Marcos asks half a million civil servants to resign Premium

Manila, Sept. 29: President Ferdinand Marcos ordered to-day the compulsory resignation of all civil servants — estimated at 500,000 — to enable the Philippine Government to get rid of corrupt, inefficient, ignorant and non-essential workers. To signal the start of the revamp of the Government’s civil service under his Martial Law proclamation, Mr. Marcos announced he had dismissed or accepted the resignations of more than 450 officials including several judges and a number of internal revenue and customs officers. The President said that under the new service rules he was enforcing all Government workers throughout the country must submit their resignations by October 15 to allow their immediate superiors to retire them on a selective basis. In other developments on the seventh day of Martial Law, Mr. Marcos directed the Motion Picture Censor Board to ban all films depicting crime, sex, violence and revolutionary themes from Fillipino screens.  The seven-point directive also instructed the Board to bar “films which tend to undermine the faith and confidence of the people in their Government and/or duly constituted authorities.” The Government last night ordered the indefinite closure of all high schools, colleges and universities to enable military authorities to purge them of suspected communist subversives.