Filipino VP says she has contracted an assassin to kill the president if she herself is killed
Philippine Vice-President Sara Duterte said Saturday she has contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the Speaker of the House of Representatives if she herself is killed, in a brazen public threat that she warned was not a joke.
Lucas Bersamin, the country’s executive secretary, referred the “active threat” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to an elite presidential guards force “for immediate proper action.” It was not immediately clear what actions would be taken against the vice-president.
The Presidential Security Command immediately boosted Marcos’s security and said it considered the vice-president’s threat, which was “made so brazenly in public,” a national security issue.
The security force said it was “co-ordinating with law enforcement agencies to detect, deter and defend against any and all threats to the president and the first family.”
Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the May 2022 election, and both won with landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity.
The two leaders and their camps, however, rapidly had a bitter falling out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Duterte resigned from the Marcos cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body.
Like her equally outspoken father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, the vice-president became a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s ally and cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters.
Duterte’s latest tirade was set off by the decision by House members allied with Romualdez and Marcos to detain her chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of hampering a congressional inquiry into the possible misuse of her budget as vice-president and education secretary. Lopez was later transferred to a hospital after falling ill and wept when she heard of a plan to temporarily lock her up in a women’s prison.
In a pre-dawn online news conference, an angry Sara Duterte accused Marcos of incompetence as a president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the House Speaker, in expletives-laden remarks.
When asked about concerns over her security, the 46-year-old lawyer suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill her. “Don’t worry about my security because I’ve talked with somebody. I said ‘if I’m killed, you’ll kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,”‘ the vice-president said without elaborating and referring to the initials that many use to call the president.
“I’ve given my order, ‘If I die, don’t stop until you’ve killed them.’ And he said, ‘yes,”‘ the vice-president said.
Under the Philippine penal code, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threatening to inflict a wrong on a person or his family and is punishable by a jail term and fine.
Amid the political divisions, military chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. issued a statement with an assurance that the 160,000-member Armed Forces of the Philippines would remain non-partisan “with utmost respect for our democratic institutions and civilian authority.”
“We call for calm and resolve,” Brawner said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who will try to break our bonds as Filipinos.”
The vice-president is the daughter of Marcos’s predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, whose police-enforced anti-drugs crackdown when he was a city mayor and later as president left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead in killings that the International Criminal Court has been investigating as a possible crime against humanity.
The former president denied authorizing extrajudicial killings under his crackdown but has given conflicting statements. He told a public Philippine Senate inquiry last month that he had maintained a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of southern Davao city.
Published at Sat, 23 Nov 2024 21:45:22 +0000
COP29 agrees on $300B-a-year deal for developing countries to curb, adapt to climate change
Countries at the COP29 climate change conference agreed on a deal to inject at least $300 billion US annually in humanity’s fight against climate change, aimed at helping poor nations cope with the ravages of global warming at tense United Nations climate talks in the city where industry first tapped oil.
The money will go to developing countries who need the cash to wean themselves off the coal, oil and gas that causes the globe to overheat, adapt to future warming and pay for the damage caused by climate change’s extreme weather.
It’s not near the full amount of $1.3 trillion that developing countries were asking for, but it’s three times the $100 billion-a-year agreement from 2009 that is expiring.
Delegations at the conference, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, said this deal is headed in the right direction, with hopes that more money flows in the future.
“Everybody is committed to having an agreement,” Fiji delegation chief Biman Prasad said as the deal was being finalized. “They are not necessarily happy about everything, but the bottom line is everybody wants a good agreement.”
COP29, the 29th annual UN Climate Change Conference, kicked off this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, and for the third year in a row, representatives from B.C.’s First Nations joined the Canadian delegation. Six members from the First Nations Climate Initiative are at COP29, participating in the event and delivering a presentation at the Canada Pavilion.
It’s also a critical step toward helping countries on the receiving end create more ambitious targets to limit or cut emissions of heat-trapping gases that are due early next year. It’s part of the plan to keep cutting pollution with new targets every five years, which the world agreed to at the UN talks in Paris in 2015.
The Paris Agreement set the system of regularly ratcheting up the goals to fight climate change as a way to keep warming under 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. The world is already at 1.3 C, and carbon emissions keep rising.
Countries also anticipate that this deal will send signals that help drive funding from other sources, like multilateral development banks and private sources. That was always part of the discussion at these talks — rich countries didn’t think it was realistic to rely only on public funding sources — but poor countries worried that if the money came in loans instead of grants, it would send them sliding further backward into debt that they already struggle with.
“The $300-billion goal is not enough, but is an important down payment toward a safer, more equitable future,” said World Resources Institute president Ani Dasgupta. “This deal gets us off the starting block. Now the race is on to raise much more climate finance from a range of public and private sources, putting the whole financial system to work behind developing countries’ transitions.”
It’s more than the $250 billion a year that was on the table in the first draft of the text, which outraged many countries and led to a period of frustration and stalling over the final hours of the summit. After that initial proposal was soundly rejected, the Azerbaijan presidency brewed up a new rough draft of $300 billion. It was never formally presented but was also dismissed roundly by African nations and small island states, according to messages relayed from inside.
The several different texts adopted early Sunday morning included a vague but not specific reference to last year’s Global Stocktake approved in Dubai. Last year there was a battle about first-of-its-kind language on getting rid of oil, coal and natural gas, but instead it called for a transition away from fossil fuels. The latest talks only referred to the Dubai deal but did not explicitly repeat the call for a transition away from fossil fuels.
Countries also agreed on the adoption of Article 6, creating markets to trade carbon pollution rights — an idea that was set up as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement to help nations work together to reduce climate-causing pollution. Part of that was a system of carbon credits, allowing nations to put planet-warming gasses in the air if they offset emissions elsewhere. Supporters said a UN-backed market could generate up to an additional $250 billion a year in climate financial aid.
Reaching an agreement at <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/COP29?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#COP29</a> was essential to keep the 1.5°C global warming limit alive.<br><br>I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome – on both finance & mitigation – to meet the scale of the great challenge we face, but the agreement reached provides a base on which to build.…
—@antonioguterres
Despite its approval, carbon markets remain a contentious plan because many experts say the new rules adopted don’t prevent misuse, don’t work and give big polluters an excuse to continue spewing emissions.
“What they’ve done essentially is undermine the mandate to try to reach 1.5,” said Tamra Gilbertson, climate justice program co-ordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network. Greenpeace’s An Lambrechts called it a “climate scam” with many loopholes.
With this deal wrapped up as crews dismantle the temporary venue, many have eyes on next year’s climate talks in Belem, Brazil.
Published at Mon, 11 Nov 2024 09:11:59 +0000
