Across the nation, Chinese officials have sought to limit religious freedoms for Muslims as part of a widespread attempt to bring believers in line with the dictates of the ruling Communist Party.

Protesters began gathering Thursday ahead of a deadline to demolish the grand mosque in the town of Weizhou in the northern Ningxia region, a restaurant owner surnamed Ma told AFP.

Videos posted on social media over the last two days show hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the building as police with riot shields stand by.

Holding Chinese flags, they sat quietly on the building’s steps and milled around a large plaza, before heading to Friday night prayers, according to the videos, which could not be verified by AFP.

“The government said it’s an illegal building, but it’s not. The mosque has several hundred years of history,” Ma said.

The mosque was rebuilt over the past two years, according to government documents, but the licensing process was not carefully managed and several officials received a “serious warning” from a local disciplinary committee.

In the process, the facade was changed from its previous Chinese style — featuring sweeping tiled roofs similar to a Buddhist temple — to what is often described in China as an “Arab” design, with domes and crescents.

Concerns have been growing in Weizhou since the circulation of a government order last week demanding the mosque’s demolition on the grounds that it had been rebuilt without the proper permits.

The document — which could not be verified by AFP — said that if the building was not demolished by Friday, August 10, the government would “forcefully tear it down, and you will accept responsibility for the consequences.”

Calls to the local county government and the regional Islamic association Saturday went unanswered.

The words “Weizhou mosque” appeared to be censored on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform when AFP tried to search for them.

– ‘Sinicization’ of religion –

Islam is one of five officially recognised religions in China, home to some 23 million Muslims.

Pressure has been building on the group in recent months as the Communist party moves to tighten the reins on religious expression.

China’s top leaders recently called for the “Sinicization” of religious practise — bringing it in line with “traditional” Chinese values and culture — and new regulations on religious affairs came into effect in February, sparking concern among rights groups.

The measures increased state supervision of religion in a bid to “block extremism”, and in areas with significant Muslim populations, authorities have removed Islamic symbols, such as crescents, from public spaces.

In the far western region of Xinjiang, things have gone much farther, with Muslims being harshly punished for violating regulations banning beards and burqas, and even for the possession of unauthorised Korans.

Concerns about the mosque standoff in Weizhou appeared to be spreading Saturday, as Muslims in other regions expressed solidarity with the protesters

“We are quietly waiting to see that the problem is satisfactorily resolved,” said one open letter posted on Weibo by a mosque in Shanxi province.

If it is not, “we reserve the legal right to go to Ningxia or call on the central government to petition”.

The Swiss-made Pilatus aircraft lost contact with air traffic control during what was supposed to be a flight of around 40 minutes in remote Papua province, police said.

“Villagers in Okatem reported that they heard a loud roar from the plane followed by a big explosion,” Bintang regency police chief Michael Mumbunan told AFP.

Search and rescue teams have been deployed but it will take them up to three hours to reach the suspected crash site by foot, he added.

The plane was carrying seven passengers, including a child, and two crew.

It belonged to Dimonim Air, a private company operating charter flights in and around Papua.

Indonesia relies heavily on air transport to connect its thousands of islands but has a poor aviation safety record and has suffered several fatal crashes in recent years.

Papua is a particularly difficult area to reach.

Five people died after a small plane crashed near Wamena in Papua province in July last year.

In August 2015, a commercial passenger aircraft operated by Indonesian carrier Trigana crashed in Papua due to bad weather, killing all 54 people on board.

The North’s Korea International Youth Travel Agency told a Chinese tourist agency that hotels in Pyongyang would be closed for renovations for 20 days starting Saturday, according to South Korean media reports.

Another North Korean travel agency informed their Chinese partner that an unspecified “state decision” meant they had to stop receiving Chinese tour group package travellers until September 5, the reports said.

North Korea has in the past restricted entry to foreigner tourists as the country prepares for significant events, giving a variety of reasons for the moves, Yonhap reported.

The latest measures come as the North prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the government.

In his New Year speech in January, leader Kim Jong Un said North Korean people would “greet the 70th founding anniversary of their Republic as a great, auspicious event”.

In part thanks to a recent diplomatic thaw, the number of Chinese tourists visiting the North has rapidly increased.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 tourists are currently visiting popular sites such as the North’s side of the demilitarized zone in a single day, NK News, an online news provider, said.

The surge in Chinese tourism may have been seen by North Korean authorities as straining Pyongyang’s limited hotel infrastructure ahead of the anniversary, it added.

The North has been preparing for the arrival of foreign delegations and thousands of North Korean citizens have reportedly been practicing choreographed movements in Pyongyang for the official celebration of the anniversary.

YTN TV quoted a military official as saying that soldiers and weapons were converging on Mirim military airport near Pyongyang to practice a military parade.

A satellite picture showed massive camouflage hangars have been put up, sparking speculation that the North might be hiding long-range missile transport and launch vehicles.

Similar camouflage hangars were seen in January when the North was preparing for a military parade to mark a military anniversary the following month.

The North at that time showcased what appeared to be its two newest intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15.

“The hangars look large enough to conceal ICBMs” Shin Jong-woo, a defence analyst, told YTN.

The 70th anniversary comes during a rare diplomatic detente on the Korean peninsula.

At a historic summit with President Trump in June in Singapore, Kim made a vague commitment to denuclearisation — although it was far from the longstanding US demand for the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of Pyongyang’s atomic arsenal.

Although Trump touted his summit with Kim as a historic breakthrough, the nuclear-armed North has since criticised Washington for its “gangster-like” demands of complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament.

The US has urged the international community to maintain tough sanctions on the isolated regime.

The US 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit said a member, who was not named, may have gone overboard Thursday morning.

Aircraft on board the USS Essex are searching waters off the Sulu Sea and the Surigao Strait while multiple searches are also being made inside the ship itself, the unit said.

The ship was conducting “routine operations in the Sulu Sea” at the time, the California based unit said in the statement, which was posted on its social media sites.

“We remain committed to searching for and finding our marine,” the statement quoted its commander, Colonel Chandler Nelms as saying.

“All of our sailors, marines and available assets aboard the USS Essex have been and will continue to be involved in this incredibly important search and rescue operation,” added the search commander, US Navy Captain Gerald Olin.

In Manila, Philippine authorities said on Saturday they authorised US ships and aircraft to enter Philippine territory to join in the search, while dispatching their own military search aircraft.

“A US marine fell from a US ship while traversing Philippine waters. We allowed the entry of rescue ships and aircraft,” Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told reporters.

“As of now there has been no update on whether the marine has been recovered,” Lorenzana added.

The US Marines said an expanded search covering about 3,000 square nautical miles (10,290 square kilometres) was underway.

Sulu Sea sprawls over the central and southern sections of the Asian archipelago, a US military ally.

Surigao Strait is at least 300 kilometres (186 miles) away, off the country’s eastern seaboard.

The US statement did not explain why the two separate locations were being searched.

The shallow 6.9-magnitude quake Sunday levelled tens of thousands of homes, mosques and businesses across Lombok, just one week after another tremor surged through the island and killed 17.

“It’s predicted the death toll will continue to grow because there are still victims who are suspected of being buried by landslides and under rubble, and there are victims that have not been recorded and reported to posts,” national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said.

The number forced from their homes in the disaster has soared to 387,000, Nugroho said, with around 13,000 injured.

The hardest hit region of Lombok has been in the north, where 334 people have died and nearly 200,000 have been forced from their homes, according to latest official tolls.

Two people were also killed by the quake on the neighbouring tourist island of Bali.

Nugroho said the emergency response period has been extended another 14 days, which would allow authorities to deal with the “many problems” that still existed in the field.

Most of the displaced are sleeping under tents or tarpaulins near their ruined homes or in evacuation shelters, while makeshift medical facilities have been set up to treat the injured.

Six days after the quake hit some evacuees have still not received assistance, particularly in the mountainous north of the island.

“The main problem is the distribution of supplies to thousands of refugee points,” Nugroho said.

“Most of the roads in North Lombok were damaged by the earthquake.”

Survivors of the quake have been shaken by hundreds of aftershocks, including a shallow 5.9-magnitude quake Thursday which caused people to flee evacuation shelters crying and screaming.

Local authorities quickly ruled out terrorism as a motive for the incident, and said the F-15s “were not involved in the crash.”

An airline employee “conducted an unauthorized takeoff” of an airplane carrying no passengers at the major airport in the northwestern US state of Washington, airport officials said on Twitter.

The aircraft “crashed in south Puget Sound,” Sea-Tac Airport said, adding that normal operations at the transport hub had resumed after a pause.

“This is not a terrorist incident. Confirmed info… this is a single suicide male. We know who he is. No others involved,” the Pierce County Sheriff said.

The suspect was identified as a 29-year-old Pierce county resident who “acted alone,” the sheriff’s office added, confirming that there were “no passengers on the plane” when it crashed.

Video taken by a bystander showed the airplane making a loop, then flying low over a body of water.

Alaska Airlines on Twitter said the airplane was a turboprop Q400 airplane belonging to its sister carrier Horizon Air.

Local media described the man who stole the plane as a mechanic.

The villagers spotted the endangered animal in Lubuk Larangan, at a spot in the river where fish commonly gather, on Thursday. The local name for the animal is a fish crocodile because of its narrow, flat and long snout.

Rantau Panjang village chief Alfadol said the crocodile was 2-meters long. He said in the past, residents, who had never been threatened by the crocodiles, often saw Senyulong crocodiles in the river.

“However, after illegal gold mining became rampant in the upstream areas of the Jujuhan River, we rarely see them now,” he said on Friday.

The residents discovered the crocodile when it was accidently caught in a net they were using to catch fish. Local customs only permit villagers to catch fish from the deepest depths of the river for special occasions such as Independence Day, which falls in August. The villagers immediately released the crocodile back into the river.

“The villagers never meant to disturb the crocodile’s habitat,” Alfadol added.

Senyulong crocodiles are one of seven crocodile species endemic to Indonesia and live in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Java. The endangered species are a target of poachers. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) categorizes Senyulong crocodiles as Appendix I animals, meaning that they face imminent extinction unless the illegal trade in the animal is brought to an end.

Police and troops organised a search and rescue operation after the helicopter plunged into a forest Friday in Gunma prefecture, northwest of Tokyo.

“All the nine people were confirmed dead by noon today,” a local official told AFP.

The victims were disaster management officials and firefighters as well as the pilot and an aviation mechanic, the official said.

Aerial footage broadcast on Japanese television showed the wreckage of the crashed helicopter surrounded by trees, as the government dispatched aircraft accident investigators to the site.

The Bell 412 helicopter left its base Friday morning on a two-hour flight to observe climbing routes from the air but did not return and lost contact with air traffic control.

In February, two pilots were killed in a military helicopter crash in southern Japan. The helicopter went down seven minutes after takeoff, slamming into and setting fire to a house, which was completely destroyed in the accident.

Last year, nine people aboard a helicopter were killed after it crashed during a mountain rescue drill.

Semuel A. Pangerapan, the ministry’s director general of applications and information, said the policy would come into effect starting Friday.

The SafeSearch feature will be permanently activated in the search engine when it is accessed from Indonesia.

“The method will filter any pornographic content in the image category, including if a user inputs keywords,” Semuel told kompas.com on Thursday.

The permanent factor means that Indonesian users cannot deactivate the feature. In addition to Google, Semuel also said the government planned to collaborate with other search engines, such as Microsoft’s Bing to apply a similar filtering feature.

He said the ministry already blocked pornographic sites, but this was ineffective as the content was easily available through image searches.

“That’s what we’re trying to eradicate. Concerned mothers have reported that their children search for images by using pornographic words. We are using the SafeSearch method based on our year-long research,” he added.

SafeSearch is a feature in Google to filter out negative content, such as pornography. According to Google as quoted from its features page, “SafeSearch is not 100 percent accurate, but it can help you filter inappropriate content.”

Semuel said internet service providers should enact their own policies regarding filtering based on SafeSearch. In the last few days, there have been rumors that the filter has affected YouTube as well, with users’ status changed to “restricted” mode.

Semuel said the feature should only be applied to Google, and that providers should not broaden it to YouTube