MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A Philippine appeals court reversed a regulator's 2018 order to shut down a prominent news outlet in a decision made public Friday, marking a legal victory for journalists who angered former President Rodrigo Duterte by reporting critically on his deadly crackdown on illegal drugs and alarming human rights record.
The Court of Appeals ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission to restore the certificates of incorporation of Rappler, an online news outfit founded by 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner Maria Ressa, in a decision issued July 23.
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Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, greets the gathering at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, displays documents showing the court's decision, with her lawyer Francis Lim seated beside her at a press conference at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, speaks to the media, with her lawyer Francis Lim seated beside her at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, speaks to the media at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
FILE -Rappler CEO and Executive Editor Maria Ressa gestures during an interview at a restaurant in Taguig city, Philippines, Oct. 9, 2021. T (AP Photo/Aaron Favila), File)
It wasn't immediately clear if the SEC will appeal the ruling.
“It’s a vindication,” Rappler said in a statement. “It’s a fact that the Duterte government used the SEC order to unleash its power to further harass us, our employees, our stakeholders and our communities.”
Rappler said it’s still facing two other legal cases: a cyber-libel conviction that Ressa is appealing to the Supreme Court and a case pending in another Philippine court in which the outlet is accused of violating the “Anti-Dummy Law,” which prohibits Philippines nationals from acting as proxies for noncitizens to evade legal requirements.
Rappler has continued to operate during its legal fight, despite the closure order.
Rappler was accused of violating a constitutional ban on foreign investments in local media agencies when it received funds through financial papers called Philippine depository receipts in 2015 from the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic organization backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The government alleged that the funding gave Omidyar some control over Rappler.
Rappler denied Omidyar wielded any control over it through the financial receipts, which Omidyar later donated to the online outfit's employees.
The court ruled that the 2018 shutdown order, one of several legal issues that Ressa and Rappler faced under Duterte, was made “with grave abuse of discretion, contravening established procedures, jurisprudential and legal instructions, and clear intent of the constitution."
Duterte and other Philippine officials have said the criminal complaints against Ressa and Rappler, which included tax lawsuits, were not a press freedom issue but part of normal judicial procedures.
But Duterte was known for openly lambasting journalists and news agencies that critically reported about his deadly campaign against illegal drugs, including the country’s largest TV network, ABS-CNS. ABS-CNS was shut down in 2020 after Duterte-allied lawmakers refused to renew its license.
The Philippines has long been regarded as one of the most dangerous places for journalists in the world.
In 2009, members of a powerful political clan and their associates gunned down 58 people, including 32 media workers, in a brazen attack in southern Maguindanao province. It was the deadliest single attack on journalists in recent history.
While the mass killing was later linked to a violent electoral rivalry, it also showcased the threats faced by journalists in the Philippines. A surfeit of unlicensed guns and private armies controlled by powerful clans, and a lack of law enforcement in rural areas are among the security concerns journalists face in the poverty-stricken Southeast Asian nation.
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, greets the gathering at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, displays documents showing the court's decision, with her lawyer Francis Lim seated beside her at a press conference at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, speaks to the media, with her lawyer Francis Lim seated beside her at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel peace prize co-winner and founder of Rappler, an online news outfit, speaks to the media at the Rappler office in Manila, Philippines, Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Joeal Calupitan)
FILE -Rappler CEO and Executive Editor Maria Ressa gestures during an interview at a restaurant in Taguig city, Philippines, Oct. 9, 2021. T (AP Photo/Aaron Favila), File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street’s worst crisis since COVID slammed into a higher, scarier gear Friday.
The S&P 500 lost 6% after China matched President Donald Trump’s big raise in tariffs announced earlier this week. The move increased the stakes in a trade war that could end with a recession that hurts everyone. Not even a better-than-expected report on the U.S. job market, which is usually the economic highlight of each month, was enough to stop the slide.
The drop closed the worst week for the S&P 500 since March 2020, when the pandemic crashed the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 2,231 points, or 5.5% Friday, and the Nasdaq composite tumbled 5.8% to pull more than 20% below its record set in December.
So far there have been few, if any, winners in financial markets from the trade war. Stocks for all but 12 of the 500 companies that make up the S&P 500 index fell Friday. The price of crude oil tumbled to its lowest level since 2021. Other basic building blocks for economic growth, such as copper, also saw prices slide on worries the trade war will weaken the global economy.
China’s response to U.S. tariffs caused an immediate acceleration of losses in markets worldwide. The Commerce Ministry in Beijing said it would respond to the 34% tariffs imposed by the U.S. on imports from China with its own 34% tariff on imports of all U.S. products beginning April 10. The United States and China are the world’s two largest economies.
Markets briefly recovered some of their losses after the release of Friday morning’s U.S. jobs report, which said employers accelerated their hiring by more last month than economists expected. It’s the latest signal that the U.S. job market has remained relatively solid through the start of 2025, and it’s been a linchpin keeping the U.S. economy out of a recession.
But that jobs data was backward looking, and the fear hitting financial markets is about what’s to come.
“The world has changed, and the economic conditions have changed,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock.
The central question looking ahead is: Will the trade war cause a global recession? If it does, stock prices will likely need to come down even more than they have already. The S&P 500 is down 17.4% from its record set in February.
Trump seemed unfazed. From Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, he headed to his golf course a few miles away after writing on social media that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH.”
The Federal Reserve could cushion the blow of tariffs on the economy by cutting interest rates, which can encourage companies and households to borrow and spend. But the Fed may have less freedom to move than it would like.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Friday that tariffs could also drive up expectations for inflation. That could prove more damaging than high inflation itself, because it can drive a vicious cycle of behavior that only worsens inflation. U.S. households have already said they’re bracing for sharp increases to their bills.
“Our obligation is to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored and to make certain that a one-time increase in the price level does not become an ongoing inflation problem,” Powell said.
That could indicate a hesitance to cut rates because lower rates can give inflation more fuel.
Much will depend on how long Trump’s tariffs stick and what kind of retaliations other countries deliver. Some of Wall Street is holding onto hope that Trump will lower the tariffs after prying out some “wins” from other countries following negotiations.
Trump has given mixed signals on that. On Friday, he said an official from Vietnam said his country already “wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.” Trump also criticized China’s retaliation, saying on his Truth Social platform that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED - THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!”
Trump has said Americans may feel “some pain” because of tariffs, but he has also said the long-term goals, including getting more manufacturing jobs back to the United States, are worth it. On Thursday, he likened the situation to a medical operation, where the U.S. economy is the patient.
“For investors looking at their portfolios, it could have felt like an operation performed without anesthesia,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.
But Jacobsen also said the next surprise for investors could be how quickly tariffs get negotiated down. “The speed of recovery will depend on how, and how quickly, officials negotiate,” he said.
On Wall Street, stocks of companies that do lots of business in China fell to some of the sharpest losses.
DuPont dropped 12.7% after China said its regulators are launching an anti-trust investigation into DuPont China group, a subsidiary of the chemical giant. It’s one of several measures targeting American companies and in retaliation for the U.S. tariffs.
GE Healthcare got 12% of its revenue last year from the China region, and it fell 16%.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 322.44 points to 5,074.08. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,231.07 to 38,314.86, and the Nasdaq composite fell 962.82 to 15,587.79.
In stock markets abroad, Germany’s DAX lost 5%, France’s CAC 40 dropped 4.3% and Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 2.8%.
In the bond market, Treasury yields fell, but they pared their drops following Powell’s cautious statements about inflation. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.01% from 4.06% late Thursday and from roughly 4.80% early this year. It had gone below 3.90% in the morning.
AP Writers Jiang Junzhe, Huizhong Wu and Matt Ott contributed.
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