DAVAO, Philippines/MANILA:Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has a problem with women, says the woman who has known him longer than perhaps any other: his sister Jocellyn.
“He’s a chauvinist,” she told Reuters in a recent interview. “When he sees a woman who fights him, it really gets his ire.”
Then Jocellyn ran through a list of Duterte’s female critics that included his vice president, a prominent senator who is now in jail and the head of the Philippines Supreme Court.
All three have sparred with Duterte after denouncing his brutal war on drugs, which has killed thousands of people in the Asian nation since he took office in June 2016.
Duterte has joked about rape, insulted the Pope and baffled friends and foes with often contradictory public statements. Neither this, nor his profanity-laden reactions to women critics, seem to have dented his popularity among Filipinos.
The 72-year-old president is a self-confessed womanizer who once told a large gathering of local officials, “I can’t imagine life without Viagra.”
On the campaign trail last year, he joked about the gang rape of an Australian missionary who was killed in a prison riot. Speaking to Philippine troops in May, he said he would take responsibility for any rape they might commit.
But women’s rights advocates also praise him for handing out free contraceptives in his hometown, Davao City, where he was mayor for 22 years, and for championing a reproductive health bill opposed by the country’s influential Catholic Church.
In a recent statement, even Human Rights Watch — a fervent critic of the drug war — acknowledged Duterte’s “strong support” for legislation aimed at protecting and promoting women.
After nearly 15 months in power, he remains highly popular with men and women alike, according to the latest survey by Manila-based pollster Social Weather Stations.
While foreigners frown at Duterte’s rape jokes, says Gina Lopez, a former environment secretary in Duterte’s male-dominated cabinet, Filipinos judge him by his actions not his words.
“When I see him dealing with women in the cabinet or whatever, he has been very above-board, very decent,” she told Reuters.
She said this decency also once extended to Vice President Leni Robredo, who has publicly fallen out with Duterte. She is from an opposition party and was elected separately.
“He really liked Leni. They got along and he was always flirting,” said Lopez. “That’s what men do, right?“
In a statement to Reuters, the president’s office called Duterte “an advocate of women’s rights” who had launched a “massive campaign against gender bias” while mayor of Davao.
As president, it added, he had “hand-picked the best and brightest women” for his cabinet. Three of the country’s 25 cabinet secretaries or ministers are women.
RELUCTANT DAUGHTER
Duterte spends up to four days a week in his far-flung hometown Davao, ruling a nation of 100 million people not from the presidential palace in the capital, Manila, but from a modest house shaded by a jackfruit tree. Duterte was mayor of Davao for 22 years.
He sleeps until lunchtime, holds cabinet meetings infrequently and sometimes announces major policies without forewarning senior officials, leaving them scrambling to catch up.
Duterte’s volatility has baffled Washington, which has long seen the Philippines as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism. He has courted Beijing and publicly berated the United States in rambling speeches.
Much of Duterte’s venom is reserved for women who oppose him.
In August, he called Agnes Callamard, a UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, a “daughter of a whore” after she condemned the police shooting of a teenage drug suspect.
“He’s a misogynist,” said Senator Leila de Lima, who spoke to Reuters at a police detention facility in Manila.
De Lima was arrested in February on drugs charges she says were trumped up as part of a presidential vendetta. “To him, women are inferior,” she said. “It’s totally insulting to him that a woman would be fighting him.”
According to Jocellyn Duterte, Duterte is also fighting with the woman he hopes will cement his political legacy: his daughter Sara.
Sara Duterte reluctantly replaced her father as mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines when he became president. Father and daughter barely speak, said Jocellyn.
“I know in his quiet moments he considers himself a failure as a father because of Sara fighting with him,” she said.
Jocellyn said she had her own problems with her older brother but they now get along. They have two other brothers.
ANYTHING BUT SUBMISSIVE
Jocellyn, who refers to the president as “the mayor,” said Duterte still eats the same simple food their mother Soledad once cooked: cheap fish simmered in vinegar.
She also traces Duterte’s authoritarianism to Soledad, who punished her children with a horsewhip or made them kneel at an altar for hours.
“You can see that in the mayor,” says Jocellyn. “Sometimes people perceive it as arrogance or call it close to being a dictator. But we grew up in that atmosphere.”
Their father Vicente, also a politician, was often absent, and the young Duterte saw the bodyguards, police and soldiers around him as role models, his sister said. He grew up in a macho culture where wives and daughters were expected to be submissive, Jocellyn said.
His daughter Sara is anything but. In 2011, during her first term as Davao’s mayor, she was caught on camera punching a local official who angered her.
In 2016, Sara ran as mayor again, but only because she was “pressured” by her father’s supporters, she told Reuters. “If it were up to me, I would not have run,” she said.
She said she now only saw her father on special occasions, such as birthdays and Christmas, but denied they had differences. “He’s very busy,” she said.
Duterte and his daughter have “a normal Filipino parent-child relationship which has its own share of ups and downs,” said the president’s office in its statement.
Like her father, Sara is blunt, down-to-earth and thronged by admirers at public appearances in Davao.
She told Reuters she wanted to practice law and, once her three-year term as mayor was up, had no wish or intention to continue in politics.
But in a country famous for political dynasties spanning many generations, Duterte wants his daughter to “preserve what the family has done for the city,” said Jocellyn.
“He is trying to instill in Sara that it is our legacy,” she said. “Maybe she needs more time.”
All the president’s women: Duterte’s fiercest critics and a surly political heir
All the president’s women: Duterte’s fiercest critics and a surly political heir
Trump tells Jersey Shore crowd he’s being forced to endure ‘Biden show trial’ in hush money case
- The former president’s extraordinary legal woes, which include three other unrelated criminal cases, have emerged as a central issue in the campaign
WILDWOOD, N.J.: Sandwiched between his appearances in court, Donald Trump headed on Saturday to the Jersey Shore, where he repeatedly blamed President Joe Biden for the criminal charges he’s facing as the presumptive nominees prepare to face off in the November election and called his New York hush money case “a Biden show trial.”
Blasting the Democratic president “a total moron,” Trump before a crowd of tens of thousands repeatedly characterized the cases against him as politically motivated and timed to harm his ability to campaign.
“He’s a fool. He’s not a smart man,” Trump said of Biden. “I talk about him differently now because now the gloves are off.”
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, drew what his team called a “mega crowd” to a Saturday evening rally in the southern New Jersey resort town of Wildwood, 150 miles (241 kilometers) south of the New York City courthouse where he has been forced to spend most weekdays sitting silently through his felony hush money trial.
Lisa Fagan, spokesperson for the city of Wildwood, told The Associated Press that she estimated a crowd of between 80,000 and 100,000 attendees, based off her own observations on the scene Saturday, having seen “dozens” of other events in the same space.
Trump was joined on stage by several high-level endorsers including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor, who is still listed as a registered sex offender after pleading guilty in New York in 2011 to misdemeanor criminal charges of sexual misconduct and patronizing an underage prostitute.
The beachfront gathering, described by Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., as the largest political gathering in state history, was designed to serve as a show of force at a critical moment for Trump, who is facing dozens of felony charges in four separate criminal cases with the election less than six months away.
Hours before he was scheduled to take the stage, thousands of Trump loyalists donning “Never Surrender” T-shirts and red “Make America Great Again” hats crowded onto the sand between the boardwalk and carnival rides to greet the former Republican president.
“The everyday American people are 100 percent behind him,” said Doreen O’Neill, a 62-year-old nurse from Philadelphia.
“They have to cheat and smear him and humiliate him in that courtroom every single day,” O’Neill said. “This country is going to go insane if they steal the election again.”
Trump’s extraordinary legal woes, which include three other unrelated criminal cases, have emerged as a central issue in the campaign.
Trump has repeatedly accused the Biden administration and Democratic officials in New York of using the legal system to block his return to the White House. Prosecutors allege the former president broke the law to conceal an affair with a porn actor that would have hurt his first presidential bid.
On Saturday, Trump posited that even those whom he accuses of politically motivated prosecutions didn’t bring every case they could have, pointing to the boosts his campaign has sustained with each wave of charges.
“I heard they were going to do a couple of other things and they said from Washington ... ‘we’re indicting him into the White House,’” Trump said. “They said, ‘Don’t do it.’”
While Trump seized on his legal woes Saturday, a judge’s gag order — and the threat of jail — limit Trump’s ability to comment publicly on witnesses, jurors and some others connected to the New York trial, which is expected to consume much of the month. The judge in the case already has fined Trump $9,000 for violating the order and warned that jail could follow if he doesn’t comply.
The order doesn’t include references to Judge Juan M. Merchan, whom Trump called “highly conflicted” or District Attorney Alvin Bragg, both of whom Trump said are “doing the bidding for crooked Joe Biden.”
Trump’s responsibilities as a defendant have limited his ability to win over voters on the campaign trail.
He spent last week’s off-day from court in the general election battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan. And he was campaigning with tens of thousands of voters Saturday in New Jersey, a reliably Democratic state. Parts of New Jersey have deep-red enclaves and the southern shoreline in particular draws tourists and summer homeowners from neighboring Pennsylvania, a key swing state.
Biden, meanwhile, opened his weekend with a series of fundraising events on the West Coast.
He avoided Trump’s legal challenges — as he has done consistently — while addressing donors in Seattle. Instead, the Democratic president focused on Trump’s recent interview with Time magazine in which the Republican former president said states should be left to determine whether to prosecute women for abortions or to monitor their pregnancies.
Saturday’s visit to the New Jersey Shore resort wasn’t Trump’s first.
While president, Trump held a rally there in January 2020 to thank Van Drew, the New Jersey congressman who had just left the Democratic Party for the GOP as a rebuke for the former president’s first impeachment.
Trump drew a crowd at the time that lined the streets, filled bars and supported numerous vendors in what is usually a sleepy city in the winter. This time, the summer season is around the corner for the resort known for its wide beaches and boardwalk games and shops.
Wildwood is in New Jersey’s 2nd District, which Van Drew has represented for three terms and covers all or part of six counties in southern New Jersey. It went for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 after earlier backing Barack Obama.
Trump is set to return to the courtroom next week, when key prosecution witness Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer-turned-foe, is expected to take the witness stand. Last week, he was visibly angry at times as he was forced to sit through testimony from former porn actor Stormy Daniels, who described a sexual encounter with the former president in shocking detail.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying internal Trump Organization business records. The charges stem from paperwork such as invoices and checks that were deemed legal expenses in company records. Prosecutors say those payments largely were reimbursements to Cohen, Trump’s attorney, who paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet.
The prosecution could rest its case by the end of the week. It’s unclear if Trump himself will take the stand when the defense presents its case.
Back on the Jersey Shore, 65-year-old Pat Day said she felt some urgency to see Trump in person on Saturday.
“We want to see Trump before they take him out,” said Day, who was visiting from the Florida Keys. “I’m worried. They’re going to do everything they can so he doesn’t get elected again.”
US university apologizes after contractors spray paint in faces of pro-Palestine protesters
LONDON: The president of a Cleveland university in the US state of Ohio has apologized to students after hired contractors sprayed pro-Palestinian demonstrators in the face earlier this week while attempting to cover up a mural, local media has reported.
Students at Case Western Reserve University painted the Advocacy and Spirit walls on Monday night with the Palestinian flag and messages that included “I dream of breaking the siege,” “Come together in peace” and the number of Palestinian children killed in Gaza since war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October, Cleveland.com said.
Prompted by an unprecedented attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israel retaliated with an offensive that has so far killed almost 35,000 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.
A video showed the students, who are accusing the contractors of assault, trying to block the contractors from painting over the wall by standing in front of it, and one student wearing a face shield, was seen completely covered in white paint.
The video was shared by the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com by Case’s Students for Justice in Palestine group.
The contractors had been hired by the university’s president, Eric Kaler, early on Tuesday because “the administration said the messaging was ‘threatening, intimidating and antisemitic,’” Cleveland.com said, adding that he later released a statement apologizing to the community for the incident, saying he was “disturbed by what occurred.”
He added: “Let me be clear: No students — or any individuals — should ever be treated this way, especially on a campus where our core values center on providing a safe, welcoming environment. This is not who we are as an institution, and I am deeply sorry this ever occurred.”
Palestinian-Ameican student, Ameer Alkayali, 18, who was seen being completely sprayed in the video, said: “I stood against the wall, and the painters asked ‘Should we continue?’ The cops showed general confusion and didn’t tell them to stop. So, as seen in the video, they continue to just paint right over us.
“They told us to not put our hands in front of the machine because it’s dangerous. And we put our hands up, and they still continued to paint on our hands and sprayed us with it?”
Alkayali, who has been protesting with Case students sine they set up their encampment last week has also previously been detained and released by local police and now says “plans to take legal action against Case’s administration and its public safety department,” Cleveland.com reported.
“We were coughing, and it didn’t come out of my skin for hours,” he said. “Like it’s still in my hair. I can see it under my nails, and there was no sort of medical or any assistance with the situation after from Case or local police.”
Case said it was investigating the incident and since then, the wall has been painted over with a pro-Israeli message, saying: “They call for intifada so we call them terrorists.”
“Kaler said the college will ‘hold individuals responsible for this behavior, including the failure of our own officers to intervene,’” Cleveland.com said.
On Wednesday, “Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and the city’s police chief, Annie Todd, urged Kaler and his administration to think of the students’ rights,” the news outlet said.
“We support 1st Amendment rights and implore CWRU leadership to consider this and think about how the decisions they make and the actions they take – especially against those who are abiding by the law – will influence some of the progress we have collectively made as a city. At the same time, we urge individuals to demonstrate peacefully,” Bibb and Todd said.
Sit-ins and demonstrations demanding an end to the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip continued to spread across several American and European universities, while local media reported that US police have arrested or detained more than 2,400 students who participated in protests in support of Palestine.
Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters rally in Madrid
- Spain is one of Israel’s harshest critics in Europe and leading efforts to recognize a Palestinian state
MADRID: Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched through Madrid on Saturday to demand a ceasefire in war-torn Gaza and a severing of ties between Spain and Israel.
Numbering around 4,000 according to the authorities, protesters held up banners and signs condemning a “genocide” in Gaza and lauding the “resistance” of the Palestinian people.
Palestinians have been “crammed” in southern Gaza and “now they are displaced again from one place to another while there are no more safe places,” said 57-year-old Jaldia Abubakra, referring to Israeli evacuation orders in the city of Rafah.
Around 30 organizations called for the rally before the 76th anniversary of what Palestinians call the “Nakba” (“catastrophe“), when 760,000 people fled their homes during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation.
Spanish students have set up peaceful sit-ins and camps at universities in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia in recent days, mirroring similar pro-Palestinian campus movements across the United States and Europe.
Earlier this week, Spanish universities expressed willingness to suspend ties with any Israeli educational institution that failed to express “a clear commitment to peace.”
Spain is one of Israel’s harshest critics in Europe and leading efforts to recognize a Palestinian state.
The Gaza war started with Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Militants also seized hostages, of whom Israel estimates 128 remain in Gaza, at least 36 of whom the military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,971 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Mali national dialogue recommends longer military rule
- Months-long nationwide consultations, boycotted by many of the opposition, culminated with several recommendations, including extending the transition to five years from two, effectively prolonging the junta’s rule to 2027
BAMAKO: Participants in Mali’s national dialogue have recommended extending the military-led transition to democracy by three years and allowing junta leader Assimi Goita to stand in the eventual election.
The West African country has been under military rule since a coup in 2020, and tensions have risen over the junta’s failure to stick to a promised timeline for the return to constitutional rule.
Months-long nationwide consultations, boycotted by many of the opposition, culminated with several recommendations, including extending the transition to five years from two, effectively prolonging the junta’s rule to 2027.
BACKGROUND
Mali has been under military rule since a coup in 2020, and tensions have risen over the junta’s failure to stick to a promised timeline for the return to constitutional rule.
The substantial delay is likely to deepen concerns about democratic backsliding in West and Central Africa, where there have been eight coups over the past four years.
On the security front, participants in the consultations advised the authorities to be open to dialogue with Islamist armed groups and engage with all Malian armed movements.
On the Sahara Desert’s southern fringe, Mali has been plagued by violence since 2012, when militants hijacked an uprising by the Tuareg groups who complained of government neglect and sought autonomy for the desert region they call Azawad.
Deep insecurity, economic hardships, election delays, and the authorities’ recent move to limit political activities have stoked frustration with the junta in some quarters. In April, an alliance of political parties and civil society organizations formed and refused to participate in the national dialogue.
Germany urged to explain Schengen ban on British Palestinian academic
- Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who has been volunteering in Gaza hospitals, was blocked entry to Germany and France in recent weeks
LONDON: A human rights group has urged Germany’s government to publicly announce if it has imposed a Schengen-wide entry ban on a British Palestinian surgeon and academic.
Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who has been volunteering in Gaza hospitals, was blocked entry to Germany and France in recent weeks and, on Thursday, Dutch officials told Palestine’s ambassador to the Netherlands he would not be allowed to enter the country for an event at the Palestinian Embassy in The Hague on May 15.
When blocked from entering France last Saturday, Abu-Sittah was placed in a holding zone at Charles de Gaulle airport before being expelled, according to French Sen. Raymonde Poncet Monge, who had invited him to speak at the senate.
Abu-Sittah posted to social media and told Human Rights Watch that French authorities at the airport had informed him he was barred due to a year-long ban imposed by Germany, without his knowledge.
A French official told the Associated Press that the German ban would be applied across the entire 29-country Schengen area.
“Dr. Abu-Sittah has seen firsthand the atrocities taking place in Gaza,” said Yasmine Ahmed, UK director at Human Rights Watch. “Germany should immediately explain why it has denied him entry and imposed this far-reaching ban on a leading health professional to speak in Berlin, Paris and The Hague about what he witnessed in Gaza.”
The prevention of Abu-Sittah from sharing his experience of treating patients in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war ravaging the enclave risked “undermining Germany’s commitment to protect and facilitate freedom of expression, and assembly and to nondiscrimination,” HRW said.
HRW also urged the UK and Scottish governments to push Germany into explaining Abu-Sittah’s Schengen-wide visa ban.
“In the midst of ongoing atrocities in Gaza, countries should be prioritizing ending complicity and promoting accountability,” Ahmed said. “Instead, Germany, in blocking Dr. Abu-Sittah from sharing his experience, is trying to block citizens from even hearing about the grave abuses taking place in Gaza. The UK government should immediately raise the reported ban with their German counterparts.”
