Deadly bus blast hits southern Philippines

Military spokesman Lt. Col. John Paul Baldomar said seven individuals were initially hurt in the blast. (Shutterstock/File)
Short Url
Updated 12 January 2022
Follow

Deadly bus blast hits southern Philippines

MANILA: An explosion on a bus killed at least one child and injured six other people in the southern Philippines on Tuesday, a military official has confirmed, as authorities launched an investigation into what has been described as a “terroristic act.” 

Seven individuals were initially hurt in the blast on Tuesday morning on the national highway in Cotabato province, military spokesman Lt. Col. John Paul Baldomar said. 

“So far no group has claimed responsibility for the attack. (The) post-blast investigation is ongoing to determine what type of explosive was planted at the rear end of the bus,” he told reporters. 

Among the victims is a five-year-old boy, who was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical condition and later succumbed to his injuries. Baldomar said an infant and a three-year-old are also among the wounded. 

Police Chief MSG Randy Hampac, a spokesman for the local police in Aleosan town, where the incident took place, described it as “plainly a terroristic act” in a radio interview. 

Authorities have yet to identify any suspects as of Tuesday afternoon. Local media outlets initially reported that the explosion was triggered by an improvised explosive device. 

The attack came just two days after the government imposed stricter security measures ahead of the 2022 election period in the Philippines. 

Philippine National Police Chief Gen. Dionisio Carlos said on Sunday that some 14,000 military and police personnel had been deployed across the country to implement a nationwide ban on carrying firearms, and to prevent election-related violence. In addition, at least 2,000 checkpoints have been established at strategic locations all over the country.


Former Philippine president Duterte arrested for crimes against humanity

Updated 5 sec ago
Follow

Former Philippine president Duterte arrested for crimes against humanity

  • Duterte was arrested after landing at Manila’s international airport following a brief trip to Hong Kong
  • Duterte is still hugely popular among many in the Philippines, and he remains a potent political force
MANILA: Former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte was arrested Tuesday in Manila by police acting on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant citing crimes against humanity tied to his deadly war on drugs.
The 79-year-old faces a charge of “the crime against humanity of murder,” according to the ICC, for a crackdown in which rights groups estimate tens of thousands of mostly poor men were killed by officers and vigilantes, often without proof they were linked to drugs.
“Early in the morning, Interpol Manila received the official copy of the warrant of the arrest from the ICC,” the presidential palace said in a statement.
“As of now, he is under the custody of authorities.”
The statement added that “the former president and his group are in good health and are being checked by government doctors.”
Duterte was arrested after landing at Manila’s international airport following a brief trip to Hong Kong.
Speaking to thousands of overseas Filipino workers there on Sunday, the former president decried the investigation, labelling ICC investigators “sons of whores” while saying he would “accept it” if an arrest were to be his fate.
The Philippines quit the ICC in 2019 on Duterte’s instructions, but the tribunal maintained it had jurisdiction over killings before the pullout, as well as killings in the southern city of Davao when Duterte was mayor there, years before he became president.
It launched a formal inquiry in September 2021, only to suspend it two months later after Manila said it was re-examining several hundred cases of drug operations that led to deaths at the hands of police, hitmen and vigilantes.
The case resumed in July 2023 after a five-judge panel rejected the Philippines’ objection that the court lacked jurisdiction.
Since then, the government of President Ferdinand Marcos has on numerous instances said it would not cooperate with the investigation.
But Undersecretary of the Presidential Communications Office Claire Castro on Sunday said that if Interpol would “ask the necessary assistance from the government, it is obliged to follow.”
Duterte is still hugely popular among many in the Philippines who supported his quick-fix solutions to crime, and he remains a potent political force. He is running to reclaim his job as mayor of his stronghold Davao in the May mid-term election.
Charges have been filed locally in a handful of cases related to drug operations that led to deaths, only nine police have been convicted for slaying alleged drug suspects.
A self-professed killer, Duterte told officers to fatally shoot narcotics suspects if their lives were at risk and insisted the crackdown saved families and prevented the Philippines from turning into a “narco-politics state.”
At the opening of a Philippine Senate probe into the drug war in October, Duterte said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for his actions.
“I did what I had to do, and whether or not you believe it or not, I did it for my country,” he said.

Australian police say crime ring preyed on Jewish ‘vulnerability’

Updated 11 March 2025
Follow

Australian police say crime ring preyed on Jewish ‘vulnerability’

  • New South Wales Police said Tuesday that 14 people had been arrested and charged with 65 offenses, including taking part in a “criminal group,” arson and destroying property

SYDNEY: Australian police said Tuesday they have charged 14 members of an organized crime ring accused of menacing the country with attacks dressed up as religiously motivated hate crimes.
Jewish neighborhoods in Sydney city have in recent months seen synagogues daubed in anti-Semitic graffiti, buildings firebombed in the dead of night and cars torched by vandals.
Although the crime wave stoked fears about rising anti-Semitism in Australia, police said they no longer believed many of these incidents were driven by “ideology.”
Instead, police said it appeared to be an attempt by organized criminals to gain favor by carrying out high-profile attacks — and then tipping off authorities later.
New South Wales Police said Tuesday that 14 people had been arrested and charged with 65 offenses, including taking part in a “criminal group,” arson and destroying property.
“None of the individuals we have arrested... have displayed any form of anti-Semitic ideology,” NSW Police deputy commissioner David Hudson said Monday evening after a series of raids.
“I think these organized crime figures have taken an opportunity to play off the vulnerability of the Jewish community,” he added.
The most alarming incident was the discovery of explosives in an abandoned caravan alongside a purported list of Jewish targets.
At the time, NSW Premier Chris Minns said the caravan appeared to be part of a foiled “mass casualty” terror plot.
Police now believe it was nothing more than a carefully constructed “criminal con job.”
“I can reveal that the caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event, but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit,” senior officer Krissy Barrett said on Monday evening.
Police said they suspected the same “individual or individuals” were behind both the anti-Semitic attacks and the caravan hoax.
“It was about causing chaos within the community, causing threat, causing angst, diverting police resources away from their day jobs to have them focus on matters that would allow them to get up to, engage in other criminal activity,” said deputy commissioner Hudson.
“There are a variety of reasons why individuals do this.”


Arrest of Palestinian activist stirs questions about protections for students and green card holders

Pro-Palestinian protestors demonstrate in Lower Manhattan in New York City on March 10, 2025. (AFP)
Updated 11 March 2025
Follow

Arrest of Palestinian activist stirs questions about protections for students and green card holders

  • A green card holder is someone who has lawful permanent residence status in the United States
  • Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a message posted Sunday on X that the administration will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported”

WASHINGTON: The arrest of a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests of the war in Gaza has sparked questions about whether foreign students and green card holders are protected against being deported from the US
Mahmoud Khalil was arrested Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Homeland Security officials and President Donald Trump have indicated that the arrest was directly tied to his role in the protests last spring at Columbia University in New York City.
Khalil is being held at an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, while he awaits immigration court proceedings that could eventually lead to him being deported. His arrest has drawn criticism that he’s being unfairly and unlawfully targeted for his activism while the federal government has essentially described him as a terrorist sympathizer.
A look at what kind of protections foreign students and green card holders have and what might be next for Khalil:
Can someone with a green card be deported?
A green card holder is someone who has lawful permanent residence status in the United States.
Jaclyn Kelley-Widmer is a law professor at Cornell Law School who teaches immigration law. She said lawful permanent residents generally have many protections and “should be the most protected short of a US citizen.”
But that protection isn’t absolute. Green card holders can still be deported for committing certain crimes, failing to notify immigration officials of a change in address or engaging in marriage fraud, for example.
The Department of Homeland Security said Khalil was taken into custody as a result of Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.
Trump has argued that protesters forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting the Palestinian group Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been designated as a terrorist organization.
Khalil and other student leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest have rejected claims of antisemitism, saying they are part of a broader anti-war movement that also includes Jewish students and groups. But the protest coalition, at times, has also voiced support for leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Islamist organization designated by the US as a terrorist group.
Experts say that officials seem to indicate with their rhetoric that they are trying to deport Khalil on the grounds that he’s engaging in some sort of terrorist activity or somehow poses a threat.
Khalil has not been convicted of any terrorist-related activity. In fact, he has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
But experts say the federal government has fairly broad authority to arrest and try to deport a green card holder on terrorism grounds.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, green card holders do not need to be convicted of something to be “removable,” Kelley-Widmer said. They could be deported if the secretary of homeland security or the attorney general have reasonable grounds to believe they engaged in, or are likely to engage in, terrorist activities, she said.
But Kelley-Widmer said she’s never seen a case where the alleged terrorist activity happened in the US, and she questioned whether taking part in protests as Khalil did qualifies.
What did ICE say about why they were arresting him?
One of the key issues in Khalil’s case is what ICE agents said to his lawyer at the time he was arrested.
His lawyer, Amy Greer, said the agents who took him into custody at his university-owned home near Columbia initially claimed to be acting on a State Department order to revoke his student visa.
But when Greer informed them that Khalil was a permanent resident with a green card, they said they would revoke that documentation instead.
Kelley-Widmer said that exchange raises questions about how familiar the agents who arrested him were with the law or whether there was a “real disregard for the rule of law.”
“I think we should be really concerned that this is happening,” she said.
What are the next steps in his case?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a message posted Sunday on X that the administration will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
If someone is in the country on a student visa, the State Department does have authority to revoke it if the person violates certain conditions. For example, said Florida immigration attorney John Gihon, it’s quite common for the State Department to cancel visas of foreign students who get arrested for drunk driving.
But when it comes to someone who’s a lawful permanent resident, that generally requires an immigration judge to determine whether they can be deported.
Gihon said the next step is that Khalil would receive charging documents explaining why he’s being detained and why the government wants to remove him, as well as a notice to appear in immigration court.
Generally, he should receive those within 72 hours of being arrested, and then he would make an initial appearance before an immigration judge. That could take from 10 days to a month, Gihon said.
But he cautioned that right now he’s seeing extensive delays across the immigration court system, with clients often moved around the country to different facilities.
“We are having people who are detained and then they’re bounced around to multiple different detention facilities. And then sometimes they’re transferred across the country,” he said.
Khalil’s lawyers have also filed a lawsuit challenging his detention. A federal judge in New York City ordered that Khalil not be deported while the court considered his case. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

 


Judge temporarily blocks deportation of arrested Palestinian Columbia student

Updated 11 March 2025
Follow

Judge temporarily blocks deportation of arrested Palestinian Columbia student

  • On Monday, US District Court Judge Jesse Furman put a hold on his deportation “unless and until the Court orders otherwise”

NEW YORK: A US judge on Monday ordered that Palestinian Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil not be deported for now as part of US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on some anti-Israel protesters, and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday. Trump publicly denounced Khalil and said more arrests would follow. Khalil has been moved to a federal jail for migrants in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings, according to his lawyers and a US detainee database.
Demonstrators on the streets of New York City, the state attorney general and the American Civil Liberties Union have denounced his arrest by US Department of Homeland Security agents as an attack on free speech.
Police and hundreds of protesters briefly clashed in lower Manhattan and at least one person was detained, according to a Reuters witness. Khalil, who had held legal permanent resident status and was arrested Saturday, has been a prominent figure in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian student protest movement that set off campus demonstrations across the United States and around the world last year. Trump branded Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” on social media. On Monday, US District Court Judge Jesse Furman put a hold on his deportation “unless and until the Court orders otherwise.” Khalil’s lawyers also urged Furman to order Khalil’s return to New York. They accused the government of seeking to deprive Khalil of access to legal counsel by sending him far from New York.
Trump said on social media that Khalil’s “is the first arrest of many to come.”
The Trump administration has not said Khalil is accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump wrote that his presence in the US was “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.”
The Education Department on Monday sent letters to 60 US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and four University of California schools, warning them of cuts in federal funding unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus. Even before Khalil’s arrest, students say federal immigration agents have been spotted at student housing around Columbia’s Manhattan campus since Thursday, a day before the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts awarded to the school because of what it described as antisemitic harassment on and near Columbia’s New York City campus.
The federal agents have been trying to detain at least one other international student, according to the Student Workers of Columbia labor union. Spokespeople for DHS and ICE declined to answer questions about the union’s account, which Reuters was unable to independently verify.
A spokesperson for the Department of State said visa records are confidential under US law and so the department could not comment.

’CHILLING EFFECT’
On Saturday evening, agents from the Department of Homeland Security arrested Khalil in front of his wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, telling him his student visa had been revoked, according to Amy Greer, a lawyer for Khalil.
His wife showed the agents Khalil’s green card and they also threatened to arrest her if she did not leave her lobby, Greer said. They then said the green card was also revoked and handcuffed Khalil, Greer said.
Hours before his arrest, Khalil told Reuters he was concerned that the government was targeting him.
Khalil and other activists note that Jewish students are among the protest organizers, and say their criticism of Israel and its US government support is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism. Jewish faculty at Columbia held a rally and press conference in support of Khalil outside a university building on Monday, holding signs saying “Jews say no to deportations.” “There is a chill in the air. It’s a chill of fear and despair,” said Marianne Hirsch, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, who grew up in Romania as a child of Holocaust survivors. While the Trump administration has cited concerns over antisemitism, the president and his allies have themselves been accused of enabling antisemitism. Following a 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where some demonstrators carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Trump said there were “fine people on both sides.” Trump, who denies allegations of being antisemitic, also faced criticism in 2022 for dining with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

 


Gabon junta chief faces three challengers in election

Updated 11 March 2025
Follow

Gabon junta chief faces three challengers in election

  • Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, the last premier under ousted ex-president Ali Bongo Ondimba, is considered the strongest potential opponent to Oligui, who led the military coup that ended 55 years of Bongo family rule

LIBREVILLE: Gabon’s military leader Brice Oligui Nguema will face three challengers, including a former prime minister, in the country’s April 12 presidential election, according to the candidate list.

Alain-Claude Bilie By Nze, the last premier under ousted ex-president Ali Bongo Ondimba, is considered the strongest potential opponent to Oligui, who led the military coup that ended 55 years of Bongo family rule.

Lawyer and tax inspector Joseph Lapensee Essingone and doctor Stephane Germain Iloko Boussengui round out the final candidates list.

Interior Minister Hermann Immongault said 23 Gabonese had presented their candidacy, with only four “deemed admissible.”

Immongault did not detail the reasons for the 19 rejections, which include leading trade unionist and senator Jean-Remy Yama.

Oligui, who announced on March 3 that he would run for president, had pledged to hand the reins of power in the nation back to civilians.

But a new electoral code rubber-stamped by the transitional parliament in late January allowed army officers to stand for election, paving the way for his presidential tilt.

When filing his candidacy on Saturday, Oligui said that he had his request to abandon his general’s uniform for the election period — as required by procedure — granted by the Ministry of Defense.