NEWS AT A GLANCE

Gabriela scores GMA, DTI for not heeding calls for price caps

Gabriela Women’s Party (GWP) this week lambasted President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) for their failure to impose price caps on Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and other petroleum products.

GWP said the Php1.70 per kilogram increase in the price of LPG is the seventh and the highest increase this year. The latest price brought the cost of an 11-kg LPG tank to as much as Php360.

Recently-proclaimed Representative Liza Maza of GWP said that the recent increases would drastically cut the family budget.  It would also result in higher prices of "carinderia food," an alternative meal for workers and families who now cannot afford to buy fish, meat and vegetables from the market.

Maza also accused President Macapagal-Arroyo of being “oblivious to the people’s woes as she busies herself consolidating political allies in attempts to produce credible results amid the slow canvass."

She added that aside from conducting protest actions against price hikes in the coming days, GWP would be calling for a review of the oil deregulation law when the 13^th Congress opens in July. 

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‘Assassination plot is a big Malacañang lie’ ¾ Ka Roger

Gregorio “Ka Roger” Rosal, spokesperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), belied the claim of National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales and the Philippine National Police (PNP) that the New People's Army (NPA) is plotting to assassinate opposition candidate Fernando Poe Jr.

In a statement sent to the press last June 17, Rosal said that the alleged plot is “another ludicrous knot in the string of malicious intrigues by the national security adviser and AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines)-PNP directed against the revolutionary forces as well as the regime's main foes in the still-unresolved electoral contest.”

The Poe assassination spin, he said, is just “the latest in a series of concoctions by Gonzales, AFP spokesman Lt Col. Daniel Lucero and PNP Director Gen. Hermogenes Ebdane. Ebdane's effort to convince the Kilusan ng Nagkakaisang Pilipino about the assassination threat was only laughed off by Poe's party, he noted.

According to Rosal, the series of psywar spins churned out by the NSA and the AFP-PNP are meant “to create intrigues against the revolutionary forces and the regimes electoral opposition and to stupefy the public in the face of mounting evidences of electoral fraud and apprehensions about the mandate of the incoming regime.”

  Bulatlat.com

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