Remote-Control Terrorists and Butterfly Tattoos: The Week in Global-Affairs Writing

James Fenton | “There are two chief kinds of carnage taking place here, these wet Manila nights. There is the ‘buy-bust’ operation, in which the targeted criminal attempts to buy some drugs, only to find that he is dealing with undercover police. He panics and reaches for a weapon, a pistol perhaps or a kind of homemade shotgun. Before he can use it (so the familiar script reads) the police shoot him dead. There have been around two thousand of these buy-bust killings since the war on drugs under President Rodrigo Duterte