MANILA (UCAN): A Catholic lay worker in Timor-Leste, a psychiatrist in India, a peace advocate in the Philippines and a social worker in Vietnam are among this year’s winners of the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award.
 
Carmencita Abella, president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, said this year’s winners have been key in advancing causes to improve lives and transform societies across Asia. 
 

MANILA (UCAN): Some 48 environmental campaigners in the Philippines were murdered in 2017, a 71 per cent increase on the 28 killings in 2016. Most victims were tribal people trying to protect their ancestral lands from mining companies and plantation owners, according to a report, At What Cost?, from international non-government organisation, Global Witness.
 
That makes the Philippines the second most dangerous country in the world after Brazil with 57 murder cases, and Asia’s most dangerous.
 

The court decision came as a total shock for the two men and a woman accused of trafficking children in Angeles City to foreign sex tourists, while it is a victory for children and Philippine justice. The judge, Bernardita Gabitan-Erum of the Regional Trial Court Branch 61, Angeles City, handed down a 20-year sentence last February 2017 to each of the three convicted and levied a million peso fine on behalf f the victims. The traffickers were greedy and cheated the exploited children, Patricia and Vilma, out of two hundred pesos. This is their story.
 

On July 23, the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, warned the public during his third State of the Nation address that his two-year war on drugs would become even “more chilling.” 
 
Earlier that day, a group of activists heard Mass before taking to the streets of Manila armed with banners and placards calling for an end to extrajudicial killings, rallying for “democracy, justice, and freedom,” and demanding he step down from office.
 

MANILA (UCAN/VaticanNews): Philippine authorities have again ordered the immediate deportation of Australian missionary Sister Patricia Fox after she was declared an “undesirable alien” by the Bureau of Immigration in a 19-page resolution released on July 19, UCAN reported on July 20.
 
Bureau spokesperson, Dana Krizia Sandoval, said the board of commissioners decided that Sister Fox’s actions were “inimical to the interest of the state.”
 

MANILA (UCAN): Philippine trade union workers voiced their support for the Philippine Church’s declaration of July 17 to 19 as National Days of Fasting and Almsgiving in protest against a wave of killings and the president’s blasphemous attacks on God, as they began the People’s March for Justice, Democracy, Freedom and Just Peace, a weeklong march from the southern Tagalog region to the capital Manila.
 

MANILA (UCAN): Mindanao is now on the “cusp of peace” Orlando Cardinal Quevedo of Cotabato, said as the Philippine congressional body drafting legislation to create a new Muslim autonomous region in Mindanao, approved a final version of the Bangsamoro Organic Law late on July 18.
 

MANILA (Agencies): As he delivered his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on July 23, at the start of his third year in office, the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, Rappler reported that thousands of demonstrators from all sectors of society braved the threat of rain to protest among many things, the threat of constitutional change; labour issues;corruption in government; and the tragic, so-called war against drugs which has victimised the poor. 
 

MANILA (UCAN): An ecumenical peace group in the Philippines on July 11 marked the 33rd anniversary of the disappearance of a Redemptorist priest and leading figure in the resistance movement against the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
 
The Philippine Ecumenical Peace Platform paid tribute to Father Rudy Romano’s “contribution to the advancement of peace and human rights” in the country.