The Inquirer, in its usual alarmist fashion, carried the headline “No Stopping Oil Price Rise”. In its report, Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes called on the public Thursday to brace themselves for still higher fuel prices as world oil jumped to record highs above $135 amid fears about tight energy supplies, rising global demand and a dropping dollar.

“This is the reality that we must face and act on,” Reyes said, citing a forecast by investment bank Goldman Sachs that oil prices would average $141 a barrel in the second half of this year and could top $200 a barrel by 2010.

OPEC President Chakib Khelil weighed in with his prediction that, indeed, US$200 crude will be a reality in 2010, if not sooner.

The scrapping of import duties on crude and refined oil products effective June 1 will have minimal impact, a reduction of 35-50 centavos per liter at the pump, and will hardly be felt by consumers. Gasoline and diesel prices are going up by P1.00/liter weekly, with no immediate end in sight.

This is bad news. But there’s worse to come. This could spell the end of the world as we know it, according to certain prophets of doom. The scary thing is, they have both numbers and history on their side. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been called, without exaggeration, as the bloodiest bank robbery in the country’s history. Ten dead, all methodically shot in the head. And the killers literally got away with murder, at least for the time being, and with an estimated P9 million to P12 million in cash. That’s an average of P1 million for every dead body. So successful was the heist that the robbers left behind millions more at the vault and scattered around the bank. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve previously written about the case of Megan Meier of Dardenne Prairie, St. Charles County in Missouri, U.S.A., who committed suicide after being spurned by a boy she was communicating with in the MySpace social networking site. She was chatting with a 16-year old boy named “Josh Evans” on a regular basis, and had come to believe that a certain romantic relationship had been established between them. But one day, without warning, Josh turned mean. He called Megan names, and later they traded online insults. Other youngsters who had linked to Josh’s MySpace profile joined the increasingly bitter exchange and began sending profanity-laden messages to Megan. The online bullying finally drove Megan to hang herself with a belt in her bedroom closet. She was thirteen.

But Josh Evans never existed. He was an online character created by Lori Drew, the 47-year old mother of Megan’s former best friend, who lived just four houses down the street from the Meiers. Mrs. Drew created the character “Josh Evans”, according to a neighbor, because she “going to mess with Megan” for apparently breaking up the once-close friendship with her daughter. Lori Drew did more than that. She drove Megan Meier to kill herself.

Despite the cruel and vicious nature of Mrs. Drew’s acts, Missouri officials could not charge her with a crime. There was nothing in the state’s laws that would cover the perpetrator’s conduct of creating an online “avatar” with the intent to deceive and harm another person.

Mrs. Drew herself expressed little remorse, callously blaming Megan for being suicide-prone. Read the rest of this entry »