Word: manila
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...After the film, Macapagal-Arroyo emerged smiling?with relief. Earlier, she had withdrawn Live Show from Manila's cinemas and leaned on the liberal chairman of the censor board to resign. Then she began having misgivings. The Catholic church and ultra-conservative groups lauded her decision, but her two-month old presidency found itself assailed by powerful former friends, the media and the intelligentsia. She was lambasted for succumbing to "moral terrorism," as one newspaper columnist put it. So, on Monday afternoon, Macapagal-Arroyo cleared her schedule and watched Live Show, alone. "Well, I finally saw it," she told...
...bragged about his fondness for women and booze. Live Show is the first victim in this crusade, and many newspapers are calling it censorship. And worries of a nationwide bowdlerization campaign were exacerbated by Macapagal-Arroyo's banning of a film she hadn't even seen. One columnist, the Manila Standard's Alex Magno, wrote: "We cannot allow that noble vision of a 'moral society' to be taken hostage by those who use the same phrase to mean denial of artistic freedom." Nonsense, says anti-pornography activist, Cecile Alvarez: "There's a huge difference between obscenity and freedom of expression...
...skipped lunch hours and stayed late after school to get a turn at the terminal. Neither of his parents?his dad is a machinist, his mom a store clerk?had even used a typewriter. Hungry for more than he could learn in his small hometown, Eyestrain went to Manila at age 17 to attend Systems Technology Institute, a technical college that offers low-cost programming courses. The classes were disappointing: Eyestrain found that he knew more than his teachers. "They exempted me from classes and got me to help administer the computers," he recalls. He tried another computer school...
Chatting online with some Manila friends in 1999, Eyestrain decided to return to the capital. He got off the bus with $150 in his pocket and hopes of finding work as a programmer or system administrator. But without a degree, finding computer work has been impossible. Ieta Chi, general manager at Trend Microsystems, an antivirus company that employs more than 280 people at its Manila office, says his desk is flooded with applicants like Eyestrain. "We can't really afford to waste time seeing people who haven't even finished school," Chi says...
Instead of returning to his backward hometown, however, Eyestrain stayed in Manila and became a cyberthief. By hacking into several e-commerce websites, he has built up a database of hundreds of credit card numbers. To use them without risking arrest, he set up a mailing system through a chat room, a kind of Net Bandits Clearing House. It works like this: "I order two monitors, they get sent to an address in Tacoma, Washington, that the guy I met in the chat room has access to, and then he forwards me one monitor and keeps the other for himself...