TACLOBAN CITY – A 46-year-old job order worker of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) in Calbiga town was arrested after police allegedly found an unlicensed firearm inside his vehicle while responding to a road crash in Jiabong, Samar, early Thursday, Aug. 6.
Police identified the suspect only by his alias “Welo,” a resident of Barangay 1, Poblacion, Calbiga, Samar.
According to the Jiabong Municipal Police Station, officers were dispatched at around 3 a.m. to Barangay Catalina following a report of a collision involving a metallic gray Toyota Wigo and a patient transport vehicle from Paranas, Samar.
While investigating the incident and assisting those involved, police asked the Toyota Wigo driver to present his driver’s license and vehicle registration documents.
As the suspect searched inside the vehicle, responding officers allegedly noticed a caliber .45 pistol in plain view beneath the front passenger seat.
During the investigation, the police station’s Tactical Operations Center also relayed a separate report of indiscriminate firing that had occurred in Barangay Tagbaya-on, Jiabong.
Police said verification showed that the reported gunfire happened at about the same time the suspect’s vehicle had passed through the village before figuring in the crash at Barangay Catalina.
Officers then required the suspect to present a License to Own and Possess Firearms (LTOPF) and a Permit to Carry Firearms Outside Residence (PTCFOR), but he allegedly failed to produce the required documents.
The suspect was immediately arrested for alleged violation of Republic Act No. 10591, or the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act.
Recovered from the vehicle was a chamber-loaded caliber .45 pistol, one magazine containing six rounds of ammunition, and an extra magazine loaded with 13 live rounds.
Police are preparing the filing of an inquest complaint for violation of Republic Act No. 10591 before the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office.
Authorities have yet to determine whether the recovered firearm was used in the reported indiscriminate firing incident, which remains under investigation.
Five remarkable Eastern Visayans whose leadership, service, and passion are strengthening
communities across the region.
Five remarkable Eastern Visayans whose leadership, service, and passion are strengthening communities across the region.
Beyond its breathtaking landscapes, Eastern Visayas is laden with exceptional leaders and changemakers who create opportunities, inspire others, and leave their communities stronger than ever. To recognize the exemplary individuals whose work have made a lasting impact across the region, the Department of Tourism Region VIII, in partnership with Tingog Partylist, held the inaugural Ten Outstanding Eastern Visayan Awards last July 31.
This first feature spotlights five Outstanding Eastern Visayans in Arts, Tourism and Cultural Heritage; Environmental Advocacy; Faith, Religion and Philanthropy; Public Service and Governance; and Youth Leadership and Community Development who have uplifted lives and inspired future generations across the region.
Keeping Heritage Alive Through Music
For Outstanding Eastern Visayan for Arts, Tourism, and Cultural Heritage, Dr. Stephen Q. Lagarde, preserving and promoting Eastern Visayan culture is about more than safeguarding traditions. It is about bringing communities together through the stories and songs that define their shared identity.
A cultural worker, educator, author, and choral musician from Tacloban City, Dr. Lagarde has spent decades championing the region’s musical heritage. In 2021, he established Project Kanta Binisayá, an initiative that has grown into a movement celebrating Eastern Visayan music. Through instructional books, original choral arrangements, and the Kanta Binisayá Choral Collection found on the Singapore-based Muziksea, he has helped introduce Eastern Visayan music to audiences beyond the region and preserve the region’s cultural heritage.
His collaborations with the Philippine Madrigal Singers, along with regional choral festivals and competitions, have further elevated the region’s musical traditions on both the national and international stage. A recording of Kanta Binisayá heritage songs is found on Spotify as one of the recording albums of the Madz.
Saving Seas, Sustaining Lives
Outstanding Eastern Visayan for Environmental Protection and Sustainability, Ms. Margarita T. de la Cruz, proved that caring for the environment also means caring for the people whose lives depend on it.
A fisheries expert and environmental advocate from Northern Samar, Ms. de la Cruz founded the Guiuan Development Foundation, Inc. (GDFI) in 1988 to advance marine conservation and promote sustainable livelihood across Eastern Visayas. Through more than 30 marine sanctuaries, community-based coastal resource management, along with local government and community partnerships, she empowered coastal communities to become active stewards of their natural resources. After Typhoon Yolanda, she helped families rebuild their livelihoods through sustainable means by introducing seaweed farming initiatives.
Beyond conservation, Ms. de la Cruz has played a role in shaping future environmental leaders as a professor, later a dean, at the University of the Philippines Tacloban. To this day, her work on mangrove mapping and blue carbon assessments continues to strengthen climate resilience planning for vulnerable coastal municipalities. Throughout her career, she has shown that lasting environmental progress begins with empowered communities.
From Hardship to Hope: How a Leader Builds Progress with Compassion
The son of a mangagawil sa sapa, Outstanding Eastern Visayan for Public Service and Governance, Honorable Mayor Atty. Norman D. Sabdao turned personal hardship into a blueprint for compassionate leadership. Now in his third term as mayor of San Miguel, Leyte, Atty. Sabdao led the municipality’s transformation from a fourth-class to a third-class municipality through disciplined, inclusive governance. But beyond economic growth, his greatest milestones lie in the lives he has improved.
He redefined disaster response and provided dignified shelter for evacuees through the pioneering Family Hub Evacuation Center. His administration brought clean water to over 7,000 households and established a 15-bed municipal hospital with no balance billing. He provided scholarships to over 3,000 students to ensure that young people would not have to struggle for education as he once did. Mayor Norman has received multiple recognitions, including the Seal of Good Financial Housekeeping, the National Award of the Seal of Good Local Governance, and the National Award for Gawad KALASAG.
Mayor Norman reminds us that compassion is the foundation of progress and hope for an entire community.
Beyond Resilience: Putting Advocacy into Action
A survivor of Typhoon Yolanda, Outstanding Eastern Visayan for Youth Leadership and Community Development, Aron Sedrick C. Caminong witnessed the devastation of disaster and the quiet heroism of communities rebuilding from the ground up.
Recognized as the 2025 Most Outstanding Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) Chairperson of Tacloban City, Caminong transformed those lived experiences into a lifelong commitment to public service and youth empowerment. Becoming a staunch advocate of access to education, he turned an unused storage space into a community learning center and established the Paglaum Youth Hub. The space offered students free access to tools and educational resources, removing the barriers that stood in the way of learning. What began as a local initiative has since been recognized for its approach to youth empowerment, becoming a finalist in the Ten Outstanding UN SDG Awards 2026.
In 2023, he launched Project Urostorya, an ongoing youth education and dialogue initiative that empowers young people through conversations on health and well-being, climate action, leadership, civic engagement, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. As a champion of disaster resilience, environmental stewardship, and humanitarian service, he spearheaded the Urban Bayanihan Earth Month Summit. The initiative brought together Eastern Visayan youth leaders to strengthen climate action, disaster preparedness, and community resilience.
He also revived community pride through the Pasundayag Syete Kwatro festival, providing hundreds of young athletes and artists with a platform to showcase their talents each year. Humble, dedicated, and a visionary, Caminong’s leadership is grounded on a simple conviction: communities become stronger when young people are given the chance to learn, serve, and lead.
Faithfully Serving the Place He Calls Home
Raised in Maripipi, Biliran, Outstanding Eastern Visayan for Faith, Religion, and Philanthropy Aldrin C. Norio’s success was measured by how much he could give back to the island he calls home. A nursing graduate and social worker, Norio has led multiple humanitarian programs—from Typhoon Yolanda response and recovery efforts in Western Leyte to providing strategic support for multi-donor-funded early recovery projects in Ukraine, where he now resides.
Driven by a profound sense of social responsibility, Norio leveraged his professional expertise into life-changing local initiatives for the people of Maripipi. There, he supported the local government’s home-based care program for vulnerable senior citizens, who were sick, living alone, or abandoned. He organized a community medical mission that brought volunteer doctors and healthcare professionals from Manila to the island, providing safe, free medical circumcision to dozens of young boys. He also lent his expertise by facilitating a capacity-building program on sustainable supplemental feeding and giving talks to local youth, encouraging them to take active roles in the community.
For Norio, his greatest calling was to serve the island that raised him. By generously sharing his gifts, knowledge, and compassion to uplift others, he became a living testament that the truest measure of success is the impact you leave on the community.
Outstanding in Service, Rooted in Community
Though their paths are different, these five Outstanding Eastern Visayans are united by a common purpose: to serve beyond themselves. Each of them has transformed conviction into meaningful action, proving that true community building is forged by resilience, compassion, and dedication.
Their stories remind us that the true wealth of the region lies in the fierce, unyielding grace of its people. Through their leadership and unwavering service, these changemakers continue to shape communities that are more resilient, inclusive, and hopeful.
Given the socio-political atmosphere we are witnessing today, we realize more than ever that the country needs an administration that places economic recovery, peace, environmental protection, workforce development, and democratic principles above corruption and political maneuvering. The 2028 national elections must therefore be judged by the character, competence, and priorities of aspiring chief executives. Candidates who cannot meet these standards should receive no support from the electorate.
Economic recovery must be treated as a central responsibility, not as a campaign slogan. The next administration should create conditions for stable employment, support productive enterprises, protect consumers, improve agriculture and industry, and manage public funds with discipline. Political decisions that benefit only allies, families, or private interests cannot produce lasting prosperity. Economic policy must serve ordinary citizens, especially workers, farmers, small business owners, and families struggling with rising costs.
Peace must also be pursued through justice, effective governance, and sincere dialogue. Violence, armed conflict, criminality, and social division impose high costs on communities and weaken the nation’s capacity to develop. At the same time, peace cannot mean silence in the face of abuse or the surrender of lawful rights. A responsible administration must protect civilians, uphold due process, address legitimate grievances, and ensure that security measures remain subject to law.
Environmental protection and workforce development deserve equal seriousness. The country cannot secure its future while allowing the destruction of forests, watersheds, coastal areas, and communities for short-term gain. It must also invest in quality education, health care, technical training, decent work, and opportunities that enable citizens to contribute productively at home and abroad. Human capacity and environmental security are not secondary concerns; they are foundations of national resilience.
Above all, the next administration must respect democratic ideals through transparent institutions, accountable leadership, free elections, an independent press, an impartial justice system, and equal application of the law. Voters should examine platforms, records, sources of wealth, alliances, and responses to criticism rather than surrendering judgment to propaganda or personality politics. The 2028 election should be a firm rejection of corruption and filthy political maneuvering, and a clear demand for leaders prepared to work for recovery, peace, environmental protection, human development, and constitutional democracy.
In the first half of 2025, United Nations investigators recorded a sharp rise in civilian deaths and injuries in Ukraine, driven partly by short-range drone attacks. The machines may be small, remote, and precise, but the human suffering they produce is none of those. Modern warfare has changed its appearance, but its terrible results remain the same: dead people, ruined homes, and shattered lives.
Old wars announced themselves more plainly. Armies marched across fields, ships crossed visible waters, and soldiers faced one another with rifles, bayonets, artillery, and cavalry. Even when warfare was brutal, its instruments were easier to recognize: a cannon, a bomb, a burning village. Today, the battlefield may be controlled from a room far from the smoke, where an operator watches a screen and guides a drone toward a target. Distance has increased, but moral responsibility has not disappeared.
The modern military arsenal is a complicated array of satellites, surveillance systems, cruise missiles, drones, artificial intelligence, electronic jamming, and cyberattacks. These tools can improve accuracy and help soldiers avoid some risks, yet they can also make violence feel abstract. A human being becomes a moving dot, a building becomes coordinates, and a neighborhood becomes a “target area.” I find this language disturbing because it can turn suffering into data and make destruction sound like a technical achievement.
Still, the belief that advanced weapons make war clean has repeatedly collapsed under real events. During the Second World War, bombing campaigns destroyed large parts of European and Japanese cities, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and left millions homeless. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 alone killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people and injured more than a million. Technology did not remove cruelty; it gave cruelty a greater reach.
Modern warfare may be more precise in theory, but precision does not guarantee justice. A missile can be carefully aimed and still strike a crowded building, a hospital, a school, or a family trying to escape. Drones can loiter above a street for hours, while cyberattacks can disable electricity, communications, or essential services without a conventional explosion. The method is new, but the consequences—fear, displacement, hunger, grief, and the destruction of property—remain painfully old.
What’s more troubling is the way war turns ordinary people into collateral damage. Children lose classrooms, parents lose livelihoods, and elderly people lose the homes that hold their memories. A damaged house is not merely a structure of wood, concrete, or steel; it is a family’s history made visible. Even when the fighting stops, unexploded weapons, trauma, poverty, and broken public services continue to speak long after politicians have finished their speeches.
War also destroys something less visible: the possibility of trust. Communities divided by violence may spend generations fearing one another, while nations invest in weapons instead of schools, hospitals, and livelihoods. The language of security can become a shield for pride, revenge, or political ambition. I do not dismiss the need for national defense, but I believe every government should be unwavering in asking whether a military action will genuinely protect people or merely deepen the wound it claims to heal.
For me, peaceful coexistence through diplomacy is not naïve optimism but the most intelligent form of courage. Dialogue, mediation, humanitarian agreements, arms-control efforts, and patient negotiation may seem slow beside the dramatic power of a missile, yet they foster solutions without demanding graves as evidence of resolve. Modern weapons may continue to evolve, but humanity should leverage its greater gift—the ability to listen, compromise, and recognize another people’s right to live.
The best victory is not the one that leaves an enemy’s city in ruins; it is the one that prevents the ruins from appearing at all. The idea of going to war to ensure peace is not the wisest path—it is the most primitive and Jurassic.
One set down and match suspended the Filipinos in Washington DC were anxious, its favorite daughter was on the most definitive game of his career, the DC Mubadala Open Tennis Tournament. Alex Eala defeated all the Medal holder of the Paris Olympic including the Gol Medalist Chinas Zheng Qinwen. The tournament also saw Eala besting Japan’s Naomi Osaka in the quarterfinals.
Alexandra “Alex” Eala is a trailblazing Filipina tennis star whose journey from humble beginnings in Quezon City to breaking into the WTA Top 30 has made her both a symbol of potential and an inspiration for young athletes in the Philippines. She started swinging a racket at age four, trained at the Rafa Nadal Academy in Spain by 13, and has since become the highest-ranked Filipino in WTA history.
Alex Family Influence: Born May 23, 2005 in Quezon City, Alex grew up in a sports-oriented family. Her mother, Rizza Maniego-Eala, was a Southeast Asian Games swimming medalist, and her brother Miko played collegiate tennis in the U.S. She began playing tennis under the guidance of her grandfather, Roberto “Lolo Bob” Maniego, on makeshift courts often shared with basketball hoops. By age 11, she was already competing internationally, winning the Li Na Inspiration Award at the WTA Future Stars event in Singapore. At 13, she moved to Mallorca, Spain to train at the Rafa Nadal Academy, where her discipline and aggressive baseline style were honed. Here are some notable achievements found in the internet; (Wikipedia )
Junior Success:
o 2020 Australian Open Girls’ Doubles Champion
o 2021 French Open Girls’ Doubles Champion
o 2022 US Open Junior Singles Champion — the first Filipino to win a junior Grand Slam singles title
She officially turned professional in March 2020 at age 14.
• Breakthroughs: By 2026, she reached World No. 28, the highest-ever ranking for a Filipino, and won her first WTA Tour title at the Washington Open. This proved that Alexandra Eala is the new Manny Pacquiao of the Philippine Sports and that she became a unifying figure for us Filipinos and further, she had inspired the overcoming of struggles because she can save a losing run into victory.
Small businesses are the backbone of our communities, driving innovation, creating jobs, and providing unique goods and services. However, they often operate with limited resources, making them particularly vulnerable to economic downturns, unexpected crises, and market shifts. Economic resilience, the ability to withstand and recover quickly from adverse conditions, is therefore crucial for the survival and prosperity of small businesses. This article explores key strategies that small businesses can adopt to build resilience and navigate economic uncertainties.
Diversify Revenue Streams
Relying on a single product, service, or customer base can be risky. Diversification helps spread risk and create multiple pathways to generate income.
• Expand Product or Service Offerings: Identify complementary products or services that cater to existing customers or attract new segments. For example, a local bookstore could add a coffee shop or host author events to diversify its offerings.
• Explore New Markets: Consider expanding geographically or targeting different customer demographics. Online sales can open new markets without a physical presence.
• Develop Subscription Models: Recurring revenue streams provide stability. Businesses can offer subscription boxes, membership programs, or service contracts to ensure a predictable income.
Build a Strong Online Presence
In today’s digital age, a strong online presence is essential for reaching customers and staying competitive.
• Create a User-Friendly Website: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, and optimized for search engines (SEO).
• Engage on Social Media: Use social media platforms to connect with customers, build brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website.
• Invest in Digital Marketing: Utilize email marketing, online advertising, and content marketing to reach a wider audience and generate leads.
Manage Finances Wisely
Effective financial management is the cornerstone of economic resilience.
• Maintain a Healthy Cash Flow: Monitor cash flow closely, forecast future needs, and take steps to improve cash flow, such as offering discounts for early payments or negotiating extended payment terms with suppliers.
• Build an Emergency Fund: Set aside a portion of profits in a savings account to cover unexpected expenses or revenue shortfalls. Aim for at least three to six months’ worth of operating expenses.
• Control Costs: Identify areas where you can reduce expenses without compromising quality or customer service. Negotiate better deals with suppliers, streamline operations, and consider outsourcing non-core functions.
Foster Customer Loyalty
Loyal customers are more likely to stick with you during tough times.
• Provide Excellent Customer Service: Go above and beyond to meet customer needs and exceed their expectations.
• Build Relationships: Get to know your customers personally, listen to their feedback, and create a sense of community around your brand.
• Implement a Loyalty Program: Reward repeat customers with discounts, exclusive offers, and other incentives.
Embrace Technology
Technology can help small businesses improve efficiency, reduce costs, and reach new customers.
• Automate Tasks: Use software to automate repetitive tasks such as accounting, inventory management, and customer relationship management (CRM).
• Utilize Cloud Computing: Cloud-based services can provide access to affordable and scalable IT solutions.
• Adopt E-commerce: Selling online can expand your reach and provide an additional revenue stream.
Develop a Business Continuity Plan
A business continuity plan outlines how your business will continue to operate in the event of a disruption.
• Identify Potential Risks: Assess the risks that could impact your business, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, or supply chain disruptions.
• Develop Contingency Plans: Create plans for how you will respond to each risk, including alternative suppliers, backup systems, and communication strategies.
• Test and Update Your Plan: Regularly test your business continuity plan and update it as needed to ensure it remains effective.
Seek Expert Advice
Don’t be afraid to seek help from experts such as accountants, financial advisors, and business consultants.
• Join Industry Associations: Industry associations provide valuable resources, networking opportunities, and advocacy support.
• Attend Workshops and Seminars: Educational events can help you learn new skills and stay up-to-date on industry trends.
• Find a Mentor: A mentor can provide guidance, support, and advice based on their own experience.
Building economic resilience is an ongoing process that requires proactive planning, sound financial management, and a willingness to adapt to change. By diversifying revenue streams, building a strong online presence, managing finances wisely, fostering customer loyalty, embracing technology, developing a business continuity plan, and seeking expert advice, small businesses can increase their ability to weather economic storms and thrive in the face of adversity. In doing so, they not only secure their own futures but also contribute to the overall health and vitality of their communities.
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If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts on the column, feel free to send an email to jca.bblueprint@gmail.com. Looking forward to connecting with you!
