A BUNCH OF NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS FROM MILO DIMATAGA OF SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

Today, I received a thick postal envelope from Milo postdated January 30, 2006 from Sydney, Australia. It came with this hand-written note:

26 Jan 2006

Dear Boy,

Enclosed please find some news clippings that might be of interest to you.
Sincerely,

Milo

The clippings is a potpourri of news articles from The Daily Telegraph of Sydney around the 2nd and 3rd weeks of January.

The main one was a headline that screamed: HARBOUR POISONED. The clipping came with a handwritten note from Milo that states: "Dear Boy, due to pollution, I hope our waters would not come to this. Milo". The article talks about banning of all fishing activities in Sydney due to poisoning of the harbour by dioxin, coming from the pesticide factory. I shudder to think that our problem is much worse (although it has not been studied). Since there is no hazardous waste disposal system in Metro Cebu, heavy metal poisons such as arsenic, cyanide, lead, lithium, etc must be routinely dumped into Mactan Channel. Battery businesses, electroplating and ship reconditioning, furniture processing, etc. all dump their waste into the 13 rivers and creeks that empty into Mactan Channel, and the sea. We need a study badly!

Other articles talk about shark attacks and shark scares - the kind that erroneously gets translated here in the Philippines as "sharks are bad, kill them!"

Another interesting one is about a feature in the entertainment section on a Filipino restaurant offering karaoke. (There goes the neighborhood!)

Lastly, one article talks about the controversy hounding RU486, the controversial abortion pill.

I will be posting different follow-up articles on these as they pertain to Lapu-Lapu City in particular.

Thank you, Milo.