The Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, has said he would have his son killed if drug trafficking allegations against the younger politician were true, and that the police who carry out the hit would be protected from prosecution.  Paolo Duterte, 42, appeared this month before a senate inquiry to deny accusations made by an opposition lawmaker that he was a member of a Chinese triad gang who helped smuggle in a huge shipment of crystal methamphetamine from China.

Duterte did not refer to the allegations specifically but reiterated his statement from last year’s election campaign that none of his children were involved in drugs, but they would face the harshest punishment if they were. “I said before my order was: ‘If I have children who are into drugs, kill them so people will not have anything to say,’” Duterte said in a speech on Wednesday night in front of government workers at the presidential palace in Manila. “So I told Pulong [Paolo’s nickname]: ‘My order is to kill you if you are caught. And I will protect the police who kill you, if it is true,’” he said.

Duterte, 72, won the presidential elections on a brutal law-and-order platform in which he promised an unprecedented campaign to eradicate illegal drugs in society by killing up to 100,000 traffickers and addicts. Since he assumed office in the middle of last year, police have reported killing more than 3,800 people in anti-drug operations while thousands of others have been murdered in unexplained circumstances.(theguardian)…[+]

The European parliament’s Brexit negotiator has launched a scathing attack on Boris Johnson, saying his recent criticism of young voters who feel allegiance to Europe was “old-fashioned” and “nonsense”. Guy Verhofstadt told a special meeting of three committees in the Irish parliament that it was perfectly possible to feel European while at the same time feeling allegiance to your country of birth.  “Some British politicians – not to name Boris Johnson – criticise their countrymen and women for wanting to keep their European identity. He accuses them of ‘split allegiance’. I think this is a binary, old-fashioned and reductionist understanding of identity. I think we need to be smarter, more open and more inventive then that,” he said.

“It’s nonsense to talk about split allegiance. It’s perfectly possible to feel English, British and European at the same time. As it is perfectly normal to be a Dubliner, Irish and European at the same time,” he said. “It is this position that needs to be defended by our European Union just as the European Union needs to [make sure] there is no return to the past, to hard borders on our continent, and certainly not to a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.” Verhofstadt’s attack comes after the foreign secretary’s Daily Telegraph article in which he said lack of allegiance to the country by some voters drove the leave result in the EU referendum last year.(theguardian)…[+]

The Catalan president has accused the Spanish government of effectively suspending the region’s autonomy and declaring a de facto state of emergency. Police officers raided Catalan government offices on Wednesday and arrested 12 senior officials in a bid to stop an independence referendum being held in less than two weeks’ time. Carles Puigdemont described the raids as a “a co-ordinated police assault” that showed that Madrid “has de facto suspended self-government and applied a de facto state of emergency” in Catalonia.

Speaking after an emergency ministerial meeting, Puigdemont vowed the poll would go ahead, adding: “We reaffirm our peaceful response. The Spanish government has crossed a red line and become a democratic disgrace.” The mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, tweeted: “Searching public bodies and arresting officials for political reasons is a democratic scandal. We defend Catalan institutions.”(theguardian)…[+]

More than 1.1 million people who sought asylum in Europe during the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since the second world war were still waiting up to two years later to hear whether they would be allowed to stay, according to a study. In the first Europe-wide analysis of the status of asylum seekers who arrived in Norway, Switzerland and the 28-member EU during the 2015-16 crisis, the Pew Research Center estimated more than half were still in limbo in December last year.

The research also produced individual country data showing that how fast applications were handled varied dramatically according not just to the nationality of the asylum seeker but to the country in which they filed their demand, with Hungary and Greece proving particularly slow. With countries working through the backlog at wildly different rates and asylum seekers continuing to arrive, the researchers said the most recent available figures showed pending asylum applications still numbered 990,500 in June this year. The study analysed data from Eurostat, the European statistics authority, and other sources, including NGOs, to estimate how many of the 2.2 million who applied for asylum during the refugee surge still did not have a decision at the end of last year.(theguardian)…[+]

BARBADOS – The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) has approved a grant of USD150,000 to the Healthy Caribbean Coalition (HCC), to support capacity building to address childhood obesity prevention in four countries. The project will strengthen the ability of civil society organisations (CSOs) in The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize and Jamaica to contribute to non-communicable disease (NCD) prevention and control, with specific focus on childhood obesity programmes.

The grant agreement was signed at CDB headquarters in Barbados on Monday, September 18, 2017 by Sir Trevor Hassell, President of the HCC and CDB’s Vice-President (Operations), Ms. Monica La Bennett.

“Childhood obesity is associated with a wide range of health complications and an increased risk of premature onset of illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease. Preventing childhood obesity is a key strategy for reducing the incidences of NCDs in the Caribbean. These illnesses create an economic burden for countries in the region, and may also result in loss of income, contracted labour markets, as well as increased economic dependence within households,” said Ms. La Bennett.

HCC, the project implementation agency, will engage with the CSOs. The organisations selected are the Cancer Society of The Bahamas; Breastfeeding and Nutrition Foundation of Barbados; Heart and Stroke Foundation of Barbados; Belize Cancer Society and the Heart Foundation of Jamaica. Five CSO-led childhood obesity prevention interventions are expected to be implemented in the four countries by 2019. Other anticipated outcomes include the development of CSO-led action plans on childhood obesity, the hosting of a meeting of Regional participants to discuss and finalise childhood obesity prevention strategies and plans, and the documentation and dissemination of project successes and lessons learned.

The grant is consistent with CDB’s strategic objective of supporting inclusive and sustainable growth and development, and its corporate priorities of improving quality of access to education and training and citizen security; regional cooperation and integration; and gender equality.(CDB)…[+]

Theresa May has announced that the UK will suspend the training of Burmese military amid concerns about the treatment of the Muslim Rohingya population. Speaking at the UN general assembly in New York, she said the UK would end all engagement with the Burmese military until military action against civilians in Rakhine state had stopped. The prime minister has been under pressure to halt the programme since the country’s army was accused of driving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into Bangladesh. “We are very concerned about what’s happening to the Rohingya people in Burma. The military action against them must stop,” May said. “We have seen too many vulnerable people having to flee for their lives. Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese government need to make it very clear that the military action should stop.

“The British government is announcing today that we are going to stop all defence engagement and training of the Burmese military by the Ministry of Defence until this issue is resolved.” Asked if the action was coordinated with international allies, May said: “There has been very clear international concern about the issue of the Rohingya people and what is happening to them.(theguardian)…[+]

A Russian attack helicopter accidentally fired at least one rocket into a group of people during large-scale military exercises close to Nato’s borders, Russian media has reported.

Three people were injured in the incident at the Zapad 2017 drills, a source close to the Russian Ministry of Defence told RBC news agency. “They weren’t civilians,” the source said. RBC also posted a video of what appeared to show a rocket from a passing Ка-52 “Alligator” combat helicopter explode close to a group of men dressed in camouflage fatigues. The footage shows at least one person knocked to the ground by the force of the impact. Fontanka, an independent news site, also posted video footage of the incident, which it said took place on Monday – the day the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, attended the Zapad drills. It said three rockets were fired by the helicopter. Unconfirmed reports said the incident took place at the Luzhsky firing range near St Petersburg. The defence ministry initially denied the reports, but was later said to have admitted the unplanned launch of a rocket by a combat helicopter at a military drill.(theguardian)…[+]

The Caribbean island of Dominica has been “brutalised and devastated” by category 5 Hurricane Maria, the prime minister of the country has said. The eyewall of the hurricane barrelled into Dominica’s eastern coast on Monday evening, crossing towards the former British colony’s capital, Roseau, on the south-west side.

Hurricane Maria had intensified into a category 5 storm as it moved towards Dominica. It was reclassified as a category 4 as it moved away from the island. It is expected to hit the eastern Caribbean islands still working to provide basic food, water and health services to the regions hard hit by Hurricane Irma. The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the “major hurricane” was producing maximum sustained winds of 155 miles per hour and would strengthen further over the next two days, remaining “extremely dangerous” as it approaches the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Roosevelt Skerrit, the prime minister of Dominica, experienced the force of the hurricane first hand. He posted on his official Facebook page that the wind had ripped the roof off his house and wrote he was “at the complete mercy of the hurricane”.(theguardian)…[+]

Another powerful storm was bearing down on a string of battered Caribbean islands on Sunday, with forecasters saying that Maria had strengthened into a hurricane and would intensify before hitting the Leeward Islands on Monday night. Maria was about 275 miles (445km) east-southeast of the Leeward island of Dominica with maximum sustained winds of 75mph (100km/h) at 4pm (8pm GMT), the US National Hurricane Center said.

The forecaster said: “Maria … could be near major hurricane intensity when it affects portions of the Leeward Islands over the next few days, bringing dangerous wind, storm surge and rainfall hazards.” Maximum sustained winds were expected to accelerate to 120mph within 72 hours, by which time the hurricane could reach the British and US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, a US territory with a weakened economy and fragile power grid. The government of Puerto Rico has already begun preparations for Maria, which is expected to make landfall there on Tuesday, officials said. The storm is moving west-northwest at about 15mph (24km/h) and is expected to cross the Leeward Islands on Monday night, the NHC said. Hurricane warnings were in place for the French island of Guadeloupe, Dominica, St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat, while a hurricane watch was in effect for the US Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, Saba and St Eustatius, St Maarten, St Martin and St Barthelemy and Anguilla.(theguardian)…[+]

The second man arrested by police over the Parsons Green terrorism attack has been named as Yahyah Farroukh. Pictures showed the 21-year-old man being stopped by officers outside a fried chicken shop in the Hounslow area of west London on Saturday night. Metropolitan police officers were still searching the area on Monday morning.

Officers were also searching an address understood to be Farroukh’s home in nearby Stanwell, in Surrey, only metres from the outer boundaries of Heathrow airport. Farroukh was the second person to be arrested over Friday’s attack; an as-yet unnamed 18-year-old man was stopped by officers near the port of Dover on Friday evening. According to a Facebook profile thought to belong to Farroukh, he is originally from Damascus, in Syria, and studied English for speakers of other languages at West Thames college, near the Stanwell property. His profile also claims that he worked for an events company in London. Images of Farroukh on Facebook show him with family members and posing in front of a tourist site in central London.(theguardian)…[+]