Bantay Kita

Cebu Daily News
7:19 am | Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

Tacloban City — The Mines and Geosciences Bureau in Eastern Visayas has directed a mining company to pay for the losses of owners of fish pens and cages affected by a fish kill in Lake Bito, MacArthur town, Leyte, last weekend.

Roger De Dios, MGB regional director, said he has ordered the management of the Nicua Mining Corp. to compensate the affected fish pen and fish cages owners for the fish kill incident caused by an oil leak traced to the mining firm.

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By: Amy R. Remo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
9:49 pm | Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

Investments registered with the Board of Investments (BoI) in April surged by 255 percent to P133.18 billion from only P37.56 billion a year ago.

The jump in investment commitments in April was driven largely by the two power projects approved by the BoI during the month. These were the P21.78-billion project of South Luzon Thermal Energy Corp.—a company jointly owned by the Ayala group, Trans-Asia Oil and Energy Development Corp.—and the P49.45-billion expansion of the 600-megawatt Masinloc coal facility of Masinloc Power Partners Co. Ltd., the local arm of US power giant AES Corp.

The April registration brought to P151.55 billion the value of investment commitments approved by the BoI in the first four months of the year. This was, however, only 2 percent higher than the P147.95 billion posted a year ago.

Data from the BoI showed that the investment pledges in the first four months of the year covered 158 projects, which are expected to generate 22,114 new jobs once operational. The biggest investment commitments came from the electricity, gas, steam and air-conditioning sector with a total of P84.25 billion; real estate, P20.63 billion; and mining and quarrying, P14.59 billion.

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By MELODY M. AGUIBA
May 13, 2012, 4:39am
Manila Bulletin

The Department of Tourism (DOT) has released its list of 78 ecotourism sites will be closed to mining as part of governments plan to boost their tourism potential for revenue and jobs generation.

Lumped into 20 clusters, the Tourism Development Areas (TDA) are mostly long recognized as protected areas (PA) being natural parks (NP), marine reserve (MR), protected landscape (PL), wildlife sanctuary (WS), protected seascape (PS), protected landscape-seascape (PLS), watershed reservation (WR), or watershed forest reservation (WFR).

Aside from DOT, other government agencies like the Parks and Wildlife Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and local government units have plans to develop these as top tourism areas.

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