Priest who defied drug war honoured

Shared sorrow: Villanueva (left) consoling Melinda Lafuente as she lays her son, a casualty of Duterte’s war on drugs, to rest in Caloocan City in this file photo. — AP

A Filipino priest, who pub­licly protested then-president Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody crackdown against illegal drugs despite death threats and helped provide proper funerals to those killed, is among the winners of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award – Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.

The other winners announced on Sunday were a non-profit foundation in India that worked to bring poor girls to schools in more than 30,000 villages across the country’s most underserved regions and a local Maldives diver who sparked a movement to save her tropical island nation from plastic pollution with massive clean-ups and recycling.