The use of confidential funds (CF) by the Office of Vice President Sara Duterte, concurrently the secretary of education, continues to be in the news and in social media posts. While most of the comments dwell on the P125 million in confidential funds supposedly spent in an 11-day period in December 2022, among the other...
Category: Politics
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Detention, ‘town arrest’ under martial law
It was a comfortless humid night in July 1974 in Zamboanga City when agents of the National Intelligence Security Agency (Nisa) arrested me. I was then a philosophy undergraduate student and an activist at the University of the Philippines Diliman. I was visiting my mother’s hometown to attend the funeral of my maternal grandmother, Isabel...
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What’s the endgame for electoral fraud?
Electoral fraud, also called vote rigging, voter fraud or election manipulation, involves illegal interference in the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. Through the TNTrio’s scrutiny of hard data coming from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) itself and...
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Petitioners want Smartmatic out of next polls for ‘meeting with Marcos Jr.’s wife before May 2022 elections’
Representatives of Smartmatic met with the future first lady before the May 9, 2022, presidential election, violating their contract as the automated election system (AES) provider for the Commission on Elections (Comelec), according to a motion to disqualify the company from involvement in the 2025 polls. The submission to the Comelec on Sept. 11 is...
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TV journalist Atom Araullo files P2-M suit against Red-taggers
Multi-awarded television journalist and documentarist Atom Araullo filed a civil suit claiming P2 million in damages against former anticommunist task force spokesperson Lorraine Badoy-Partosa and Jeffrey Celiz for allegedly Red-tagging him and jeopardizing his safety. Araullo said Badoy-Partosa and Celiz, anchors of a program on SMNI television network, made “a series of unsubstantiated accusations and...
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Marcos urged to push proposed Maritime Zones Act in the face of China’s ‘10-dash’ line map
China’s latest map should not distract the Philippine government from addressing the more “disconcerting” Chinese harassment of Philippine vessels in the West Philippine Sea, according to a foreign affairs and security analyst. If anything, said Lucio B. Pitlo III, the map with a new 10-dash line that still encompasses parts of the Philippines’ 370-kilometer exclusive...
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Inquirer.net takes down story on Martin Romualdez’s reported funding of Tagalog course in Harvard
Did Speaker Martin Romualdez give $1 million (about P56 million) to fund a new Tagalog course at Harvard University? On Thursday, Inquirer.net, one of the Philippines’ most-read news websites, asked that question in an article based on an exclusive report by The FilAm, an online magazine based in the United States with which it has...
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May 2022 vote rigged from the start, retired general, others say
After recovering from their stunned disbelief at the results of the national elections on May 9, 2022, certain prominent senior citizens formed an informal group that is now trying to rouse Filipinos into questioning the vote count which, they said, had been rigged even before the first ballot was cast. One of them, retired brigadier...
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Mayors unite for good governance and against corruption
It started with a phone call by Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong to like-minded local chief executives in July, shortly after he delivered a speech at the Philippine National Police headquarters in Camp Crame railing against corruption in high places. For that scathing speech, Magalong reaped a heap of “messages of support,” including one from...
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Poverty alleviation is at the mercy of political patronage
On July 10, the disbarred lawyer Lorenzo “Larry” Gadon was sworn in as presidential adviser on poverty alleviation. After nearly a month of public adverse reactions to Gadon’s appointment, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has made his priorities clear: to honor political patronage over providing credible leadership in addressing poverty in the Philippines. Critics claim that...