I check what’s false, and I know how to make the truth travel.

The 2025 midterm elections

I spent two months covering Cavite for Inquirer.net through the 2025 Philippine midterms, on its #INQVolunteer programme, working mostly out of General Trias City.

The work was live and deadline-bound: interviewing voters at the precinct, recording what was going wrong inside polling places, and verifying results material off candidates’ pages against Comelec partial counts as the returns came in. I filed from the field to the newsroom in Manila. My contributions ran on the paper’s election coverage credited as “via Russell Aguila.”

Little Fire Ant in Iligan

One of the world’s worst invasive ant species is now in Mindanao. Where does it go next? A long-form data feature for DigiSalle built from a field survey in Rogongon and Ditucalan, Iligan City, and a set of models I wrote to ask what happens if nobody acts.

The spread model runs a hundred simulations across Northern Mindanao to 2045, with a toggle for the unconfirmed Ditucalan sighting, and reports how often the ant reaches each town. A farm model plays out a sugarcane or pineapple field month by month. Road and shipping maps show how the ant hitchhikes; a climate map shows where it can survive. The piece argues that early surveillance and quarantine are the only realistic option, because eradication has almost never succeeded once the ant spreads.

The claim that the ant blinds pets circulates widely. I checked it the way I check anything else, rated the evidence, and said what is and isn’t known. The models are scenarios, not forecasts, and the page says so. AI tools helped with the modelling, editing and fact-checking; every assumption and source is mine and was checked by me. The method is set out on the page.

digisalle.com/interactive/little-fire-ant · October 2026

Duterte and the ICC: the case so far

Two and a half minutes, vertical, built for a phone. Thirty-six years in public office and nineteen months in The Hague, told from the court record: the arrest, the eight names in the case, the three confirmed counts, the 6,909 items of evidence, what the Rome Statute allows if there is a conviction, and the presumption of innocence until there is a verdict.

Every panel cites its source on screen, and wherever the Court has published a document the citation is to the filing, not to a news report: the confirmation decision, the prosecution’s disclosure notice, the Court’s press releases, the Rome Statute articles. The trial date comes from the Court’s own scheduling announcement.

I wrote the script and chose the facts; the graphics code was written with Claude, and the voice is Google text-to-speech. Each figure was checked against the source before it went in. It is an experiment in how much of an explainer one person can produce with these tools without letting go of the checking.

October 2026 · 2:29

Fact-checked

A programme on DLSU-D’s official campus radio about disinformation in the Philippines. Seven episodes across two seasons.

I hosted, wrote, produced and booked all four episodes of the first season, broadcasting in Filipino. For the second season I stepped back from the microphone and ran it from behind, producing, writing, and booking student fact-checkers from India, Indonesia and Vietnam to compare how information disorder looks in their countries. What spreads, who spreads it, and why the same tactic lands differently depending on where you are.

The pilot episode examined how mainstream outlets and government agencies were citing Numbeo, a crowd-sourced database, as if it were official statistics. Other student fact-checkers have since cited that episode as a source in their own work.

Season one pilot  ·  Season two pilot
Station role: staff. Executive producer on individual programmes.