“We will be wallowing in the mud like pigs if you do that to me”, Duterte said. He said there was room for dialogue if North Korea changes direction.
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Obama, at a news conference on the G20 summit in China, said he had heard about the comment and had instructed his aides to determine whether a meeting would be productive.
Laotian President Bounnhang Vorachit, right and U.S.President Barack Obama stand as the national anthems are played at Presidential Palace in Vientiane, Laos, Tuesday, Sep 6, 2016.
“Nobody has a right to lecture me”, Duterte said.
Duterte said the crackdowns would continue.
It also soured Obama’s last swing as president through a region he has tried to make a focus of USA foreign policy, a strategy widely seen as a response to China’s economic and military muscle-flexing.
Despite the heavy sanctions, North Korea says the programmes are justified because of the threat posed by the USA and South Korea.
Obama’s project to shift USA diplomatic and military resources from the Middle East to Asia has been dubbed his Asia pivot.
“The country watching Duterte most closely is probably the USA”, said Christian Lewis, a South-east Asia risk analyst with Eurasia Group.
Former Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario, under whose watch U.S.
It is the President’s first overseas trip – an opportunity that many leaders would have used to cement ties with neighbouring countries and superpowers like China and the U.S.
Between 1964 and 1973, the US conducted 580,000 bombing missions over Laos, dropping some 270 million cluster bombs on the officially neutral country.
“It’s great news for the sector and great news for Laos”, said Kim Warren, head of mission at Handicap International Laos, an aid group that clears unexploded ordnance and helps victims who have been injured by bombs and mines.
He also says it’s important to recognize the suffering by all sides in that conflict and that war inflicts a bad toll whatever the cause.
Obama announced that one of his and Michelle’s favorite initiatives, “Let Girls Learn”, is coming to Laos.
President Barack Obama is offering a luncheon toast to “the dignity and the future” of the people of Laos. The dancers twirled their hands in the air in a slow, rhythmic dance.
However, diplomats say strains with longtime ally the Philippines could compound Washington’s difficulties in forging a united front with Southeast Asian partners on the geostrategic jostle with Beijing over the South China Sea.
Obama isn’t the only leader that is the recipient of Duterte’s verbal wrath.
Millions of unexploded cluster bombs remain in the Laotian countryside from a nine-year US covert bombing campaign that was aimed at cutting off communist forces in neighboring Vietnam. The U.S. also provides hundreds of millions of dollars in annual financial assistance to the Philippine military.
For nine years, the US conducted a punishing, covert bombing campaign on landlocked Laos in an effort to cut off communist forces in neighboring Vietnam.
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The bombing left behind deep scars, millions of unexploded cluster bombs across the countryside and decades-worth of cleanup.
