Japan and North Korea will hold talks next week in China, officials said, after Pyongyang failed to produce a report on its probe into the Cold War kidnappings of Japanese citizens.
Sep 242014
Regional Philippines News
Aug 232014
Philippine police arrested eight suspects and are hunting more in connection with an Internet extortion racket that has victimised hundreds of people in Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau, an official said Saturday. This is the second large-scale arrest of suspects allegedly for “sextortion” — using the Internet to lure foreigners into sending them compromising material which they can use for blackmail, said Jhoanna Fabro, spokeswoman of the national police anti-cybercrime division. The eight suspects were arrested and five minors taken into custody following a raid on Thursday in towns just outside Manila, she said. But Fabro warned that an undetermined number may have escaped before the raid. “There are other targets but we weren’t able to get them,” she told AFP. About 400 people from Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau were targeted by the group and the arrests were made due to complaints from victims, Fabro said. The suspects operated from towns in Bulacan province, about 30 kilometres (17 miles) from Manila. They used social media websites such as Facebook to meet people overseas and then used video call services such as Skype to engage in “cybersex,” the police said. “Unknown to the victim, these acts were recorded. Once the suspect captured sufficiently lewd video footages, he/she would stop the call instantly. Immediately, the victim would receive messages… from the suspect, threatening the victim that his lewd acts were video recorded with a video link to prove it,” the cybercrime division said in a statement. The suspect would then demand Read More …
Jul 152014
Tens of thousands of people in the Philippines hunkered down in evacuation centres while three people were reported missing Tuesday as a typhoon pounded its eastern coast amid warnings of giant storm surges and heavy floods. The eye of Typhoon Rammasun struck Legazpi city in the eastern Bicol region in the early evening, with Manila and other heavily populated regions expecting to be hit on Wednesday afternoon, the state weather service said. “Roofing sheets are flying off the tops of houses here… the wind is whistling,” Joey Salceda, the governor of Albay province in Bicol said over ABS-CBN television. He said there had been no reports of deaths while damage to the region — an impoverished farming and fishing region of 5.4 million people — was expected to be “moderate”. However, Bicol police said three local men were listed as missing off the island of Catanduanes on Tuesday, a day after they pushed out to sea to fish and failed to return. The Philippines is hit by about 20 major storms a year, many of them deadly. The Southeast Asian archipelago is often the first major landmass to be struck after storm build above the warm Pacific Ocean waters. In November Super Typhoon Haiyan unleashed giant seven-metre (23-foot) high storm surges that devastated the coasts of the eastern islands of Samar and Leyte, killing up to 7,300 people in one of the nation’s worst ever natural disasters. More than 96,000 families were moved to evacuation centres Tuesday as a precaution, Read More …
Jul 052014
The leader of the Philippines’ Catholic Church, which routinely denounces abortion and contraception, called for the clergy on Saturday to listen more and condemn less, in the latest sign of a liberal shift in the powerful institution. Church leaders exert vast influence in the conservative Philippines, Asia’s bastion of Catholicism and the only state apart from Vatican that still outlaws both divorce and terminations. But with many modern Filipino Catholics embracing attitudes that were once considered taboo or frowned upon, and the more conciliatory tone of the Vatican under Pope Francis, there are signs that the Philippine church is softening its stance. Speaking at an annual assembly of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, where he is president, Archbishop Socrates Villegas said a change of tone would be a fitting welcome for the pope, who is expected to visit the Philippines next year. “Perhaps we can reconsider our approach to solving the problems of family and life by listening more to the wounded and the grieving broken homes rather than condemning divorce and abortion and contraception at every opportunity,” Villegas said. “Perhaps we can reach out to more people by stretching our minds and lowering our fences and listening… without being judgemental or punitive.” In 2012 President Benigno Aquino signed a law requiring government health centres to hand out free condoms and birth control pills, in a major defeat for the church, which fought a 15-year campaign against any form of family planning laws. The law took effect this Read More …
Jun 302014
More than 200 US and Filipino Marines launched a mock amphibious assault Monday on an enemy beachfront close to a disputed South China Sea outcrop. Amid driving rain and rough waves, five amphibious assault tanks roared off from a US destroyer anchored off Zambales province, about two hours drive northwest of Manila, and landed on the soggy beach peppered with imaginary foes. US Marines scanned the horizon on scopes mounted on assault rifles as they dramatically emerged from the hatch, while their Filipino counterparts took firing positions on the ground. Shots later rang out towards enemy positions in an assault that lasted about an hour. The drill was part of week-long, annual Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training that the United States bilaterally holds with Asian allies, including the Philippines, to boost maritime security. About 1,000 US and Filipino troops and five warships, including an American missile destroyer, took part in the training, which began last week. Philippine fleet commander Jaime Bernardino told reporters at the start of the war games last week that they were designed to upgrade the Filipino navy’s capability in guarding the country’s long coastline. “These are the gaps that we would like to address (to) make sure we detect (foreign vessels) properly, we intercept them and we neutralise them if necessary,” he had said. Monday’s exercise took place on an uninhabited beach near a naval outpost on Zambales on Luzon island, 220 kilometres (137 miles) east of Scarborough Shoal on the South China Sea. The shoal, Read More …
Jun 282014
The Philippines stepped up security at key installations and all public areas in parts of the country’s volatile south Sunday following a terror threat, police said. The national police said they had received reliable information on a “possible terrorist threat” on the southern island of Mindanao, particularly in Davao, the country’s third largest city with a population of more than two million. All police forces were alerted “to beef up security operations against possible infiltration of suspected members of said reported threat groups”, the national police said in a statement. It did not mention the nature of the possible attack, nor identify any group, although parts of Mindanao are plagued by Al-Qaeda-linked Muslim militants as well as communist guerrillas waging a decades long insurgency. The police said security forces would conduct checkpoints and patrols and also carry out inspections at transport terminals, commercial centres and vital installations. The threat alert came as minority Muslims in the mostly Catholic nation began celebrating the holy fasting month of Ramadan. It also came just over two weeks after police captured Khair Mundos, one of the country’s most wanted Islamic militants from the Abu Sayyaf group who was also on the US government’s terror watch list. Mundos is a key leader and fund raiser for the Abu Sayyaf, which is blamed for the country’s worst terrorist attacks, including a 2004 bombing of a ferry in Manila Bay that left more than 100 dead. The Philippine military said it was also hunting Abdel Basit Usman, Read More …
Jun 232014
Security forces have captured four members of the Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group in the southern Philippines, including one accused of the 2002 kidnapping of Christian missionaries who were later beheaded, police said Monday. It was the latest in a series of reported arrests of senior Abu Sayyaf men as operations against the group are intensified. Three of the four were arrested in a coastal village near the port city of Zamboanga on Mindanao island on Sunday night, said city police chief Senior Superintendent Angelito Casimiro. “We recovered from them documents of a plan to kidnap a local businessman and a son of a shipyard owner,” Casimiro said. “The plot was thwarted and we have heightened the security alert around the city,” he said. Earlier on the same day, Casimiro said combined military and police intelligence units arrested Sattar Sabtula, an Abu Sayyaf member involved in the 2002 kidnapping of a group of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries on the nearby island of Jolo, a rebel stronghold. Two of the missionaries were beheaded while four others were freed after months in captivity following ransom payments, police said. On June 11 Khair Mundos, listed as one of the “most wanted” terrorists by the US government which put a $500,000 reward on his head, was captured in a Manila suburb. A week later two of Mundo’s followers, who were linked to various kidnappings for ransom, were captured in Zamboanga. The Abu Sayyaf is a small gang of Islamic militants blamed for the country’s worst terrorist Read More …
Jun 212014
One hundred convicts armed with machetes wander through a vast prison without walls in one of the Philippines’ most beautiful islands, a unique approach to reforming criminals. Two token guards with shotguns slung on their shoulders relax in the shade nearby as the blue-shirted group of inmates chop weeds at a rice paddy at the Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm on Palawan island. But Arturo, who is 21 years into a life sentence for murder, has no plans to escape, preferring to keep his chances of an eventual commutation or even a pardon. “I don’t want to live the life of a rat, panicked into bolting into a hole each time a policeman comes my way,” the 51-year-old inmate, whose full name cannot be used in keeping with prison regulations, told AFP. Surrounded by a thick coastal mangrove forest, a mountain range and a highway, the 26,000-hectare (64,000-acre) Iwahig jail is one of the world’s largest open prisons, more than two times the size of Paris. A single guard sits at its largely ceremonial main gate, routinely waving visitors through without inspection. A shallow ditch, but no walls, is all that separates the 3,186 prisoners from the outside world. A mere 14 kilometres (nine miles) away is Puerto Princesa, a city of 250,000 people and a top tourist destination as the gateway to an island famed for stunning dive sites, a giant underground river system and beautiful beaches. A steady stream of local and foreign tourists visit Iwahig’s quaint, pre-World Read More …
Jun 072014
Donald Sterling, the embattled owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has decided to fight to keep the NBA team and pull out of a $2 billion sale deal, according to reports.
Jun 022014
Tens of thousands of students in the central Philippines began the school year on Monday in steamy tents and other makeshift classrooms, seven months after Super Typhoon Haiyan devastated the region. The government said it had hoped to rebuild or repair 20,000 classrooms before students returned, but new regulations requiring higher building standards so schools withstand future typhoons led to delays. “These are the birth pangs of making sure that resiliency… would be the basis for better structures,” presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda said in Manila. “In the meantime, the students will be studying in structures which are not yet resilient, but we hope for their understanding.” At the Panaluran Central School in Tacloban, a coastal city which bore the brunt of the typhoon, hundreds of sweat-soaked children crammed into three temporary classrooms made from steel frames and corrugated iron sheets as the temperature outside hit 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit). “It is pitiful to see them packed like sardines,” said housewife Gina Villamor as she anxiously waited for her children, aged 6 and 10, to finish their first day at school. “It is so hot in there. And there is no electric fan.” Haiyan, the most powerful typhoon ever recorded on land, left more than 7,000 people dead as it tore across the central Philippines in November last year. Storm surges higher than trees that swept kilometres inland compounded the devastation, destroying entire towns. More than 1,000 schools in the typhoon zones were damaged or destroyed, according to the education Read More …