Top US officials promised President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines on Monday that Washington will defend its longtime ally and ramp up military resources aimed at deterring an assertive China.Marcos will meet Tuesday with President Donald Trump, who has rattled many European allies by demanding they pay more to be protected as part of NATO.Both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who have both identified China as a top threat, stated their commitment to the seven-decade treaty with the Philippines as they held separate meetings with Marcos on Monday.”Together we remain committed to the Mutual Defense Treaty. And this pact extends to armed attacks on our armed forces, aircraft or public vessels, including our Coast Guard anywhere in the Pacific, including the South China Sea,” Hegseth told Marcos.Noting growing US defense spending, Hegseth said that the two countries “must forge a strong shield of real deterrence for peace, ensuring the long-term security and prosperity for our nations.””We do not seek confrontation, but we are and will be ready and resolute,” Hegseth said.Marcos welcomed US support, noting the “changing political geopolitical forces and the political developments around our part of the world.”China and the Philippines have engaged in a series of confrontations in the contested waters, which Beijing claims almost entirely, despite an international ruling that the assertion has no legal basis.Since his election in 2022, Marcos has boosted cooperation between the former US colony and the United States, both under Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden.

Former mechanic and taxi driver Adolfo Macias rose from a life of petty crime to the top of Ecuador’s drug gang hierarchy, using extreme violence to try and submit an entire country to his will.His reign of terror has seemingly come to an end, however, as the 45-year-old head of Ecuador’s “Los Choneros” gang pleaded “not guilty” to drug and weapons charges in a New York court Monday.In January 2024, Macias — alias “Fito” — made international headlines when he escaped from a prison in Ecuador’s port city of Guayaquil — a hub for drug exports.He had been serving a 34-year sentence for weapons possession, narcotics trafficking, organized crime and murder.Jail did little to check Macias’s ambitions: he earned his law degree behind bars and continued pulling the strings of the criminal underworld.Videos have emerged of him holding wild prison parties, some with fireworks. In one recording, a mariachi band and the drug lord’s daughter perform a narco-glorifying ballad in the prison yard while he laughingly strokes a fighting cock.Fito exercised “significant internal control over the prison,” the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) noted in a 2022 report following a meeting with the gang leader.His escape prompted the government to deploy the military, to the anger of Los Choneros, which unleashed a wave of violence in response.The gang detonated car bombs, held prison guards hostage and stormed a television station during a live broadcast in several days of running battles that prompted President Daniel Noboa to declare a “state of internal armed conflict.”In June this year, a massive military and police operation dragged a bedraggled Fito from a bunker concealed under floor tiles in a luxury home in the fishing port of Manta, where he was born.No shots were fired, and the government was quick to release photos of the overweight, disheveled Macias appearing rather less dangerous than his deadly reputation.On Sunday, he was put on a New York-bound plane in Guayaquil wearing shorts, a bulletproof vest and helmet, and on Monday he appeared in court. He was smiling.- ‘Ruthless’ -Macias became leader of Los Choneros in 2020, at a time when it was transitioning away from petty crime and establishing links with the big-league Colombian and Mexican drug cartels.”The defendant served for years as the principal leader of Los Choneros, a notoriously violent transnational criminal organization, and was a ruthless and infamous drug and firearms trafficker,” US attorney Joseph Nocella said in a statement ahead of Monday’s hearing. “The defendant and his co-conspirators flooded the United States and other countries with drugs and used extreme measures of violence in their quest for power and control,” he added.Macias has also been linked to the assassination of presidential candidate and anti-corruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio at a political rally in 2023.Villavicencio had accused Los Choneros of threatening his life.The gang is one of dozens blamed for bringing bloodshed to Ecuador, once one of the world’s safest nations, but now one of its deadliest.The country is wedged between the world’s top two cocaine exporters — Colombia and Peru — and more than 70 percent of all worldwide production now passes through Ecuador’s ports, according to government data.Under Macias’s leadership, Los Choneros “have leveraged their connections and sway… to become a key link in the transnational cocaine supply chain,” according to an analysis by the InSight Crime think-tank.It said the gang oversees the arrival of cocaine shipments from Colombia and uses a fleet of speedboats to send it on to Central America and Mexico, from where it is shipped to consumer markets in North America and Europe.”With or without Fito, Ecuador will continue to be a top cocaine transit nation,” said the NGO.Macias had also escaped prison in 2013, but managed to elude authorities for only three months at the time.On Sunday, he became the first Ecuadoran extradited by his country since the measure was written into law last year, after a referendum in which Noboa sought the approval of measures to boost his war on criminal gangs.

In interviews published one year after Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid, his son Hunter lashed out at actor George Clooney for leading the public charge on calling for the elderly president to bow out.”Fuck him. And everybody around him,” Biden’s younger son said in a profanity-laced interview with independent journalist Andrew Callaghan, who has 3 million followers on YouTube.”Really, do you think in middle America, that voter in Green Bay, Wisconsin, gives a shit what George Clooney thinks about who she should vote for?” Biden also said in a podcast with Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee. Clooney was one of the first high-profile Democrats to publicly call on Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, just three months before the election.Biden, then 81 years old, was at the time facing growing doubts in his own camp about his health and mental acuity, after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump at the end of the June.”I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,” read the headline for Clooney’s essay, published in the New York Times on July 10, 2024. The Oscar-winning actor and producer recounted having seen the president at a Hollywood fundraiser the month prior, describing him as no longer the politician he was in 2010 or 2020.”I consider him a friend, and I believe in him…In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Clooney wrote. “But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.”Less than two weeks later, on July 21, the president announced he was quitting the race.In the interviews released on Monday, Hunter Biden angrily remembered the events leading to the end of his father’s decades-long political career.”Why do I have to fucking listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the fucking New York Times?” he said in the Callaghan interview.Plagued for years with legal troubles and drug addiction, Hunter Biden became a favorite target of Republicans, who viewed him as the president’s Achilles Heel.Hunter received an unconditional pardon from his father in December 2024, after Trump defeated the Democratic replacement candidate, vice president Kamala Harris.

The Trump administration released hundreds of thousands of pages of records on Monday about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. despite concerns from the civil rights leader’s family.”The American people have waited nearly sixty years to see the full scope of the federal government’s investigation into Dr King’s assassination,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement.”We are ensuring that no stone is left unturned in our mission to deliver complete transparency on this pivotal and tragic event in our nation’s history.”Gabbard said more than 230,000 pages of documents were being released and were being published “with minimal redactions for privacy reasons.”President Donald Trump signed an executive order after taking office declassifying files on the 1960s assassinations of president John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and King.The National Archives released records from John F. Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination in March and files related to the June 1968 murder of Robert F. Kennedy in April.King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder and died in prison in 1998, but King’s children have expressed doubts that he was the assassin.In a statement on Monday, King’s two surviving children, Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, said they “support transparency and historical accountability” but were concerned the records could be used for “attacks on our father’s legacy.”The civil rights leader was the target during his lifetime of an “invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign” orchestrated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, they said in a joint statement.The FBI campaign was intended to “discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” they said. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth.””We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief,” they said.The Warren Commission that investigated the shooting of John F. Kennedy determined it was carried out by a former Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.That formal conclusion has done little, however, to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, and the slow release of the government files added fuel to various conspiracy theories.President Kennedy’s younger brother, Robert, a former attorney general, was assassinated while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-born Jordanian, was convicted of his murder and is serving a life sentence in a prison in California.

Immigrants held at US detention centers have experienced abusive and degrading treatment, a Human Rights Watch report said Monday, in a sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown.The 92-page report alleges medical neglect, overcrowding and “inhuman” cell conditions at a time when the Trump administration is ramping up immigration enforcement with the promise of deporting millions.”People in immigration detention are being treated as less than human,” Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at HRW, said in a statement.In one alleged instance, shackled detainees being prepared for a transfer had to kneel and eat food from styrofoam plates with their hands behind their backs.”We had to put the plates on chairs and then bend down and eat with our mouths, like dogs,” one man was quoted as saying.The report, which focuses on three facilities in Florida, cites migrants sleeping on concrete floors and using their shoes as pillows. One man said he was denied access to soap or water to wash his hands for 20 consecutive days. Another complained that he was not allowed his medications, including insulin and an asthma inhaler.Some women reported being held in a cell with exposed toilets that were visible to men in nearby rooms. HRW, a New York-based nonprofit, documented the experiences of 17 immigrants for the report. Advocacy groups Americans for Immigrant Justice and Sanctuary of the South also contributed to the research.Florida is notably home to a new detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” which Trump visited in July, boasting about the harsh conditions and joking that the reptilian predators will serve as guards.The president has vowed to lead the largest migrant deportation program in US history, and lawmakers this month voted to inject around $45 billion into constructing immigration detention facilities.Trump’s hardline migration policy was a key element of his presidential campaign but has also sparked protests in the United States, which has the largest immigrant population in the world.The average daily migrant detention population in the United States has surged more than 40 percent since last June, according to the HRW report. It added that nearly 72 percent of individuals held as of mid-June had no criminal history.”The US government is detaining many people who pose no threat to public safety in conditions that violate basic human rights and dignity,” Wille said in a statement.