By ELLEN T. TORDESILLAS WHILE everybody was trying to recover from the emotional performance of President Aquino in his 5th State-of-the-Nation address Monday night, pork barrel queen Janet Napoles was brought to Camp Bagong Diwa jail at the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology in Bicutan,Taguig. Reports said Napoles arrived at Bicutan from Fort Sto.
By ELLEN T. TORDESILLAS THAT was a strong statement that Luchi Cruz-Valdes, head of TV5’s news and public affairs department, unleashed against those who dragged her name in the Janet Napoles pork barrel scandal especially the Philippine Daily Inquirer who published the unverified information. Luchi’s name was mentioned in Inquirer’s May 18 issue as one
By ELLEN T. TORDESILLAS AMONG working journalists, we have a term “didal.” That is used when a PR (press relations officer) pockets the money intended for a reporter. So the PR’s principal- a government official, a businessman or anybody who is the subject of a news report – thinks that he has paid off
By ELLEN TORDESILLAS THE quote of the day from Thursday’s Senate Blue Ribbon hearing was Sen. Miriam Santiago’s “Ignorance can be treated, but stupid is forever. ” Santiago was spot on in her observation that Napoles could not be stupid considering the pork barrel operator’s rise from her humble beginnings in Basilan to her
By DANA BATNAG IT WILL be a much-anticipated media event, but the filing of complaints against senators and congressmen allegedly involved in the pork barrel scam is unlikely to result in fireworks or other earthshaking political upheavals. That’s because filing a complaint with the Ombudsman is just the start of a long process—one that
BY ELLEN TORDESILLAS TODAY, photos of the President with Janet Napoles, the alleged brains of the mindboggling pork barrel scam, made the rounds in Facebook and Twitter. They were taken at the same occasion where Napoles daughter, Jeane, had her photo with President Aquino- after the national thanksgiving mass for the canonization of
BY ELLEN TORDESILLAS THERE’S a politician I know who welcomes people having a picture taken with him marking them perhaps as a potential vote come Election Day. In a few parties that I attended where Vice President Jejomar Binay was a guest, I noticed that he was always accompanied by a photographer. The VP
By JONATHAN DE SANTOS THE rallyists had their own calls and campaigns and clung to their own advocacies, but for a few hours at least, they were united in calling for the abolition of the Priority Development Assistance Fund and the prosecution of lawmakers and individuals involved in the allocation of public money to fake
By ELLEN TORDESILLAS RETIRED Marine Colonel Ariel Querubin remembers that when Jenny Napoles, the pork barrel queen who is now a fugitive, wrote a check for forty thousand pesos for the interest of the money she owed his late first wife, Loretta (Cercenia), she didn’t know how to spell the word “forty.” “Ano nga ang
