MANILA (Agencies): Catholic bishops of the Philippines will lead this year’s Walk for Life, scheduled for February 24, to protest the spate of drug-related killings in the country, UCAN reported.
 
Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo of Manila said the protest walk will also highlight other anti-life issues such as the declaration of martial law in Mindanao.
 

MANILA (UCAN): The relics of St. Therese of the Child Jesus arrived in Manila, the Philippines, on February 18 to a shower of white and red rose petals.
 
Devotees waved yellow flags as the reliquary containing the saint’s relics entered Manila’s San Fernando de Dilao parish church.
 
Father Rolando dela Cruz said that the people in his parish were honoured to have been chosen as one of the places to receive the relics.
 

MANILA (UCAN): Members of a Philippine ecumenical church group, Dambana, started the Pray, Fast, Build Lenten programme and other Lenten activities to raise money to help build tribal schools in the southern region of Mindanao.
 
The group, an ecumenical disaster response network of faith-based organisations, has been inviting young people to join the project.
 
Miro Sabino, a 15-year-old son of a church worker, donated his savings during the Christmas break to the programme, saying he is happy to be able to help.

MANILA (Agencies): “I welcome you and if you want to find me guilty, so be it. Find a country where they kill people with a firing squad. And I’m ready,” said the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, reacting to the announcement on February 1 that the International Criminal Court (ICC) will conduct a “preliminary examination” into killings in the Philippines linked to the government’s war on drugs.
 

BUTUAN CITY (UCAN): Church leaders in Mindanao have joined calls for an investigation into what caused the devastating floods that displaced thousands of families and killed at least 16 people on February 12.
 
Landslides and floods triggered by heavy rain dumped by tropical depression Sanba (Basyang) displaced at least 37,370 individuals in the southern Philippine region of Caraga.
 
The scale and speed of the flooding took many by surprise.
 

MANILA (UCAN): In what looks like payback for supporting his presidential run, Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, named Eduardo Manalo, executive minister of the Iglesia ni Cristo (Church), special envoy for Filipino migrants’ concerns.
 
In an appointment paper dated February 13, the presidential palace in Manila announced that Manalo would hold the position from January 30, until 29 January 2019.
 

HONG KONG (SE): “In the name of God, stop the killings! May the justice of God come upon those responsible for the killings! For the good of the country, stop the killings! The toll of ‘murders under investigation’ must stop now”, was the cry for peace from Bishop Socrates Villegas, the archbishop of Lingayen-Dagupan and the president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, urging the Duterte administration for a stop to the killing of drug suspects. 
 

The young man, Jake, 22-year-old and single laughed when I asked him whom he voted for in the local elections for mayor. He said he abstained, but he went to the house of the mayor and received a payment all the same. “Why not?”, he reasoned, “It was for free everyone was going there.” 
 

MANILA (UCAN): The Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled on February 6 that there were sufficient grounds for the extension of military rule in the region following a terrorist attack in the city of Marawi last year.
 
“Public safety requires the extension (of martial law) as shown by facts presented by the Armed Forces of the Philippines,” the Supreme Court ruling said.