Straight from the Sky turns 11 years old today

Today is a red-letter day for us in Straight from the Sky as our final episode last week ended with the showing of our 580th show marking the end of our tenth year in Cebu Cable Television. Today, we mark the beginning of our 11th year giving you a talkshow with the most varied topics. You might ask, what do we do after our 10th year? Well in entertainment parlance, they would say, “The show must go on!”

 We usually do a collage or snippets of our previous interviews or shows to mark our anniversaries, but for our 11th year, we won’t have any fanfare, rather we shall present to you an Economic Briefing for Cebu with our special guest, Prof. Fernando “Perry” Fajardo, former Assistant Regional Director of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) in Region 7, an Economics Professor in the University of San Carlos (USC) Graduate School and concurrently the Executive Director of the Cebu Business Club (CBC).

 For tonight’s special presentation, Prof. Perry Fajardo will give us a similar Economic Briefing that he gave a few months ago, but with a twist on how things would go because of the unrest in the Middle East and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. So please watch this very informative show on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00pm as our special anniversary presentation.

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 The big surprise last Saturday was the unexpected return of fugitive Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson who flew to Cebu on board Cathay Pacific flt. CX 921. He stayed in Cebu for a few hours and proceeded to Manila. Ping Lacson has been missing for more than a year since his warrant of arrest as the principal suspect of the Corbito-Dacer double murder. But this warrant of arrest was lifted by the Court of Appeals (CA) hence Sen. Lacson could now return to the country and resume his duties as Senator of the land.

 Now speculations are rife that Sen. Lacson was in Cebu all the time and merely got inside the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority (MCIAA) and sneaked in as the CX 921 flight arrived. Others are saying that he was in Hong Kong all along. Well, surely when Sen. Lacson comes up with his presscon, we would know for sure where he was hiding.

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 Last Saturday, the front pages of The Philippine Star and another national daily showed the thousands (the figures they said were some 40,000) that flocked to the Quirino Grandstand at the Rizal Park for one of the biggest anti-Reproductive Health (RH) bill rally in the nation’s capital. The figure mentioned may be small in comparison to the burial of the late Sen. Ninoy Aquino or Tita Cory’s burial, but hey, those stunning photographs don’t lie. Like it or not, there are literally thousands upon thousands of Filipinos out there who are pro-Life.

 What the front page photos of those two major national dailies do not show are the photographs of so many other pro-Life rallies held in Cebu City, Davao City, Bacolod, Iloilo and many more throughout the country. Unfortunately, too many of our fellow media practitioners give more important coverage to those so-called “Catholics” supporting the RH Bill, a group that only surfaced because of the lobby groups funding such organizations.

 Here in Cebu, the media isn’t all that excited to take sides on this issue simply because most of them have not been given the basic reasons why the Catholic Church remains steadfast in its decision to fight the RH bill. Call it the total failure by the Cebu Archdiocese to educate Cebu’s media practitioners on this issue. Of course there are deeper issues behind the simple call for the enactment of the RH bill and it has something to do with the spiritual warfare that we are waging these days. Call it a war between good versus evil if you wish. But this is the reality happening today.

 Just a few days ago, I saw a video presentation by CNN of a religious analysts who claimed that organized religion is doomed to extinction, whether it is Mohammedanism, Judaism, Buddhism or Catholicism. As we are Catholics, I take comfort and refuge on what our Lord Jesus Christ said in Matt. 16: 18 “And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” Indeed, this is our Catholic faith, the church established on this earth by our Lord Jesus Christ that will be with us till the end of time, regardless of what CNN and those other groups say about our religion.

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 This Wednesday, Mar.30th, the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation, Inc. (RAFI) will hold its Urban Development Series of the Understanding Choices Forum dubbed, “Urban Development and Governance, Ricks and Opportunities, Learning from Other Cities. This is open to the public. See you there!

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 Email: [email protected].