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MANILA - Can you keep a secret? I have more than 100 of Jose Rizal secrets. My hero! By  secrets , I don't mean like Rizal's abrupt departure to Spain he and his brother  Paciano  kept secret even to the rest of the family and  Leonor Rivera , his fiancée, or that he was buried in a secret grave at the Paco Cemetery, or that he had a secret in the lamp he handed to his sister before they executed him in a very public place. Almost everyone knows those. The Rizal secrets I am about to tell you are more my discoveries than anything else. Like award-winning Filipino painter  Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo 's portrait of Rizal as a young man (he is 22 years old here), this essay is my portrait of Rizal as his own man as revealed in some aspects of his life, works and writings that have been either rejected, ignored, unnoticed, not considered, or not known by most people, including historians and Rizalists. You know, I'm sure, that Jose Rizal was executed by a firing ...

If they get Rated O, Outstanding overall, for 2008, I wouldn’t be surprised. They were Rated O by the World Bank for the years 2006 and 2007, #1 among 15 international agricultural research centers supported by CGIAR, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research based in Washington DC. Doing their best doing their science. I’m referring to ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics based in  India . Team ICRISAT is what they have formed of themselves; partners are what they have sought for with other offices and institutions in  India  to serve the poor farmers in the SAT, semi-arid tropics. If they can do it in  India , they can do it anywhere. While I’m confining it to  India , this is a story of those collaborations. For anyone to have an idea how steeped into the fabric of Indian science ICRISAT is, I have decided to compile a list of the Institute’s allies, Indians only, a total of 180 (no, not by any mea...

Globally Yours, William Dar Today Danumán, tomorrow the world!? Today, the drylands. It’s the water. There is pleasant irony in the fact that William Dollente Dar comes from a village called Danumán West in the lowlands of Santa Maria, Ilocos Sur, Philippines while he was ensconced as the Chair of the Committee on Science & Technology (CST) starting at the September 3-14 meeting of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), with 191 countries having signed the Convention – a very high honor. Danumán indicates, from danúm ( water in Ilocano, his native tongue) a waterlogged or watery place while desertification suggests all sand and hardly a drop of moisture . Extremes. Givens that he learned to accept and work from there. Where he is now, Dar is high and dry, safe above the water, although with a new, top-level responsibility. He is quietly happy for this added window of service to peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America. It shows in his face. He is quite hap...