The Briton thrilled home fans with a devastating quickest lap of 1min 26.600sec to finish 0.547sec clear of Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, although Hamilton was under investigation for potential impeding.

Championship leader Sebastian Vettel was left frustrated in third in the second Ferrari ahead of Valtteri Bottas in the second Mercedes.

Bottas, however, faces a likely five-place grid penalty for an unscheduled gearbox change, while stewards were looking into an incident in which Romain Grosjean claimed he was blocked by Hamilton.

Max Verstappen was fifth for Red Bull ahead of Nico Hulkenberg of Renault, Sergio Perez and his Force India team-mate Esteban Ocon.

Stoffel Vandoorne took an encouraging ninth for McLaren ahead of Grosjean of Haas.

“You always try to save the best till last,” said Hamilton, who closed to within one of Michael Schumacher’s record of 68 poles. “I felt very comfortable in these conditions – they are the conditions we grew up racing in here in England.”

“It felt ok, but the conditions were not easy, changing a lot,” said Raikkonen. “The car felt the best it had this weekend, but not quite fast enough for first place.”

Vettel said: “The car came alive this morning and that was really good. It’s a shame there that in the last run in Q3 there was not more time!”

Religious South Koreans have been a loud fixture at the annual parade for years, holding a rival anti-homosexuality rally while trying to physically block the march.

Some 2,000 police troops lined up around a square outside the City Hall, where revellers gyrated and waved flags as scantily-clothed performers sang and danced on the stage.

Across the street hundreds of Christians chanted slogans, calling homosexuality a “sin” and urging homosexuals to “return to Jesus Christ”.

Their presence is the most visible display of intolerance towards sexual minorities in the tradition-bound society, where religious belief is widespread and many homosexuals stay in the closet due to fear of discrimination and social isolation.

Homosexuality is not illegal in South Korea. But gay, lesbian or transgender rights remain politically unpopular

But festival-goers took the protest in their stride.

The crowd, estimated to be some 10,000, later paraded through the centre of Seoul, carrying banners and rainbow flags, with many swaying on open truck beds.

Meghan Lefevre from California, said: “I am happy that they (police) are here to make us feel protected. Not every country will do that. So I am very happy that it’s a safe environment.”

Gay rights activists say that some progress has been made in recent years, with surveys showing increasing tolerance, particularly among young people, and participation at Pride surging since the first parade in 2000, when only 50 attended.

The National Human Rights Commission of Korea, a state rights watchdog, and the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism — the country’s biggest Buddhist sect — are taking part this year for the first time.

“Buddha has taught us everyone, regardless of his or her sexual orientation, can attain perfect enlightenment. Sexual minorities must not be indiscriminated against”, said Hyo Rok, a senior nun and professor at the Seoul University of Buddhism.

But the event’s growing profile has unnerved South Korea’s conservative Protestant church groups, which have millions of followers, enormous political lobbying power, and see homosexuality as a psychological illness to be “healed”.

Liu’s remains were incinerated “in accordance with the will of his family members and local customs” in the northeastern city of Shenyang, said Zhang Qingyang, an official from the municipal office.

Officials released photos showing his wife, the poet Liu Xia, with her brother, and two of Liu Xiaobo’s brothers in front of the body, which was covered with white petals and surrounded by flowers at a funeral home.

Zhang also said “friends” were at the ceremony, but Amnesty International’s China researcher Patrick Poon told AFP that he did not recognise any of the row of non-family members in the official photo and people close to the Liu couple identified at least one “state security police officer” among them.

Chinese dissident artist critic Ai Weiwei, who lives in Berlin tweeted a photo of the funeral and called the display “disgusting” and a “violation” of the deceased.

China’s government faced a global backlash for denying the democracy advocate’s wish to be treated abroad. After his death, the United States and European Union called on Beijing to free Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest since 2010, and let her leave the country.

“As far as I know, Liu Xia is in a free condition,” Zhang said, though it was unclear whether she was released as he did not answer questions about her whereabouts.

Authorities have severely restricted Liu Xia’s contact with the outside world and Jared Genser, a US lawyer who represented the Nobel Peace Prize winner, said she has been held “incommunicado” since her husband’s death.

“The most preposterous thing is that even during his cremation and funeral he still was not free. And now it’s been passed on to his wife, who will continue to lead on that same freedom-less existence,” Hu Jia, a Beijing-based activist and family friend, told AFP.

Rescue her ‘fast’

Liu was jailed in 2008 after co-writing a petition calling for democratic reforms. The veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “subversion” a year later.

He died of multiple organ failure at a Shenyang hospital on Thursday at age 61, more than a month after he was transferred from prison due to late-stage liver cancer.

At his funeral, Mozart’s Requiem was played and Liu Xia “fixed her eyes on him a long time, mumbling to say farewell,” Zhang said, adding that she was “in very low spirits”.

“She has just lost her husband, so she is currently emotionally grieving,” Zhang said.

“It’s best for her not to receive too much outside interference during this period after Liu Xiaobo has died,” he said.

Zhang said authorities would release information about where Liu Xiaobo’s ashes will be taken “at an appropriate time”.

Genser said Liu Xia has been held for seven years even though she has never been charged with any crime.

“The world needs to mobilise to rescue her – and fast,” he said in a statement.

Another family friend and activist, Ye Du, also cast doubt that she was released: “Liu Xia has never been free. There’s no doubt about that.”

The foreign ministry lashed out at the international criticism on Friday, saying it lodged official protests with the United States, Germany, France and the United Nations human rights office.

The foreign ministry said giving Liu the Nobel Peace Prize was “blasphemy” while state-run media has called him a “convicted criminal”.

“His influence has breached the fundamental moral principle of Chinese patriotism and posed a challenge to China’s stability and national security,” the nationalist Global Times tabloid said in an editorial. “This is why the Chinese society opposes and despises him.”

The centres will aim to find the exact number of Lao workers in Thailand who need help from the government.

At a meeting in Luang Prabang province from July 10-12, Laos and Thailand also agreed to set up a centre next month in Thailand to upgrade the status of Lao workers currently holding pink cards.

Acting Director General of the Department of Labour Skill Development at Laos Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, Anousone Khamsingsavath spoke to Vientiane Times yesterday via telephone after the meeting with Thai officials in charge of labour management to solve the undocumented workforce problem.

At present, there are around 71,000 Lao workers with pink cards, a temporary identity document, in Thailand. “Local workers cover about 10 percent of the 1.5 million from Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar in Thailand,” Anousone said. She also confirmed that only 50 per cent of Lao workers have legally registered to work in Thailand.

According to the agreement which was signed during the three-day meeting in Luang Prabang, the Thai government confirmed the Thai side will open a centre to ensure the legal status of Lao workers who can prove their identity, while Lao authorities have promised to help illegal workers wanting to return home to acquire passports so they can be legally re-employed in Thailand.

Employment Department Director General under  the  Ministry of Labour of Thailand, Waranan Pitiwan said the Lao government will also issue temporary entry permits to allow workers to return home for five days to acquire a passport before heading back to be re-employed in Thailand. The joint effort is meant to fix the undocumented foreign worker problem in Thailand. He said the Thai government had introduced the pink card for foreign workers without proper documentation as an interim measure to give them time to apply for the required documents including a work permit and visa as well as a passport after confirming their nationality with their country of origin.

“The foreign workers may be able to do some occupations such as work in garment production, but not in making hand-crafted traditional Thai costumes which the law interprets as cultural conservation and only open to Thais,” he said.

Although people besides passengers use airport terminal buildings — a soft target where a large number of people gather — the management of the buildings has been handled by companies in the private sector. Advanced measures have yet to be taken to counter the threat of terrorism. The government intends to implement specific measures by 2020.

Explosives detectors developed overseas include an optical sensor-equipped scanner that detects firearms and explosives when people walk through it, and also handheld devices.

The Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry plans to look into such devices and how they perform this fiscal year. If certain aspects can be verified, the ministry will begin discussions with companies that manage terminal buildings next fiscal year or later to determine specific matters, such as where the devices are to be installed.

The ministry plans to conduct a test at Haneda Airport as early as this autumn as it moves toward the introduction of surveillance cameras that can detect suspicious individuals in terminal buildings as quickly as possible.

Some cameras are capable of finding people who are acting suspiciously, such as pacing in the same place in a crowd, and identifying baggage left unattended in the same locations for a certain period of time. The planned experiment involves installing various cameras at the airport to examine how they perform.

The specific locations for the future installment of such devices have yet to be determined, but the ministry is expected to prioritize the terminal buildings at airports including Haneda, Naha, Shin-Chitose and Fukuoka, which handle international flights and many foreign tourists.

Airports such as Narita and Kansai, which are administered and operated by private-sector companies, carry out anti-terrorism measures on their own.

Abu Sayed was killed in a July 11 strike in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar on the headquarters of IS-Khorasan Province (IS-K), which also killed additional jihadists, the Pentagon said in a statement.

“You kill a leader of one of these groups and it sets them back,” Pentagon chief Jim Mattis told reporters.

“It’s obviously a victory on our side in terms of setting them back. It’s the right direction.”

First emerging in 2015, IS-K overran large parts of Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, near the Pakistan border, but their part in the Afghan conflict had been largely overshadowed by the operations against the Taliban.

Afghan and US forces had killed Abu Sayed’s two predecessors atop the group’s Afghan branch — Hafiz Saeed in July 2016 and Abdul Hasib in late April of this year, the Pentagon said.

Hasib and other top militant commanders were killed in a joint raid by US Army Rangers and Afghan special forces.

At the time, the US military had said Hasib’s death would “help reach our goal of destroying them in 2017.”

“We will continue until they are annihilated. There is no safe haven for ISIS-K in Afghanistan,” said General John Nicholson, who leads US Forces-Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials say the group now numbers fewer than 1,000 in Afghanistan.

The compound used by Hasib in Nangarhar province was not far from the spot where on April 13, the US military dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb it has ever used in combat, hitting IS positions.

The deployment of the so-called Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB) killed at least 95 jihadists, according to the Afghan defense ministry, but fighting in the area has continued.

The governor of Red Sea province, where the resort of Hurghada is located, said two “foreign residents” of the city were killed in the attack, a cabinet statement said.

Although the attacker’s motives were unclear, the stabbing will come as a blow to Egypt which has been trying to woo back tourists after years of unrest and deadly attacks.

There was confusion about the nationalities of the victims, with Egyptian officials and state media initially saying the two women killed were Ukrainian which Kiev’s ambassador to Egypt denied.

An Egyptian health ministry official told AFP “the two foreigners killed earlier are Germans”.

But Germany’s foreign ministry, which condemned the stabbing as “cowardly” in a statement, said it could not confirm or deny whether its nationals were among the victims.

An Armenian foreign ministry spokesman said two Armenian women had been wounded in the attack, and the Czech foreign ministry tweeted that one of its nationals had been lighty injured.

The interior ministry said in a statement that the attacker, who had swum ashore, was arrested and was being questioned.

“We don’t know his motives yet, he could be crazy or perturbed — it’s too early to tell,” a senior interior ministry official told AFP.

In January 2016, three tourists in Hurghada were wounded in a stabbing assault by two assailants with apparent Islamic State group (IS) sympathies.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Friday’s stabbing.

Hurghada is one of Egypt’s most popular beach resorts, especially with Ukrainians and European tourists.

Security has been boosted in resorts around the country, as the tourism industry provides Egypt with much-needed revenues.

An IS bombing of a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers from a south Sinai resort in 2015 killed all 224 people on board and decimated the country’s tourism sector.

Russia suspended all flights to Egypt in response and has yet to resume them.

IS has been waging a deadly insurgency based in the north of the Sinai Peninsula that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers.

Policemen shot dead

Also on Friday, unknown assailants shot dead five policemen south of Cairo, in the latest of a series of attacks targeting the country’s security forces.

The ministry said three gunmen opened fire on a police car and then fled, killing a non-commissioned officer, three conscripts and a police employee.

CCTV footage posted online by the Ahram newspaper showed the three assailants pretending to fix a motorbike before they opened fire on a passing police truck then looted it.

The attack took place near Badrasheen, a town some 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Cairo, where militants have also targeted police in the past.

As with the beach stabbing, there has not yet been any claim of responsibility for the attack.

The killings came as police and the army said they were closing in on militants and jihadists following a spate of deadly attacks in the Nile Valley and the Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt has struggled to quell IS jihadists based in the Sinai and smaller militant groups in the mainland since the military overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and cracked down on his supporters.

IS jihadists killed at least 21 soldiers in restive north Sinai on July 7, the same day as the militant Hasam group claimed responsibility for shooting dead an officer with Egypt’s secret police in an attack north of the capital.

While smaller groups such as Hasam have mostly targeted policemen and government officials, IS has also attacked foreign tourists and Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority.

Dozens of Christians have been killed in church bombings and shootings since last December in attacks claimed by IS.

The jihadists have threatened to carry out further attacks on Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 90 million people.

July 15 has been declared an annual national holiday of “democracy and unity” and the authorities want people to see the foiling of the putsch as a historic victory of Turkish democracy.

Friday’s measures, however, mean that 50,000 people have been arrested and a further 100,000 sacked in response to the thwarted bid to overthrow Erdogan.

Some 7,563 people were fired in the latest cull, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported, with nearly 350 retired army members also stripped of their rank. Hurriyet daily reported that 2,300 police were dismissed.

Saturday will see Turkey hold a major programme of events to mark the coup attempt, blamed by the authorities on US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen.

The decree, published late Friday in the official gazette, said those sacked were “linked to terror organisations, or groups determined to have been acting against the state’s national security”.

A former Istanbul governor was among those dismissed. The decree also stripped medals from Hakan Sukur, the retired Galatasaray and Turkey national team footballer.

Once one of the country’s top sporting heroes, Sukur powered Turkey to third place in the 2002 World Cup where he scored the fastest goal in the competition’s history.

He later served as a ruling party MP but then fell out with the authorities over his links to Gulen. Now believed to be living in the United States he is the subject of a Turkish arrest warrant.

Slanders

Gulen on Friday again denied any involvement in what he called a “despicable putsch,” and called on Ankara to end its “witch hunt” of his followers.

“Accusations against me related to the coup attempt are baseless, politically motivated slanders,” Gulen, who lives at a compound in rural Pennsylvania, said in a statement.

“I reiterate my condemnation of the despicable putsch and its perpetrators,” he said, while decrying a government “witch hunt to weed out anyone it deems disloyal” to Erdogan “and his regime”.

The attempted putsch came when a disgruntled faction in the army sent tanks into the streets and planes into the sky in a bid to oust the president.

War planes bombed Ankara and tanks surged into the streets of Istanbul in a night of violence that left 249 people dead. The bid was swiftly thwarted as the authorities regrouped and people poured into the streets in support of Erdogan.

Late-night commemorations

Turkey insists the post-coup crackdown is necessary to tackle the threat they say is posed by the Gulen movement, but activists and Western governments have criticised it as excessive.

Gulen called for an independent international investigation of the coup attempt, saying “hundreds of thousands” of innocent Turks had been punished simply for suspected links to him.

“The government’s treatment of innocent citizens during the past year is dragging Turkey into the category of the countries with the worst record of democracy, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms in the world,” he said.

Saturday’s events begin with a special session of parliament, after which Erdogan will take part in a people’s march on the bridge over Bosphorus that saw bloody fighting on the night of the coup, since renamed Bridge of the Martyrs of July 15.

At midnight local time (2100 GMT) people across Turkey will take part in “democracy watches”, rallies commemorating how crowds poured out into the streets.

Erdogan will return to Ankara and give a speech to parliament at 2:00 am — the time it was bombed on the night of the attempted putsch.

A monument to those killed will then be unveiled outside his palace in the capital as the dawn call to prayer rings out.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a strongly-worded statement announcing the appeal, accused the Hawaii court of having “undermined national security, delayed necessary action, created confusion and violated a proper respect for separation of powers.”

He charged the lower court had “improperly substituted its policy preferences for the national security judgments of the executive branch in a time of grave threats, defying both the lawful prerogatives of the executive branch and the directive of the Supreme Court.”

It was unclear how quickly the Supreme Court — now in summer recess but able to act on emergency motions — might be able to respond, and when or if the expanded terms set by the Hawaii judge might take effect. If they do, thousands of potential travelers could be affected.

The travel ban, which the administration insists is necessary to keep violent extremists out of the country, has faced a series of judicial roadblocks from lower courts.

But the administration gained partial satisfaction in June when the Supreme Court ruled that it could proceed with its plan to prohibit the entry of some people from countries deemed dangerous, while still allowing visits by people with “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling allowed a 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and a 120-day ban on refugees to come into force, with exceptions for those people with “bona fide” relationships.

That June 29 ruling, which capped months of legal wrangling, left unclear the question of just who had such a “credible claim.” The Trump administration then provided a list defining that category as including parents, spouses, children, sons- and daughters-in-law, siblings and step- or half-siblings.

But the Hawaii judge, Federal Judge Derrick Watson ruled that the administration’s criteria unfairly exclude grandparents and grandchildren.

The decision late Thursday thus expanded the exceptions to the ban, ordering that the list include grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins of people in the United States.

Common sense

Watson said the government’s “narrowly defined list finds no support in the careful language of the Supreme Court or even in the immigration statutes on which the government relies.”

“Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents,” he wrote.

“Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members. The government’s definition excludes them. That simply cannot be.”

The judge also ruled that refugees who have assurances of a placement by an agency in the United States should be exempt.

White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert told journalists the ruling seemed “fairly broad,” adding that he would be troubled “if it was as broad as reported.”

The original ban, announced days after Trump became president on January 20, was successfully challenged in lower courts on the grounds that it overstepped Trump’s presidential authority and discriminated against Muslims in violation of the US constitution. A revised version also did not pass legal muster.

Judges in lower courts had cited Trump’s repeated statements during the presidential campaign that he intended to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

People have suffered enough

Douglas Chin, attorney general for the state of Hawaii, which filed the lawsuit against the Trump administration, welcomed the Thursday ruling.

“The federal court today makes clear that the US government may not ignore the scope of the partial travel ban as it sees fit,” said Chin.

“Family members have been separated and real people have suffered enough. Courts have found that this executive order has no basis in stopping terrorism and is just a pretext for illegal and unconstitutional discrimination.”