Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

News

Hard Numbers: Duterte's drug war kills kids, global hunger surges, Mexican narcos strike, Japans army thins

Hard Numbers: Duterte's drug war kills kids, global hunger surges, Mexican narcos strike, Japans army thins
Make us preferred on Google

129: When the Philippines' tough-talking populist president Rodrigo Duterte first took office in 2016, he unleashed a controversial war on drugs that has killed thousands of people and drawn heat from global human rights watchdogs. Now activists say at least 129 children are among the dead — most of them killed by government forces or their allies.


270: The number of people in need of food aid globally could rise to at least 270 million as a result of pandemic-related job losses and vanishing remittances, according to the UN's World Food Program. That's an 82 percent increase over last year, and the WFP says it doesn't have enough money to meet the need.

3: Mexico's Police Chief was seriously wounded and three people were killed in a brazen assassination attempt attributed to a powerful drug cartel. Among the dead were two bodyguards and a bystander. Mexican authorities have long struggled to subdue the cartels — now it looks like that battle is coming straight to the capital.

8: Japan's aging population is having a direct effect on national security. The country currently has an 8 percent shortfall in troops for its Self-Defense Forces, and has missed recruitment targets every year since 2014.

More For You

Brazilian voters arrive at a polling station at Cidade Universitaria to cast their ballots in the second round of Brazil's presidential election in Lisbon, Portugal, on October 25, 2026.

Brazilian voters arrive at a polling station at Cidade Universitaria to cast their ballots in the second round of Brazil's presidential election in Lisbon, Portugal, on October 25, 2026.

Luis Boza via Reuters Connect
Elections have been taking place around the world in recent weeks – and if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s this: voters are fired up.In Serbia, turnout reached its highest level since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992. In Israel, it was the highest in more than two decades. Brazil saw an additional three million people who had [...]
Paraguayan President Santiago Peña (photo) submitted his resignation on Thursday, November 5, amid a political and financial crisis triggered by the intervention of Ueno Bank, a banking institution linked to the president's former business associates.

Paraguayan President Santiago Peña (photo) submitted his resignation on Thursday, November 5, amid a political and financial crisis triggered by the intervention of Ueno Bank, a banking institution linked to the president's former business associates.

Handout / Latin America News Agency via Reuters Connect
Paraguay’s president resigns over bank collapseThe tiny South American nation is in turmoil after a spectacular bank collapse left about half of its 6 million people without access to their money. The bank, called “Ueno,” rose from obscure local origins to become the country’s dominant lender. Critics say it was helped along by connections with [...]
California clears death row
Natalie Johnson
The California governor announced the move on Thursday in an open letter in which he called state-sanctioned killing “incompatible” with the state’s values and morally wrong – though the state hasn’t executed anyone in two decades. Until the move, California’s death row population was the largest in the Western Hemisphere and represented more than [...]
Armoured vehicles of the El Salvador Army operate separately from the UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force (GSF), after additional troops were deployed following an October 18 ambush in which four Salvadoran GSF personnel went missing, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, November 3, 2026.

Armoured vehicles of the El Salvador Army operate separately from the UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force (GSF), after additional troops were deployed following an October 18 ambush in which four Salvadoran GSF personnel went missing, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, November 3, 2026.

REUTERS/Patrice Noel
Over the past two weeks, President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele has sent around 2,000 troops to Haiti to rescue four Salvadoran nationals working in Haiti who were kidnapped by gangs. But the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” may have bigger ambitions. In a series of social media posts, he's drawn parallels between Haiti's struggles with [...]