María Corina Machado was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her democratic advocacies in Venezuela. In light of the 2024 political crisis due to the Maduro government's falsification of election results, she published a letter in the Wall Street Journal detailing her evidence and account of the electoral fraud, and went into hiding subsequently after being threatened with arrest. This January 3, 2026, Maduro has since been detained by US forces.

Meanwhile, she has been critiqued for her supposed alignment with the political right. She has recently presented her Nobel to Trump, and has been vocal about her support for the current US president, the crown prince of Iran Reza Pahlavi, and Israel's atrocities in Gaza.

In recent years, several local governments in the Visayas have increasingly turned to coastal reclamation as a development strategy. Cebu City has expanded reclamation efforts in areas such as the South Road Properties to support commercial and infrastructure growth. Dumaguete City has proposed a large-scale coastal reclamation project of around 174 hectares for mixed-use development. In Leyte, particularly in areas like Tacloban, reclamation has been included in post-Typhoon Yolanda redevelopment plans aimed at economic recovery and urban expansion.

According to trans activist Micha Cárdenas, transgender desire is a creative force for trans people to craft and live possible futures that resist against conventional standards, especially for the gender they identify as (gendered selves).

It can manifest in the desire to live as one's true gender through gender-affirming medicine/procedures and gender performances (e.g., lived names, fashion, gesture, movements, pronouns, etc.); in the erotic/romantic desire to be intimate outside cis perspectives such as the attraction towards fellow trans people, or the longing to engage in sexual subcultures; and in the desire for social recognition.

In 2020, Virologist Dr. Beata Halassy was diagnosed with breast cancer for the third time. Instead of opting for conventional treatment, she utilized her knowledge in virology and self-experimented using Oncolytic Virotherapy (OVT). She self-administered viruses into her own tumor, with the theory that viruses can cause tumor shrinkage and cancer cell death. While engineered to be less harmful, this procedure could have still led to various unknown complications. Her tumor size indeed shrank, and eventually, the tumor was successfully removed and she remains in remission. 

In 2024, she co-authored a Case Report about her self-experiment, and it was published in the journal Vaccines, which has an Impact Factor of 3.4.

For the purposes of this debate, a graduated wage system refers to a tiered structure in which wage obligations scale with a firm’s capacity, cost, or operational size. The Philippine status quo sets region-specific minimum wages that apply uniformly to businesses within each region, irrespective of firm size.