OFFBEAT MAIL

Being a public servant is no joke. Apart from having low salaries for rendering service to the public, government employees, including law enforcement agents and the military, are being used and abused by top government officials to retaliate against those who tried to implicate the former for wrong-doings in the government service. That's the trade-off and any law enforcement agent must be prepared to take the bait. Even if he knows for sure that what he is being assigned to do is against his conscience. Just the same, he would do it for the sake of following orders meant to destroy someblody in retaliation for what he had done against certain public figures. However, not all law enforcement agents are the same. And not all of them follow what they were supposed to do against their will. As a reporter covering then the Central Police District in Quezon City, I was reminded of a certain agent of the Criminal Investigation Service (CIS) during the time of President Fidel Ramos, who

Despite the brouhahas that implicated the name of former Commission on Elections chair Benjamin Abalos who allegedly brokered the anomalous multi-million dollar national broadband deal with China, ranking officials of the ZTE Corporation hadn't budged an inch to the calls of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee to attend a hearing that would eventually shed more light on the scrapped NBN-ZTE broadband project. ZTE chair Fu Yong and Chinese embassy commercial attache Fan Yang were invited to testify at a public hearing called by the Senate Blue Ribbon committee to no avail. Philippine senators have interpreted the continuous refusal of the Chinese officials as a show of arrogance against weak nations like the Philippines. Senate minority floor leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. said the ZTE officials must appear during a formal hearing to be conducted by the respective committees and take advantage of the opportunity to clear the cobwebs that now blur the controversy surrounding the latest re