Police Christmas bonuses and Duterte’s Fentanyl
PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT...
CHRISTMAS BONUSES DOLED OUT BY PRESIDENT DUTERTE TO POLICE OFFICIALS, ranging from P50,000 (senior superintendents down) to P100,000 (regional and provincial directors to P500,000 (PNP chief Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa.
And why chief Bato won’t disclose the source of Duterte’s spending: “Just don’t ask. Maybe from his intelligence funds.”
THE PLEA OF BATO FOR FORGIVENESS FOR THE KILLINGS IN THE DRUG WAR, which he said would continue. It was his Christmas wish, he said, for people to forgive the police. If the killings were the result of unlawful aggression in a legitimate police operation, there would no crime and no sin to forgive.
The fact, though, is that even the police make mo more pretense about the killings, not even the usual lip service to “human rights” and “due process of law.”
FENTANYL, THE OPIOID DRUG DUTERTE HAD BEEN TAKING FOR CHRONIC PAIN on his spine. The president himself said the drug as prescribed for him but it had been taken off when his doctor learned he taking more than he should.
Which prompted the comment from Sen. Antonio Trillanes that Duterte must have become “a drug addict.” Overdose on Fentanyl killed singer Prince last April. Sen. Leila de Lima, another Duterte critic, has another concern: medications for his illnesses might have seeped into the brain and affected what he’d say and do.
CEBU CITY DPS HEAD BOB CABARRUBIAS’S COMPLAINT ON THE SPEED OF THE SERVICE OF THE COURT ORDER closing the Inayawan, Pardo landfill: “Kusog pa sa kilat ang pag-serve ana... Nagkabulibuli sad ta. Di ta gusto ma-contempt.” Colorful language, particularly that idiom referring to genitals.
He apparently wanted the postal mail to do the service, which would’ve bought time for City Hall until after the holidays, maybe before next Lent.
HOW DUTERTE STEPPED UP HIS BRASH STATEMENTS ON KILLINGS, ANTI-U.S. STANCE, ETC. after it was announced that he made it to #74 in Forbes’ 2016 list of “Most Powerful People in the World.”
Forbes cited his propensity to speak out in raw language what he thinks, thus putting him in the headlines. Sure enough, he landed in the national broadsheets and even in the U.S. media. His “bye, bye America” rhetoric, repeated after a U.S. agency cut off aid to the Philippines, earned precious mileage in American newspapers and cable-TV news.