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Poland's border with Belarus sees decrease in illegal immigration attempts by 96%
(www.euronews.com)
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This collective effort shows the strength of united Filipinos.
CAGAYAN DE ORO — In times of crisis, expect Filipinos to try to alleviate the suffering of those battered the most.
Drivers and riders of public transportation have been severely affected by runaway prices of petroleum products. Intending to help, concerned citizens, organizers, and youth advocates brought back the pandemic-era community pantries.
Read:Solons, transport workers slam ‘useless’ energy emergency declaration
Through community pantries, people can donate goods which the severely affected could get based on what they need. These are made possible through collective efforts, reminiscent of how such initiatives were established in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The revival started when community organizer Ana Patricia “Patreng” Non put up a community pantry at Maginhawa corner Magiting Streets in Quezon City on March 26. She was the one who started it during the pandemic.
She put up a rack shelf and displayed some vegetables and rice, with the familiar phrase, “Magbigay ayon sa kakayahan, kumuha batay sa pangangailangan (Give what you can, get what you need).”
Non posted it on Facebook and it went viral. Other groups and citizens were encouraged to establish their own. There are now at least 12 community pantries in Luzon, according to Non’s March 28 Facebook post.
For her, the essence of community pantry has not vanished since 2021. It remains in the presence of relief operations, emergency responses, and community kitchens conducted to help fire and typhoon victims in the past years.
Understanding the struggle
In the southern part of Mindanao, the Youth Advocates for Pro-People Transportation (YAPPT), a network of young individuals and youth organizations opposing a bus project in Davao City, joined the solidarity. They went to public markets and called for donations for the community pantry they plan to establish.
Its volunteers also went to terminals and talked to the affected drivers to deepen their understanding of their present situation. The group learned that the jeepney drivers’ usual daily income was reduced to more than 50% due to oil price hikes, said Marlou Engreso, YAPPT spokesperson. “As they said, they would only get a net income ranging from P200-P500 (US$3.32-US$8.29).”
Read:Aid, other government measures not enough to cushion impacts of oil price hikes – groups
For YAPPT, putting up a community pantry means taking part in the drivers’ struggle.
Drivers of public transportation in Davao City get their goods from YAPPT Network’s community pantry on April 1, 2026. Photo from YAPPT’s Facebook page
Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (Kadamay), an urban poor group that also led a community pantry, wrote in a Facebook post that this collective effort shows the strength of united Filipinos in the face of adversity.
It also stressed that people should be united in echoing the transport sector’s urgent demands, including the abolition of value-added tax (VAT) and excise tax on petroleum products to reduce their prices; the repeal of the downstream oil deregulation law that prevented government control over oil pricing and distribution; and the stop of the West Asia conflict which brought the sudden increases in petroleum products.
On March 27, YAPPT joined the jeepney drivers and concerned organizations in the Davao region during the nationwide transport strike, highlighting these calls.
Unfazed
Initiators said that the community pantries aim to help those in need. During the pandemic, however, organizers were accused of having links with the communist movement.
Non was among those baselessly red-tagged. In Cagayan de Oro, the organizer of the Kauswagan community pantry, including journalist Leonardo Vicente Corrales, was also labeled as a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
A poster is displayed at a community pantry in Barangay Kauswagan, Cagayan de Oro, on April 21, 2021, labeling the organizer and a journalist as part of the communist movement. Photo courtesy of the SALiGAN sa CSSP Facebook page via the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines
The police’s reported questioning on community pantry organizers also drew flak, prompting an official of the Philippine National Police-Human Rights Affairs Office in 2021 to apologize.
Read:Cops visit community pantries, question organizers
When asked about this, the YAPPT spokesperson told Bulatlat that the past occurrences were part of the considerations in the planning. He said they even sought the approval of the drivers they talked to about the community pantry they wanted to initiate.
Engreso said that they reminded themselves that there is nothing wrong with helping. “Above all, we should not stop being a humane community just because of intimidation.”
In a video posted at the Community Pantry PH Facebook page on March 27, Non said that people behind these relief efforts were also victims of calamities. Helping and demanding accountability, she said, can coexist. (DAA, RVO)
The post Community pantry in the face of adversity appeared first on Bulatlat.
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As Trump Pushes 'Polluters First Agenda,' 2027 Budget Blasted as 'Bloody New Deal'
(www.commondreams.org)
US President Donald Trump continued his "war on science" on Friday with his budget request for the 2027 fiscal year, which critics have denounced as "grossly irresponsible" for its proposed $1.5 trillion in military spending and "a moral obscenity" because of its cuts to social and scientific programs.
In the lead-up to Trump's request to the Republican-controlled Congress, as he and Israel waged war on Iran, Sean Manning, a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program, wrote that "if this Bloody New Deal actually passes, it could give unparalleled increases in financial power to defense contractors and support for the political work they already do to influence Congress."
"Sane voices need to act now, building opposition to this unprecedented plan," Manning argued. "Progressives should be unflinching in defining this proposal as a blank check for the same contractors who cannot deliver ships on time, munitions at scale, or clean audits. Pouring funds into a defense sector that has repeatedly failed basic tests of accountability will not miraculously produce innovation."
In addition to railing against the budget for the Pentagon—the world's largest institutional climate polluter—after it was officially released on Friday, progressive voices directed attention to some particular proposed cuts and their consequences.
To fund the Pentagon's massive war-making budget, "the Trump administration is requesting the cancellation of billions of dollars in funds for renewable energy, environmental justice, carbon removal, space science, and climate change education," Emily Gardner reported Friday for Eos, the American Geophysical Union's news magazine.
As Katherine Tsantiris, Ocean Conservancy's director of government relations, pointed out, among the targeted federal agencies is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The proposed cuts, she said, "fly directly in the face of the clear bipartisan support Congress showed earlier this year by protecting funding for this critical agency."
"Slashing NOAA's budget would weaken weather forecasting, disrupt fisheries management, and stall ocean research—putting American lives, livelihoods, and global scientific leadership at risk," Tsantiris continued. "Congress should once again reject these cuts to ensure NOAA has the resources it needs to support our economy, protect our ocean, and keep Americans safe."
Quentin Scott, federal policy director at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network Action Fund, argued that "this proposed budget is exactly what America does NOT need when facing rising energy bills, more frequent extreme weather, and rising insurance rates."
"By gutting funds for climate science and innovation, the budget jeopardizes our ability to understand and respond to the accelerating climate crisis," Scott said. "Defunding climate research at NOAA doesn't make the problem go away—it makes those hazards more dangerous and more expensive. Families across the country are already paying the price through higher utility bills, flooding, and storm damage. This budget would only make those burdens worse."
Big Oil-backed Trump's budget proposal came on the heels of devastating flooding in Hawaii and as high temperatures hit the Western United States. It also followed an annual World Meteorological Organization report on the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which last month led UN Secretary-General António Guterres to declare that "every key climate indicator is flashing red."
Devastating.
[image or embed]
— Scott Kardel aka Palomar Skies (@palomarskies.bsky.social) April 3, 2026 at 12:29 PM
Trump also proposed slashing the Environmental Protection Agency's budget—amid calls to oust Administrator Lee Zeldin for "so brazenly" betraying the EPA's core mission to "protect human health and the environment." Trump also proposed cutting the agency's budget. Noting that attack, Climate Action Campaign director Margie Alt described the president's plan as "anything but a serious" one and "a declaration of who this administration is willing to let suffer."
In a nod to some of the rich executives whose campaign cash helped Trump return to power after promising to scrap his predecessor's climate policies and to enact a "drill, baby, drill" agenda, Alt also called it "a reiteration of this president's devotion to fossil fuel interests."
"This budget would slash the EPA budget by 52%, gutting the agency's ability to protect the air our children breathe, the water our families drink, and the communities that already bear the worst of extreme weather and climate change," she said. "It is a deliberately callous choice to remove the protections that keep families safe, healthy, and shielded from the impacts of pollution and climate change."
According to Alt:
This is not just a continuation of last year's rollbacks. It is an escalation of the Trump administration's Polluters First Agenda and their assault on public health safeguards. Since January 2025, among other abuses, this administration has fired 600 National Weather Service staff, proposed eliminating critical climate research institutions, waived mercury pollution standards for 60 dirty power plants, and gutted the Clean Air Act. This budget is the Trump administration's payback for their big oil, coal, and gas friends and contributors. It slashes resources for clean energy, it zeroes out environmental justice, and pushes oil, gas, and coal, at a time when prices for these energy sources are skyrocketing.
Never before have we had an administration that so blatantly treats American lives as expendable, as proven by this budget. Congress must reject this inhumane budget in full. The American people deserve a federal government that protects them, not one that trades their health, their safety, and their futures for big oil, coal, and gas profits.
As Gardner reported, Trump's budget also "proposes consolidating the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act, but did not provide details outside noting the program would be housed at the Department of the Interior," among other changes and cuts.
Chris Westfall, senior government relations legislative counsel at Defenders of Wildlife, said that "the administration is yet again demanding that an overworked and grossly understaffed federal workforce do more with less. The proposed budget recklessly consolidates US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries without the needed resources to preserve scientific expertise, opens our lands and waters to extractive industries, and hollows out the already strained workforce that provides crucial conservation work."
"This proposed budget pushes us further in the wrong direction—potentially triggering even more staff layoffs and providing less resources for wildlife conservation, which are pivotal to recovering America's imperiled species," Westfall warned. "Our nation's lands and the wildlife that depend on them for habitat deserve better than to be ignored by agencies that are shells of their former selves."
The president's proposed attack on endangered species came just days after the administration's so-called "God Squad" voted unanimously for an exemption allowing fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico to ignore policies intended to protect them. In response, Andrew Bowman, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, said that "I cannot stress enough how unprecedented and unlawful this action is."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
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