A radio broadcaster was yesterday fatally shot outside his home in the central Philippines, police said, the latest in a long list of journalists killed in the country.
Cresenciano Bunduquin, 50, was killed by motorcycle-riding shooters in Calapan City in Oriental Mindoro province, police Colonel Samuel Delorino said.
One of the assailants died after Bunduquin’s son hit the shooters with his vehicle as they fled the scene of the pre-dawn attack.
Photo: AFP / Oriental Mindoro Provincial Police Public Information Office
“The remaining suspect was able to run off. The hot pursuit operation is still ongoing,” Delorino said.
The archipelago nation is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, and most of the killers often go unpunished.
Radio broadcasters outside the capital are often the targets.
Bunduquin hosted a program on radio station 101.7 DWXR as well as on Facebook, said station manager Jester Joaquin, who described the broadcaster as “hard-hitting” on local issues.
He had been outspoken about an oil spill affecting the province, illegal gambling and politics.
“He told me before that he’s receiving threats, but he didn’t elaborate,” Joaquin said. “He mentioned to me that he wanted a change in his line of work — that’s why he put up a chicken farm, because he wants to go quiet.”
Bunduquin is the third journalist to be killed since Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr took office in June last year.
“Bunduquin’s killing further shows that journalists in the Philippines still operate under threat despite our improvement in the press freedom index and the relatively friendlier relations that media has with the current administration,” National Union of Journalists of the Philippines chairman Jonathan de Santos said.
“When perpetrators of attacks on media are not held to account ... future attacks become more likely,” De Santos said.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
NO MORE LONG LINES: Swift border crossings for people traveling between Russia and areas it occupies in Ukraine show how quickly Moscow is seeking to absorb them To enter Russia from occupied Ukraine, all Tatiana has to do is arrive at the edge of the war-battered Donetsk region, show guards her Russian passport, say “thank you” and cross. Moscow has controlled several key border points since 2014, but the frontier has become more porous since the Kremlin annexed four Ukrainian territories last year, encouraging residents to take up new citizenship. “It’s become more comfortable because we’ve become Russians,” said the 37-year-old, who is from a Russian-occupied town. Tatiana used to have to go through a more arduous procedure to enter Russia: a check run by Moscow-sponsored separatists, then through Russian
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s