Conservation officials early on recognised the advantage of having the local community involved in wildlife monitoring and protection and now hail the arrangement as a boon for the black rhinoceros.

The Maasai, however, believe they are still seen as a “problem” for wildlife conservation. The wildlife might be secure, one tribesman said, but his people are not.

Edwin Nyerembe, chief of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority, said the sanctuary is one of the few places in Tanzania where the black rhinoceros, a critically endangered species, can still roam freely and safely.

He credits the hard work of park rangers and the active participation of the local Maasai.

“With intensive patrolling and surveillance by the rangers, we are able to efficiently combat wildlife crime and protect the last rhino population from being hunted for its precious horn,” Nyerembe said.

“The number of rhinos is still small, but after years of the rangers’ splendid operation and the fruitful corroboration with the Maasai tribe within the park, we are happy to reveal that the rhino population is now increasing.”

He explained that the Maasai help keep an eye on suspicious outsiders in case they’re sneaking into the sanctuary to kill rhinos and chop off their horns.

Tanzanian law prohibits people living in national parks, but the Maasai are allowed an exception at Ngorongoro, having led a pastoral way of life there for generations.

Their cattle graze alongside wild animals, just as they did long before the conservation area was established.

Park ranger Emmanuel Uled said the Maasai also help officials track the rhinos and make sure they’re safe and healthy.

“They have a greater understanding than we do of the land and the animals,” he said. “The park and the Maasai now have a good relationship. We can use their wisdom to facilitate our conservation work.”

But Noah Tevenile, a Maasai, said the relationship is not always harmonious.

He said his tribe was forcibly evicted from ancestral land more than three times while the government set up conservation areas, resulting in prolonged conflicts.

“The authorities have sought to end the land conflicts by allowing Maasai to settle in Ngorongoro Conservation Area, but we are still subjected to various limitations,” Tevenile said.

“For instance, there are many restricted areas within the park where we cannot live or take our cattle to graze.

“The problems are now growing because our community is expanding and we need to raise more cattle to sustain the population, which eventually leads to competition with wild animals over limited resources and stirs up more discord with park officials.”

The situation is increasingly tense because less and less pastureland is available for the Maasai, forcing them to buy animal feed in the city, adding another financial burden to already poor tribesmen, Tevenile said.

He said most Maasai are so poor they cannot afford basic healthcare or education.

And some officials maintain a negative view of the Maasai too, he said, regarding their presence in the conservation area a threat to the wildlife.

“Even though we never hunt wild animals for consumption, many officials believe our cattle are not only competing with wild animals for food, but also spreading disease,” Tevenile added.

“Our lives are not yet secured.”

After shaking hands with Kim over the line that marks where their two countries and their allies fought each other to a standstill in the 1950-53 Korean War, Trump walked for several steps into North Korean territory, before another handshake.

The two men then walked into Seoul’s territory together — pausing on the line for photographers — where they were joined by South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

“It’s a great day for the world and it’s an honour for me to be here,” Trump said. “A lot of great things are happening.”

The impromptu meeting in the DMZ — which came after Trump issued an invitation on Twitter on Saturday — comes with negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington over the North’s nuclear arsenal at a deadlock.

The two would “just shake hands quickly and say hello because we haven’t seen each other since Vietnam”, Trump said earlier.

Their first summit took place in a blaze of publicity in Singapore last year but produced a vaguely-worded pledge about denuclearisation, and a second meeting in Vietnam in February intended to put flesh on those bones broke up without agreement.

Contact between the two sides has since been minimal — with Pyongyang issuing frequent criticisms of the US position — but the two leaders have exchanged a series of letters and Trump turned to Twitter on Saturday to issue his offer.

“If Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!,” he wrote from from Osaka in Japan, where he was attending a G20 summit before flying to Seoul.

In an unusually fast and public response, within hours of Trump’s tweet the North’s official KCNA news agency quoted Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui as saying the offer was “a very interesting suggestion”.

Trump’s entry onto North Korean soil is a dramatic re-enactment of the extraordinary scene last year when the young leader invited South Korean President Moon Jae-in to walk over the Military Demarcation Line that divides the Koreas.

Moon — who seized on last year’s Winter Olympics to broker the process between Pyongyang and Washington, after tensions soared in 2017 amid missile and nuclear tests and mutual insults — will be going to the DMZ with Trump.

“The leaders of the US and the North will have a handshake for peace at Panmunjom, the symbol of division, for the first time,” Moon said, referring to the “truce village” in the DMZ.

‘Barren no-man’s land’ 

But analysts were divided over the headline-grabbing meeting’s potential impact on the underlying issues.

The four-kilometre-wide (2.5 miles) DMZ, running for 250 kilometres, is where the front line lay when the Korean War ended with a ceasefire rather than a peace treaty, and is described as the world’s last Cold War frontier.

John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul said an encounter in the “barren no man’s land that embodies the unhealed wound of post-WWII division, the Korean War, and 70 years of animosity” would help improve ties.

“It’s not just about denuclearisation and it’s not all about a deal — important as those are,” he said. “If Trump and Kim meet & can announce some kind of interim agreement, that’s great. If they meet and don’t, that’s ok too. If in the end they don’t meet, it’s good that Trump offered to.”

But Joshua Pollack of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies cast doubt on what it could achieve.

The Hanoi meeting foundered amid disagreements on what the North — which has carried out six nuclear tests and developed missiles capable of reaching the entire US mainland — would be willing to give up in exchange for relief from sanctions that have crippled its economy.

“An agenda-free, made-for-TV encounter won’t undo a year of inflated expectations and disappointment,” said Pollack.

What was needed, he added, was “something more than a one-page letter and another handshake”.

The DMZ has been a regular stop for US presidents visiting the South, a security ally — although Trump’s helicopter was forced to turn back by fog in 2017 — while Panmunjom saw the first two summits between Moon and Kim last year.

“US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei,” Trump told reporters in Osaka hours yesterday, after sealing a tariff truce with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it.”

It was not immediately clear whether Trump’s comment marked a material change in the stance toward Huawei, which has essentially been barred on national security grounds from accessing crucial American technology or operating in the US market.

The US fears that systems built by Huawei – the world leader in telecom network equipment and number two smartphone supplier –could be used by the China government for espionage via built-in secret security “back doors”.

Huawei vigorously denies that and says the US has never provided proof to substantiate it.

Last month the US government added Huawei to an “entity list” of companies barred from receiving US-made components without permission from Washington.

Trump’s comment on its face does not mark a change from current practice.

But it could be read by financial markets as a positive signal that his administration may be open to negotiating on Huawei when bilateral trade talks resume.

However, any softening on Huawei could meet resistance from a bipartisan US congressional movement that is calling for a hardline on the firm.

A Huawei spokesperson told AFP the company had no inital comment.Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei said earlier this month that its overseas smartphone sales had fallen by up to 40% as a result of the ban.

The polar researcher-turned rescue vessel skipper was arrested Saturday for docking without permission at an Italian port, despite threats of jail time, with a shipload of desperate migrants.

The dreadlocked 31-year-old offered no resistance as she was escorted from the Sea-Watch 3 without handcuffs to applause from supporters gathered pierside, but shouts of “Handcuff her!”, “Shame!” and “Get lost!” from locals.

Born in the German city of Kiel on Germany’s Baltic coast, Rackete studied nautical science and conservation management.

Tanned and at home in a tank top, Rackete is a specialist in Arctic and Antarctic polar research and a sailor for the past eight years,

“I’ve always really loved polar zones because they are very beautiful and inspiring. But working there is sometimes sad because you see directly what humans are doing to the planet,” she has said.

From Arctic into the fire

From her concern for the environment was born a social commitment which moved Rackete to spend spare time away from working on ice-breakers to volunteer missions in the Mediterranean with German NGO Sea-Watch.

Rackete’s first mission came in the summer of 2016, when Italian and European military ships still viewed the flotilla of humanitarian vessels as key support in the rescue of repeated waves of migrants from Libya.

That swiftly brought home the scale of the human drama for Rackete, with rescuers often finding just a handful of survivors aboard the rickety vessels in which they had escaped, surrounded by the corpses of those who had perished.

They would encounter many a stranded child desperate for affection after losing a parent, and hear many stories of torture from the fleeing migrants.

Over time, the navy vessels became fewer and fewer, leaving their humanitarian counterparts in the front line.

– ‘Ready to go to jail’ –

For Rackete, there is a principle at stake.

“It doesn’t matter how you end up in distress. Firefighters don’t care about that, hospitals don’t. Maritime law doesn’t.

“If you need to be rescued, everyone has the right to come to your aid,” is how she sees it.

At sea, “rescue ends when people reach a safe place.”

The battle is also a political one.

“We Europeans have allowed our governments to construct a wall at sea. There is a civil society fighting against that and I am a part of it,” Rackete has said.

The captain insists she is scrupulously complying with maritime law and stresses that “I am ready to go to jail for that and defend myself in court if I have to because what we are doing is just.”

Salvini had been calling loudly for her arrest, describing her as a “pain in the neck” and adding that “those who flout the rules must be held accountable.

He added that “the captain of Sea-Watch (is) playing politics on immigrants’ backs, funded by I don’t know who.”

Amid these comments and a slew of social media insults hurled at Rackete there are also many offering support.

Senator Gregorio De Falco, a former coastguard officer who has publicly backed Sea Watch as having the right to dock in Italy, saluted her as “a person of high moral dignity who shows considerable strength and coherence in the face of her responsibilities.”

Supporters have raised more than 320,000 euros ($350,000) since Wednesday towards the potential legal costs of “Captain Carola.”

The Meteo-France weather service lifted its red warning but forecast a “very hot day” across a large central band of the country with the mercury expected to rise to 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit) in some parts.

With France, Spain, Italy and parts of central Europe hard hit by the record-breaking temperatures, officials pleaded with people to take precautions.

France’s new record temperature of 45.9 degrees C (114.6 degrees F) was registered on Friday in Gallargues-le-Montueux, a village in the southern department of Gard near Montpellier, breaking successive records set earlier in the day, Meteo-France told AFP.

This is the same area where the previous high of 44.1 degrees Celsius was set in August 2003. Records began at the turn of the 20th century.

The weather service said the new high was comparable to August temperatures in California’s Death Valley.

Earlier Friday, the mercury rose above 44 degrees C in the southeastern French town of Carpentras. The town was deserted, with cafe owners contemplating empty terraces which would normally be packed.

“We have never seen this!” one exclaimed.

The new record makes France just the seventh European country to have recorded a plus 45-degree temperature, along with Bulgaria, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece and North Macedonia, Meteo France said.

– ‘Avoidable deaths’ –

Two deaths linked to the heatwave were reported in Spain.

A Spanish teenager felt dizzy while helping harvest wheat in the southern Andalusia region, took a dip in a swimming pool, and collapsed in convulsions.

He was rushed to hospital in the town of Cordoba where he died, the regional government said.

A 93-year-old man collapsed and died on the street in the northern Spanish city of Valladolid, police said, giving heatstroke as the cause of death.

Heat-related deaths have also been reported in Italy, France and Germany, mainly among the elderly.

France remains haunted by the memory of the devastating heatwave of August 2003 which exposed the shortcomings of emergency services at the height of the summer holidays.

That year, nearly 15,000 people are estimated to have died because of the heat, many of them elderly people at home.

“I want to appeal to the sense of responsibility of citizens — there are avoidable deaths in every heatwave,” said French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.

Scientists warn that global warming linked to human fossil fuel use could make such scorchers more frequent.

Germany’s national weather service said the country experienced temperatures more than four degrees higher in June than the average, on one measure.

Fire hydrants uncapped

French Health Minister Agnes Buzyn warned people tempted to plunge into cold water, both young and old, to do so only in designated public bathing areas, adding that four people have drowned since the beginning of the week.

On Thursday, Buzyn lamented that despite a barrage of public health warnings on radio, TV and on public transport, some parents were still leaving their children in hot cars and joggers were out exercising in the midday heat.

A six-year-old Syrian child was seriously injured north of Paris Thursday after being catapulted into the air by water gushing from an open fire hydrant and then crashing to the ground.

The incident occurred in the multi-ethnic Saint-Denis neighbourhood, where “uncapping” hydrants has long been used as a way to cool off.

In the Italian city of Milan, a 72-year-old homeless man was found dead at the main train station Thursday after falling ill in the heatwave.

A day earlier, four people died in Germany in bathing accidents.

Spanish inferno

In Spain, firefighters managed to halt the progression of a forest fire that broke out Wednesday in the northeastern Catalonia region and had burned more than 6,000 hectares (14,800 acres).

Catalonia’s forest service said the fire likely began when an “improperly managed” pile of manure at a chicken farm spontaneously combusted in the extreme heat.

Hundreds of firefighters backed by troops and aerial water bombers were hampered by roasting 44-degree temperatures and very low humidity.

Spain’s north-east was on red heatwave alert denoting “extreme risk”.

The stifling temperatures have caused air quality to nosedive in some European cities, prompting local authorities to take anti-pollution measures.

In Paris, Lyon and Marseille, authorities have banned the most polluting cars from the roads in recent days.

While the Philippines has a reputation of being accepting of gay and transgender people, same-sex marriage is outlawed and legal protections are nearly non-existent.

President Rodrigo Duterte has repeatedly used gay slurs against critics, and told a crowd last month that in his younger days he “cured” himself of homosexuality with the help of “beautiful women”.

“He’s absolutely wrong on that one. That’s not how it works!” said marcher Noel Bordador, 55, an episcopal priest.

But Bordador told AFP that the gay community faced deeper issues than worrying about Duterte’s outrageous comments.

“Can I get married here? Do I have rights?” he asked. “Legal protections, that is what we are fighting for.”

Divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage are all illegal in the deeply Catholic nation, where a gay rights bill has made very little progress in the legislature after decades of pushing.

Gay Pride marchers numbered some 30,000, organisers said, as the rally crept through heavy rain with metres-long rainbow banners.

“It is a human rights movement — and as such, is a call for active solidarity with other marginalised communities,” march organiser Nicky Castillo said.

Manila’s rally comes as New York expects millions of marchers for its 50th commemoration of the city’s Stonewall riots, a turning point in the LGBTQ community’s fight for rights.

The invitation issued on Twitter caught observers by surprise. If Kim accepts, it would be the third meeting between the leaders of the two wartime enemies amid efforts to contain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The North’s official KCNA news agency quoted Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui as saying the offer was “a very interesting suggestion” but that no official request had been received.

Trump lobbed the shock invitation on Twitter from the G20 summit in Osaka, saying: “if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!”

He later said he would have “no problem” stepping into the North with Kim — in what would be a dramatic gesture re-enacting an extraordinary 2018 scene when the young leader invited South Korean President Moon Jae-in to walk over the Military Demarcation Line that forms the border between the Koreas.

“Sure I would, I would. I’d feel very comfortable doing that. I’d have no problem,” Trump told reporters.

The US leader said the invitation was spontaneous, but it comes amid a recent flurry of diplomacy over North Korea’s nuclear programme after a Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi collapsed without an agreement.

Speculation grew that something was afoot when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo skipped a G20 dinner Friday without giving a reason.

“We’ll see. If he is there, we will see each other for two minutes,” said Trump. “We seem to get along… That’s a good thing, not a bad thing,” he added.

North Korea’s Choe said if a meeting took place it would be “another meaningful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations”.

The North’s speedy response to Trump’s offer, and from such a senior figure, was seen by analysts as an indication that Kim would agree to the meeting as soon as Washington followed up with an official proposal.

Cheong Seong-chang, a senior researcher at the private Sejong Institute in Seoul, said Kim had “practically accepted” Trump’s invitation.

“If he (Kim) isn’t interested he would not release such a statement to begin with.”

Twitter is not available to ordinary North Korean citizens, who have no access to the global internet, but Trump told reporters that Kim “follows” his account and that a “quick” response had been received to his offer.

Later, at a dinner with the South’s President Moon Jae-in after he flew to Seoul, he was asked about the meeting and said: “We’re gonna see. They’re working things out right now.”

– Freeze and thaw –

But there was scepticism that a fleeting frontier photo opportunity, no matter how symbolic, would help to bridge the two sides’ differences over denuclearisation.

“For talks to have real legs, either Kim must credibly commit to denuclearisation or Trump must credibly agree to allow Kim to keep some of his nuclear weapons,” said Scott Seaman, director of Eurasia Group Asia.

“Without a shared end goal, creating a viable roadmap to reaching it will remain impossible.”

After several months of public silence, an exchange of letters between the leaders appears to have thawed the deep-freeze and raised hopes for a third summit after a historic first tete-a-tete in Singapore on June 12, 2018 and the second in Hanoi in February.

Trump arrived in Seoul from the summit in Osaka, where on Saturday he held a highly anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping that produced a truce in trade tensions between the world’s top two economies.

Last week, Xi visited Pyongyang for a highly symbolic summit with Kim. Analysts say that diplomatic breakthroughs often follow on from such meetings.

The Hanoi summit foundered amid disagreements on what the North would be willing to give up in exchange for relief from sanctions that weigh on its economy.

The two sides blamed each other for the breakdown but Washington has said they are prepared to meet the North Koreans at any time without preconditions to keep diplomacy alive.

According to South Korea’s unification minister, Kim and Trump have exchanged a total of 12 letters since the beginning of last year, with Kim the more assiduous suitor in their nuclear bromance, penning eight of those.

The US president is known for his love of the sport and his simple culinary tastes — he likes his meat well-done.

In the past he has bonded with Shinzo Abe, the conservative prime minister of South Korea’s neighbour Japan — who Trump has regularly described as his friend — over burgers and several rounds on the course.

The relationship between Trump and Moon — also the leader of a country in a security alliance with the US, but a somewhat reserved former human rights lawyer — is nothing like as close.

But as Trump arrived in Seoul ahead of a trip to the Demilitarized Zone Sunday and a possible third meeting with the North’s Kim Jong Un, the South’s presidential Blue House appeared to have crafted a dinner to appeal to the guest of honour’s particular tastes.

The main dish was a sirloin steak made of US beef, accompanied by bulgogi sauce, pickled garlic leaves and other side dishes.

And as well as the 12 cold Korean starters on the official menu — among them steamed sea urchin with tofu, and pan-fried mung beans — mini-hamburgers were served, Blue House officials said.

Serving western-style food along with Korean dishes symbolised the “collaboration and harmony” between the South and the US, Seoul’s presidential office said.

When Trump last visited in 2017, the Blue House prepared a menu infused with “local, traditional flavour” and featuring a beef rib dish accompanied by a gravy using a 360-year-old soy sauce.

Then, Seoul also sought to score a diplomatic point by featuring a prawn caught in the waters off Dokdo, disputed islands controlled by the South but claimed by Japan.

In another diplomatic jab, Moon’s office invited a former wartime sex slave for Japanese soldiers to that state dinner, leading Tokyo to call the move “inappropriate”.

This time the guests at the meal — eaten in a traditional-style building in the grounds of the presidential complex in Seoul — included retired star golfer Pak Se-ri, who has five majors to her name.

Trump spoke at length with her, saying at one point: “She’s gonna be my partner.”

South Korea dominates the women’s game globally — and Trump highlighted the success of the country’s players when he spoke to its parliament two years ago.

Sparkling water was provided as Trump does not drink, the Blue House said, and a separate Kosher meal was provided for his daughter and advisor Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who are Jewish.

Also among the guests were members of K-pop band EXO — Ivanka’s children are known to be fans — who handed the President and his daughter signed albums.

Trump is known to enjoy fast food. But Kim Hyun-wook, a professor at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy, said that had the meal been a more formal occasion such as a full state banquet, serving burgers as the main dish would be “improper in any diplomatic setting”.

The military said the kidnap-for-ransom group and IS-affiliate Abu Sayyaf was likely behind the midday blast on the island of Jolo, which also left nine other soldiers wounded.

IS claimed the bombing was the work of two suicide attackers, according to tweets from Rita Katz, the director of SITE Intelligence Group which monitors jihadist activities worldwide.

The Philippines has renewed its campaign against the militants on Jolo this year after a suspected suicide bomber struck the island’s Roman Catholic cathedral in January, killing 21 people.

The country is home to numerous armed groups, several of which are linked to the decades-old insurgency aiming to create a Muslim homeland in the Christian-majority nation’s deep south.

Friday’s blast blew the roof off the sentry gate of the military camp and blackened its concrete walls, according to photographs of the aftermath of the attack shown on local television.

Three members of the military unit were killed and nine others were wounded, while two civilians — a motor tricycle driver and a woman street vendor — also died in the attack, army spokesman Colonel Ramon Zagala told AFP.

“This attack is meant to disrupt the intensified security operations and our operational tempo following (a) series of recent operational gains in the area,” Zagala said in a separate statement.

An AFP reporter on the scene saw a blood-soaked man slumped beside a gore-covered motorized tricycle parked on a street outside the temporary headquarters of the 1,500-member First Brigade Combat Team.

The authorities could not say what kind of explosives were used.

Abu Sayyaf was active in the Philippines years before linking up with Islamic State, and has supported its violent activities with kidnapping.

The group has held hostages over the course of years and negotiated ransoms, but has also shown a willingness to kill its captives.

In the same week, a Dutch birdwatcher held for years by the Abu Sayyaf was killed on Jolo during a firefight between his kidnappers and soldiers sent to rescue him.