I don’t know why people or their organization go to extreme lengths in sending fake news through social media, which for me is total shamelessness. Last Monday Aug.17, 2020, a group that calls themselves UPSEAA Community send this long text message “No Sayonara” telling themselves that the President was off to Singapore and no one knows why because of a news blackout.
?Allow me to quote what they say, “The President bothered to leave for his people, not even a sayonara, adios patria adorada before disappearing. No word about who’s in charge while the President is away and he leaves behind a nation bewildered by lack of plan and lack of leadership while confronting the Covid pandemic and a full blown economic recession.” Let me end this quote here.
?I really hope that our government authorities can trace whoever wrote that fake news so they can be stopped. If there is anything that is happening within Malacañang, it is because Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) Secretary Eduardo Año was found to have COVID-19 – for the second time. We mistakenly thought that once you get COVID-19 and passed it with flying colors, you are already immune from getting it again. Now we know that one can never be immune from COVID-19.
?Of course this dire situation prompted a drastic change in the hectic schedules of the President. This is why presidential spokesman Harry Roque said at a press briefing, “The President is in perpetual isolation because no one can come close to him. I think I told you that whenever we meet with him, there is a velvet rope that keeps him at least six feet away from everyone else. So, no one can really come close to the president.” The President was supposed to hold a face-to-face meeting with members of the Inter-Agency Task Force on the Management of Emerging Infectious Disease (IATF) to discuss quarantine classifications of areas, but this meeting did not push through because of the current situation.
?To counter this fake news, Malacañang responded by sending a simple photo with the President having a simple dinner with his family and his partner holding a Manila Bulletin newspaper with the date Aug. 17, 2020. Of course the creators of that fake news were saying that the photo was photo shopped! At this point, I would like to believe that the people behind this piece without any doubt hate this President. I’m not saying that they are trolls of the Yellowtards, but certainly they are not far from them.
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?I was already wide awake taking my morning medicines when a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck Masbate province and other areas in Bicol and the Visayas early Tuesday morning, killing a retired police officer while injuring 24 others, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs). Actually I learned about this earthquake from the comments of my Facebook friends who felt it. But somehow sitting in my sofa, I didn’t feel the tremor at all despite its huge magnitude rating.
Then as the reports came in, the temblor occurred at 8:03 a.m. and was centered seven kilometers southeast of Cataingan, Masbate where it was felt at Intensity 7, which is classified by Phivolcs as “destructive.” While an earthquake is always destructive, perhaps because Cataingan, Masbate is not really a high-urban area, so the damage wasn’t really as bad there unlike if it happened in Cebu City.
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I read in the Philippine STAR the other day that the Tourism Investment and Enterprise Zone Authority (TIEZA), as well as tourism groups are appealing to the House of Representatives to prioritize the financial support for the tourism stakeholders under the sector’s P10-billion allocation in the proposed Bayanihan to Recover as One or Bayanihan 2 bill in a bid to help revive the industry. This was a letter that TIEZA chief operating officer Pocholo Paragas sent to House Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano.
In truth, there is no question that one of the biggest losers because of our five-month lockdown is the Tourism economy. Many big or small hotels, including Resorts, and related businesses like transportation, tour guides and hotel resort employees have been severely disadvantaged by the loss of our Tourism economy. If you ask me, they should be the first to be given support by our Congress, not TIEZA, which has many properties that they acquired since the Marcos time… however because of mismanagement, they have only resulted in more losses. So TIEZA’s letter should not be priority.
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Email: vsbobita@gmail.com