During their summit meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Laos on Tuesday, President Park Geun-hye and her USA counterpart Barack Obama reaffirmed that the two allies would mobilize all possible means to counter Pyongyang’s continued provocations.
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President Obama reportedly met Wednesday with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte after an initial meeting was scrapped when the southeast Asian leader called him a “son of a bitch”.
Mr Yasay said: “They met at the holding room and they were the last persons to leave the holding room”.
“They will pay. When the time comes, I will eat you in front of people”, he said while speaking in Lagos during the ASEAN summit.
Obama trumpeted increased military cooperation with countries such as the Philippines, Singapore and India, as well as a push for greater trade with the region, and vowed this would continue.
Early Wednesday, however, Duterte’s press service announced that the Philippine president would meet both of these men for the first time at a dinner that evening – because he would be seated next to them.
The next day, the Filipino president walked back his comments in a new statement, saying they were not intended “as a personal attack on the US president”.
U.S. President Barack Obama has described the Philippines as America’s oldest ally in Asia, a relationship bound by friendship and mutual respect. The temple was used for coronations and was under royal patronage until 1975, when the monarchy was abolished.
Located in mountainous northern Laos, the city is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
And with a slight bow, he accepted flowers from Miss Luang Prabang.
Aside from his deadly record, Duterte’s disdain for statecraft, irreverence and bluntly frank and profane language would likely weigh on ASEAN, a conservative group steeped in tradition, protocol and nuanced rhetoric. “The war did not end when the bombs stopped falling”.
Could the U.S pivot to Asia be undermined by tension with the Philippines?
“For the people of Laos, the war was also something that was not contained to the battlefield”. The tribute follows a US pledge this week to finally clean the ordinance up.
He touted his administration’s move to double spending on ordnance clean-up to roughly 90 million dollars (£67 million) over three years.
Laos became the world’s most-bombed country per capita from 1964 to 1973 as Washington launched a secret CIA-led war to cut supplies flowing to communist fighters during the Vietnam War.
“As one Laotian said, the ‘bombs fell like rain, ‘” he said to a polite audience at the Lao National Cultural Hall.
Obama’s visit to Laos is the first by a sitting US president.
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The $90 million is a relatively small sum for the USA but a significant investment for a small country in one of the poorer corners of the world.
