FORMER president Fidel Ramos and Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte met in Davao recently, keeping alive speculations that he could be gunning for the presidency despite his loud and repeated disavowal of any such plan.
And is FVR supporting or, at least encouraging, the mayor?
Jess Dureza, the former press secretary, in his Oct. 26 posting from Davao said yes. His bases?
-- FVR, coming out of a closed-door meeting with Digong (the mayor), said “the best is soon to come.”
-- When asked if it was time for someone from Mindanao should be president, FVR said, “It’s about time!”
-- At a dinner hosted by the mayor, FVR wore a t-shirt emblazoned with “DIGONG,” under which was Ramos’s signature with the thumb-up sign and the line “Ato ni pres,”
suggesting, Dureza said, “this is our president”;
-- FVR took off his shirt with the word “PHILIPPINES” at the back and made Digong wear it to show, Dureza said, Duterte was for the country, not only for Davao.
Price of beef,a ‘kill’ victim
WOULD YOU BELIEVE...
... SEN. GRACE POE, in her Senate speech Monday, Oct. 27, said there are 15 million children who are hungry and malnourished, noting that “today, a minimum wage worker in Cebu City must work 5 1/2 hours to buy a kilo of beef.”
Minimum pay of Central Visayas non-agricultural workers ranges from P295 to P340
(agricultural workers get less: P275-P322). At P140 per kilo for second-class cut beef and P200-P340 per kilo for prime-cut beef, how much do actual conditions in the market vary from Poe’s source?
... A LOCAL POLICE OFFICIAL said a gun-for-hire’s services can be had for as low as P2,000 per hit.
In 1963, when newspaper editor Antonio Abad Tormis was shot dead by an assassin along Colon St. in Cebu City, police learned the killer was paid P400 (four hundred pesos).
Adjusted for inflation and considering there were no agents or middlemen then, the P2,000 per target these days is cheaper than in the sixties, says a police source.
Define Annabelle’s PG (‘patay gutom’)
KINSA KAHA NO?
-- WHEN ANNABELLE RAMA, entertainment talent manager, publicly berated her actress daughter Ruffa Gutierrez, over her choices in her love life, preferring “PG” (“patay gutom”) men to those with stable jobs, who was the “over-protective” mom referring to?
She could be referring to her past boyfriends Zoren Legaspi, Robin Padilla and John Lloyd Cruz or the guy she’s currently dating, a French-Arab businessman named Jordan Mouyal. Did Zoren, Robin and John Lloyd lead hand-to-mouth lives? How about this foreign businessman? It would be interesting to know what would qualify a man as “PG” to Annabelle.
-- THERE’S TALK that Team Rama, instead of gaining new members from the City Council, might lose one or two instead to rival BOPK.
Possibly the two councilors who were allegedly “taken to task” by the mayor when they raised “a problem of governance” to him. The mayor later apologized, a City Hall watcher says, but the hurt could rankle.
[bzzzzz@sunstar.com.ph or paseares@gmail.com]