Solon bats for fuel tax suspension amid fluctuating pump prices

Alawmaker said the temporary provision regarding the automatic fuel tax cut under the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) law should be made permanent to bring down the cost of fuel and provide instant relief to the Filipino people.

In a statement, Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte said the

TRAIN law’s provisional authority to suspend the fuel excise tax whenever the USD80-price cap is breached ended in 2020.

Villafuerte said the proposed tax suspension aims to shield ordinary Filipinos from “further adversities that may be caused by unforeseen economic downturns.”

“Geopolitical conflicts and other developments in world markets have been driving up the cost of petroleum products, which, in turn, have jacked up transportation expenses and food prices responsible for the seemingly unending elevated inflation that now threatens to slow the global economy and possibly even lead to recession in most parts of the world,” Villafuerte said.

He cited the Philippine

Statistics Authority (PSA) report that inflation soared to a 14-year record of 8.1 percent last December, the highest since the 9.1 percent clip in 2008 and the ninth consecutive month in 2022 that the pace of commodity price hikes breached the target range of 2 percent to 4 percent set by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).

On the Basic Education Report 2023 which contains the state of education in the Philippines and the programs that the Department of Education to improve the quality of education, meet challenges, and solve problems faced by Filipino students:

BILLACURA Sports Editor

Whales are associated with compassion and solitude, and knowledge of both life and death.

Whales play special roles in the history and culture of Cadiz City in Negros, Occidental as it is called the City of Whales.

Various murals of whales are scattered on walls of schools along with the centerpiece of the fountain at the city plaza.

Its annual festival “Dinagsa” every last weekend of January was coined after an event that occurred on May 7, 1967 when several whales were stranded along the city’s shores each measuring at least 40 feet long and eight feet tall.

Dinagsa came from a Hiligaynon word “dagsa” meaning to gather together, driftage or to come in groups.

A year later, notorious pirates surprisingly attacked Cadiz on the December 31, 1968.

The city’s version of Ati-Atihan festival begun in 1972 in honor of the patron saint Sto. Nino de Cadiz whom the locals believed to have created miracles protecting the city from the invading pirates. It was only in 2002 that the festival was called “Dinagsa”.

ATTY. DENNIS R. GORECHO KUWENTONG PEYUPS

WHALES AS SYMBOLS OF LIFE, DEATH AND HOPE.

The Ati-Atihan street dancing competition basically had the common elements of whales, pirates and Sto.Nino. Ati-atihan means ‘making like Atis,’ that is, pretending to be like the aboriginal natives that once inhabited Negros.

The “Lamhitanay sa Dalan” is one of the unique features of Dinagsa wherein everyone in the street merrymaking smother latex paint on each other’s faces.

With the kaleidoscope of colors, one will be a human canvass of the other festival revelers.

An old painting of Moby-Dick still hangs in our house which I consider as my first encounter with whales.

It was in my literature class at the University of the Philippines (UP) that I made a review of the book “Moby Dick or The Whale” which is an 1851 allegorical classic novel by American writer Herman Melville.

It narrates the quest of Captain Ahab of the whaling ship Pequod for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that crippled him on the ship’s previous voyage.

There have been a number of adaptations of Moby-Dick in various media including the first production in 1926 as a silent film called “The Sea Breast.”

A two-act play by Orson Welles was staged from June 16 to July 9, 1955 in London that starred Christopher Lee.

Some interpret the whale as the powerful force of nature, which humans have long battled and tried to conquer. For Captain Ahab, the white whale symbolizes all that is evil in the world, and therefore, it must be destroyed.

The international coffee chain Starbucks got its name from a character in Moby Dickthe first mate who was the only man aboard the who resists Ahab’s plan to devote the ship’s mission to hunting and killing the White Whale. To Starbuck, the whale would provide oil like any other whale as his line of thinking is that nature is there to be exploited for profit.

In the Extraordinary Attorney Woo Korean drama, the main actress loves whales.

It follows the story of Woo Young Woo, a lawyer with autism spectrum disorder, working at a large famous law firm. The drama depicts her growth as she solves cases using her remarkable memory and outsideof-the-box thinking.

Rather than a lightbulb, whales occasionally appear via her imagination to bring her comfort or when she has a “Eureka” enlightenment moment.

Her autism characteristic has brought her to a certain fixation with whales as they are able to freely swim in the ocean without any limitations.

Whales also became entangled in the landmark case oddly labeled “Resident Marine Mammals of the Protected Seascape Tañon Strait et. al. V. Secretary Angelo Reyes et al.”(G.R. No. 180771 April 21, 2015).

Collectively referred to as the “Resident Marine Mammals”, the petitioners are the toothed whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other cetacean species, which inhabit the waters in and around the Tañon Strait, a body separating Negros and Cebu.

They are joined by environmental lawyers of Oceana Philippines as their legal guardians and as friends (“the Stewards”) who empathize with, and seek the protection of, the marine species.

Environmental lawyers in- sisted that the oil exploration harmed the animals and most of them had moved to another location.

The Supreme Court ruled that oil exploration, development and exploitation of resources by Japan Petroleum Exploration Co. Ltd. (Japex) in Tañon Strait was unconstitutional by violating laws like the National Integrated Protected Areas System act of 1992.

The Court also ruled that the whales and other sea mammals had no legal personality to sue— however, citizens can sue in their behalf.

The lawyers said that the ruling should serve as a reminder to national agencies to perform their mandates of environment protection, and also protect the rights of the people. This should also deter them from ecologically destructive acts, especially in protected areas like Tañon Strait.

(Peyups is the monicker of Philippine Collegian. Atty. Dennis R. Gorecho heads the seafarers’ division of the Sapalo Velez Bundang Bulilan law offices. For comments, e-mail info@sapalovelez.com, or call 09175025808 or 09088665786.)

REEXAMINING DAVAO’S CONQUEST

1848 is a watershed date in local history, and many see this event as more than just the conquest of Davao but also the start of an irrevocable colonial influence in the region.

But the larger aspect of Davao’s subjugation by Spain is another proud moment in Da-vao’s storied past. It is an indirect admission on the part of the Spaniards that it took them 293 years after Manila’s founding before they managed to remove Davao from the grasp of a Maguindanao-inspired polity represented by Datu Bago.

What makes the conquest of Davao exceptional, though achieved with Spanish support, is the fact that it was not an initiative of the colonial administration. Don Jose Oyanguren, who led the expedition, was not a government functionary even if in later accounts he was given the sobriquet of ‘last Spanish conquistador.’ He was removed as Tondo judge in 1845.

In recent times, judicious historians have dug deep into the ethnologic origin of the Moro people and have stumbled on a yet to be substantiated oral tradition that this group of peo-ple, even before Islam was introduced in Mindanao, was known by other names.

Two theories have slowly gained interest in recent decades, namely: (i) they are Sangils who originated from northern Indonesia, and (ii) they are chiefly Manobos from the Agusan area who resettled via riverine migration to the western side of southern Philippines.

Linguistically, the Manobo languages are extensively dispersed outside the Caraga regions where they are accepted to have originated. A comparative study of dialects shows a kind of Manobo diaspora in northern and central Mindanao, the littorals of Sultan Kudarat, and the remote areas of Cagayan and Palawan where Manobo dialect is still spoken. Both the Magu-indanao and Manobo tongues, interestingly, are subgroups of the Austronesian languages.

Sangil migration to Sarangani, which can still be reached from the Celebes region by boat using only wind power, has long been documented in many accounts. That answers why there exists in Davao and Gen. Santos a sizeable but dispersed population of Indonesian-blooded settlers. With their Malay features, they can pass up without effort as Filipinos.

On the other hand, the Manobo theory is anchored on the assumption that long before the Maguindanao identity was even recognized, the Manobo, arguably the second people to populate Besar Maluku (Mindanao’s old moniker) after the Mamanua of Surigao, was al-ready exploring the network of waterways that define the entire island of southern Philip-pines.

In the process of this exploration, the hypothesis goes, the Manobos set up hamlets in are-as where there was an abundance of food. Though most of the small settlements can be de-scribed as stopovers, demographics, intermarriage, and the rise of smaller shelters finally re-sulted in the formation of enduring settlements. Inter-tribal trade and exchange also helped define the growth of the communities which became tribes, and later formed into a polity known as the sultanate.

Theories, however, remain until contrary evidence is shown to buttress another hypothe-sis. As it is now, the Sangil migration and the Manobo relocation models are conceptually sound and can be adopted as interesting fields for historical research.

If, indeed, the Manobo model is recognized, the identity of Datu Bago as part-Maguindanaoan takes an even more weighty meaning because this would confirm the tradi-tion that the precolonial Manobo was an itinerant people who extensively explored the inner regions using the convenience of a riverine highway that continues to link most of Mindanao to this day.

Beyond theories, the Spanish conquest of Davao reinforces the long-held belief that Min-danao, even until the early American rule, was never occupied under a pure State initiative.