Hindi umano handa ang mga Pilipino para makita ang tambalang Duterte-Duterte sa 2022, ayon kay Senador Panfilo Lacson.
“The Philippines is not Davao City. If they can do that in Davao
City, I don’t think Filipinos are ready for a Davao City-like political
situation or arrangement. I don’t think so,” pahayag ni Lacson sa
panayam sa ANC hinggil sa Duterte-Duterte tandem.
Una nang pinalutang ni Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador
Panelo ang posibleng pagtakbo ni Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio sa
pagka-pangulo kung saan magiging running mate nito ang kanyang amang si
Pangulong Rodrigo Duterte.
Isinusulong din ng PDP Laban party ang posibleng tambalan ni Senator
Christopher “Bong” Go bilang presidente at ni Pangulong Duterte bilang
bise presidente nito.
“This is not to take anything away from Senator Go, or Sara Duterte
or President Duterte. But I don’t think Filipinos are ready to see a
Davao City-like political situation in the whole country,” sabi ni
Lacson.
Ayon pa kay Lacson, kung mananalo ang Duterte-Duterte sa 2022, magiging barangay na lang ng Davao City ang Pilipinas.
“Philippine is just a barangay of Davao City kung ganun ang magiging situation,” ani Lacson.
“I think it’s a bit too much. While you say it’s constitutional, it’s legal, and it’s really up to (the) electorate to decide,” dagdag pa nito.
Walang pahintulot ang liderato ng PDP-Laban sa hakbang ng ilang miyembro nito na humihikayat kay Pangulong Rodrigo Duterte na tumakbo bilang vice president sa 2022 election, ayon kay Senador Manny Pacquiao.
Ito ang reaksyon ni Pacquiao, acting president ng PDP-Laban matapos mabalitaan na nagpulong ang kanyang mga kapartido at nagkaisa para isulong ang pagtakbo ni Pangulong Duterte sa vice presidential election.
“Hindi ko `yan pinapahintulutan bilang acting president ng partido dahil ang focus ng partido ay kung paano pa tayo makatulong sa mga pamilya na nagugutom ngayon,” pahayag ni Pacquiao.”
Ginawa ni Pacquiao ang pahayag matapos ihayag ni Deputy Speaker Eric Martinez, miyembro ng partido, na ilang miyembro ng PDP-Laban ang nagpapaikot ng resolusyon na humihimok kay Duterte na tumakbo bilang vice president sa 2022.
Sabi ni Pacquiao, wala pang lineup ang PDP-Laban para sa 2022 election.
PACQUIAO PUMALAG SA ‘VP’ DUTERTE!
Nagbabala pa si Pacquiao kay Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi na huwag hatiin ang PDP-Laban.
Opinyon:
Paging @MannyPacquiao is this also not sanctioned?
THIS is really quite amazing. The Muntinlupa Regional Trial Court in February 2017 ordered Sen. Leila de Lima arrested and detained on drug-trafficking charges, with several witnesses fingering her.
Yet as a senator, de Lima has received her full salary and benefits, and spent everything allowed a fully functioning senator since 2017. But other than incessantly ranting against President Rodrigo Duterte and other government agencies on her Facebook account, have you heard any real output from her, a good research study or a bill that became law, even if this were done by her staff, and simply attributed to her?
The P400 million is based on the Senate’s recent report of amounts paid to and expenses for each senator from January to December 2019. For that year, de Lima’s salaries and benefits as well as those of her staff, and other expenses for her office totaled P107 million.
In fact the detained de Lima is the fourth biggest spender in the Senate, after Senators Mary Grace Poe (P107 million), Ralph Recto (P113 million) and Juan Miguel Zubiri (P110 million). The Republic has spent more for her than Senate President Vicente Sotto 3rd (P102 million) and Sen. Panfilo Lacson (P94 million). We spend more for a senator in her cell than the Senate president and an inarguably busy legislator.
Unless de Lima claims otherwise, I do not have any doubt that her spending habits as a senator had changed from the year before last, so P106 million for her and her office in 2019, would total roughly P400 million in four years.
Of course she and the Senate leaders would claim that expenses for her are legal, and there is nothing in the law that stops a senator from receiving such huge money while in prison, and that she is using this to craft laws.
Opposition But de Lima claims to be the leader of the opposition, throwing all kinds of mud at the President and claiming to so upright that the Yellows are mulling the idea that she should perhaps be their presidential standard-bearer in the 2022 elections. If indeed she will, the opposition will just be wasting their money and time.
Why she described herself in her Facebook page, as “Human rights defender, prisoner of conscience.”
Well, this prisoner isn’t in a particularly dire situation. De Lima is getting the annual salary of top executives, P3 million, and considering that she has had free room and board, doesn’t need a senator’s wardrobe, and doesn’t have a family to feed, she’ll have P18 million when she steps down from office. No wonder, in contrast to the dour visage of real “prisoners of conscience” like Aung San Suu Kyi in the 1990s, de Lima is always photographed smiling and hardly seeming not to have lost a pound in her four years of imprisonment.
She has spent about P70 million a year for services she demands almost as a whim. As a citizen, I would demand information on the following:
Extraordinary Being in jail, what are the “extraordinary and miscellaneous expenses” that amounted to P10.5 million in 2019 (so, P40 million from P2017 to 2020) she spent for?
What has her staff, whom we taxpayers paid P47 million in salaries in 2019, plus P3 million for “meetings and conferences” and P6 million in travel, been doing?
I don’t think her core staff would have spent P6 million last year commuting from the Senate to Camp Crame where she is detained, unless they are using five-star hotel limousines. In fact, de Lima spent P3.2 million last year to rent motor vehicles. This was the biggest for such expense among all 24 senators.
De Lima claimed she spent P10.4 million for consultancy fees, bigger than Sotto’s P6.6 milllion and Lacson’s P5.4 million. I hope this wasn’t for lawyers’ fees to defend herself from the drug-trafficking charges against her. That would be the use of taxpayers’ money for her personal benefit which, if not explicity, implicitly, violates our anti-graft laws.
De Lima, however, issued a press statement a year ago claiming that she had filed 144 bills and and 142 resolutions, implicitly claiming that her expenses as a senator was due to her and her staff’s work.
Spewed out Any senator however would know that most bills aren’t really worth the paper they’re printed on, and can be spewed out in a couple of days by staffers. If they’re not well researched and, more importantly, able to gather the support — via co-authorhip — of other senators so it would even merit deliberation in the relevant committee, it will just go the Senate’s dustbin it calls its archives. I haven’t heard a bill filed by de Lima that generated any support, even from her Yellow colleagues in the Senate.
De Lima is even filing bills that are thinly disguised as manifestoes against Duterte, as in her bill filed in 2019 titled “Defining Extrajudicial Killing, Providing for its Penalty and other Purposes.” In this bill, she claims that according to the Commission on Human Rights, the number of those killed in Duterte’s anti-drug war could be 27,000.” That’s total BS, a deliberate fake news that unfortunately has gone around the world, as it were. I have written seven columns debunking point by point how such a number had been fabricated, for instance in “Tatad’s Fake data; 14,000 EJKs.”
So, it could be an even much worse a situation than de Lima’s staff and consultants twiddling their thumbs just waiting for the 5 p.m. alarm. They could be manufacturing anti-administration propaganda, their salaries paid for by us taxpayers.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is doing its part to inoculate the world against COVID-19.
The Utah-based church announced on Friday that it has donated $20 million to fund a program targeting the distribution of coronavirus vaccines to impoverished nations.
The donation is going to UNICEF as part of the organization’s partnership with the UN-backed COVAX initiative, which this week sent its first deliveries to the western African nations of Ivory Coast and Ghana, reported The Associated Press.
“This grant for our important role in COVAX, from Latter-day Saint Charities, is the single biggest donation from a private-sector partner that we’ve received to date,” noted UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore, according to the Deseret News. “We hope that their generosity inspires other organizations, businesses and individuals to help ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.”
Officials have praised the initiative as the first vaccines are delivered to poor countries during the continuing pandemic, but it has been hindered by limited global supplies.
Ultimately, the goal is to deliver 2 billion shots by the end of 2021 to the world’s most vulnerable people.
Ghana received 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Wednesday and Ivory Coast got 504,000 on Friday, according to The AP.
“As more adults in vulnerable communities are vaccinated, critical health, nutritional and educational services for children in need will be able to resume,” explained Bishop Gérald Caussé, the presiding bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “We hold hope in our hearts, not only on overcoming the pandemic, but of seeing a brighter future for all children and their families.”Dozens of African migrants dead after boat capsizes in Mediterranean Sea »
As of Friday, more than 2.5 million people on Earth have succumbed to COVID-19, according to health tracker Johns Hopkins University.
Africa’s hardest-hit nation has been South Africa, which has reported nearly 50,000 coronavirus deaths — less than 10% of America’s fatality total of 509,000.
Last decade, Ebola breakouts in western Africa killed more than 11,000 citizens, according to advocacy organization World Vision International.
President Rodrigo Duterte congratulated on Friday evening the Department of National Defense (DND) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) for the successful acquisition of more air assets for the country.
“Our efforts to strengthen our military have been vital in ensuring that we are able to fulfill our sworn and shared duty of protecting our sovereignty and safeguarding the welfare of the Filipino people,” Pres. Duterte said in his speech.
The Chief Executive led the inspection at Clark Airbase of the new air assets from Brazil, Poland, US, and Israel. This includes 10 of the 16 Blackhawk Utility Helicopters bought through government-to-government transaction with Poland to be used for humanitarian assistance, disaster response, and other COVID-19 efforts.
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Hermes 450 and Hermes 900 came from Israel. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said these can be used in patrolling the West Philippine Sea and for intelligence surveillance.
A newly refurbished C-130 from the US was also shown to the president, which can be used for territorial defense security, and humanitarian and disaster response operations.
The Super Tuscano units from Brazil which were bought under the AFP Modernization Program can be utilized to boost internal security operations.
The commander-in-chief shared his plan to add more air assets before his term ends which will be “spread along a number of years.”
He also conferred in the same event the order of Lapu-Lapu with the Rank of Kamagi to outstanding officials and enlisted personnel “who took part in restoring peace and order in Sulu” last November 2020.
The President admitted that he has been checking the list of slain uniformed personnel in his briefer and this pushed him to provide modernized assets for the military.
He also promised assistance to families of fallen heroes, assuring that the “administration will remain steadfast in doing our best to ensure, improve the welfare of the families of those who have gone ahead.” – Report from Sweeden Velado-Ramirez
Our country’s path to progress is a long and arduous road, and the pandemic has definitely contributed a significant delay to that progress. Despite this, the Philippines seems to continue to continue a future with better infrastructure. Surprisingly, Rodrigo Duterte’s landmark “Build, Build, Build” project has continued to achieve notable accomplishments in the first half of this tumultuous year. These included projects aimed to address the pandemic.
In his latest State of the Nation Address (SONA), President Duterte expressed confidence in the country’s fiscal state. He said that we, “are in a better position to weather the crisis caused by COVID-19.”
“We have accomplished significant infrastructure projects under the “Build, Build, Build” program.”
What exactly are these significant accomplishments that he is talking about?
Painting a Picture of Progress
Similar to the previous years, the data on the government’s accomplishments were presented ahead of the SONA. They were presented during the series of Pre-SONA conferences leading up to the event.
During the first conference led by the Economic Development and Infrastructure Clusters, Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Mark Villar bannered several “Build, Build, Build” accomplishments.
The usual metrics were presented by Secretary Villar. It painted a picture of continued progress despite the lockdowns that happened in the previous months:
23,657 KM of roads constructed, maintained, widened, upgraded, and rehabilitated;
4,959 bridges constructed, widened rehabilitated, and strengthened;
8,941 flood mitigation structures and drainage system projects completed;
180 airport projects completed, 124 projects ongoing;
189 commercial port projects, 37 ongoing.
These were the primary metrics, but Villar also presented specific projects that were completed. He also presented updates on several other projects like railways, pedestrian infrastructure and bike lanes, as well as infrastructure projects related to education.
Read: PH economy in a good position for COVID-19
Progress despite the Pandemic
What’s vital to note is that progress on all these projects happened while the government was addressing the pandemic. Many may not know this, but the DPWH went on overdrive in the past few months on COVID-19 infrastructure projects nationwide.
Several of the country’s large venues were converted into centers to help quarantine and care for patients. This included the recently completed Athlete’s Village in New Clark City. It’s good that after it served its purpose in hosting the SEA Games in 2019, the infrastructure turned into something that actually helps us contain and fight the virus.
Secretary Villar also mentioned that a total of 11 “Mega Community Quarantine” Facilities, or “We Heal as One Centers,” were also developed during the past few months.
On his official Facebook account, Villar mentioned that the DPWH has constructed 150 quarantine facilities nationwide. On top of this, several other projects like off-site dormitories for frontliners have also been built.
Achieving despite the focus on COVID-19
All these COVID-19 facilities were constructed in the span of four months. It’s important to appreciate the scale of these infrastructure projects, and their importance in the fight against the virus. Despite this focus, the DPWH was still able to continue their previous work, and only added to their long list of “Build, Build, Build” accomplishments.
Kudos to Secretary Mark and his team, and all the workers and partners striving to improve our infrastructure for a #BetterPhilippines!
500-PIRASO/P850K HALAGA NG PARTY DRUGS(ECSTACY) NASABAT NG MPD PS7, DALAWA KALABOSO‼️
ARESTADO ng mga operatiba ni MPD PS7 commander PLTCOL HARRY LORENZO ang dalawang tulak ng iligal na droga makaraang mahulihan ng nasa 500-piraso ng party drugs(ECSTACY) nagkakahalaga ng P850k at ecstacy substance sa ikinasang buy bust OPERATION sa kahabaan ng Rizal Avenue Tondo Maynila.
Sa pinaigting na kampanya laban sa lahat ng uri ng iligal na droga base sa utos ni MPD DD PBGEN LEO FRANCISCO, Alinsunod sa programa ni NCRPO CHIEF PMAJ GEN VICENTE DANAO JR.
MANILA — The Sandiganbayan has found former Metro Rail Transit 3 (MRT 3) general manager Al Vitangcol III guilty of charges arising from anomalies in the grant of a 2012 interim maintenance contract worth PHP350 million to the firm Philippine Trans Rail Management and Services Corp. (PH Trams), where his uncle-in-law was a key official.
In its 45-page decision dated January 31 penned by Associate Justice Bernelito R. Fernandez, the anti-graft court’s Third Division sentenced Vitangcol and PH Trams incorporator Arturo Soriano to up to 16 years imprisonment as well as disqualification from public office for violation of Republic Act 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act and RA 9184 or the Government Procurement Reform Act.
The court held that Vitangcol “exhibited evident bad faith in not disclosing the material of his relationship” to Soriano.
The six-month interim contract was announced in 2012 when Vitangcol, general manager of MRT 3 and the head of the negotiating team of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC)-MRT 3.
“The 2009 Revised Implementing Rules and Regulations of R. A. No 9184, of which he (Vitangcol) is charged since the act was committed sometime in 2012, clearly enumerated the officers and employees of the procuring entity that may cause the bidder automatic disqualification, if it failed to disclose such relationship or proven to be related to them,” the court held.
Vitangcol is married to Lady Mericar S. Bravo, whose mother is Elemelie Soriano, sister of Arturo.
“This material fact was apparently concealed precisely to prevent the eventual disqualification of PH Trams from negotiating for the interim Maintenance Provider of MRT3. Because of this non-disclosure, PH Trams eventually bagged the interim maintenance contract from DOTC,” it noted.
Associate Justices Amparo M. Cabotaje-Tang and Ronald B. Moreno concurred in the ruling.
Soriano, a Pangasinan-based accountant, claimed he had no role or participation in the operations of PH Trams and that he neither attended any of its meetings nor he participated in the bidding process of the contract.
He added that he had been asked by the firm to become an incorporator after he put PHP104,250 as an initial investment in PH Trams.
To qualify for the bidding, the firm executed an affidavit of disclosure which failed to reveal that Soriano, an uncle-in-law, was a relative of affinity within the third civil degree of Vitangcol.
As air pollution has become a major issue, it is important to have plants at home. Here’re some Indoor Plants Recommended By NASA which you should grow!
We generally think that indoor air is safer than outdoor air but we are wrong! Synthetic building materials and various organic compounds lead to various health hazards and can lead to “sick building syndrome.”
In a study conducted by NASA and Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA) in the year 1989, it was proved that some houseplants naturally remove toxic agents from indoor air. Here are some of the best Indoor Plants Recommended By NASA that you must consider growing!
1. English Ivy
Botanical Name: Hedera helix
English ivy is an evergreen perennial vine and is a super climber. It is useful for cleansing benzene and toluene. One research also indicated that English ivy could also reduce mold in the home.
2. Spider Plant
Botanical Name: Chlorophytum comosum
With spiderettes growing out from the mother plant, it makes it appear as spiders are dangling down from the pot! The Spider Plant is also useful in removing carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, xylene, and toluene.
To know more about fantastic spider plant benefits, click here!
3. Peace Lily
Botanical Name: Spathiphyllum
Peace lilies are amazing houseplants with big white bracts and glossy green leaves. They are easy to maintain and also cleans indoor air from xylene, benzene, formaldehyde, ammonia, and toluene.
Botanical Name: Aglaonema modestum
Even if you lack a green thumb, you will find growing Chinese evergreen super easy. Benzene and formaldehyde are the toxins, which it devours from the air.
Check out the list of plants that remove formaldehyde here!
5. Bamboo Palm
Botanical Name: Chamaedorea seifrizii
Among the many palm plants, the bamboo palm is most suited for low light conditions. It tops the list of Indoor Plants Recommended By NASA for filtering benzene and trichloroethylene.
6. Weeping Fig
Botanical Name: Ficus benjamina
The Weeping fig is one of the most popular indoor trees, cleaning out the pollutants from the air like formaldehyde and trichloroethylene. The research showed that the plant was capable of cleaning 80% of the formaldehyde within 4 hours.
Check out different ficus varieties to grow indoors here!
7. Barberton Daisy
Botanical Name: Gerbera jamesonii
Barberton or Gerbera daisies are famous for producing large, bright, and colorful flowers. They remove chemical vapors of benzene, exposure to which is linked with leukemia.
