Conquer Club

Maria and her husband come from an impoverished neighbourhood of Manila and had no regular income before agreeing to become contract killers. They earn up to 20,000 Philippines pesos ($430; £327) per hit, which is shared between three or four of them. That is a fortune for low-income Filipinos.

Contract killing is nothing new in the Philippines. But the hit squads have never been as busy as they are now. President Duterte has sent out an unambiguous message.

Ahead of his election, he promised to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office.

And he has warned drug dealers in particular: "Do not destroy my country, because I will kill you."

Last weekend he reiterated that blunt view, as he defended the extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals.

"Do the lives of 10 of these criminals really matter? If I am the one facing all this grief, would 100 lives of these idiots mean anything to me?"

mrswdk wrote:Ignoring your declaration that thousands of ordinary French Muslims are all 'known terrorists', which is best saved for one of the dozens of OT threads about French Muslims, where exactly in the OP did I condone Duterte's assassination campaign?

Dukasaur wrote:

mrswdk wrote:Ignoring your declaration that thousands of ordinary French Muslims are all 'known terrorists', which is best saved for one of the dozens of OT threads about French Muslims, where exactly in the OP did I condone Duterte's assassination campaign?

You certainly didn't have a critical thing to say about it, and the cheery headline doesn't look like the depths of approbation, either.

Dukasaur wrote:depths