Philippines faces P3B in damages as southwest monsoon continues relentless rains

For days, the Philippine archipelago has absorbed the compounding force of two tropical cyclones and a stubborn southwest monsoon, and the reckoning has arrived in the form of three billion pesos in damage, twenty-six lives lost, and more than fifty-three thousand people uprooted from their homes. The landslide that swallowed sixteen lives in Baguio City stands as a grim emblem of what happens when the earth is asked to hold more than it can bear. As the habagat shows no sign of relenting, the nation finds itself in that familiar and painful space between enduring the storm and beginning to co