Don't worry about it Sof, just think happy thoughts.
Our politicians' pointless, petty squabbles over inheritance tax are apparently more important than this.
Political killings and a high inheritance tax together would make it even more unbearable for the family the deceased "left behind"; one day your dad's alive and well, and the next, he got killed because of politics and you have to pay a chunk of his money to the government that the politics were from.
The thing is, yeah, it's normally the patriarch and the men of the rival clan who are targeted. This is why Mangadatu sent his wife and sisters to file his candidacy, because he believed that the Ampatuans wouldn't break the "rule" that women and reporters were not to be touched by political violence.
One would think the international community would be outraged at so many reporters being killed. Even Iran with it's current protests didn't go all-out with taking down opposition and media leaders but merely cut off their lines of communication.
I always assumed that was because everyone's eyes were on Iran. Doing something like this would have caused any and all foreign opinion to plunge.
On the other hand, I suspect that the southern warlords here
don't think out their plans before they carry them out. If they did, they would have realized exactly how monstrous the thing they were doing was. Or failing that, at least predicted the government backlash.
It really infuriates me when political crud like this happens. It to me goes against the whole point of having a government.
Why are those two groups even bothering with political violence anyhow?
Mindanao, the southernmost Philippine territory, is far enough from the central government that stuff like this happens a lot. That's the reason it's the base for the Al Qaeda-backed Abu Sayyaf and the local branch of Jemaah Islamiyah. And the other people who
aren't terrorists are the local politicians, who take feuds seriously. It doesn't help that they basically have private armies.