Word: malacanang
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Once a week, the Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo likes to kick back and unwind with a movie. Last Monday, the lights dimmed in the screening room at the MalacaNang Palace, and the diminutive, 53- year-old president settled back uneasily to watch Live Show, a raunchy, local sex film. Rated "R" (18 and above), the film explores the sad and desperate lives of several impoverished boys and girls who put on sex shows. Live Show had generated a Babel of commentary, and the president wanted to judge for herself: was it social realism, or porn...
...managed, with the help of some of the same special effects that had worked on Marcos - persuasion flights over the palace by the Philippines' antiquated F-5 fighter jets and the positioning of combat troops and armored personnel carriers outside its perimeter - to force a recalcitrant Estrada out of MalacaNang just five minutes before a second deadline of Saturday noon. Although Estrada did not actually resign, he agreed with the decision of the Supreme Court, which had met secretly early Saturday morning. The court resolved that "the people have spoken" and that they could not be ignored. Estrada...
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has just about everything a Philippine President could desire. Her middle name, for starters, reminds Filipinos of former President Diosdado Macapagal, her dad. (Arroyo says she is looking forward to moving into to her old bedroom in MalacaNang Palace, the presidential residence.) Though 53 years old, she resembles a delicate ingEnue, a plus in the appearance-crazy Philippines. A Ph.D. in economics gives great gravitas. In office, Arroyo intends to be the reverse image of her disgraced predecessor, Joseph Estrada: brainy, focused and, well, sober. "I won't be drinking with my friends," she tells Time...
...jealous of a newborn brother. She stayed there for three years, and then split her time between Manila and Mindanao until the age of 11. (As President, Arroyo says she will concentrate on the separatist problem that has plagued Mindanao for decades.) At 14, she moved into MalacaNang with her father. She was always a strong student, earning the top grades in her Catholic girls' high school. (She was valedictorian at graduation.) For two years she studied economics at Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown University - at the same time as Bill Clinton, whom she knew - before returning to the Philippines...
When Calimlim arrived at Malacanang Palace, the President was in his office with several advisers, speaking on the phone. In a fit of anger following the call, he ordered everyone out of the office so that he could talk privately with Calimlim. "You too?" the President then said. "Everybody has forsaken me." It was clear that he had been drinking, and Calimlim observed that he was "despondent," saying at one point, "You know what I'll do? I'll just wait for one soldier to come in and kill me." Calimlim later remarked that "it was as if the whole...