Philippine troops found the remains of the two hostages early Wednesday morning on the island of Basilan, a stronghold of the notorious Abu Sayyaf kidnap-for-ransom group, military spokeswoman Captain Jo-Ann Petinglay said.

“This is a desperate measure of the Abu Sayyaf Group because they see they have no gains from their kidnap-for-ransom activity,” Petinglay told AFP.

Abu Sayyaf, originally a loose network of militants formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, has splintered into factions, with some continuing to engage in banditry and kidnappings.

One faction has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, with members among those holding parts of Marawi, the largely Catholic nation’s most important Islamic city.

Militants continue to occupy parts of Marawi despite a US-backed military offensive there that has claimed more than 460 lives and displaced nearly 400,000 people since it began in May.

The two Vietnamese were seized last November along with four other Vietnamese crew members of a vessel that was boarded by the militants off the southern region of Mindanao, the military said.

One of the six crewmen was rescued last month and three remain in captivity, Petinglay said.

Abu Sayyaf militants are holding a total of 22 hostages, including 16 foreigners, according to Petinglay.

The Abu Sayyaf is known to behead its hostages unless ransom payments are made.

German national Jurgen Kantner, 70, was beheaded in February after the kidnappers’ demand for 30 million pesos ($600,000) was not met.

Last year, the group beheaded two Canadian hostages.

Washington described the device, launched on Tuesday in a watershed moment for Pyongyang’s weapons ambitions, as an ICBM, and independent experts said it was capable of reaching Alaska.

The Korean Central News Agency said that after personally overseeing the test, leader Kim Jong-Un “said American bastards would be not very happy with this gift sent on the July 4 anniversary”, the United States’ independence day.

Breaking into peals of laughter, KCNA said, he “added that we should send them gifts once in a while to help break their boredom”.

Kim had inspected the Hwasong-14 missile and “expressed satisfaction, saying it looked as handsome as a good-looking boy and was well made”.

North and South Korea have been divided since the war on the peninsula ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, and Pyongyang says it needs nuclear weapons to defend itself against the threat of invasion.

The North’s long confrontation with Washington had entered the “final stage”, KCNA cited Kim as saying, and Pyongyang would not put its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles up for negotiation under any circumstances, “unless the US hostile policy and nuclear threats come to an end completely”.

The North is subject to multiple rounds of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, and the launch triggered a new chorus of condemnation.

In response, US and South Korean soldiers fired ballistic missiles simultaneously in a drill Wednesday simulating an attack on the North’s leadership, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “as a strong message of warning”.

The live-fire training was held at the order of President Moon Jae-In, Yonhap news agency said, who backs engagement with Pyongyang to bring it to the negotiating table.

“President Moon said North Korea’s serious provocation required us to react with more than just a statement and that we need to clearly show our missile defence readiness to North Korea,” it cited Seoul’s presidential Blue House as saying.

For decades Pyongyang has sought to develop a missile capable of delivering a warhead to the continental United States.

Questions remain about whether the North can miniaturise a nuclear weapon to fit a missile nosecone, or if it has mastered the technology needed for it to survive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

But KCNA said Tuesday’s launch had verified “all the technological requirements including heat resistance and structural stability of the re-entry nosecone”, which it said was made of carbon composite.

“Under harsh conditions involving thousands of degrees of heat, pressure and tremors, the temperature inside the nose cone was stable between 25-45 degrees Celsius,” it said, adding the warhead “flew flawlessly and struck the target precisely”.

Lawyer Aamer Anwar joined family members of former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, who died in 2012, to present their case to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in Glasgow.

The commission will review the files to see if there are grounds for an appeal.

“The only place to determine whether a miscarriage of justice did occur is in the appeal court,” Anwar said.

A Scottish court in 2001 sentenced the Libyan to 27 years in jail over the attack on Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people.

However, he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 after doctors said he had only three months to live.

Megrahi suffered from prostate cancer and was sent back home, where he received a hero’s welcome.

The fact that he survived much longer than the doctors had estimated provoked indignation in Britain and the United States.

Megrahi had always maintained his innocence and his brother Abdelhakim defended him on Sunday, saying he was the “scapegoat” of Moamer Kadhafi’s regime.

A 2002 appeal against the conviction was unsuccessful and a second appeal in 2009 was abandoned.

Most of those killed in the bombing of the Boeing 747 jet headed from London to New York were Americans. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, along with 11 people on the ground.

Lee Hsien Yang accused Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, 65, of falsely telling parliament Monday that their father had been open to reconsidering plans to demolish a century-old family bungalow.

The house is at the centre of a political drama that has simmered since the 2015 death of the elder Lee, and which has played out in public with the PM and his siblings exchanging barbs on social media, shocking a tightly controlled nation unused to divisions among the elite.

The patriarch had wanted the bungalow destroyed after he passed away to prevent the creation of a personality cult.

But the prime minister’s siblings say their brother is attempting to block the house’s demolition to capitalise on their father’s legacy for his own political agenda, including grooming his own son as a future leader.

“(Lee Hsien Loong) has made convoluted, but ultimately false, claims about Lee Kuan Yew’s wishes,” the 60-year-old said in a Facebook post Tuesday, which was shared by his sister Wei Ling, 62.

The dispute burst into the open last month when the PM’s brother and sister launched attacks on Facebook, which quickly went viral.

In Monday’s speech, the PM said that despite a “demolition clause” governing the house in his final will, his father was “prepared to consider alternatives”, and had even approved renovation plans should the government decide against tearing down the building.

However Hsien Yang said that his father had been misled by the prime minister into agreeing to the renovation, with the elder Lee made to believe the house had been listed as a national monument so could not be torn down — a claim of which the founding leader’s lawyer had found no evidence.

Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s authoritarian first prime minister, ruled Singapore from 1959 to 1990.

His death at age 91 sparked a massive outpouring of grief among Singaporeans, many of whom credit the family patriarch with turning Singapore from a poor former British colony into one of the world’s wealthiest and most stable societies.

The debate in parliament continued for a second day on Tuesday.

San Francisco-based Uber insists it is a service, not a transport provider, connecting riders with freelance drivers directly and much more cheaply than traditional cab companies.

But critics and competitors say this allows it to dodge costly regulation and several countries, led by France, have banned its low-cost UberPop service as a result.

Uber France challenged the ban, saying it amounted to regulation of an information company which Paris should have first lodged with the Commission, the European Union’s administrative arm.

However, Maciej Szpunar, an advocate general with the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, said Uber was in fact an ordinary transport company and so member states could go ahead and regulate its activities without notifying the Commission in advance.

He recalled that in a May 11 opinion on a related case concerning Uber Spain, he had concluded that UberPop “does not constitute an information society service.”

Szpunar also argued that even if the ECJ, the EU’s highest court, should at some stage determine UberPop was indeed an information service provider, a ban in response to “the illegal exercise of a transport activity does not constitute a technical regulation within the meaning of the directive.”

“Notification of the draft law to the Commission would not be necessary in that situation either,” he said.

He argued that member states only had a duty to notify the Commission if they took a specific, targeted action against information service providers.

“Rules which affect those services only in an implicit or incidental manner are excluded from the notification obligation,” he said.

The ECJ’s advocate generals — its top lawyers — are regularly called on to provide initial guidance to the court which in most instances follows their advice in its final rulings.

The French authorities banned Uber after violent protests by traditional taxi drivers.

Uber in turn filed complaint with the EU against France and other states, arguing that national policies hostile to its operations violate European law.

The adverts featuring a female employee, wearing a red T-shirt with a Shell logo, black trousers and a black headscarf, smiling and with her thumb raised in the air, had been placed at Royal Dutch Shell’s stations in Malaysia.

But images of men kissing the cardboard cutouts, holding her hand and grabbing her chest and crotch started circulating on Facebook in recent days, in what Shell blasted as “distasteful and suggestive acts”.

The woman, named in local reports as 25-year-old Nor Shafila Khairusalleh, who worked at a Shell station, criticised the “extreme behaviour” of the men in the images.

“They may just be joking, but I feel humiliated because that is still myself although it is just an image,” she told news portal mStar.

The Anglo-Dutch group said in a statement that “we do not condone this disrespectful act, which is completely against the culture of Malaysians and Shell’s core values. We urge netizens and members of the public to refrain from sharing these images further.

“The standee (cutout) will be removed from all our sites with immediate effect.”

An AFP journalist at a Shell station in Bentong, just outside the capital Kuala Lumpur, said two of the cutouts had been removed from the forecourt and placed inside the site’s shop. A staff member said the cutouts were removed Monday and were going to be placed in storage.

Shell did not say how many cutouts were removed and which stations were affected. The oil giant has a network of over 950 stations across Malaysia and serves nearly one million customers a day, according to its website.

More than 60 per cent of Malaysia’s population of over 30 million people are Muslim and social attitudes — particularly outside cities — can be conservative.

Religious conservatism has also been rising in Malaysia in recent years, chipping away at a one-time reputation for moderation and tolerance.//AFP

Dr Dahlia Molo Valera, the Iligan City veterinarian, said the Animal Kingdom Foundation has partnered with her office for the conduct of an animal feeding activity.

Officials have been saying that starving animals have started devouring the cadavers of dead people littering the war zone here.

The exact number of persons killed – civilians and Maute terrorists – since May 23 remained unclear although the military estimated there could be not fewer than 400.

Zia AlontoAdiong, the spokesperson of the Lanao del Sur provincial crisis management committee, told the Inquirer that the reports about animals – particularly dogs – feasting on cadavers strewn in the city were made by survivors themselves.

“Yes, it has been happening. A lot of them saw how dogs devoured the cadavers lying on the streets,” Adiong said.

He said the reports were horrifying but there was no way to retrieve many of the cadavers as the fighting continued to this day.

Valera said the Animal Kingdom Foundation has sent them 35 packs of dog food for abandoned pets and strayed animals here.

Each pack weighs five kilograms, she said.

A few days ago, netizens and other animalcentered groups have started a campaign to raise fund or pool care package for abandoned pets and stray animals here.

Among them was the Save Animals of Love and Light (Save ALL).

A report quoted Desiree Carlos of Save ALL as saying they also borrowed food from their group’s animal shelters.

“We hope we can send more…relief goods do not include food for animals,” she was quoted as saying.

Valera said they have also suggested to authorities to let volunteers at the city veterinarian to round up stray animals and abandoned pets in Marawi.

“The problem is the military said there are still uncleared areas so they could not give us clearance to do that,” Valera told the Inquirer by phone.

She agreed that unless rounded up, animals would return to feed on cadavers again.

“I think we can really round them up if the crisis was already over,” Valera said.

Journalists covering the war here have also volunteered to help feed the animals in areas that had already been declared by the military to be clear of terrorists.

Pictures of the statues on the seats in the business class section together with other passengers on the Xiamen Airlines flight were posted on the Selangor and Federal Territory Hainan Association’s Facebook page.

The statues arrived at the Thean Hou Temple in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday under the China-Malaysia Mazu Cultural Exchange programme, major Chinese dailies reported.

The other two statues are Qian Li Yan (eyes that see thousand miles) and Shun Feng Er (ears that hear from far). They are regarded as the assistants to the Mazu goddess, who is widely believed to protect fishermen and sailors.

Sin Chew Daily reported that the organiser had purchased three business class tickets for the statues which were flown in to Kuala Lumpur International Airport from Xiamen Gaoqi International Airport.

The air tickets (RM2,091 per ticket) were posted online and were widely circulated on social media.

A procession was held in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday before the statues were brought to Melaka yesterday. The statues will then be taken to Singapore before being sent back to China.

Previously, Selangor and Federal Territory Hainan Association president Dr C.Y. Tang was quoted as saying that the inaugural South-East Asia tour was organised by the Mazu ancestral temple in Meizhou and marks Mazu’s “revisit” to the Maritime Silk Road. Malaysia is the first destination for the cultural exchange.

“The government has received official notification that King Salman will not travel to the G20 summit,” a spokesman told AFP.

The 81-year-old monarch will send Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan in his place, the German news agency DPA said separately.

The monarch was to have joined the meeting of major industrialised and emerging economies on Friday and Saturday.

Recent German media reports have said that the Saudi delegation had rented out Hamburg’s luxury Vier Jahreszeiten (Four Seasons) hotel in its entirety for the king and his delegation.

Saudi Arabia and its allies the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt have engaged in a bitter row with Qatar, severing air, sea and ground links and cutting off vital routes for imports including food.

They accuse Doha of supporting Islamic extremism and of being too close to their regional rival Iran, which Qatar has strongly denied.

They are demanding that Doha end support for the Muslim Brotherhood, close broadcaster Al-Jazeera, downgrade diplomatic ties with Iran and shut down a Turkish military base in the emirate.

Qatar Monday handed its official response to the demands to the emir of Kuwait, which is acting as a mediator, a Gulf official told AFP.

It was delivered hours after the four nations had accepted a call by Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad Al-Sabah to extend the 10-day deadline for another 48 hours.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel on Monday travelled to the region, where he was to meet his Saudi counterpart Adel al-Jubeir and visit the UAE before heading to Qatar and Kuwait on Tuesday.

Another reported no-show at the Group of 20 meeting will be Brazilian President Michel Temer, who is under pressure at home in a bribery case.

Masao Gunji, who spent his working life on the trail of hardened criminals, now spends his retirement tracking down pink and white soft toys to keep in a Hello Kitty-themed house, which he built specially and has become a magnet for tourists.

“Kitty has been like the love of my life,” he said at his one-storey property, which is surrounded by regular houses.

“I love Kitty,” he added, calling her “adorable, especially her facial expressions”.

Hello Kitty, Japan’s global icon of cute, was introduced in 1974 and is now one of the country’s most famous exports — adorning everything from pencil cases to pyjamas.

To the surprise of fans, brand owner Sanrio said in 2014 the feline-inspired character was not actually a cat but a “happy little girl”, sparking uproar from Internet users who spluttered: “But she’s got whiskers!”

Though he doesn’t live in the property, Gunji was recognised last November by Guinness World Records for his collection, having spent around 30 million yen ($267,000) on thousands of items, including the house.

More than 5,000 items he owns bear Kitty’s iconic red bow, propelling Gunji past the previous record holder, also Japanese.

Gunji’s wife Yoshiko says she fully supports her husband’s passion.

“I don’t care how much he spends on Hello Kitty,” she said.

“People need to make a mark on the world, and Hello Kitty is the one he lives for,” she added.

“This is his dream.”//AFP