A NATIONAL land use measure is expected to face resistance from local governments because it seeks to take away local powers and give them to a central authority, Senator Cynthia A. Villar said.
“Land use is determined by the local government. Now, they want to centralize it. Who will remove it from the local government to centralize? You are inviting the ire of all the mayors in the Philippines. That’s their power,” she told reporters in a chance interview.
“Mas marami nga silang hinihingi na ibalik sa local government (local officials want a lot more powers to be returned to them)… Now we’re going to centralize it? I don’t want to do that,” she added.
A national land use measure has been stuck in Congress for years, even after it was certified as urgent by former President Benigno S.C. Aquino III. President Rodrigo R. Duterte also brought up the issue of land use in his last three State of the Nation Addresses (SONAs).
In his most recent SONA on Monday, Mr. Duterte said that the law should be passed within the year.
The proposed National Land Use Act, or Senate Bill No. 1522, which dates from the Second Session of the 17th Congress, aims to “provide a policy for the rational, holistic, and just allocation, utilization, management and development of our land resources.”
It calls for a National Land Use Commission to create, update, and ensure the implementation of the National Framework Plan, which will be the basis for land use and physical development policy.
The House version, House Bill (HB) No. 5240, or the proposed National Land Use and Management Act of the Philippines, backs the creation of the National Land Use Policy Council (NLUPC). It will be responsible for the execution of the responsibilities under the act, and take on the function of the National Economic Development Authority National Land Use Committee (NB-NLUC), which will then be abolished.
Currently, land use is undertaken by local government units, who are authorized by Section 20 of Republic Act (RA) 7160, or the Local Government Code of 1991, and the Joint Memorandum Circular (JMC) No. 54-1995.
They give a city or municipality the power to reclassify agricultural land after determining that the land is not suited for agricultural purposes, or if it has more value as a residential, commercial, or industrial site.
Reclassification is limited to certain levels depending on the category of local government. Highly urbanized and independent component cities can reclassify about 15% of their land; component cities and first to third class municipalities 10%; and fourth to sixth-class municipalities 5%. — Vincent Mariel P. Galang
THE Senate economic affairs committee will focus on poverty reduction measures, its chairman, Senator Imee R. Marcos, said.
Ms. Marcos said she is preparing bills that seek to address poverty and has sought preliminary briefings from concerned agencies.
“Ang aking priority d’yan ’yung poverty reduction programs, whether land reform, whether PhilHealth and Universal Health coverage, whether 4P’s, sana tingnan natin ’yan (My priority is to address poverty via land reform, health, and cash transfers)“ Ms. Marcos said in a briefing.
“Actually, nagpapa-informal briefing na ako para mabilis. May resolution na ako for a review of all the poverty reduction programs. (I have sought informal briefings on the issues to hurry things along. I have filed a resolution calling for a review of all the poverty reduction programs).”
Ms. Marcos has filed Senate Resolution No. 6 calling for the review.
“The other issue that I’d like to work out d’yan sa economic affairs (in committee) is urbanization,” she added.
Separately, Ms. Marcos said she could call for a dialogue with the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) after its recent statements calling for “balance” in the Security of Tenure (SoT) Bill.
“Definitely, we have to take notice of what the NEDA is saying and perhaps the economic affairs committee could initiate a dialogue with NEDA,” she said.
Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia on Wednesday said the proposed SoT Bill, which is still awaiting President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s signature, needs tweaking.
The bill was transmitted to the Office of the President on June 27 and will lapse into law on July 27, if the President fails to act on the measure. — Charmaine A. Tadalan
THE Department of Energy (DoE) said Thursday that it is cracking down on the illegal trading of petroleum products, particularly in the Visayas.
In a statement, the DoE said its Visayas field office dispatched teams in Capiz last week to deter the illegal in trade petroleum products, which is known as “bote-bote.”
Energy Secretary Alfonso G. Cusi said the DoE “is on top of the situation with the reported ‘bote bote’ cases and we are ensuring the safety of the people by monitoring the quality and quantity of liquefied petroleum gas.”
The DoE said the enforcement team together with the Philippine National Police raided six large retailers of liquid fuels in the municipalities of Dumarao, Ivisan, and Roxas City, which resulted in the confiscation of 16,346 liters of gasoline and 5,644 liters of diesel.
It said criminal cases will be filed against the nine individuals who were caught selling liquid fuels without authority from the agency, which is a violation of Batas Pambansa Bilang 33, “An Act Defining and Penalizing Certain Prohibited Acts Inimical to the Public Interest and National Security Involving Petroleum and/or Petroleum Products, Prescribing Penalties therefore and for other Purposes.”
The DoE’s Visayas office also said that it is strengthening its enforcement activities against the illegal refilling of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) into non-compliant containers such as butane canisters. It said several fires caused by these LPG-refilled butane canisters had been reported across the Visayas.
The department said it was “in constant coordination with the local PNP and the LGUs as part of regulatory operations in enforcing the safety standards of petroleum products.”
Separately, the department said it had created a special task force “to urgently address the recurring brownouts in Puerto Princesa and other parts of Palawan.”
It said the interagency coordinating committee and task force was to meet representatives of the Palawan Electric Cooperative (Paleco), National Power Corp. (Napocor), and provincial government agencies on Thursday to discuss the progress of the implementation of their respective action plans.
Mr. Cusi in February directed the task force to look into the power interruptions in Palawan via a performance audit and assessment. Its findings included the uncoordinated protection system of Paleco and Napocor’s distributions lines, overloaded substations, vegetation obstruction along distribution lines, and the slow coordination among various government agencies on distribution line maintenance and improvements. — Victor V. Saulon
WASHINGTON, DC — It’s my first time to land at Washington Dulles International Airport from Manila via Seoul-Incheon airport. The two previous times (2004 and 2009) that I went to Washington DC, I landed at Ronald Reagan Washington International Airport.
From Dulles to Washington DC proper, I took the bus-rail combination. It is safe, convenient and cheap, only $10 or about 1/6 of the taxi or Uber fare here; travel time for this combo is about one hour. When I went to Kuala Lumpur in May, I also took the train-bus combo from KL International Airport (KLIA) to my hotel in KL city center. Bus fare from KLIA to KL Sentral is about 12 ringgit or 1/3 of Ekspress train.
Metro rails are good complements to international airports. Metro Manila has one of the shortest rail network among developed and developing Asia, we need to have more.
The development and expansion of trains from international airports and seaports to and from Metro Manila was not covered by President Rodrigo R. Duterte in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) 2019 on Monday. Congress leaders should prioritize these.
The Parliament of Singapore passed a law against uploading and spreading false information last May. It requires online media platforms that any government ministry accuses of carrying “fake news” to correct or remove the offending material, and penalizes those responsible with 10-year prison terms and fines of up to S$1 million (about $740,000). The bad news is that the Philippine Congress could do the same thing.
Singapore’s “fake news” law has been widely criticized by journalists, human rights groups, and legal scholars for being a threat to free expression. But its passage was not really all that surprising. Singapore, whose rulers look at free expression and press freedom as solely Western values rather than as universal legacies of the human struggle for freedom, has never been a haven for either. Many journalists practice self-censorship out of fear of being accused of defamation or of violating its stringent national security laws. Singapore has imprisoned journalists for these offenses.
But that is Singapore. In contrast, the 1987 “People Power” Philippine Constitution explicitly protects freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and press freedom in Section 4 of its Article III, and recognizes the citizenry’s right to information “on matters of public concern” in Section 7 of the same Article.
When he issued Executive Order No. 2 in 2016, mandating access to information held by agencies of the Executive Branch, President Rodrigo Duterte even said he hoped that it would encourage Congress to finally pass a Freedom of Information (FOI) law that would enable everyone to access information held by all three branches of government. A number of FOI bills have been introduced in Congress over the past two decades, but none has ever made it beyond the committee level, despite the invaluable role public access to information could play in combating corruption and assuring government transparency.
Despite Mr. Duterte’s 2016 declaration, instead of an FOI bill that would truly make government-held information accessible to every citizen and the press, Senate President Vicente Sotto III, one of his closest allies, has re-introduced in the 18th Congress a bill that would penalize posting and disseminating false information online. A veritable clone of the Singapore law, the Sotto bill would impose the same penalties of fines and imprisonment on alleged offenders.
If it passes the Congressional mill with only minor changes and with most of its 14 sections intact, Senate Bill No. 9, the “Anti False Content Act,” would abridge free expression and press freedom despite their being expressly protected by the Philippine Constitution. By empowering the government to censor what it considers “false content,” it will also limit the information the public can access to only what the current regime approves of.
The Sotto bill imposes prison terms of up to 12 years and fines from P200,000 to P2 million against those individuals who “create and/or publish false and misleading content” on social media, news sites, blogs and websites. It would also penalize the “intermediaries,” meaning such platforms as Google and Twitter, on which they were published, should they refuse to correct, take down, or block content — presumably whether text, videos, photos, and other illustrations — that the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Philippine National Police (PNP), or the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) declares to be false and misleading .
PEXELS_ADHITYA ANDANU
On the excuse that the published information affects “public interest,” rather than wait for a complaint, the DOJ can issue any of the above orders to the administrators of the platforms in which it was published. “Public interest” is very loosely defined in the bill’s Section 3 as “anything that affects national security, public health, public safety, public order, confidence in the government, and the international relations of the Philippines.”
The bill would thus limit the discourse on public issues to what the government approves of by criminalizing any information its agencies interpret as false because it affects “national security,” “confidence in the government,” or is about “the international relations of the Philippines.” Those phrases can be interpreted as applying to almost anything, including investigative reports and online posts critical of this or that government policy.
Senator Sotto claimed in a television interview that neither print nor broadcast media will be affected once his copycat bill becomes law. But the reality is that the country’s newspapers and broadcast networks have online sites on which they replicate in text, photos, and video the entire contents of their print and broadcast editions. Some also upload original content on their websites and on YouTube. Both those who generate the contents of the online sites of the country’s newspapers and radio and television networks as well the sites themselves will therefore be liable to the penalties to which those who have blogs, personal and institutional websites, or accounts on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., will be subject.
There is no denying the harm that false information can inflict on the need for the informed discourse crucial to the making of the politically engaged public that an authentic democracy needs. But the damage a law penalizing those supposedly responsible for disinformation can do, because it empowers government to decide what is true or false, is a far greater danger. Every government has a stake in favorable publicity, whether generated and spread through the old media of print and broadcasting or the blogs, websites, news sites, and social media networks in the Internet. The power such a law will endow government with will inevitably be abused.
If it becomes law, Senate Bill Number 9 will be especially dangerous given the current political context in which a regime that has practically unchallenged control over the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches of government has again and again demonstrated its contempt for criticism, free expression and press freedom. It can declare what is true false if unfavorable to it, and the false true if it suits its purposes, and the courts can dutifully uphold its judgment and impose the corresponding penalties.
It is far from paranoid to think these likely. Not only have some of the Duterte government’s own agencies generated and spread false and misleading information, its online trolls and bots and its mercenaries in print and broadcasting have also debased informed and democratic discourse by spreading disinformation about journalists and the independent press, the opposition, farmers and workers organizations, lawyers, Church people, and administration critics.
Journalists’ groups and non-government organizations are already doing what they can to stop the dissemination and sharing of “fake news.” Facebook and other social media sites have put fact-checking mechanisms in place to protect Netizens from false and misleading content. The online sites that spread outright lies have been exposed by journalists’ and media advocacy groups and are fairly well known. Media literacy programs with an emphasis on understanding the new media are already in place in the educational system.
As dangerous as it is to free expression and press freedom, Senate Bill No. 9 is therefore also patently unnecessary. The Philippines does not have to ape authoritarian Singapore’s use of coercion to address the “fake news” problem. The initiatives of media literate citizens, technology companies and responsible journalists in combating false information should be enough — and are well within the implicit Constitutional mandate of media self-regulation.
Luis V. Teodoro is on Facebook and Twitter (@luisteodoro).
It is like living in a pressure cooker. One needs to shut the senses to the searing, blinding heat. There is a water shortage. The water and electric bills are up. Temperatures are high.
There is a blanket of noxious diesel fumes spewed by dilapidated vehicles and factory smokestacks. The air smells like acrid burning rubber. A passing shower intensifies the humidity, releasing steam from the scalding pavement. The sparse parks are shrinking in size. The few square meters of open space have parched trees with withered twigs and dangling leaves. The dusty wind whirls over the narrow cracked sidewalks and alleys, scattering bits of paper and tin foil.
One can barely discern the hazy skyline of gray cement, pewter, steel, and glass buildings. Smog covers the distant skeletal structures. Too many skyscrapers are rising.
Mornings are sunny, hot and afternoons are sweltering, enervating. Living creatures seem to vanish in the scorching sunlight.
In the suburbs, birds and butterflies and other animals flee to the shade of the ancient acacia trees.
The flame trees are gloriously abloom despite the heat, but they don’t last long due to the grimy air.
However magnificent the new structures are, the metropolis is overbuilt, congested. There are too many towers, too many people, but not enough open parks trees and fountains to cool the place. Once upon a time, there used to be vast green fields, rolling hills, clear rivers with cool breezes.
After the past 20 years, development fatigue is setting in. At first, development was slowly creeping in. Then, it stripped the landscape and uprooted trees and shrubs. The once pristine river has become a smelly dumpsite, a stagnant canal.
In the older part of town, the urban blight is worse. The city is shrouded in smoke that dissipates only with heavy rain and wind. Then there is the gray acid rain.
The once splendid coastal boulevard is now an avenue with reclaimed land, buildings and casinos.
The pre-war bridges need repairs. The vintage art deco buildings are being demolished instead of being retrofitted and restored. The beautiful centuries-old Binondo church was restored by adding layers of cement to cover the original adobe stones with etched lines to appear like bricks. The statues of saints on the outer walls were spray painted a garish shade of gold.
Heritage advocates should try to remedy the situation by calling a heritage specialist/architect to coordinate with the parish priest or church authorities. The trompe l’oeil ceiling and the relics are photogenic. But the luster and ambiance of the old church are gone.
The luxury hotels that are almost 50 years old are being torn down to give way to skyscrapers. This is to avoid the ban on tearing down heritage structures.
City residents, students, professionals, office staff and workers have to brave the horrendous traffic caused by too many vehicles and not enough roads. There are not enough decent, safe modes of public transportation.
Garbage spills onto many sidewalks. Ironically, the trash is strewn outside the fences of immaculately clean homes and gardens. For some odd reason and a character fluke, most people seem to limit neatness and order only to the inner portion of their immediate surroundings.
Beyond the wall, who cares?
The lackadaisical manner and nonchalant attitude are symptoms of a general malaise. One can feel lonely in a city bursting with people.
The bay still has the best sunset in the world. The colorful spectacle is incomparable and awesome. The contrast lies in the murky waters whose stench is repugnant. The floating debris the river brings is the big scourge — loathsome non-biodegradable plastic.
There is hope for Manila Bay. There is a big civic group affiliated with tourism that is cleaning and saving the bay. They are removing the loathsome plastic.
The monsoon rains have started to wash away some of the filth and grime form the city. The rains bring blessed relief from the heat. The air is cleansed for a while of the soot. The smog disappears and is replaced by a fine mist.
The cityscape appears in soft focus. An Impressionist painting whose sharp angles now have gently blurred edges and soft delicate brushstrokes. Gardens and little parks come alive as grass and weeds sprout wildly. The trees, leaves and flowers glisten with tiny prisms and droplets. The winds cool the air and blow remnants of summer away.
The clouds unleash torrents that cascade over rooftops and splash on to the streets. Water seeps into every crook and cranny and flows into instant streams. After the rain, when the sun peeps through the clouds, the city is bathed in a special glow. Everything smells fresh and new. For a while.
One always has mixed feelings about the rainy season. It could be one’s favorite season because of the cooler temperature.
If there were no floods.
Maria Victoria Rufino is an artist, writer and businesswoman. She is president and executive producer of Maverick Productions.
Perhaps the worst thing an aspiring lawyer learns in law school is the idea that the law is “what the judge says it to be.” It’s cynical, yes, but arguably (in the present day) likely even true. Such is justified under “The Living Constitution” theory, beloved of many a “progressive” law faculty. But such is wrong. It violates the Constitution and — worse — is inherently undemocratic.
While the Constitution has indeed “majestic generalities,” as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would describe it, allowing the judiciary a certain degree of flexibility, such is fundamentally distant from the religion propagated in law schools today that is the “living constitution.”
Former US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist illustrates its present incarnation, a constantly evolving constitution where “non-elected members of the federal judiciary may address themselves to a social problem simply because other branches of government have failed or refused to do so. These same judges, responsible to no constituency whatever, are nonetheless acclaimed as ‘the voice and conscience of contemporary society.’”
The catalyst for the living constitution’s early heyday can be pinpointed (appropriately enough) to contraceptives. In Griswold and Eisenstadt, despite the complete absence of the words “contraceptives” and “privacy” in the US Constitution, liberal justices declared what is not there there by simply conjuring the most annoying phrase in constitutional jurisprudence: “penumbras formed by emanations.”
This (as narrated by Mark Pulliam in Law and Liberty) led the US Supreme Court to make its most atrocious decision ever (next to Dred Scott) and that is the giving of “recognition of abortion rights in Roe v. Wade (1973) — striking down state laws nationwide.” This “emboldened liberal law professors to articulate ever more result-oriented theories, urging judges to impose their desired policy objectives, from busing students to achieve racial balance to race-based affirmative action to abolishing the death penalty, and much else.”
This outrage led future justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh to advance a school of constitutional interpretation known as “originalism.”
But the “original originalist” was the great legal scholar Robert Bork, who (as described by Pulliam): “believed that judges should instead play a limited role: to enforce the Constitution as written. This approach [is] often expressed as ‘judges should interpret the law, not make it’.”
Now this, Pulliam points out, “shouldn’t be controversial, but it directly challenged the dominance of the legal professoriat and the liberal interest groups that benefited from judicial activism.” Such is true in the US and such is true in the Philippines.
Bizarrely, law students are likely to think that textualism and originalism are not applied in the Philippines, the “living constitution” being the end all and be all of many of today’s legal academia.
Which is weird because the Supreme Court has not actually been silent regarding textualism and originalism: “The words used in the Constitution must be given their ordinary meaning except where technical terms are employed. As the Constitution is not primarily a lawyer’s document, it being essential for the rule of law to obtain that it should ever be present in the people’s consciousness, its language as much as possible should be understood in the sense they have a common use.”
Furthermore, if “the plain meaning of the word is not found to be clear, resort to other aids is available.” But “while it is permissible to consult the debates and proceedings of the constitutional convention in order to arrive at the reason and purpose of the resulting Constitution, resort thereto may be had only when other guides fail as said proceedings are powerless to vary the terms of the Constitution when the meaning is clear.” Hence, “the proper interpretation, therefore, depends more on how it was understood by the people adopting it.” (Justice Antonio Nachura, Outline Reviewer in Political Law; citing Francisco, GR 160261; and Civil Liberties Union, 194 SCRA 317).
Why the insistence on reading the Constitution as written? Because the Constitution contains our best defense against tyranny.
And again, contrary to what many learn in law school, the people’s best protection against tyranny is not the Bill of Rights but rather our constitutional structure of separate and equal branches: “A bill of rights has value only if the other part of the constitution — the part that really ‘constitutes’ the organs of government — establishes a structure that is likely to preserve, against the ineradicable human lust for power, the liberties that the bill of rights expresses. If the people value those liberties, the proper constitutional structure will likely result in their preservation even in the absence of a bill of rights; and where that structure does not exist, the mere recitation of the liberties will certainly not preserve them.” (Scalia).
A “living constitution” upends this crucial structure, allowing activist judges to impose their will beyond the Constitution and effectively establishing a “judicial oligarchy.”
For democracy’s sake, this is something the Filipino people should clearly not stand for.
Jemy Gatdula is a Senior Fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.
NOTHING that happened Wednesday will satisfy Facebook Inc.’s critics. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s chief consumer privacy watchdog, hit Facebook with a $5 billion fine for violating promises to better protect personal information.
This FTC action kicked off after revelations that a politically connected consulting firm obtained information from tens of millions of Facebook users without their explicit permission. That and other eyebrow-raising privacy missteps or creepy data sharing started an overdue reckoning about how Facebook and other internet companies collect repositories of information on what people do and where they go and too often play fast and loose with that data.
The reckoning won’t stop with the fine from the FTC, which said this was a record for any privacy-related enforcement action. It still won’t make anyone happy. Members of Congress have already said that $5 billion is nothing for a company with $45 billion in the bank. Structural changes at Facebook, including a new board committee responsible for privacy and privacy certifications by senior executives, seem smart, but only time will tell.*
Leave aside what the FTC should have done with its power under the law. I want to suggest an action that could make Facebook less of a data-privacy horror show: Give people the power to make Facebook collect less data on them. Not fake empowerment, which is too often the case in internet privacy. I’m talking about a real option to force Facebook and the companies with which it works to collect less data in the first place.
In a way, Cambridge Analytica and related scandals distracted us from the original sin of Facebook: Its zeal to grab as much information as it can about people and harness it to sell advertisements based on their identity and activities online and off.
This behavior did not originate with Facebook. The internet economy is a game of one-upmanship to normalize ever-more inventive and aggressive human surveillance. Facebook shouldn’t receive all the blame for this. (Although it should get a lot of the blame.) This is how the internet works now, and it’s only going to get worse. It is not OK. It’s time to put roadblocks on history’s largest human-tracking scheme at the hands of internet powers and the many other companies complicit in their behavior. We might as well start with Facebook.
PRIVACY COPS
Dina Srinivasan, who wrote a compelling legal paper linking Facebook’s privacy shortfalls to monopoly power, proposed a version of the US “do not call” registry introduced in the early 2000s that stopped many telemarketing calls.** The idea applied to Facebook is that people would have the option to make Facebook’s surveillance system end at the borders of its internet hangouts.
Facebook would no longer be able to vacuum information about what people do on websites and apps that aren’t owned by Facebook, or would no longer be able collect the location of people as they roam around the world with smartphones that double as Facebook surveillance devices. Yes, Facebook does all this, although many people are not aware of the scope of the company’s information-harvesting practices.
Facebook users today can check a box — if they can find it and understand the language — to tell the company not to use information about their visits to news websites, medical information apps, and their trips to the coffee shop for use in tailoring advertisements bought by Ford or Starbucks. But they cannot prevent Facebook from collecting this information in the first place, and the company even collects information on people who don’t have a Facebook account at all.***
Facebook says, in part, that it needs some information such as location to identify fake accounts or other security purposes. But truly, Facebook and other internet companies believe they should gather as much information about people as they possibly can because it might help their business — and hardly anyone has stood in their way.
This is how the internet works. Track everything, break down any semblance of anonymity in online activity to create highly specific personal dossiers. The big lie of Facebook and the internet is that people have knowledge about and control over what happens to their information. They absolutely do not, and people should have a choice to truly opt out of the great horror show of pervasive internet surveillance.
To be clear, a “do not call” type option will seriously harm Facebook’s advertising business. That is the point. And any attempts to roll back widespread internet information harvesting will be tough to push through and require vigorous enforcement. The obvious objections are that data harvesting is a standard part of the internet to which people effectively consent. The “everyone does it” line is true, and that’s why the internet economy is broken.
I don’t want to single out Facebook alone, nor punish it for the sake of punitive justice. But it is beyond time to say no to what has become standard operating procedure online, and that means rolling back the internet surveillance system.
BLOOMBERG OPINION
* In a perfect encapsulation of all that is broken with Facebook and the internet, tucked into the company’s explanations of the privacy changes it is making is a disclosure of newly discovered data privacy holes.
** The “do not call” registry worked until robo-calling scammers ignored it.
*** Also, Facebook and its partners may have found ways around the option to stop tailoring ads based on information gathered outside of Facebook’s walls.
THE PHILIPPINE military has identified at least two of the seven foreign jihadists who are grooming locals to become suicide bombers in the Mindanao region, according to Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana.
The nationalities of the foreign terrorists linked to Islamic State (IS) are Egyptian, Malaysian, Indonesian and Singaporean, the Defense chief told reporters on Thursday.
“We have the names of a couple but we are not going to give them out yet until we get all the names,” he said, adding that the foreign jihadists are with the group of Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan on the island of Jolo in southern Philippines.
Abu Sayyaf leader Sawadjaan, who is believed to have taken over the leadership of IS in the Philippines, allegedly masterminded the bombing of a Catholic cathedral in Jolo in January, killing 23 people and wounding about 100 more.
This was one of the few major instances where suicide attacks were used in the predominantly Catholic nation. Another was a van blast at a military checkpoint on the island of Basilan in July 2018, where at least 10 people died.
IS has also claimed responsibility for the June 28 attack near a military camp in Sulu province. The military later identified one of the two suicide bombers as the first Filipino to have participated in the tactic.
The Philippines has received attention from IS as it turns its sights on Southeast Asia after the fall of its self-proclaimed “caliphate” in the Middle East.
Mr. Lorenzana said they have received reports that about 100 foreign terrorists have entered the country and are staying in Central Mindanao.
He said military operations targeting members of the Abu Sayyaf in Jolo will be intensified.
Resource-rich Mindanao is home to a number of armed groups, several of which are linked to the decades-old insurgency seeking to create an independent Muslim state.
The Abu Sayyaf, the most violent extremist group in Mindanao, has used terror both for profit and to promote its jihadist agenda, according to the US National Counterterrorism Center. The group engages in kidnapping for ransom, bombings, assassinations and extortion. — Vann Marlo M. Villegas
THE Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) yesterday took delivery of assets meant to upgrade its sea patrol capabilities and response to natural disasters.
The new assets include 73 rubber boats with outboard motors, 12 rigid-hulled inflatable boats, 90 pickup trucks, seven buses and five ambulances.
China’s neighbors are racing to empower their Coast Guard fleets amid increasing tensions in the South China Sea.
China has been building artificial islands in the disputed Spratly Islands and setting up installations including several runways. China claims sovereignty over more than 80 percent of the waterway based on its so-called nine-dash line drawn on a 1940s map.
“These new assets boost our men’s morale and see the silver lining to the challenging times and rainy days ahead,” Admiral Elson E. Hermogino said in ceremonies yesterday.
Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana said the Coast Guard can perform its duties more efficiently using the new equipment.
President Rodrigo R. Duterte has sought closer investment and trade ties with Beijing, including over resources in the South China Sea, since taking power in 2016.
On June 9, a Filipino fishing boat sank after colliding with a Chinese vessel at the disputed Reed Bank. The president has called the collision a “little” maritime incident.
His predecessor, Benigno S. Aquino III, sued China before an international arbitration tribunal over its territorial claims, and won. He also strengthened Philippine alliance with the US to try to check China’s expansion in the main waterway. — Vann Marlo M. Villegas
A COMPLAINT against Vice-President Maria Leonor G. Robredo accusing her of inciting to sedition was likely started to form a basis for her eventual impeachment, her spokesman said yesterday.
“There is clearly a political motivation behind all of this,” Barry Gutierrez, Ms. Robredo’s spokesman, told reporters at a briefing. “Impeachment is really the endgame here,” he added.
Mr. Gutierrez, a lawyer, also questioned the solicitor general’s role in drafting the complaint against the vice-president and other lawmakers, lawyers and Catholic Church leaders.
The Office of the Solicitor General, which allegedly helped draft the police complaint at the Ombudsman, in a statement said it is its duty to serve clients seeking legal advice.
Mr. Gutierrez noted that the solicitor has generally acted as the lawyer of government agencies before the courts.
“Helping prepare a complaint-affidavit that will initiate a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice falls way outside its mandate,” he added.
Police last week filed a complaint of inciting to sedition, cyberlibel, libel, estafa, harboring a criminal and obstruction of justice against Ms. Robredo and other people whom it accused of circulating a video linking President Rodrigo R. Duterte and his family to illegal drugs.
Also sued was Peter Joemel Advincula, the self-confessed drug dealer who was featured in the videos.
Mr. Advincula had sought legal assistance in filing charges against members of the drug syndicate he formerly belonged to. Later that month, he surrendered to police over estafa charges, and tagged the Liberal Party as behind the propaganda.
The Liberal Party has accused the government of political harassment and persecution, saying the complaint is based on lies.
Human Rights Watch on Wednesday said governments and donors should press the Duterte administration to end its persecution of critics of its “murderous war on drugs.” A conviction for incitement to sedition carries a maximum penalty of six years in jail. — Vince Angelo C. Ferreras
PRESIDENT Rodrigo R. Duterte on Thursday raised the reward money to P3 million for the capture of those responsible for the ambush of four policemen in Negros Oriental last week.
Mr. Duterte made the announcement in a speech in Ilocos Sur.
The Palace announced on Sunday that Mr. Duterte had offered a P1 million reward for the capture of the suspects. He later raised it to P1.3 million.
“I am raising it to P3 million,” he said in his speech in Ilocos Sur on Thursday.
The slain policemen were attacked while verifying the presence of communist rebels in Ayungon town. — Arjay L. Balinbin
Airports, trains, and buses
By Bienvenido S. Oplas, Jr.
WASHINGTON, DC — It’s my first time to land at Washington Dulles International Airport from Manila via Seoul-Incheon airport. The two previous times (2004 and 2009) that I went to Washington DC, I landed at Ronald Reagan Washington International Airport.
From Dulles to Washington DC proper, I took the bus-rail combination. It is safe, convenient and cheap, only $10 or about 1/6 of the taxi or Uber fare here; travel time for this combo is about one hour. When I went to Kuala Lumpur in May, I also took the train-bus combo from KL International Airport (KLIA) to my hotel in KL city center. Bus fare from KLIA to KL Sentral is about 12 ringgit or 1/3 of Ekspress train.
Metro rails are good complements to international airports. Metro Manila has one of the shortest rail network among developed and developing Asia, we need to have more.
The development and expansion of trains from international airports and seaports to and from Metro Manila was not covered by President Rodrigo R. Duterte in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) 2019 on Monday. Congress leaders should prioritize these.