News Roundup 14 May 2022
May 14, 2022 • 6 min Read
Dayan: Umali forced me to testify vs De Lima | INQUIRER.NET – Ronnie Dayan, a former aide of Sen. Leila de Lima, has accused the late former Oriental Mindoro Rep. Rey Umali of coercing him to testify against the senator during the 2016 congressional inquiries into the illegal drug trading in New Bilibid Prison. Dayan affirmed his recantation of the testimonies he made before the Senate and House of Representatives by submitting to the court a new affidavit on Friday. He is a corespondent of De Lima in one of the two remaining cases. According to Dayan’s lawyer Haidee Soriano, he also denied the allegations of prosecution witnesses that he received drug money and delivered it to De Lima, when she was still justice secretary. In his new affidavit filed at the Muntinlupa Regional Trial Court Branch 204, Dayan said Umali, who was then the chair of the House of Representatives committee on justice, forced him to say that he received money from self-confessed drug lord Kerwin Espinosa. “Because when I told him that I did not know anything about the Bilibid drug trade, he told me to just build upon the testimony of Kerwin Espinosa,” Dayan said, adding that he did not know Espinosa. According to Dayan, he was forced to follow Umali’s orders since “I was guarded by armed police officers.”
Robredo takes a break to spend more family time | INQUIRER.NET – Vice President Leni Robredo is taking a much-needed break after the recently-concluded polls. “We will be gone for a few days to just spend time with family and take a well deserved rest before all of us restart the lives we have put on hold,” Robredo said in a Facebook post on Saturday. “For now, we just need to spend as much time together.” Robredo will also fly to New York on Saturday to attend her daughter Jillian’s graduation. “This is the first time since my husband died in 2012 that we will be traveling again as a family with no work to take care of,” she noted. The Vice President also turned down other commitments like meet ups, for which she apologized: “We will do that some other time in the future.” Despite taking a break, Robredo said she is still “on top of preparations” for the launch of the non-government organization Angat Buhay when her term as vice president ends on June 30. Robredo added that the Office of the Vice President is “making all the preparations” for the official turnover of the office to presumptive vice president Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio.
For Robredo’s pink movement, moving forward won’t mean moving on | PHILSTAR.COM – We lost the battle but not the war. That was how supporters of Vice President Leni Robredo characterized their candidate’s losing run in the 2022 elections on Monday. The air was somber yet hopeful Friday night at Bellarmine Field on the Ateneo de Manila University campus in Quezon City. Though they lost the day, Robredo’s voters knew this was just the beginning of something. Perhaps Robredo herself said it best during her speech before thousands of supporters: “It’s okay to cry, but pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and soldier on.” Philstar.com spoke to a number of her supporters to capture the pulse of the Vice President’s enthusiastic base. Here’s what they had to say. Ahead of the program, Quezon City-based doctors John and Kristine Duenas said they were still having trouble processing their emotions. They asked: how could the gap between Robredo and presumptive president Bongbong Marcos be that wide? “It wasn’t expected because we really saw the effort of the people. So many of us sacrificed [our] time and effort. You saw how many people went to the rallies. So the results were really confusing,” the 54-year-old John said. “I would be able to accept it if the elections were fair. But I think Vice President Leni is a once-in-a-lifetime leader, and we wasted that chance to have a leader who could change the country.” Research assistant Gerald Guillermo, 24, said his space of mind was one of accepting the years ahead instead of just moving on with life. “It will take me a long time to move forward personally… What I’m really feeling is anger. These people chose the son of an ex-dictator who is a liar and a thief,” he said in mixed Filipino and English. “Right now we’re all allowed to feel things, sabi nga ni VP Leni. But we need to understand where that anger is coming from, and I hope I don’t turn that anger into a divisive way of moving forward.” Danny Agoncillo, a 62-year-old owner of a travel and tour agency, said he wasn’t optimistic about the days ahead. “I have ups and downs because I know what this development means. In all probability, we will be heading back to a dictatorship. And we have to watch out for that,” Agoncillo, once an editor in chief of a local broadsheet said. “The situation is there.” He pointed out a number of factors, including the plan to place Sara Duterte-Carpio, Marcos’ presumptive vice president, in the Department of Education and the possible revisionism and militarization of campuses this could cause, the politically-charged environment of red-tagging by the NTF-ELCAC and the Anti-Terror Law, and the Marcos family’s history with Martial Law. “I am concerned about the future of the country… They can red-tag me all they want. But I will never shut up,” he said. One common theme arose among the VP’s supporters: something changed in the course of Robredo’s 90-day campaign. And this momentum could definitely be built on moving forward, with or without Robredo in office. “People were so apathetic, they didn’t care about the things that were happening. But many were inspired to get involved in this campaign,” Duenas said. “I hope and I pray that we don’t lose this… I hope it will become a movement to be better citizens, better Filipinos.” College sophomore and first-time voter Margarita Madriaga said that she’d never experienced being politically active until she got invested in Robredo’s campaign. “I hope that this energy, the spirit of volunteerism, I hope it continues. Right now, the strength of the youth, and all these people from all walks of life, it can really help our country,” she said. “Even if things have been messy, we all just want a better Philippines for our families.” Robredo’s supporters added that the outgoing veep’s speech helped ease their spirits for the coming days. “She brought us back to reality, and that mindset of not choosing who we help. We’re not red and yellow and pink; we’re all Filipinos and I think we deserve one another and we need to help one another,” Guillermo said. David Gats, a member of Bikers for Leni said he was dismayed and had trouble moving on until he heard Robredo’s announcement that she would turn the Angat Buhay program into a non-government organization. “As long as we’re together, in the end, I’m sure things will go back to normal. It’s hard but I think we’ll get through it,” he said in Filipino. “We can definitely maintain this momentum. We’re behind VP Leni all the way. We didn’t lose, because with this movement, we’ve already won.”
