The overreaction of the Aquino government to the launch of belies its sincerity in facing the supposed risks. Rather than seeking a dialogue with the DPRK, it would rather join in the fray and panic with other countries such as the US, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Its "disaster preparedness" is unprecedented in this instance since we do not see such a level of preparation and activity when typhoons arrive in the country. It seems that the government has proved that it can indeed mobilize and prepare for a very small risk from space debris, imagined or otherwise, but it seems to be just Noynoying when other disasters strike.

Undersecretary Abigail Valte, deputy presidential spokesperson, told a press briefing last Tuesday that President Benigno Aquino III has rejected the proposed P125 legislated wage hike for minimum earners. Valte told her audience that upon consulting Aquino about the proposal Tuesday morning, he presented to them a computation showing that employers will be shelling out P42,250 for the salary increase of each employee. Showing a slide with the calculations, the Palace people got this figure by multiplying P125 by 26 days and multiplied the result further by 13 months. They added that this P42,250 multiplied by 38 million workers in the country would result in expenditures for employees of P1.6 trillion (mistakenly written as 1,605,500,000 trillion [or 1.6 billion trillion] in their slide).