BATAAN – AFTER shelling out money to College Assurance Plans (Philippines) Inc. (CAP) for more than a decade of working in Saudi Arabia, Francisco Aguilar Jr. is biting his fingernails over the shaky outlook for CAP as implied in recent media reports.

CAP, majority owned by the Sobrepena family, has been charged by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) in court for tax evasion. This is on top of the suspension of its license to sell pre-need education plans by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since last year.

MANILA — AROUND the country, young people in white starched polo shirts and pants enroll in maritime schools this June at a time when rising unemployment among Filipino seafarers is sparking a debate over whether substandard schools or the sheer number of students is to blame for the problem.

To be sure, the number of seafarers being deployed is increasing, according to the government. According to the Deployment Statistics of Overseas Filipino Workers from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), there were 209,593 seafarers deployed in 2001, from 204,951 in 2002. In the Labor Force statistics of Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), there were 216,031 sea-based workers in 2003, which increased to 229,002 in 2004.

PASAY CITY — LITERALLY, some 2,000 Filipino workers leave the country for different places each day.

Microsoft Philippines Inc., the local subsidiary of the world’s largest software company, is now trying to bring some of them home through a computer training program it has launched in partnership with the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA).

Edited, with permission, from the original article written by Chito de la Torre, Samar News

VILLAREAL, Samar – POOLED money and cement bags from Samareños here and abroad to construct an eight-kilometer provincial road would allow the local government to save millions of pesos for this poor cluster of villages in southern Philippines.

This was announced recently by Renato Latorre, mayor of the fifth-class municipality of Villareal, and who started soliciting money from Villahanons spread across the Philippine capital and some countries around the globe.