http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12174/10296 2026-04-05T10:49:55Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12174/17510 Chinese ships massing anew Kabagani, Lade Jean The number of Chinese military and maritime vessels anchored within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ), particularly in the West Philippine Sea (WPS), has notably risen during the first week of 2026. In a Camp Aguinaldo briefing, Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) spokesperson for the WPS, Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad, said that monitoring from 1 to 7 January detected a total of 41 Chinese vessels across four key maritime features, significantly more than the average of 25 boats recorded in recent months. At Bajo de Masinloc, the AFP monitored eight vessels: two People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy ships, three Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessels, and three Chinese maritime militia boats. 2026-01-14T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12174/17509 Blue blood Sometimes called “living fossils,” horseshoe crabs have patrolled the world’s shallow coastal waters for more than 450 million years, outlasting the dinosaurs. But their population has cratered more than 70 percent since 2000 as a result of over-harvesting and habitat loss. Since the 1970s, horseshoe crabs have been caught, bled alive, and returned to the sea to harvest a protein called “Factor C,” which detects endotoxins that can contaminate drugs. Their bright blue blood is used for testing the safety of biomedical products. 2026-01-12T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12174/17508 Philippine Rise: Bold step to LSMPA conservation As the world races to protect 30 percent of its oceans by 2030, conservationists are exploring bold strategies to meet this ambitious target. One way is establishing large-scale marine protected areas (LSMPA). The Philippine Rise Ocean Conservation Area (PROCA) stands out among the LSMPA that can put Asia in the lead towards achieving the Global 30x30 campaign. Spanning approximately 150,000 square kilometers, PROCA is part of the Philippine Rise (formerly Benham Rise) underwater plateau east of Luzon that is potentially Asia’s largest LSMPA. 2026-01-12T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12174/17507 The myth of Uncle Sam There’s a certain romance in the Philippine-American alliance that refuses to die. It lives in sepia photos and war stories, in the memory of Bataan and Corregidor, when Filipino soldiers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans during World War II. It lives again in Korea, at Yultong and Hill Eerie, where Filipino troops fought under the United Nations banner alongside US forces. It even traipses into Vietnam, where Filipino medics and engineers operated in lockstep with America’s war orbit against the communist threat. 2026-01-20T00:00:00Z