Philippine police yesterday warned political warlords to turn in unlicensed firearms ahead of next May’s presidential vote to prevent bloodshed among rival candidates.
National police chief Director-General Jesus Versoza said there were an estimated 1.11 million unlicensed guns in the hands of civilians, private armies and Muslim and communist insurgents.
This is on top of the estimated 1.8 million firearms in the hands of the police, military and licensed security agencies, he said.
The capital Manila and nearby provinces, as well the southern island of Mindanao account for more than half the illegal weapons, Versoza said citing official statistics.
He said civilians would have until the end of October to register their guns, while police operations would continue against known private armies and crime groups with firearms.
The total includes a “conservative estimate” of nearly 16,000 high-powered weapons in rebel hands, Versoza said.
“The presence of loose firearms in the country contributes to our problems with peace and order,” Versoza told reporters. “Now that the elections are coming, we are [carrying out] programs and activities to control these firearms.”
The Philippines goes to the polls in May to choose a president, half of the 24-seat Senate, more than 250 congressmen and thousands of local officials from village councilors and mayors to provincial governors.
Versoza said the police had come up with a list of politicians known to control private armies and would deploy forces to traditional hot spots.
In the 2007 congressional elections, there were about 229 violent incidents reported, most of which involved the use of illegal firearms, Versoza said without giving comparative figures.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS