If you want to understand the Philippines, resist the temptation to start with its strongmen and their statues. Begin instead with its women, the quiet architects of its revolutions, the steady hands at the tiller when storms arrive.
At Ninoy Aquino International Airport, the runway is not the only thing shifting. Airlines are now studying a government proposal to redraw the airport map itself, clustering carriers by business model in a sweeping terminal realignment.
Gilbert had barely settled into his seat on a Friday evening flight bound for Manila, pleased to be heading home after several days of meetings in Mindanao. An hour later, the single-aisle jet remained parked on the tarmac at Francisco Bangoy International Airport, engines silent, cabin restless.
When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discards its own scientific “endangerment finding,” it does more than revise a memo from 2009. It performs a kind of regulatory alchemy: turning greenhouse gases from legally recognized threats into political inconveniences.