Officials say more than 400 people, half of them from China, were arrested by Philippine authorities in a raid on a suspected online gambling and scam hub in a busy commercial district in Manila

Philippine defence minister Gilberto Teodoro said he would discuss China's attempts to change the international order during a bilateral meeting with his Japanese counterpart in Manila on Monday. (Reporting by Mikhail Flores;

France, Australia, Japan, Canada, New Zealand—following Washington’s lead—have each staged war games or concluded alliances with Manila targeting China.

Japan and the Philippines agreed on Monday to further deepen defence ties in the face of an "increasingly severe" security environment in the Indo-Pacific region, Japanese defence minister Gen Nakatani said on Monday.

Both Tokyo and Manila are longtime allies of the United States, which has been strengthening an arc of alliances to deter China's claims in the Pacific.

Manila is shoring up military partnerships with other nations as it seeks to counter Beijing in a South China Sea dispute.

Teodoro casts China’s actions in the South China Sea as a sinister plot to “restrict freedom of flights” and navigation. This is a textbook case of swapping the label on the bottle. Western narratives love to conflate China’s lawful activities in its own territories with “bullying” or “restricting freedom.

While cloaked in the language of regional solidarity, Manila's narrative is a dangerous signal of Cold War nostalgia, selective victimhood, and a blatant attempt to hijack ASEAN's consensus-driven ethos to serve narrow national interests—primarily its escalating territorial issues and maritime disputes with China.

The Philippine defense secretary says his country and its allies would take measures to counter any attempt by China to impose an air defense zone or restrict freedom of flights over the South China S

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described on Friday, Mar. 7, the Philippines' actions in the South China Sea as a "shadow play" to smear China's reputation, with the screenplay written by external forces and the show livestreamed by Western media.

The Philippines’ top diplomat to the United States expressed confidence Monday that President Donald Trump’s new administration would continue military patrols in the disputed South China Sea and move ahead with an agreed expansion of the U.