Word: manila
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...Mabini, a city of 41,000 overlooking the clear waters of Batangas Bay, used to be a busy farm town, where loaded trucks left twice a week carrying fruit to Manila. Today, nobody is making a living off the land. The local markets' produce comes from somewhere else, and the cost of living is inflated by residents' foreign salaries, which are easily 10 times local wages. In Little Italy, many workers have built sprawling, European-style homes - some complete with sweeping marble terraces, faux stone façades and fountains - years before they plan to return to the Philippines...
...once kids become parents themselves, they face the same choice their parents did. When Baby Diaz was in elementary school, her mother and father moved to Italy to work. When she was 18, her four siblings did, too. The family supported her while she stayed in Manila to go to university, but she says the feeling of being deserted has never left her. Now 27, with a good local job as a bank teller, Diaz has to decide whether to join her entire family in Italy, where she'd make more money even as a domestic worker, or stay...
...Family Values The Hospicio De San Jose is a hushed haven from central Manila's crushing heat and traffic. Inside the orphanage's dormitory, Sister Socorro G. Evidente points through a window to Pauline, a 2-year-old napping in the dark, thumb in mouth. When she was a week old, Pauline was left by her mother, who said she was going to work in Dubai. She never came back. Some mothers, Evidente says, "do not even bother to send any money for their kids ... The children grow up feeling like they're really abandoned...
...Indonesia is to become more competitive regionally and globally. China in 2007 attracted seven times more FDI than Indonesia, India almost twice as much. Indonesia "has to be at par with what its neighbors are doing," says Ifzal Ali, chief economist at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, "or foreign investment won't flow...
...splinter factions are likely to increase, since the rogue MILF commanders directing the violence are also those closest linked to foreign jihadis and Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda-financed terrorist group that has carried out dozens of kidnappings and large-scale terrorist attacks, including the 2004 bombing of a Manila ferry that killed 116. Worsening chaos in Mindanao could embolden the most violent and radical elements in this protean coalition to export their jihad beyond the troubled island. "I will not be surprised by that if the MILF renews their attacks," Acharya says. "That will be what Jemaah Islamiyah wants...