Latest News Clips 2016.05.16

                     

          

1.      Philippines election: Duterte declares victory and promises change

Controversial politician weeps at parents’ graves as results show he has unassailable lead, and vows to change constitution

The Guardian     10 May 2016 

The Philippine politician Rodrigo Duterte, who has an unbeatable lead in unofficial tallies in the country’s presidential race, will push to rewrite the constitution and change to a federal system of government, his spokesman has said.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday morning a few hours after Duterte claimed victory, Peter Lavina said the plan “will require a wide national consensus beginning with asking congress to call for a constitutional convention”.

“There will be major rewriting of our constitution,” he said.

Duterte, 71, had promised during a foul-mouthed campaign to change from a centralised system to a federal parliamentary form of government, a policy that has been popular in provinces far from Manila.

As mayor for two decades in the southern city of Davao, Duterte has complained that the capital “gets everything so regions are forced to beg”.

During his campaign, Duterte pledged to kill tens of thousands of criminals and joked about raping an Australian missionary. His campaign symbol is a fist.

Yet the man who has been labelled “the punisher” displayed a more reflective side of his character at about 3am on Tuesday shortly after results made it clear he had won, as he drove to a cemetery and wept at his parents’ graves.

“Help me Mom,” he said as he sobbed in front of cameras. “I’m just a nobody.” He later told reporters he would “behave” as president.

 Rodrigo Duterte weeps as he visits his parents’ graves after claiming victory in the country’s election.

Lavina said policies Duterte imposed in Davao could be implemented nationwide, including a late-night drinking ban and a curfew for unescorted minors after 10pm.

“This liquor ban is because we have to work the next day,” he said. “Nothing to do with denying us of our freedoms.

“Incidentally, we have a ban on loud karaoke [in Davao] because everyone has to go to bed.”

Lavina added that although Duterte could use an executive order, it would be best done through a consultative “democratic process of legislating these measures”.

A preliminary ballot count by the accredited election commission showed Duterte has close to 39% of counted votes. The unofficial results suggest the tough-talking mayor, who has pledged to kill criminals en masse during his six-year term, will win when the official tally is announced.

2.   How Hillary Clinton Will Fight Donald Trump’s Unpredictability

Time    May 12, 2016

Donald Trump lurches in unexpected but effective ways. As a businessman, his unpredictability left rivals scratching their heads, and checking their wallets. After 11 months of mounting campaign-trail success in the face of more than $100 million in negative advertising, a hostile GOP Establishment and a skeptical media, those same tactics have Hillary Clinton’s supporters wondering what, exactly, can work against his kind of political insurgency.

Now some opponents in both parties have concluded that Trump represents a kind of political asymmetric threat: less equipped, unpredictable and remarkably resilient. And as others have learned in the worlds of business, technology and national security, it takes a different kind of strategy to defeat that kind of unpredictable disrupter.

“There is definitely an asymmetric political battle here,” says Tim Miller, Jeb Bush’s former communications director and an adviser to the #NeverTrump super PAC Our Principles Project. “He’s not playing by the same rules and it’s limiting.”

To be sure, Trump has provided Clinton with a bounty of potential attacks: his statements about Mexican immigrants, his comments about women and his routine shifts on policy will all be fodder in the months to come. But Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary were unable to make headway with similar material.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio made fun of the size of Trump’s hands, only to be criticized for being distasteful. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson tried to ignore him, refusing to engage even when Trump compared him to a child molester. He’s now working for the Trump campaign. Texas Senator Ted Cruz held off criticizing Trump for months and ended up looking desperate when he started. Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the lone Republican woman in the race,scored a direct hit on Trump’s remarks on women, but it didn’t help her in the polls. And former Florida governor Jeb Bush pitched himself as the policy-focused adult in the race only to be trounced.

Taken together, the GOP has provided Clinton a playbook of things not to do: don’t stoop to Trump’s level, don’t ignore him until it’s too late, don’t merely call him sexist, don’t trust in policy above personality.

“Trump seems like a boorish insult comic, but he is actually incredibly disciplined about driving a single specific contrast narrative: Cruz is dishonest, Jeb is weak, Rubio isn’t up to the job,” says Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser and message maven to President Obama. “The Clinton campaign and larger Democratic infrastructure needs to settle on a similar narrative and hammer it as relentlessly.”

Hillary Clinton has so far resisted the urge to jump into the fray. When Trump charged that she “enabled” Bill Clinton’s infidelity, she let the line slide and instead pivoted to hammer him for refusing so far to release his tax records. “When you run for President, especially when you become the nominee, that is kind of expected. My husband and I have released 33 years of tax returns,” Clinton told a crowd in Blackwood, N.J. “We’ve got eight years on our website right now. So you have got to ask yourself: Why doesn’t he want to release them? Yeah, well, we’re going to find out.”

In traditional campaigns, communications teams develop message plans and calendars to systematically relate their agenda to voters — and to sync up with advertising buttressing the themes. But running against Trump there is no “jobs week.” Rather, every day threatens to be dominated by whatever new insult or attack the former reality-television star dreams up. “A constantly reacting campaign is a losing one,” one Clinton ally says. “If you’re responding knee jerk, you’re going to need knee-replacement surgery by November.”

Clinton’s advisers are keeping their heads down and continuing with a plan that pitches Clinton as the sober, qualified candidate with concrete — if wonkish — proposals to address specific problems. They know it’s not in Clinton DNA to out-Trump her fellow New Yorker, and that she will never be the draw that Trump is for his raucous rallies. Instead, they’re leaving most of the attack work to surrogates — numerous and dispensable — and urging Clinton herself to keep focused on what she’s good at: policy.

The overarching question this November will be whether voters want a political professional, or a newcomer whose ego matches the nation’s mood.

“Hillary is not good at the witty remark. She’s not good at the charming attack,” Miller says. “That’s not her strength. But she will be able to passionately attack him on issues her supporters care about. Her campaign is going to have to find ways to keep those issues in the news and not the others that Trump brings up.”

One strategy that Clinton may end up using a lot is letting Trump speak for himself. On Cinco de Mayo, the real estate mogul tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco salad, saying that he loves “Hispanics” (the holiday is actually of Mexican origin) and bragging about the grill at the Trump Tower. Clinton responded with a tweet that contrasted his taco salad with a statement he made just a day earlier: “They’re gonna be deported.” More than 6,000 people retweeted her.

It’s one of the lessons that people in business and the military learned long ago. If you want to defeat a disruptor, you have to become more like them.

     

3.   Exclusive: London Mayor Sadiq Khan on Religious Extremism, Brexit and Donald Trump

Time   May 9, 2016    

"If Donald Trump becomes the President, I’ll be stopped from going there by virtue of my faith"

 

Sadiq Khan, 45, was declared the new mayor of London in the early hours of Saturday, becoming the most powerful Muslim politician in Europe. A Transport Minister in the Labour government of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Khan came under severe attack during the campaign from his Conservative opponent, Zac Goldsmith, for sharing platforms with extremists during his earlier career as a human-rights lawyer.

Fresh from his victory, Khan sat down with TIME on Sunday in his new office in City Hall, a bulbous glass building overlooking Tower Bridge. In these excerpts from the conversation, Khan claims he is the “antidote” to extremism, reveals that the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency might force him to meet U.S. mayors before the end of the year, and explains why he’s campaigning to keep the U.K. in the European Union ahead of June’s In/Out referendum.

You’re the first Muslim mayor of a major western city. Do you feel an extra responsibility to tackle religious extremism?
One of the things that’s important to me as a Londoner is making sure my family, people I care about, are safe. But clearly, being someone who is a Muslim brings with it experiences that I can use in relation to dealing with extremists and those who want to blow us up. And so it’s really important that I use my experiences to defeat radicalization and extremism. What I think the election showed was that actually there is no clash of civilization between Islam and the West. I am the West, I am a Londoner, I’m British, I’m of Islamic faith, Asian origin, Pakistan heritage, so whether it’s [ISIS] or these others who want to destroy our way of life and talk about the West, they’re talking about me. What better antidote to the hatred they spew than someone like me being in this position?

How do you win around impressionable young Muslims who could be lured into extremism?
You say to youngsters you can be British, Muslim and successful. You point to successful British role models. The biggest export we’ve got is [former One Direction singer] Zayn Malik. The most successful British sports person ever is Mohamed Farah, a double Olympic champion and a world-record holder. Who won the Great British Bake Off? Nadiya Hussain. We can point to, when we speak to young Brits of Islamic faith, successful role models. You can go in to business, you can go in to medicine, you can go to politics, dare I say it. So, when somebody comes along and tries to brainwash them with a sort of nihilistic view of life and say the way to get success in this world and the hereafter is to get a Kalashnikov and go to commit — in inverted commas — jihad is to say, “you know what? That’s not true.”

The Conservatives linked you to extremists in what has been viewed as one of the most vicious campaigns ever waged in the U.K. How did that feel?
My experience in relation to taking on the preachers of hate was saying to them it’s compatible being British, being Western, being Muslim. I’ve experienced the receiving end of this extremism, whether it’s the extremists campaigning against me when I stood for Parliament in 2005 and 2010 and 2015, saying somehow it was haram — sinful — to vote, let alone to stand for Parliament. I’ve been on the receiving end of a fatwa when fighting for equality in relation to same sex marriage [in 2013], so I understand what that’s like.

Do you think London’s reputation has been damaged by such a divisive campaign?
London chose to come out in record numbers, the highest turnout there’s ever been in a mayoral election, and — I say this not with arrogance it is what others have said — the single biggest mandate a British politician has ever received. That shows what a wonderful city we are. We’re not simply tolerating each other — you tolerate a toothache, I don’t want to be tolerated. We respect, we embrace, and we celebrate, which is fantastic.

You accused the Conservatives of using a “Donald Trump playbook.” What’s your view on a potential Trump presidency given his remarks on Muslims?
Clearly [I’ll visit] before January in case Donald Trump wins … Hope, I think, is a good way of persuading people to vote for you, energize and enthuse people. I think to try and look for differences, to try and turn communities against each other is not conducive to living successfully and amicably.

I think Bill de Blasio is doing interesting housing stuff in New York, Rahm Emanuel is doing interesting stuff with the infrastructure bank in Chicago. I want to go to America to meet with and engage with American mayors. If Donald Trump becomes the President, I’ll be stopped from going there by virtue of my faith, which means I can’t engage with American mayors and swap ideas. Conservative tacticians thought those sorts of tactics would win London and they were wrong. I’m confident that Donald Trump’s approach to politics won’t win in America.

Update, May 10: After this interview was published, Trump suggested Khan would be exempt from any prohibitions on Muslims entering the U.S. “There are always exceptions,” he told the New York Times. “I think [his election] is a very good thing, and I hope he does a very good job … If he does a good job and frankly if he does a great job, that would be a terrific thing.”

What would happen to London’s position as one of the world’s leading financial centers if the U.K. voted to leave the European Union?
I think leaving the European Union would be catastrophic for our city. The E.U’s GDP is bigger than China, is bigger than the U.S. We’ve got a market of 500 million people in the European Union. They’re not just a market, they’re our cousins. If you look at London, there are huge social benefits, huge cultural benefits, huge benefits to our security, but the economic benefits are massive. More than half a million jobs in London are directly dependent on the E.U. Sixty percent of the world’s leading companies, including Sony, AIG insurance, China Telecom, have their E.U. headquarters here in London. Half of London’s exports go to the European Union. I’m going to be a Labour mayor campaigning with a Conservative Prime Minister for us to remain in the European Union. It’s crucial going forward.