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David Beckham, Millie Bobby Brown and Hugh Jackman are among celebrities and world leaders announced Tuesday as participants and official supporters of the UNICEF initiative World Children’s Day.

The organization said events around the globe will focus on child takeovers to mark the day Monday, including a gathering at the United Nations in New York. That’s where U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will welcome children, and singer-songwriters Chloe x Halle will perform a new track written for the occasion.

Young people in Geneva, meanwhile, will take over the Palais des Nations to perform a special cover of Pink’s hit What About Us.

In Spain, children will join Leo Messi and others on the powerhouse soccer team FC Barcelona for a practice session, while in India, cricket will be the game for 22 child athletes who will play with legendary cricketer and UNICEF goodwill ambassador Sachin Tendulkar.

Brown, who appears on the Netflix series Stranger Things, will kick off the day in Australia. Jackman is lending his voice via video to a fundraiser focused on providing clean water to those in need, to take place in gyms around the world on Saturday.

‘It’s our day’

“I am so excited for the first-ever global celebration of World Children’s Day on November 20th with UNICEF,” Brown said in a statement. “It’s our day, everyone! A day for us to raise our voices and unite. So let’s do it — in our schools, with our friends, with our families!”

Beckham, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, will appear in a short film with children. Other events are planned for Copenhagen and Accra, where 10 children from eight African countries will tell the world about the continent in a series of TED Talk-style appearances called Africa Dialogues.

More than 50 companies and organizations around the world will turn over key roles to children, including LEGO, Qantas and the H&M Foundation. In schools, children will also take over classrooms and assemblies to raise their voices and raise funds in solidarity with the world’s most disadvantaged and vulnerable children.

“It’s a fun day with a serious point. A day for children by children to help save children’s lives, fight for their rights and help them fulfill their potential.” said Justin Forsyth, UNICEF deputy executive director.
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The first room in the former warehouse, now a detention center, is a waiting area where visitors check in and wait to see whether they will be allowed to visit a detainee.

Security screening is similar to that at an airport checkpoint. Visitors must show identification and leave belongings in a locker. No phones. No pictures. No recording of any kind.

“This one is actually nice. She is helpful,” a local volunteer who regularly visits detainees tells me about the security official standing behind the window. Above the window: “United We Stand.”

On a dead end road in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the Elizabeth Detention Center is an immigration jail that holds about 285 people. Privately owned, it is run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the fifth-largest corrections company in the United States.

The center is in an industrial area surrounded by parking lots, a railroad, a freight station and the New Jersey Turnpike — a geographic location that works as an invisible wall.

Current U.S. policy is to detain those who ask for asylum once they reach a U.S. port of entry regardless of whether they have a valid visa. The Elizabeth Detention Center is a 15-minute drive from Newark Liberty International Airport, one of the busiest entry points to the U.S. for international arrivals.

A name and a number

It is late afternoon at the end of October; about 30 people are waiting to see friends or loved ones inside the Elizabeth facility. All the blue plastic chairs are taken, and there is a check-in line. Some wait outside. Church groups, mothers and children, and other people visiting loved ones wait their turn. Also, volunteers from local nonprofit groups visit detainees every week.

I have been given the name and alien number of a detainee by First Friends, an immigrant advocacy group. It’s all the information I need to be admitted as a volunteer visitor. The goal of the visitation program, according to First Friends organizers, is to give immigrants a moment of support and friendship.

I am asked to show identification. My Maryland driver’s license is met with a skeptical look by the officer. She double-checks front and back, but I get the green light to enter. Like all visitors, I must go through a metal detector, take my shoes and jacket off, and leave my pen and notebook behind. I then step inside a large metal jail door that closes with a clank before another slides open on the other side.

“I never get used to this sound,” another visitor tells me.

Once the gates of an immigration detention center close on asylum seekers, they may not open again for months. As of September, immigration officials say, there were more than 38,000 immigrants detained nationwide in 203 facilities. Detainees leave a detention center once their cases have been gone through the immigration process, which could mean authorization for them to live in the United States or deportation.

The visitation area is filled with round tables and chairs. Detainees must sit facing officers who are posted on the right side of the room. In the back, on a single row of chairs, immigrants wait for their visitors.

Under a Statue of Liberty mural, I sit at a round table and face Faras Khan from Pakistan, who is in the midst of deportation proceedings. His girlfriend is also visiting. As a corrections officer watches from the side of the room, Khan talks about his case, how he feels he is an American because he has not lived in Pakistan since he was a 1-year-old.

Visa overstayed

Khan’s father sought asylum after overstaying a nonimmigrant visa, claiming he had been persecuted in Pakistan. At the time, Khan, still a child, was listed as a derivative beneficiary. His father’s asylum was denied, and he was deported to Pakistan.

But Khan, now in his late 20s and diagnosed as bipolar, is fighting to stay. He was taken into custody after a meeting with immigration officials and has been detained for more than six months.

A 2016 Human Rights First report shows that clients held at New Jersey facilities, who were represented by Human Rights First pro bono attorneys, were detained for an average of eight months.

After detention

Edafe Okporo was held at Elizabeth for five months. He was taken there after his flight landed at Newark, and he requested asylum.

“I was told by immigration that they don’t have housing for immigrants, arriving alien, so I was told I was going to be taken to a jail,” Okporo said.

Okporo is from Nigeria, where he was working as an LGBTQ rights and public health activist in a country that does not recognize gay rights and criminalizes gay activity. In October 2016, he won an award from a New York human rights organization that published a photo of him and exposed his work.

“The community was calling for my execution, so I had to flee. I had a U.S. visa, and that was the only travel document I had to travel with,” Okporo said.

Okporo said his time in detention put him in a deep depression.

The rooms in Elizabeth, he said, are not private. Though there is a “privacy wall” inside showers and toilets, a person can still see what others are doing.

“I got alone. Lonely. … I’ve never been in that kind of isolation before. You are instructed on what to do and what not to do. And they are giving you food to eat, whether you like it or not, you just do it,” he said.

Anxiously waiting

Not knowing the outcome of his case also added to his anxiety.

“If I lose, I would be returning to my country. If I win, I would be released. Where I would be released? I was depressed because my family … I do not have communications because my family do not accept me because of my sexual orientation,” he said.

Okporo said that besides the volunteer visitation program, he found a way out in books and meditation.

“I love reading. I increased my passion for reading by always going to the library and picking up books to read,” he said. “Even [though] my body was incarcerated, my body was free because I was able to go through a day-to-day activity of how to meditate and get a grip of my mind.”

Okporo was granted asylum.

The American Friends Service Committee, which represents immigrants held in New Jersey detention facilities pro bono, reports that between February 2015 and September 2016 it represented 80 asylum seekers. Of those, 40 received asylum. All remained in detention while their claims were adjudicated.

Okporo will be eligible to apply for legal permanent resident status in one year. But he has already begun his new life in America. With First Friends’ help, he has gotten three jobs.

“I produced a cookbook,” he said proudly, “which featured 40 refugees from different countries around the world.”
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Children younger than 10 years old are now allowed to carry guns and hunt in Wisconsin.

A bill signed into law Saturday by Republican Governor Scott Walker last week went into effect Monday, easing restrictions on children who are hunting while accompanied by trained, licensed adults.

The new law eliminates a previous age restriction and allows younger children to carry their own weapons.

Previously, children as young as 10 could hunt with a mentor at least 18 years old who had gone through a hunter safety course or had military training if younger than 44. The mentor and student could have just one gun between them and had to stay within an arm’s reach of one another.

Dozens of states in the U.S. allow children to hunt, though many have restrictions on which animals children can hunt, whether they can carry their own firearms and how old they have to be.

The Wisconsin law came into effect just ahead of this Saturday’s opening of the state’s annual nine-day period of deer hunting by gun. But several hunting seasons are already underway in the state, including those for pheasant, rabbit and squirrel.

The law’s signing also came just days after 25 people and an unborn child died in a shooting at a church in Texas, adding fuel to the country’s continuing debate on gun control.

Some information in this report from The Associated Press.
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions returns to Capitol Hill this week amid growing evidence of contacts between Russians and associates of President Donald Trump, bracing for an onslaught of lawmaker questions about how much he knew of that outreach during last year’s White House campaign.

The appearance before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday follows a guilty plea from one Trump campaign aide who served on a foreign policy council that Sessions chaired, as well as statements from another adviser who said he’d advised the then-GOP Alabama senator about an upcoming trip to Russia.

Those details complicate Sessions’ effort to downplay knowledge of the campaign’s foreign contacts, and Democratic lawmakers who already contended the attorney general had not been forthcoming with them have signaled that questions about the new revelations are likely to dominate what could otherwise have been a routine oversight hearing.

“These facts appear to contradict your sworn testimony on several occasions,” Democrats from the committee said in a letter to Sessions last week.

Republicans, for their part, are likely to press Sessions on their demands for investigations into the Clinton Foundation and an Obama-era purchase of American uranium mines by a Russian-backed company.

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said Sessions had directed “senior federal prosecutors” to “evaluate certain issues” raised in letters sent by Republican lawmakers, and to determine whether investigations – or the possible appointment of a special counsel – were warranted. 

Sessions, an early Trump backer who led a foreign policy advisory council during the campaign, has been shadowed for months by questions about his own communications with Russians and by contacts of others in the Trump orbit. That issue has been at the forefront of each of his congressional hearings even as Sessions has labored to promote the Justice Department’s work and priorities, and Tuesday’s appearance is unlikely to be an exception.

Earlier in the year

At his January confirmation hearing, Sessions told Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., that “I did not have communications” with the Russians during the campaign and said he was “unaware” of contacts between others in the campaign and Russia. Yet he recused himself in March from overseeing the Justice Department’s investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin after acknowledging two previously undisclosed encounters with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

He struck a similar note before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, when he denied knowledge of communications between Russians and Trump campaign officials.

“I did not and I’m not aware of anyone else that did, and I don’t believe it happened,” Sessions said under questioning, again from Franken.

But that narrative has been challenged by a pair of recent events, most notably a guilty plea from George Papadopoulos, who last month admitted in court to lying to the FBI about his own foreign contacts. He was part of a foreign policy council that Sessions chaired, and the two are among the men in a March 2016 photograph that Trump posted on social media. Charging documents in that case indicate that Papadopoulos told the council “that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump” and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

One of the attendees at that meeting, J.D. Gordon, recalled that Sessions quickly “shut him down and said, ‘We’re not going to do that.”’

Gordon has also said that Papadopoulos went around him and Sessions and that they did not know he had continued to try to arrange such a meeting.

Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee advised Sessions in a letter last week that they intended to press him on what they said were “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s past statements and the new revelations.

“If, as recent reports suggest, you rejected Mr. Papadopoulos’s suggestion that President Trump meet with Vladimir Putin at that March 31 meeting – a fact you appear to have remembered only after Mr. Papadopoulos’s account was made public – it seems likely that you were ‘aware’ of communications between the Russian government and surrogates of the Trump campaign,” the letter states.

Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores declined to comment Monday.

Adding to the questions for Sessions was the release by the House Intelligence Committee last week of a transcript of a private interview with Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign who acknowledged that he had contact with a high-level Russian official while on a trip to Russia last year.

Page told the panel he had informed some members of the Trump campaign about the trip, including Sessions. He said he mentioned in passing to Sessions that he was preparing to visit Russia and Sessions “had no reaction whatsoever.”
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North Korea warned Monday that the unprecedented deployment of three U.S. aircraft carrier groups “taking up a strike posture” around the Korean peninsula is making it impossible to predict when nuclear war will break out.

North Korea’s U.N. ambassador, Ja Song Nam, said in a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres that the joint military exercises with South Korea are creating “the worst ever situation prevailing in and around the Korean peninsula.”

Along with the three carrier groups, he said, the U.S. has reactivated round-the-clock sorties with nuclear-capable B-52 strategic bombers “which existed during the Cold War times.”

He also said the U.S. is maintaining “a surprise strike posture with frequent flights of B-1B and B-2 formations to the airspace of South Korea.”

“The large-scale nuclear war exercises and blackmails, which the U.S. staged for a whole year without a break in collaboration with its followers to stifle our republic, make one conclude that the option we have taken was the right one and we should go along the way to the last,” Ja said.

He didn’t elaborate on what “the last” might be, but North Korea has launched ballistic missiles that have the potential to strike the U.S. mainland, and it recently conducted its largest-ever underground nuclear explosion. It has also threatened to explode another nuclear bomb above the Pacific Ocean.

The four-day joint naval exercises by the U.S. and South Korea, which began Saturday in waters off the South’s eastern coast, were described by military officials as a clear warning to North Korea. They involve the carrier battle groups of the USS Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz, which include 11 U.S. Aegis ships that can track missiles, and seven South Korean naval vessels.

Seoul’s military said in a statement that the exercises aim to enhance the combined U.S. and South Korean operational and aerial strike capabilities and to display “strong will and firm military readiness to defeat any provocation by North Korea with dominant force in the event of crisis.”

According to the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, it is the first time since a 2007 exercise near Guam that three U.S. carrier strike groups have operated together in the western Pacific.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis insisted on Monday that the carrier maneuvers are not extraordinary.

“There’s no big message” intended for North Korea or anyone else, he told reporters in an impromptu exchange in a Pentagon hallway. “This is what we normally do with allies.”

Reminded that it had been 10 years since the last three-carrier exercise, Mattis noted that the Navy has a limited number of carriers and can’t often put three in the same place.

“It’s just a normal operation,” he said.

The military drills come amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Asia, which has been dominated by discussions over the North Korean nuclear threat.

Ja accused the U.N. Security Council in Monday’s letter of repeatedly “turning a blind eye to the nuclear war exercises of the United States, who is hell bent on bringing a catastrophic disaster to humanity.” He said the exercises raise serious concern about “the double standard” of the U.N.’s most powerful body.

He also referenced Trump’s September speech to the U.N. General Assembly in which the president said that if the U.S. is “forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Trump tweeted soon after making the speech that Korea’s leadership “won’t be around much longer” if it continued its provocations, a declaration that led the North’s foreign minister to assert that Trump had “declared war on our country.”

Ja said Monday the U.S. “is now running amok for war exercises by introducing nuclear war equipment in and around the Korean peninsula, thereby proving that the U.S. itself is the major offender of the escalation of tension and undermining of the peace.”’

Ja asked Guterres to circulate the letter to the Security Council and the General Assembly, and also asked him to use his power under Article 99 of the U.N. Charter to bring to the Security Council’s attention “the danger being posed by the U.S. nuclear war exercises which are clearly threats to international peace and security.”
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The U.S. military will fight Islamic State in Syria “as long as they want to fight,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Monday, describing a longer-term role for U.S. troops long after the insurgents lose all of the territory they control.

As U.S.-backed and Russian-backed forces battle to retake the remaining pockets of Islamic State-held terrain, Mattis said the U.S. military’s longer-term objective would be to prevent the return of an “ISIS 2.0.”

“The enemy hasn’t declared that they’re done with the area yet, so we’ll keep fighting as long as they want to fight,” Mattis said, speaking to reporters at the Pentagon about the future of U.S. operations in Syria.

He also stressed the importance of longer-term peace efforts, suggesting U.S. forces aimed to help set the conditions of a diplomatic solution in Syria, now in its seventh year of civil war.

“We’re not just going to walk away right now before the Geneva process has traction,” he added.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin affirmed joint efforts to stabilize Syria as its civil war wanes, including with the expansion of a July 7 truce in the southwestern triangle bordering Israel and Jordan.

Mattis said he believed the southwestern zone was working, and spoke hopefully about additional areas in the future that might allow for more refugees to return home.

“You keep broadening them. Try to (demilitarize) one area then (demilitarize) another and just keep it going, try to do the things that will allow people to return to their homes,” he told reporters at the Pentagon.

He declined to enter into specifics about any future zones.

Russia, which has a long-term military garrison in Syria, has said it wants foreign forces to quit the country eventually.

Turkey said on Monday the United States had 13 bases in Syria and Russia had five. The U.S-backed Syrian YPG Kurdish militia has said Washington has established seven military bases in areas of northern Syria.

The U.S.-led coalition says it does not discuss the location of its forces.

One key aim for Washington is to limit Iranian influence in Syria and Iraq, which expanded during the war with Islamic State.
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Surely but slowly, the Supreme Court is entering the 21st century. The court is making new legal filings available online starting Monday, years behind the rest of the federal court system.

Can livestreamed audio of arguments and even televised sessions be far behind? Yes, they can.

But advocates of court openness will take what they can get for now, especially because the Supreme Court will not charge for documents. The federal courts’ PACER system charges fees.

“Though the Supreme Court has moved glacially to join the rest of the judiciary in permitting online filing, that’s better than not at all, and the institution should be commended for creating an e-filing system that, unlike PACER, will be free and easily accessible to the public,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court.

​A glancing familiarity with technology

Over the years, the justices have at times shown a glancing familiarity with technology. Some carry computer tablets with high court briefs loaded on them. But notes between justices are routinely sent on paper, definitely not by email.

Chief Justice John Roberts himself noted a few years back that the court stuck with pneumatic tubes to transmit newly released opinions from the courtroom to reporters waiting one floor below until 1971, long after their heyday.

Roberts said that it’s appropriate for courts “to be late to the harvest of American ingenuity” because their primary role is to resolve disputes fairly.

Many Supreme Court legal briefs are available online and for free from several sources. Scotusblog.com obtains and posts many of them, along with opinions. The Justice Department has an easily accessible archive of its extensive high court filings on its website, and the American Bar Association posts briefs in the 70 to 80 cases the court agrees to hear each term.

But the public may not know to look elsewhere. When the justices issued their highly anticipated decision upholding President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in 2012, the court’s website was overwhelmed.

It, too, has recently been overhauled to make it friendlier to the public.

PACER system criticized

The Supreme Court updates come amid criticism of the PACER system as outmoded and unfair. 

“The PACER system used by the lower federal courts is hopelessly outdated and cumbersome. And, to add insult to injury, the PACER system charges people fees to access court records that should be made freely available,” said Deepak Gupta, the lead attorney in a class-action lawsuit challenging PACER fees.

The judiciary says the fees provide the only money to pay for the system.

The cost to users was just one among several reasons the high court opted not to join the PACER system, court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.

“The court elected to design its system in-house so that it would have the capability to customize and continuously update to meet the distinctive needs of the court and counsel,” Arberg said.

Changes take effect Monday

Until now, lawyers have not been required to submit their filings to the court electronically. Beginning Monday, those documents should appear quickly on the court’s website. People who can’t afford to pay court costs will be allowed to file paper copies, which Supreme Court employees will scan and post online.

Not everything is changing. Lawyers still will be required to submit up to 40 paper copies of every brief, and the court’s color-coding system to distinguish types of briefs also will remain.

There’s no timetable for electronic filings to supplant paper as the official court record.

And there’s also no expectation that the justices will drop their prohibition on cameras in the courtroom anytime soon.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who once sounded open to cameras, recently told a New York audience that cameras might detract from the robust exchanges during arguments.

The Supreme Court also refuses to livestream audio of its arguments, even as the federal appeals court just down Capitol Hill recently has allowed live audio access to its hearings. The high court posts transcripts within hours of arguments, but doesn’t release the audio for days.
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Two became three as a scheduled Monday morning meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was expanded to include Japan’s Shinzo Abe.

The change underscored the growing three-way relationship concerning regional security, especially regarding how to respond to North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, as well as countering China’s increasingly assertive maritime territorial claims.

“The key for us is to ensure very close trilateral cooperation so as to bring peace and stability on the ground,” said the Japanese leader, who has been displaying a united front against North Korea with Trump.

“We’ve got the same values and the same focus on ensuring that the North Korean regime comes to its senses and stops its reckless provocation and threats of conflict in our region,” Turnbull said. “Peace and stability have underpinned the prosperity of billions of people over many decades, and we’re going to work together to ensure we maintain it.”

​Show of military force

A massive naval drill involving three U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups is underway in western Pacific waters as a show of force.

The U.S. naval vessels and aircraft have been joined by elements of the South Korean navy and Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.

Trump says he will make “a major statement” on North Korea and trade when he returns to Washington following his 12-day, five-nation trip to Asia.

“We’ve made a lot of big progress on trade,” Trump said at the start of his meeting with Turnbull and Abe on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, adding that his Asia trip has generated $300 billion “in sales to various companies, including China.” However, he offered no details on the coming announcement.

​Duterte meeting

Trump also had a one-on-one meeting on Monday with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who is the host for the ASEAN summit.

“We’ve have a great relationship,” Trump said. “This has been very successful.”

Reporters tried to query whether Trump had raised the issue of human rights with Duterte.

The U.S. president did not respond. Duterte, facing strong criticism from human rights groups internationally, replied, “Whoa, whoa. This not a press statement. This is the bilateral meeting.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later said of the meeting between Trump and Duterte: “The conversation focused on ISIS, illegal drugs, and trade. Human rights briefly came up in the context of the Philippines’ fight against illegal drugs.”

Earlier, as regional leaders gathered at a colorful ceremony to open the summit in Manila, Duterte sidestepped the controversy over his war on illegal drugs and its thousands of extrajudicial killings.

In opening remarks before the 17 other leaders at the summit’s plenary session, he called illegal drugs a menace that threaten “the very fabric of our society,” without mentioning methods of the response.

“I apologize for setting the tone of my statement in such a manner,” Duterte said. “But I only want to emphasize that our meetings for the next two days present an excellent opportunity for us to engage in meaningful discussions on matters of regional and international importance.”

South China Sea talks

The communique resulting from the talks is expected to announce that ASEAN will begin official negotiations for a code of conduct for the South China Sea, where several nations have conflicting territorial claims.

A number of countries have concerns about China’s increased militarization of disputed islands it controls.

For a second day Monday, several thousand militant protesters marched in Manila, clashing with riot police who responded with truncheons, water cannons and sonic alarms to keep the demonstration out of sight of the delegates at the ASEAN Summit, which is surrounded by a security cordon.

Protesters burned an effigy of Trump on Monday. Some protesters pushed the police, organizer Renato Reyes told VOA News, who said “scores” of protestors had been injured and some had to be treated at an on-site clinic.

Local media reporters say 10 people were injured, including six police officers.

The protesters shouted for Trump to leave and accused the United States, a former colonizer of the Philippines, of looking for overseas wars.

Reyes, describing the Trump-Duterte encounters, told VOA that “the two will get along very well, but that’s not good for the Philippine people.”

The U.S. president is praising his hosts in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines for the welcome he has received.

“It was red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever seen,” Trump told reporters.

Ralph Jennings and Kenneth Schwartz contributed to this report.
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Just 14 months ago, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte called former U.S. President Barack Obama a “son of a whore,” prompting Obama to avoid meeting his Philippine counterpart at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Laos.

But times have changed.

Now that association, better known as ASEAN, is meeting in Manila and Duterte is in charge. He has met current U.S. President Donald Trump twice ceremonially here and is holding an extended meeting with him Monday.

Duterte’s chairing role in the association, along with regular state visits around Asia in his 16 months in office, have helped to refine his character, earning him new respect, analysts say.

“He has to play along with the script,” said Eduardo Araral, associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s public policy school. “Otherwise it would be a very long day if he does his usual impromptu.”

Trump and Duterte have so far this week shelved any differences, including possible U.S. objections to extrajudicial killings in his anti-drug campaign. Duterte also offered a polite “no thanks” to Trump’s offer for mediation in the South China Sea sovereignty dispute involving five other governments, including the Philippines.

Duterte made friends last year with China, the sea’s most powerful claimant, and Beijing prefers two-way dialogue.

Profanity to diplomacy

Last year, in addition to insulting Obama, Duterte called the U.N. human rights chief an “idiot” over comments about killings in the Philippine anti-drug campaign.

In the same year, he threatened to kick out U.S. military personnel from the Philippines despite continued reliance on U.S. help in national defense since American colonialism ended in 1946.

The 72-year-old former mayor of the archipelago’s second largest city also has told Filipinos he personally killed people.

But this year he has not only spurned profanity and threats in the face of foreign officials. Some credit him with getting Trump to extend his stay at this week’s summits by a day and avoiding any boycotts.

Police have stopped anti-Trump protest groups from disrupting the summit venues.

Filipinos who follow ASEAN, often those working near the summit venues in Metro Manila’s booming bayside Pasay City, expect Duterte to use his improved image to form foreign relations strong enough to increase trade and investment.

Just last month, Japan pledged $5.8 billion in economic support as the Philippines pursues $167 billion in infrastructure renewal. China is offering $24 billion in investment and aid.

But experts caution that new trade and investment are more likely to respond to Philippine economic growth of 6.9 percent last year, low labor costs and cost savings from new infrastructure, such as railways and ports. Net foreign investment inflows rose 40.7 percent last year.

Public support

Rasheda Torio, an outdoor vendor of candies in Metro Manila, said she’s “proud of the Philippines” but expects no tangible benefits from the summits this week.

“I’m just a small saleslady here, so I don’t know if I can get that benefit,” said Torio, 24.

“After this meeting we will have strong economic relations, especially with ASEAN’s countries,” said Ron Mendoza, 23, a retail worker at the giant SM Mall of Asia in Pasay City. He expects a faster flow of goods between the Philippines and other Asian countries.

“I think even if we were having a little conflict with China before, we will be having a much stronger relationship right now,” he said.

About two-thirds of Filipinos endorse Duterte, according to polls by the Metro Manila research institution Social Weather Stations.

Approval ratings have trended high over his term in office to date despite inflammatory talk and suspected use of extrajudicial killings, because many feel crime rates are falling. His image-building among foreign heads of state adds to public enthusiasm.

ASEAN leadership allows Asia to get to know Duterte better, said Anita Aduana, 52, who works at a vision clinic in Metro Manila. She expects more investment in the Philippines to follow.

“We support him, I think, not only 100 percent but 200 percent,” Aduana said. “That’s the bigger part of it for ASEAN.”

​Sidestepping Southeast Asia’s big controversy

Duterte, though he still speaks his mind on issues such as Islamic State-backed terrorism and the social impact of illegal drugs, two topics that came up at the summits Monday, he has downplayed the South China Sea dispute involving the Philippines and four other ASEAN countries.

China, as the most powerful claimant, resents international condemnation of its island building or military infrastructure in the sea. It prefers bilateral talks on any disputes. Cooperative countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam have received economic benefits in response.

The association is already working on a code of conduct to prevent mishaps on the sea that runs from China south to the island of Borneo.

“The Philippines has actually managed the ASEAN chairmanship in a fairly normal matter this far,” said Carl Baker, director of programs with the think tank Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu.

“The one area where Duterte’s leadership may have the biggest impact is the lack of emphasis that I expect to see on the South China Sea territorial disputes,” Baker said.

“I suspect what we will see on the topic is the narrative that China and ASEAN are working on fleshing out the Code of Conduct framework and the recognition that the territorial disputes must be resolved bilaterally,” he said.

 
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