E-sabong still rules the roost

Going strong: An employee of a cockfighting arena holding a wager machine during a cockfight in Bulacan province, north of Manila. Cockfighting has long been a national obsession in the Philippines, tracing its lineage to well before the first Spanish arrived in the 1500s. — AFP

Divers have spent more than a month searching a lake south of Manila for the bodies of men with links to the Philippines’ bloody national obsession: cockfighting.

They were murdered by rogue police, a government witness says, allegedly for rigging matches at the height of the country’s pandemic-era craze for betting on live-streamed cockfights, or “e-sabong”.