Friday, September 08, 2006

Philippines

The Philippines, officially the Republic of the Philippines, is an island nation located in the Malay archipelago in Southeast Asia, with Manila as its capital. It comprises 7,107 islands called the Philippine Archipelago, with a total land area of approximately 300,000 square kilometers or 116,000 square miles.
The people of the Philippines are called Filipinos. Most Filipinos are descended from the indigenous Austronesian-speaking peoples, but there are also some Filipinos of mixed descent, known as mestizos, through intermarriage with the Chinese, Spanish or other nationalities.
The country was named "Las Islas Filipinas" by Ruy López de Villalobos after King Philip II of Spain. A Spanish colonial rule through Mexico began in 1565 and lasted for about three centuries until the Philippine Revolution of 1896. The United States gained possession of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and ruled the country for about five decades. Philippine culture has many affinities with the West. Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion, and English is an official language, along with Tagalog.
The Philippines is a significant source of migrant workers; there are over 9 million overseas Filipinos and their remittances exceed $12 billion a year, an amount that forms a significant portion of the Philippines' gross national product. Moreover, the country exports more than one million of its nationals abroad annually through its overseas employment program. Due to this, the Filipino diaspora has become the third largest among overseas ethnicities.

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