Word: arroyo
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...Added to that are political concerns. The Philippines has a new President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and she announced from the start that she had no intention of suffering the humiliation dealt predecessor Joseph Estrada last year. Estrada succumbed to Malaysian and European pleas to hold the troops back and allowed Libya to broker a ransom deal. As a result, the ragtag band of one year ago has grown into a kidnapping army that can only get more audacious with every success. With Washington's backing, Arroyo refused all negotiation and ordered 5,000 troops into the scattered Sulu archipelago...
...Technology is energizing grassroots politics of all stripes: call it powering up. In the Philippines, protesters using cell-phone text messaging mobilized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in January to help oust President Joseph Estrada. Miguel Arroyo, husband of new President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, says her supporters kept urging everyone to head to the edsa shrine, the main focus of the People Power II movement. "We texted everybody to go running there: 'edsa. edsa: everybody converge on edsa!'" In China, tens of thousands of followers of the spiritual group Falun Gong continue to exist - despite a harsh crackdown...
...most part, however, governments are still on the defensive. One of the first acts of Arroyo's new administration in the Philippines was to persuade the two largest mobile-network operators, Smart Communications and Globe Telecom, to block "malicious, profane and obscene" texting, a move that would make a text-messaging revolt like the one that unseated her predecessor more difficult. To censor chat rooms, Beijing has adopted broad guidelines that ban content that "is against the national constitution, endangers state security, reveals state secrets, sabotages unity among ethnic groups and spreads heretical ideas." In Britain, laws against terrorism...
...Arroyo tried making amends by visiting Estrada last Thursday in his new, two-room jail cell. She beamed when Estrada shook her hand for the cameras and, ever the gallant actor, called her "our President." She still faces a more difficult p.r. job: to persuade poor Filipinos that despite her haughtiness and her ties to the oligarchy, she genuinely wants to help them with jobs, schools and public medical care, none of which she has done in her first 100 days. Judgment may come during May 14th senatorial elections, when her handling of Estrada and the arrests of her foes...
...Arroyo still has enemies at large. At dinner last Wednesday, a text message flashed on the President's cell phone warning that an air force general had sold out for $600,000 and joined the coup plotters. The report was wrong; the general was sitting across the table from Arroyo, and they both laughed. But unless the President starts mending ties with the military and her political opposition, the next warning to flash on her cell phone could be real...