News Roundup 09 November 2021
Nov 09, 2021 • 4 min Read
Philippines sees 1,409 new COVID-19 cases, 14 labs without data | PHILSTAR.COM – The Department of Health on Tuesday listed 1,409 new coronavirus cases, pushing the country’s total to 2,806,694. Health officials said 1.1% of the Philippines’ total caseload remain as active cases. They added 14 laboratories failed to turn in screening results. “The lower deaths reported today is due to technical issues encountered with COVIDKaya,” the agency said.
- Active cases: 30,544 or 1.1% of the total
- Deaths: 46, pushing the count to 44,567
- Recoveries: 2,941 bringing the number to 2,731,583
Robredo wants NTF-ELCAC abolished | PHILSTAR.COM – Vice President Leni Robredo, who is running for president in the 2022 elections, said Tuesday she wants President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial anti-communist task force to be abolished. “There is really a duplication of many efforts, the duplication of the mandate. And it has to be abolished,” Robredo said, referring to the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict which Duterte created in 2017. “My biggest fear here is that this will become Tokhang again. Magiging Tokhang Version 2 in the sense that the mandate given to the body will be abused, will be used to harass people,” Robredo said partly in Filipino. The vice president said there must be a rejection of the militarist approach to ending armed conflict and a shift towards more holistic ways to address its roots. “This cannot be solved by using a purely militaristic approach. We have to go to the root of the problem of insurgency to be able to give a more long term solution to the same,” she said. In August, at the height of fresh lockdowns brought about by a surge in coronavirus cases due to the Delta variant, Robredo suggested suspending the release of funding for the NTF-ELCAC and rechanneling this for cash aid for Filipinos who were most affected by the mobility restrictions. This did not sit well with National Security Adviser and NTF-ELCAC chairperson Hermogenes Esperon who dismissed calls like Robredo’s as “irrational” and “self-serving political statements.” Progressive groups and some senators have long been pushing to defund NTF-ELCAC over its persistent and often baseless red-tagging of dissidents, which human rights organizations warn could cause harm. On Tuesday, Senate finance committee chairperson Sen. Sonny Angara announced that senators are proposing a P24-billion budget cut to the anti-communist task force and would leave it with only P4 billion for 2022.
Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist, and the lies he inspires in PH | INQUIRER.NET – More than 70 years since the end of Adolf Hitler’s evil empire in 1945, social media has unleashed thousands of versions of Joseph Goebbels, the propagandist who helped Hitler rise to power and exterminate at least six million people just because they were Jews. As Goebbels found success in his propaganda strategies, one tactic he so efficiently employed to keep the German people enthralled by the Nazis was the indiscriminate use of lies or falsehoods. “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth,” Goebbels had said at the height of the Nazis’ power, explaining his biggest propaganda strategy. Goebbels succeeded in the massive use of lies at a time when the source of news, whether fake or real, was limited to newspapers, films, radio broadcasts and word-of-mouth. That power to deceive has been multiplied countless of times by social media in the age of the internet. Goebells’ tactics have found parallels in social media-crazy Philippines, especially in its politics. One example is the continuing attempt to rewrite history about martial law, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family. In 2016, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) reported that from 1986 to 2016, P170.97 billion have been retrieved by the government from an estimated P253 billion to P506 billion of the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth. But social media accounts, with names that are either aliases or fictitious but clearly followers of Marcos, fill the internet with tales about Marcos, his more than 20-year reign and how he got hold of all his wealth. Among the posts by the pro-Marcos social media accounts were that the late dictator did not steal money and became rich because his services as a lawyer were paid with “192,000 tons of gold by the Tallanos” referring to a fictitious clan which was supposed to have ruled the pre-colonial Philippines then supposed to be known as the Kingdom of Maharlika.
Senate goes to SC to stop Duterte from barring Cabinet in Senate hearings | Manila Bulletin – The Senate on Tuesday, Nov. 9 authorized the filing of an appropriate petition in the Supreme Court to assert the power of the Senate in inquiries in aid of legislation. This followed the approval today by the Upper House of Senate Resolution 946 authored by Senate President Vicente C. Sotto III on this issue. The Sotto resolution was triggered by the memorandum of Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea directing all officials and employees of the Executive Department to ‘’stop attending the Senate Blue Ribbon hearings on the Commission on Audit (COA) Report effective immediately.’’ The Medialdea memorandum was based on the order by President Duterte to his Cabinet officials and other government employees to stop going to the Senate Blue Ribbon committee which was conducting a public hearing on the alleged overprice contracts on COVID-19 medical supplies to Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corporation.
