Opinion

At Context.ph, we have always believed that journalism should meet readers where they are. The way people consume news continues to evolve, and our responsibility as a digital publication is to evolve with them.

A car can tell you many things. It can tell you that a door is open, a tire needs air, a passenger has forgotten to buckle up, or that you are getting dangerously close to the vehicle in front of you. What it cannot tell you is why you have been sitting in the same spot for 23 minutes. This is the peculiar economics of driving in the Philippines. We fork over a great deal of money buying cars that can go very fast, and then spend a considerable portion of our lives making sure they do not.

Senator-judge Raffy Tulfo asked a deceptively simple question during Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial: Why did no one in her legal orbit tell her to divest from her businesses before she took her oath?

Filipinos have never really needed an invitation to love basketball. Give us a hoop, a ball, and approximately four square meters of concrete and we will figure out the rest. There is no requirement for proper flooring, air-conditioning, seating, parking, or even a complete understanding of the rules. Someone will keep score. Someone will call a phantom foul. Someone will bend the rules to ridiculous proportions in plain sight. So when the National Basketball Association brought basketball to the Philippines once again, nobody complained. After all, Filipinos have been quite willing to make room for basketball for decades. We simply cleared a little more space.

When the US Federal Reserve, the world’s most influential central bank, moves interest rates, Manila can feel the ripple, even 8,500 miles away. The effects do not arrive all at once, and they do not affect everyone in the same way. But eventually, they can show up in the mortgage, car loan, credit card bill, and even the grocery budget.