Duterte flew by helicopter into the local military headquarters in a show of support for troops who have been engaged in an almost two month-long battle that has claimed over 500 lives.

“He really showed his courage, he showed his strong support for our soldiers in their fight in Marawi City,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jo-ar Herrera, spokesman of military forces in the warzone.

“It boosted morale and the fighting spirit of the men and women of Task Force Marawi,” Herrera told local media.

Duterte, who was dressed in military camouflage, thanked the soldiers for their efforts and gave out watches and other gifts to cheer the soldiers up, Herrera added.

The president, who declared martial law over the southern Philippines as the fighting began on May 23, stayed inside the camp, inspecting firearms seized from the militants, before departing, the spokesman said.

The fighting in the southern city of Marawi, the Muslim capital of the largely Catholic Philippines, has become the greatest challenge facing Duterte, the first president to hail from the country’s troubled south.

The president has asked lawmakers to allow him to extend martial law over the south until the end of the year to deal with the militant threat but critics fear this would edge the country closer to dictatorship.

The militants, who fly the black flag of the IS, have occupied large parts of Marawi for almost two months, defying airstrikes and artillery barrages, with parts of the city of 200,000 people left in ruins.

The government on Thursday said at least 421 militants had been killed in the fighting which has also claimed the lives of 99 soldiers and police, as well as 45 civilians.

The extremists continue to occupy parts of the city with about 300 civilians still trapped or held hostage by the gunmen.

Massimo Carminati, 59, a convicted gangster with a history of involvement with violent far-right groups, had been accused along with 45 others of operating a “mafia-style” network that used extortion, fraud and theft to divert millions of euros destined for public services into their own pockets.

His right-hand man and fellow defendant Salvatore Buzzi, 61, was handed a 19-year jail term by the court at the capital city’s Rebibbia jail.

The scandal, which led to a 20-month trial in the high-security prison, had been dubbed “Mafia Capitale” by the media.

But judge Rosanna Ianniello said Carminati and Buzzi were guilty of corruption but not of mafia association.

“The sentence is stiff, but the whole trial revolved around the question: ‘Was it mafia or not?’,” Carminati’s lawyer Ippolita Naso said.

“‘Mafia Capitale does not exist,” she said.

Naso added that she had spoken to Carminati and he was “satisfied”.

Both men were already behind bars in prisons in Parma and Tolmezzo where they were kept under the notorious harsh 41-bis regime, aimed at cutting mafia inmates off completely from their former criminal associates.

“The 41-bis will have to be repealed. But who will give Carminati back the 22 months spent under it?” lawyer Giosue Bruno Naso, Ippolita Naso’s father, said.

Carminati and Buzzi watched the verdict by video conference, Carminati standing to hear his sentence while Buzzi sat and took notes.

They will appeal the verdict.

One-eyed Carminati was given a 10-year prison term in 1998 for membership of the Banda della Magliana, a criminal crew which ruled Rome’s underworld in the 1970s and 1980s.

Carminati’s brother Sergio told media at the court that the trial was “ridiculous. Massimo is still paying for the 1980s”.

In 1983, Buzzi received a 30-year prison sentence for the murder of an accomplice in a forged cheques racket.

He served only six years after pursuing his education and successfully portraying himself as a reformed character.

The Rome scandal had been a major factor in leaving the city so cash-strapped it can barely afford to repair its buses when they break down, fill potholes in its streets or prevent trees from falling over for lack of upkeep.

 Johnson, kicking off a trip to Japan, visited the robotic centre at Waseda University, which works closely with Britain’s University of Birmingham on robotic technologies.

He witnessed a demonstration of WABIAN II, which resembles a tiny astronaut that Waseda hopes will make the list of torch runners for the Games.

“No kidding!” Johnson said, when told of the plan.

Smiling, he walked with the humanoid and also shook hands with it.

Johnson also observed a demonstration of a disaster recovery robot, named Octopus — a four-armed, four-wheeled crawler designed to clear rubble and save lives in areas with complex terrain.

Britain’s top diplomat is scheduled to meet Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida on Friday to discuss increased foreign and security policy cooperation to tackle threats to regional stability.

He will also meet business leaders, investors and representatives from British businesses to discuss the future of trade and investment relations between the two countries ahead of Brexit.

Johnson, who served as London mayor during the 2012 Olympics there, also plans to meet Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike who will lead the city into the 2020 event.

The artist’s body is buried in the elaborate museum of his work Dali designed himself in the northeastern Spanish town of Figueras, where he was born over 110 years ago.

Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old who long worked as a psychic in Catalonia, says her mother had a relationship with the artist when she worked in Cadaques, a picturesque port where the painter lived for years.

If Abel is confirmed as Dali’s only child, she could be entitled to a slice of at least 25 per cent of the huge fortune and heritage of one of the most celebrated and prolific painters of the 20th century, said the woman’s lawyer Enrique Blanquez.

The Salvador Dali Foundation had tried to fight off the exhumation with an appeal, but there was not enough time for all parties to present their case, a court spokesman told AFP.

Barring some “administrative or logistical surprise”, the exhumation will go ahead, he said.

Authorities will begin removing the over one-tonne slab covering the tomb of the eccentric artist, who died in 1989 with no known child heirs, after visitors have cleared out for the day from the Dali Theatre-Museum.

Forensic scientists will take DNA samples in the form of bone or tooth fragments directly from the grave where Dali was buried and they will then be sent to Madrid to undergo the necessary tests.

Abel has already provided a saliva sample for comparison, with results expected within a matter of weeks.

 – ‘Very happy’ –

The museum, a major tourist site that drew over 1.1 million visitors last year, will be covered in some places with cloth to prevent drones from capturing images of the exhumation.

“I just want to know the truth. I am very positive, very happy,” Abel told reporters at a Madrid hotel on the eve of Dali’s exhumation.

In an interview with AFP last month, just days after a court ordered the exhumation, Abel said her grandmother first told her she was Dali’s daughter when she was seven or eight years old, and her mother admitted it much later.

Abel is from the city of Figueras, like Dali, and she said she would often see him in the streets.

“We wouldn’t say anything, we would just look at each other. But a glance is worth a thousand words,” she said.

Notoriously eccentric, Dali’s life was marked as much by the genius of his work as by his own extravagances.

A question has always hung over his sexuality, with some claiming he was a closet homosexual who preferred to watch others having sex rather than taking part.

But according to Abel’s lawyer Blanquez, his affair was “known in the village, there are people who have testified before a notary”.

 – Dali and Gala –

Born on May 11, 1904 in Figueras to a bourgeois family, Dali developed an interest in painting from an early age.

In 1922 he began studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Madrid, where, despite being expelled twice, he developed his first avant-garde artistic ideas in association with poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel.

Soon he left for Paris to join the surrealist movement, giving the school his own personal twist and rocketing to fame with works such as “The Great Masturbator.”

Returning to Catalonia after 12 years, he invited French poet Paul Eluard and his Russian wife Elena Ivanovna Diakonova to Cadaques.

It was love at first sight between Dali and the woman to whom he gave the pet name Gala.

She became his muse and remained at his side for the rest of her life and died in 1982. The couple never had children.

“Dali loved his wife but he loved her without having sex, he was a voyeur I would say,” Lidia, a resident of Figueras who says she met Dali when she was 13, told AFP TV.

“This is why the people of Figueras think it was very unlikely that he could have had a child,” she added.//AFP

Though bile farms are already outlawed in Vietnam, bears are still captured and caged in illicit facilities where their bile is extracted using invasive and painful techniques.

Vietnam’s Administration of Forestry (VNFOREST) and non-profit group Animals Asia signed an agreement Wednesday to rescue all remaining bears from farms, committing to end bile trade and close all facilities within five years.

“This is a truly historic day,” Animals Asia CEO Jill Robinson at the signing in Hanoi, adding that the decision “will lead to the definitive end to bear bile farming here in Vietnam”.

Bear bile farming has been outlawed in Vietnam since 1992. But many bile farms use a legal loophole allowing them to raise the animals as pets.

There are about 1,200 bears in captivity in Vietnam today, down from more than 4,000 in 2005, caged in more than 400 bear farms across the country.

Animals Asia estimates it will cost up to $20 million to rescue and build enough sanctuaries to house the bears, and called on donors, companies and the government to pitch in.

“We cannot do this by ourselves, the government needs to take responsibility for the wildlife in the country,” said Tuan Bendixsen, Vietnam director for Animals Asia.

Officials said funding is the main hurdle to rescuing the bears and putting an end to the trade.

“We face difficulties finding funds to prevent and stop the hunting and rescue of wild animals,” VNFOREST deputy director Cao Chi Cong said.

Bendixsen warned that bile farms could move into neighbouring Laos or Cambodia, and urged countries to adhere to an international convention that bans cross-border bear and bile trading.

Wednesday’s agreement follows an announcement in 2015 from Vietnam’s Traditional Medicine Association to remove bear bile from its list of sanctioned prescriptions by 2020.

The bears are often kept in small cages, and their bile is ‘free dripped’ via a hole in the animal’s gall bladder or a catheter. Many are starved, dehydrated, wounded and psychologically scarred when they are rescued.

Bear bile contains an acid which can help treat liver and gall bladder illnesses, though effective herbal alternatives are available.//AFP

Lim Ji Hyun, a female defector in her 20s, arrived in Seoul in 2014 and soon became a public figure after starring in several South Korean TV shows featuring escapees from the North.

But on Sunday, Lim abruptly appeared in a video on the North’s propaganda network, describing how her dream about the wealthy South had been shattered.

In the video, posted on the North’s Uriminzokkiri website, Lim said she had “returned home” last month and is now living with her family in the city of Anju.

It is unclear if she returned voluntarily, with South Korean media speculating that she might have been kidnapped at the Chinese border with the North while trying to reunite with her family.

Police sources who probed Lim’s home and financial accounts in Seoul told the South’s JoongAng Ilbo daily there was little sign of her trying to wrap up her life in the country and move elsewhere.

Seoul’s spy agency declined to comment.

In the video, she identified herself as Chon Hae Song, which she said was her real name in the North. Wearing a traditional hanbok and red badge bearing the images of the North’s former leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, she tearfully detailed her “miserable” life in the capitalist nation.

“I went to South Korea harbouring this fantasy that I would able to eat and live well, and make a lot of money there, but the South was not the place I imagined.”

Lim also accused a South Korean TV station of pushing her to lie about her life in the North to make it sound more miserable than it actually was.

Lee So Yool, another North Korean defector and TV celebrity in Seoul, said Lim would have been broadcast criticising the South regardless of whether she had returned to the North voluntarily or forcibly.

“She has no choice in order to survive,” Lee said.//AFP

Although no trace of the Malaysia Airlines plane was found during the search in the southern Indian Ocean — the most expensive ever of its kind — large volumes of data showing a detailed picture of the sea floor had to be collected to guide the probe.

Scientists are hopeful the new maps will give their community greater insight into oceans.

“It is estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of the world’s oceans have been surveyed with the kind of technology used in the search for MH370,” Geoscience Australia’s environmental geoscience chief Stuart Minchin said late Wednesday.

“(That makes) this remote part of the Indian Ocean among the most thoroughly mapped regions of the deep ocean on the planet.

“So this data is unique both because of the remote location of the search area, and because of the sheer scale of the area surveyed.”

Minchin said the maps would also be useful for future scientific research, such as oceanographic and habitat modelling.

Australia, Malaysia and China suspended the deep sea hunt in January, almost three years after the Boeing 777 disappeared with 239 people on board.

The hunt — based on satellite analysis of the jet’s likely trajectory after it diverted from its flight path — covered a 120,000 square-kilometre (46,000 square mile) designated zone, an area slightly smaller than England.

Two shipwrecks were discovered during the search but no trace of the plane, deepening one the most enduring mysteries of the aviation age.

However, the data revealed ridges six kilometres (3.73 miles) wide and 15 kilometres long that rise 1,500 metres above the sea floor, as well as fault valleys 1,200 metres deep and five kilometres wide.

A second set of data will be released in mid-2018.

While the search for the missing plane has been called off, Canberra has said it could be restarted if new evidence about the specific location of the aircraft emerges.

“We remain hopeful that new information will come to light and that at some point in the future the aircraft will be located,” Australia’s Transport Minister Darren Chester said.

Australia’s national science body CSIRO released a report in April confirming that MH370 was “most likely” north of the former search zone.

Three fragments from the plane have been recovered washed up on western Indian Ocean shores, including a two-metre wing part known as a flaperon found on La Reunion island.

Speculation on the cause of the plane’s disappearance has focused primarily on possible hijacking, rogue pilot action or mechanical failure, but nothing has yet been proved.

But after a crackdown on the international smuggling routes that once offered a dangerous — but viable — escape route, she now sees no way out.

“We have no idea how many years we will have to live like this,” the 40-year-old widow told AFP inside the tiny bamboo hut she shares with her son, tugging nervously at her purple headscarf.

“Our lives are worse than animals… we are human only in name.”

Deadly sectarian riots in 2012 drove more than 120,000 Rohingya into the camps in Rakhine State, where they live in ramshackle homes and are deprived of adequate food, schools and doctors.

For years human traffickers cashed in on the group’s desperation, ferrying thousands of Rohingya across the Andaman Sea to countries like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The journeys were defined by danger: from rickety boats on high seas to abuse and even death at the hands of the gangs, who held many victims for ransom in jungle camps on the Thai-Malaysia border.

That route was shuttered by Thailand’s junta in 2015 and few boats have left the camps since, according to residents, aid workers and migration experts.

The move may have spared Hla Hla Sein death at sea or abuse at the hands of smugglers, but it also cut off a way out of a painful limbo.

While a Bangkok court rules Wednesday on the fate of more than 100 people arrested for running the trafficking network, she will spend another day distributing food rations in the camp.

‘Ready to die’

Hla Hla Sein and her son had tried to escape to Malaysia before the crackdown, but their boat was so overcrowded it started to sink a few hours into the journey, forcing the captain to turn back.

It was only after they returned to shore that she found out the smugglers had planned to sell them as slaves at their destination.

“I was ready to die at sea as we have nothing in this country,” she said. “Our children cannot get education, even I cannot work. I thought dying would be better.”

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has long been chastised for its treatment of the Rohingya, a group of more than a million Muslims whose rights and freedoms have been successively stripped away since the early 1980s.

Over the past five years almost 170,000 have fled the country, according to the UN’s refugee agency, leaving many families split across borders.

“It’s impossible to go to Malaysia by boat nowadays,” said a Rohingya camp leader, asking not to be named. “We do not want people to die at sea.”

Recently, a new outburst of violence in northern Rakhine pushed more than 70,000 Rohingyas across Myanmar’s northwestern border to Bangladesh.

But Bangladesh plays an unwilling host to the minority and traffickers there are believed to now be smuggling Rohingya by road and air as far afield as Saudi Arabia, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

For those left behind in Myanmar’s camps, escape is no longer an option.

“We are suffering,” said Hla Hla Sein. “We are not supposed to stay like this forever.”

Myanmar’s Martyr’s Day is observed on July 19 to commemorate country’s nine independence heroes, including General Aung San, who was assassinated on July 19, 1947.

Attending the ceremony included Myanmar military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, Phyu Phyu Thin, member of House of Representatives and HIV/AIDS activist, Chief Justice Tun Tun Oo, Chairman of the Lower House of Parliament Win Myint, Vice President Myint Swe, Chairman of the Upper House of the Parliament Mann Win Khaing Than and Military Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

During the ceremony, Myanmar guards of honour blow bugles in tribute to the late General Aung San and other leaders.

The Chinese-made Shaanxi Y8 military aircraft plunged into the Andaman Sea during a routine flight from the southern city of Myeik to the commercial hub, Yangon.

Navy ships and fishing boats battled strong monsoon swells in the following days to pull scores of bodies from the waves, most of them the wives and children of servicemen.

Recordings from the black box showed the plane went into a nose dive after icing built up on the wings and a sudden increase in crosswinds caused the engine to stall, state media said.

The plane lost contact with air traffic control roughly half an hour after takeoff from Myeik while flying at over 18,000 feet (5,486 metres), according to previous military statements.

“The accident occurred due to loss of control after experiencing adverse weather that caused the plane to stall… resulting in a nose dive,” state media said.

Investigators concluded the crash was “not from any act of sabotage, explosion or engine failure,” it added.

It is monsoon season in Myanmar but there were no reports of major stormy weather in the area at the time.

Gerry Soejatman, an independent aviation expert based in Jakarta, said storms high up in the atmosphere that are not visible from the ground can cause ice to form on wings or in engine intakes.

But he added that normally pilots would use a weather radar to avoid such clouds.

“If it is storm clouds, this begs the question, why did they fly into it?” he told AFP.

The black box data were analysed by the investigators from Myanmar and Australia, which has steered the hunt for wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Its last known location before it went missing in March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board was several hundred miles north of where the Myanmar military plane crashed.

The accident is the latest long line of crashes among the military’s fleet.

A five-strong crew died when an air force plane burst into flames soon after taking off from the capital Naypyidaw in February last year.

Three army officers were also killed in June when their Mi-2 helicopter crashed into a hillside and burst into flames in south-central Bago.