, “Women own half the sky.” What that meant to me was that men can only make half of what could possibly happen.

Four decades have gone by since then. Today we see a world still very much dominated by men. It’s a world that counts more than a billion poor and hungry—majority of them women—caught up in the cross fires of wars and civil conflicts in different places and subjected to various forms of discrimination, social exclusion, political oppression.

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We at Halalang Marangal sat down to discuss the ad and realized that all the information contained there, analyzed carefully and taken together, actually meant that as of March 8, the AES probability of success had become unacceptably low. We even tried to be generous in our assessment, and gave the company some benefit of the doubt (where it was possible to do so!), but the numbers still led to a low probability of success.

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MANILA, Philippines – With less than three months to go before the country embarks on its first ever national-level automated elections, a group of farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, and community leaders were presented with a Precinct Count Optical Scanner (PCOS) machine that will be used during the May 10, 2010 national and local polls.

The Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), the country’s oldest NGO, along with its partners the Citizens’ Movement for Good Governance (CMGG), organized a “Voter Education Forum and the Automated Election Systems” last February 19, 2010 at the PRRM National Headquarters.

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On January 16, 2010, at 1:00 in the afternoon, nine hopefuls, including two guides, finally reached the peak of Mt. Palay-Palay (Maragondon, Cavite) after six long hours of trudging and slogging up and down its steep and rocky slopes.

We were there, 664 meters above sea level, awed and charmed by the rewarding panoramic and picturesque view of the vast seas and mountain ranges. The sun was glaring hot but the tiredness and thirst drifted away with the cool and calming breeze that brought a genuine feeling of accomplishment.

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