In August, he called USA ambassador to Manila Philip Goldberg a “gay son of a b****” and said Secretary of State John Kerry was “crazy”.
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President Obama, second from left, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, second from right, look on from the podium before the Association of Southeast Asian Nations gala dinner in Vientiane, Laos, on September 7. The basis for this relationship is historical and both leaders realize this.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte plans to ask Premier Li Keqiang at the summit in the Laotian capital whether the vessels were on another island-making mission on the Scarborough Shoal.
Earlier, Duterte skipped the meeting between ASEAN leaders and officials of the United Nations led by Ban.
While Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to ever visit Laos, half a century after the U.S.’s “secret war” left it with the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history, he stopped short of offering an apology to one of Southeast Asia’s smallest countries.
Boosting people-to-people ties between the two sides will further promote the connectivity and understanding between the peoples, thus laying solid foundation for an all-round cooperation between them.
Ahead of what would have been their first meeting, Duterte anticipated that Obama would press him on violent crackdowns on narcotics trafficking in the Philippines as well as charges of extrajudicial killings.
The White House said in a statement U.S. programmes in Laos had helped slash UXO casualties from 300 to less than 50 a year and the additional funding would be used for a “comprehensive UXO survey of Laos and for continued clearing operations”.
“There has been a lot of concern primarily because I don’t think there is a lot of understanding of the Philippine President or any way to predict what he is going to do”, said Rodger Baker, vice president of strategic analysis at Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence company. “I haven’t seen them solve those issues”.
Much of the country is still littered with ordnance, including millions of cluster munition “bomblets” that maim and kill innocent people to this day.
“I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody”. Nobody but nobody. You (Obama) must be respectful.
In a statement read out Tuesday by his spokesman, Duterte said his “strong comments” to certain questions by a reporter “elicited concern and distress”.
In an unexpected reaction, Duterte’s remark against Obama had also caught the attention of Clinton’s contender and republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
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Najib said the meeting also targeted the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and the adoption of the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea in the South China Sea (COC) to be implemented next year.
