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Things hot up in the Philippines with the recent election of President Duterte. Gun battles rage as suspected drug traffickers are shot down in Manila and elsewhere.

At least 45 dead after new Philippines president pledged major operation against drugs and criminality.

At least 45 people with suspected links to drug trafficking have been killed in four days since Rodrigo Duterte was sworn in as president of the Philippines, according to authorities.

ABS-CBN, the Philippines' largest TV channel, reported on Monday that at least 29 drug and robbery suspects were killed in Bulacan province, near the capital Manila, since June 30, when Duterte took over the presidency .
Authorities said the suspects resisted arrest and shot at police officers.

Nine other killings were reported in Manila.

Duterte won the election in May on a platform of crushing crime. But his rhetoric has alarmed many who hear echoes of the country's authoritarian past.

After his oathtaking on Thursday, Duterte said he wanted to get rid of drug traffickers, telling supporters to "go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful"...
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/r ... 52796.html

Some people here will probably remember a similar mass culling of alleged drug dealers next door in Thailand

he did the same as mayor of a city just up the road and crime (apart from murders) dropped by 60% or some such.
his daughter is now the mayor

lots of non drug related scores will be settled like this

The Philippines, where bodies pile up, but no one talks
Last week the number of people killed since July 1 reached 2,400: about 900 died in police operations, and the rest are "deaths under investigation", a term human rights activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings...
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/09/p ... 49971.html

need a duterte + terminator meme

Barack Obama cancels meeting after Philippines president calls him 'son of a whore'

Barack Obama has cancelled a meeting with the president of the Philippines after Rodrigo Duterte appeared to call him a “son of a whore”.
The move followed a warning from Duterte to the US president to keep off the subject of extrajudicial killings in his country’s brutal drug war when they were due to meet on Tuesday at a regional summit in Laos. Duterte told a press conference that Obama “must be respectful”.

The firebrand president was answering a reporter’s question about how he intended to explain the extrajudicial killings to Obama, before boarding a plane to Laos for the Association of South-east Asian Nations summit.

“You must be respectful. Do not just throw away questions and statements. Son of a whore, I will curse you in that forum,” Duterte was quoted by as saying by Agence-France Presse. “We will be wallowing in the mud like pigs if you do that to me.”

When his comments reached the Obama camp, the US president initially said he was asking his staff to find out whether holding the meeting as scheduled would be useful...

But hours later the decision was made to cancel, a White House spokesman said. Instead, Obama will meet with South Korean president Park Geun-hye.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... -son-whore

Very good article in "Der Spiegel", a German weekly on the drug war. They interviewed a female killer-for-hire who said that many of the hits were ordered by cops because they either had a certain quota to fill or because they were getting rid of people they used to deal drugs and they are now getting scared for their jobs and lives.

Amazingly, Duterte recently chose to insult Obama is the crudest language that came into his head.

Usually, Filipinos have an ambivalent/schizoid relationship with the U.S.A., typified by the saying:

"Yankee go home! And take me with you!"

On undiplomatic language:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... rack-obama

"You Egyptians breed too much" said Prince Philip, stuck in Cairo's horrendous traffic.