News Roundup 09 July 2021
Jul 09, 2021 • 5 min Read
Philippines logs 5,881 new coronavirus infections | PHILSTAR.COM – The Department of Health reported Friday 5,881 more people contracted the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19, bringing the total number of cases of the respiratory disease in the country to 1,461,455.
- Active cases: 51,902 or 3.6% of the total
- Recoveries: 3,003, pushing total to 1,383,833
- Fatalities: 70, bringing death toll to 25,720
Pacquiao’s PDP-Laban kicks out Cusi, 2 others for ‘backing’ another political party | PHILSTAR.COM – The Partido Demokratiko Pilipino – Lakas ng Bayan led by Sen. Manny Pacquiao has pulled the plug on its vice chairman, Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi, and two other officials for supposedly “showing allegiance” to a different political party. The Pacquiao-led National Executive Council of the ruling party expelled Cusi, Deputy Secretary General Melvin Matibag and membership committee head Astra Naik for backing the potential presidential run of Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio. Duterte-Carpio is the daughter of President Rodrigo Duterte, who sits as PDP-Laban’s national chairman. A PDP-Laban resolution adopted July 3 focuses largely on Cusi’s backing of Duterte-Carpio for president, noting that he publicly stated that he is open to the possible presidential run of the Davao City mayor and that the party should study partnering her up with her father in the 2022 polls. It also hit the Cusi-led meeting last May 31 which pushed for the candidacy of Duterte as vice president in next year’s elections, without specifying that his running mate should hail from the party. “Thus, Vice Chairman Cusi is already manipulating the party to support the Duterte-Duterte tandem which is a blatant admission of supporting Sara Duterte Carpio for president, who is not a member of the party,” the resolution read. It continued, “He is guilty of having allegiance to a candidate and her political ideals and party. Such a candidate does not even believe in federalism, her party fielded candidates against and opposed official candidates of PDP-Laban in 2019 elections, and she is vehemently opposed to joining the PDP-Laban party.” Matibag and Naik were accused of having direct participation in Cusi’s actions, which led to their expulsion. The rift within the ruling party has been widening since some members called on Duterte to run for vice president, which has been opposed by Pacquiao who has appealed to members to focus on the pandemic first before politics.
P9.7B for ‘NPA-free’ villages pouring in regions with most EJKs | INQUIRER.NET – The Duterte administration has opened the valve to a gush of taxpayer money to fund villages supposedly successful in keeping communist rebels out but in regions where a human rights group said cases of extrajudicial killings and other rights violations were highest. In a recent announcement, the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), the agency in charge of implementing so-called barangay development projects designed to beat the insurgency, said at least 99 percent, or P16.24 billion, of P16.44 billion had already been released. Interior Secretary Eduardo Ano, a former military general, said 822 villages, or barangays, received the funds for at least 2,276 projects. The villages, he said, had already been “cleared of communist terrorist groups,” the government’s term of endearment for New People’s Army (NPA) and its political arm Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). But a closer look by the human rights group Karapatan showed that the bigger allocations went to areas in regions where cases of rights violations were highest. Data shared by Karapatan, which had been red-tagged by officials led by President Rodrigo Duterte himself, five regions with the biggest funding from the so-called barangay development program were those with the highest number of killings and legally infirm arrests.
Solon on PCOO’s denial it spent gov’t funds for troll army: ‘Unbelievable!’ | Manila Bulletin – “Unbelievable!” Bayan Muna Rep. Ferdinand Gaite gave this reaction to the denial of the Presidential Communications Operations Office that none of the 375 contractual employees it hired last year was assigned to a troll farm. PCOO Undersecretary Kris Ablan aired the denial after the Commission on Audit chided the agency for hiring contract of service (COS) personnel that tripled the number of existing personnel the PCOO had last year. Government spent P70.6 million for this. State auditors also questioned the accomplishment reports of the COS employees which “were not reflective of their actual duties/tasks” as they contain general statements and that the same accomplishments were repetitions of previous months’ reports. Ablan claimed in a television interview that those hired were given “highly technical tasks” and that they were “social media specialists”, not trolls. “This is a double whammy — pinalawak na nga ang kontraktwalisasyon sa public sector, pinalawak pa ang troll farms (they not only expanded contractualization in public sector, they even widened troll farms),” said Gaite. He said that PCOO’s claim that the hired social media specialists referred to graphic artists for their social media account is unworthy of belief because the agency’s FB page is nearly empty of infographics. “In my opinion, it would not need dozens of so-called specialists to accomplish this task,” Gaite said. Ablan’s failure to respond to the COA findings that accomplishment reports of the hired employees were nearly similar on each month is clearly suspicious, noted Gaite. “We need to know the truth, as this is not the first time that the Duterte administration has been flagged for unscrupulous online operations, ranging from inauthentic online behavior in Facebook to cyberattacks against independent media and human rights organizations,” he stressed.
