Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has personally assured him that Beijing would not allow him to be removed from office.
“The assurances of Xi are very encouraging: We will not allow you to be taken out from your office and we will not allow the Philippines to go to the dogs,” Duterte said in a speech on Tuesday.
Duterte is approaching the end of the second year of his six-year term as president. While the Philippine constitution bars presidents from serving more than one term, Duterte has repeatedly rejected calls from his allies to try to seek another term. He has even said that he would like to cut short his time in office.
Photo: EPA
Duterte, who did not say when Xi made the remarks, met with Xi on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia in China’s Hainan Province on April 10. It was Duterte’s third meeting with Xi since he took office at the end of June 2016.
Philippine Senator Francis Pangilinan, leader of the opposition Liberal Party, questioned whether Xi’s assurances were the reason Duterte is making use of substantial Chinese loans and has been reluctant to criticize Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea.
“Is China support for this administration to ensure its iron clad grip on power? Whose interest is being pursued by depending on China?” Pangilinan said in a statement.
Duterte spent most of his hour-long speech aboard a navy vessel justifying his decision to set aside a July 2016 international court ruling dismissing China’s claims to more than 80 percent of the South China Sea in a case brought by his predecessor Benigno Aquino.
Recalling how “the ever cool guy” Xi convinced him to focus on restoring relations between the two nations, he said the more “you remain meek and humble” with the likes of Xi, the more you stand to gain.
Duterte said his goal regarding the South China Sea is to get whatever he can, such as a joint exploration agreement for about 1.2 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
In what could be a prelude to forging military ties with China, Duterte said that if the Philippines ever ran out of soldiers, he would ask Xi to send over three battalions of fully geared troops.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS