MANILA: A Philippine youth theater club staged a musical at a Manila park on Sunday, challenging President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs.
The 20-minute show features a casket salesman whose funeral parlour is doing brisk business as corpses pile up.
But the salesman and his friends end up as statistics, falling to vigilante-style killings that have gripped the Southeast Asian nation and alarmed the international community.
“The play talks about the problem in the community with the war on drugs and the irony of it, that a few earn money amid this war and all the killings,” artistic director Jessie Villabrille told Reuters.
More than 8,000 suspected drug addicts and dealers have been killed since Duterte took office on June 30, some in police operations but many others in mysterious circumstances.
The authorities vehemently deny wrongdoing and blame vigilantes and drug gangs for the killings.
Criticism of the war on drugs does not sit with Duterte or his supporters. The brash leader chastised the United Nations and former US president Barack Obama numerous times or criticizing his anti-drugs program.
Duterte won the presidency by a wide margin on the promise of wiping out drugs and criminality.
The theater group plans to take the musical to schools and stage a longer version next month.
Filipino youth stage musical against Duterte’s deadly drugs war
Filipino youth stage musical against Duterte’s deadly drugs war
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
