Author: admin

In the past several decades, Kojima’s name has become synonymous with video-game blockbusters.CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JORDAN STRAUSS/INVISION/APOn Friday, October 9th, Hideo Kojima left the Tokyo offices of Konami, the video-game company where he had worked since 1986, for the last time. The departure ceremony, according to one of the hundred or so guests who attended, and who asked that I not use his name, took place at Kojima Productions, the director’s in-house studio, and was “a rather cheerful but also emotional goodbye.” He said that he did not see Konami’s president, Hideki Hayakawa, or its C.E.O., Sadaaki Kaneyoshi, at the party, but some of Kojima’s colleagues from other studios showed up to pay their respects, as did many of the people who worked on his most recent directorial project, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. The game, which takes place in mid-nineteen-eighties Afghanistan and Zaire, made a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars on its launch day, in September—more than the two highest-grossing films of the year so far (“Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Jurassic World”) combined. In the past several decades, Kojima’s name has become synonymous with such blockbusters, and with the Konami brand itself. His impending resignation had been rumored as early as March, but the fact of it remains startling—as much as if Shigeru Miyamoto, the originator of Donkey Kong and the Mario brothers, left Nintendo.

Source: Kojima, Konami, and the Future of Japanese Video Games – The New Yorker

Thousands, 75,537 to be exact, have already filed claims in the HRVCB. And there are still those who wish to file claims but missed the May 2015 deadline.According to the book, “Some are Smarter than Others,” when Ferdinand Marcos became President in 1965, there were approximately 13.4 million, or 39 percent of the population, who could not meet basic needs for food, shelter and clothing. After 10 years of Marcos rule, this figure had ballooned to 20.5 million, or 48 percent of the population.By contrast since the first Edsa People Power Revolution, figures from the World Bank show a steady decline of the poverty headcount ratio at $1.25 a day. From 39 percent in 1985, this ratio declined to 31 percent in 1994, and further decreased to 23 percent in 2002, and 19 percent in 2012.

Source: Good life under Marcos; you kidding, right? | Inquirer News

Sorry, I was not able to see her comment earlier because I was chasing a deadline. Just to correct my mistake – for which I apologize – Ms. Mendoza was finally confirmed by the Commission on Appointments in June 2014 after three years of delay and being blocked 14 times. Her appointment had a fixed tenure of up to February 2018. Those who tried to block her appointment were Senators Vicente Sotto and Jinggoy Estrada and Congressman Luis Villafuerte. They are practically the same lawmakers who had blocked th

Source: I won’t abandon Binay cases, outgoing COA Commissioner Heidi Mendoza assures Cyber Plaza Miranda

Penn State and Yale University astronomers, unable to explain strange data patterns they’re observing from a star, have come to the conclusion that there may be an “alien superstructure” orbiting it.

Source: Not a Hoax: Scientists May Have Discovered an “Alien Superstructure” | Big Think

Many reports, including GMA-7’s 24 Oras last October 3, reminded the public of Santiago’s other bizarre statements in the past which she nonchalantly retracted. Among these declarations played up by the press were claims that she would hang herself if she didn’t win in the 1992 elections and she would jump out of a plane without a parachute in 2001 if then president Joseph Estrada landed in jail. Given Senator Santiago’s habit of lying, it is amazing why media seem to readily take her statements hook, line and sinker.

Source: “He said, she said” reporting | Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility
 
Emphasis mine

The ante insofar as intrigue-laden stories are concerned was upped by Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago. The feisty and confrontational senator revealed an alleged assassination plot against President Arroyo by no less than prayerful former president Corazon Aquino and Senate President Drilon.According to Santiago, the plan to kill the President was supposed to be carried out by October 15, if the oust-Arroyo move did not materialize within the said deadline. She said she got the information from a “chattering” relative of the Senate President. Drilon and Mrs. Aquino denied the allegations, describing Santiago’s story as “fantastic,” “absurd,” and a product of the senator’s very fertile imagination.Santiago’s mind-boggling expose was the headline of the Inquirer and front-page story of the Star and The Daily Tribune on October 2. The Manila Bulletin used the story for page 1 but focused on Drilon’s denial and call for sobriety. The Manila Times reported on a plot to oust the President based on an intelligence report, whose existence was denied by the military a few days later.

Source: “He said, she said” reporting | Center for Media Freedom & Responsibility

My analysis: The ancestral land of the lumad is prime land—for logging and mining activities. The NPA wants control of it, and so, of course, do corporations interested in these activities. They may or may not be in collusion. But the NPA sees the lumad as ripe for exploitation—and among the first things it is tackling is the education of the lumad. He who controls the minds of the young will eventually control the community.So the NPA is trying to take over the education, and even the cultural practices, of the lumad. The military is the only one standing in its way. So it must be dealt with. Thus come the charges of “militarization” and “enemies of the people.” Hogwash.The NPA, according to the lumad, has killed 357 lumad between 1998 and 2008. No one is doubting the accuracy of that statement. The military, according to the NPA, has killed 50 lumad during P-Noy’s watch. The only question is: Are these lumad, or are these NPA wolves in lumad clothing?Clearly, the lumad know what the game is. One can only hope that the rest of the Filipino people are just as intelligent.

Source: Read the ‘lumad’ lips | Inquirer Opinion

There’s an old saw, often mistakenly attributed to Winston Churchill, that goes something like this: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 35, you have no brain.” A person should start left and drift right, and not the other way around, the adage suggests.1But when it comes to Supreme Court justices, growing older appears to incite a trend in the opposite ideological direction. One prominent measure of judicial ideology — the Martin-Quinn score — illustrates this tendency. These scores, as DW-Nominate does for legislators, use the justices’ votes to quantify their position on a left-right spectrum. A more negative score means a justice is further left; a more positive score means she’s further right. The scores are based on data from the Supreme Court Database and are calculated back to 1937.

Source: Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older | FiveThirtyEight

The academy chose Tu, a mid-career scientist who had studied both Chinese and western medicine and knew enough about both to realise it would not be an easy job. “By the time I started my search over 240,000 compounds had been screened in the US and China without any positive results,” she says. Soon after joining project 523, Tu was sent to Hainan province, a region in the far south long plagued by malaria, to observe the effects of the disease firsthand. As Tu’s husband had been banished to the countrysi

Source: Nobel Prize goes to modest woman who beat malaria for China | New Scientist