Philippine President Gloria Arroyo has named her manicurist to the board of a major government agency, her spokesman said yesterday.
The appointment of Anita Carpon to the board of a body responsible for lending tens of millions of dollars for the housing needs of government employees has drawn sharp criticism.
Arroyo’s spokesman Gary Olivar defended Carpon’s new posting and confirmed her other job as the president’s stylist.
“Having a relationship of trust with the president should not count against someone,” Olivar said.
Carpon is a government employee and was named to the agency’s board to represent low-paid workers the fund is serving, he said.
“The president wants the poorer government employees represented in the board because they are the ones with the housing needs,” Olivar said.
Media reports say Carpon will receive a monthly salary of about 130,000 pesos (US$2,900), double that of the president herself.
Olivar would not confirm the figure.
The appointment was criticized by the camp of presidential candidate Benigno Aquino, who is leading in the polls ahead of a May 10 election.
Butch Abad, Aquino’s campaign manager, accused Arroyo of acting without regard for the public good.
“She further deepened the culture of political patronage in this country by putting people who are loyal to her in positions which are delicate, without any regard to the qualifications of these people,” Abad said.
He said this followed a recent rash of controversial Arroyo appointments in the judiciary and the top military ranks, less than three months before the end of her term.
“These appointments are meant to put people in positions of influence in the hopes that if she is out of power, she will still be able to exercise some degree of influence,” Abad said.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000