"They can just kill anyone." Since 2016, thousands have been killed in the Philippines' war on drugs. The bloody campaign began under the Philippines' last president, Rodrigo Duterte, who said he would be "happy to slaughter" three million drug addicts in the country. When current president Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office in 2022, he promised to end this spree of state-sanctioned killings of alleged drug users and sellers, and focus on rehabilitation instead. In today's episode of The Sunday Story, NPR's Emily Feng travels to the Philippines to see what has come of Marcos' attempt to burnish the country's international reputation and to put an end to what most people in the Philippines now refer to as EJKs, or "extrajudicial killings." She found that the killings have continued. And she spoke to researchers, doctors, advocates, and victims' families to try to understand why. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy

President Biden meets leaders of Black sororities and fraternities ahead of delivering the commencement address at Morehouse College as campus protests continue. Autoworkers in Alabama will vote on whether or not to unionize a Mercedes-Benz plant. And Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has pardoned Daniel Perry, who was convicted of murdering Garrett Foster at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Roberta Rampton, Julia Redpath, Eric Westervelt, Lisa Thomson and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams and Kaity Kline. We get engineering support from James Willetts. And our technical director is Zac Coleman. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy