THE HEAVENS appear to have heard the northern and central Luzon prayers for long, hard rains to save parched farmlands and drying dam reservoirs from a most disastrous drought – the first in some two decades – hitting this agricultural part of the Philippines.

Rains aplenty have been pouring on the northern and central Luzon plains since Monday, some three weeks after a worried national government assumed a crisis mode over the inability of farmers in the regions to transplant their seedlings because of the absence of rains to moisten the soil. Read more