Amos -

I assume you noted that the stories in the side bar are tagged to correspond to peaks in the search activity plots. No peaks = no stories.

Disclaimers at the search site state that "only a sample of Google results" are currently included in the statistics shown, implying that while the process is under development they're not using the full database(s).

The link at the bottom of the page, to "About Google Trends" offers the advice that results are "normalized for populations" so if one of the five¹ people in the Phillipines who has a connection searched for the term it would likely show a very large "normalized" contribution. That 3 (in different cities) of the 5 people there who are hooked up made searches on the term would undoubtedly produce large peaks. (?)

¹ Of course I know that people there are highly civilized and everybody has a high speed connection. This just means that most people get the news on their RSS feeds and don't have to look up anything, except for the 5 people who made Google searches because they haven't subscribed to a news feed - 3 of whom asked about a local scandal that wasn't big enough to make the world-wide news.

(The possible explanations form a vast body of wonderful theories.)

John