The ceremony is one of Vietnam’s most sacred death rituals, an ancient custom usually carried out before the Tet lunar new year in early February this year, as the final act in life’s journey.

Many Vietnamese, especially in the north, honour their dead with reburials – normally three years after their loved ones are first laid to rest.

Modernity is chipping away at the tradition with cremations pref­erred as a more simple, clean and cheap passage into the afterlife.

For Thang’s relatives, however, meeting his wishes of a reburial three years after he died of cancer aged 59 was never in question.

“Finally, he can rest in his nice new home. I feel so blessed and happy,” said his wife Ha Thi Thua from his graveside at a cemetery on the outskirts of Hanoi.

The hours-long ceremonies are not for the impatient – or faint of heart.

Beginning in the evening, a shaman makes offerings to the spirit guardian and the deceased – in Thang’s case, sticky rice, boiled chicken, a paper horse model for the spirit guardian to ride on and fake US dollar bills among a cornucopia of items.

Then the shaman chants and tosses coins to gain “permission” from the dead and the grave’s spiritual guardian to begin the ritual, before the coffin is dug out by gravediggers and relatives.

Once the coffin has been carefully lifted out of the ground, the bones are gently removed.

If the remains are black and bare of flesh, as Thang’s were, it’s a relief. Otherwise, the grim but essential task of scraping the flesh off must begin.

The sight of her dead husband was too much for Thua to bear, and she fainted as his skull, ribs, tiny hands and feet were washed by bone cleaners in a pot of herbal water.

“Did the man have all his teeth when he was alive?” a bone cleaner asked the family.

“Yes,” replied a daughter, knowing the importance of reburying her father with all his parts in place.

The final and most important step is re-wrapping the bones and placing them in a new tieu – a small, carved stone casket that is buried in a new resting place, this time forever.

Adherents to the ancient custom believe the souls of the dead are stuck in a spiritual limbo until they are reburied.

“The soul can’t make the journey by itself, it needs living humans, especially relatives, to do it for them,” explains anthropology professor Shaun Malarney of Japan’s International Christian University.

The world’s biggest social network said cyber group Saracen engaged in “coordinated abuse of the platform” by operating a network of hoax accounts that mislead online readers about who was behind them.

“The people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action,” Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher said in a statement.

Saracen gained infamy in Indonesia two years ago when police accused it of deliberately spreading untruths via social media.

At least one of its members was jailed following a wide-ranging investigation.

Indonesia is battling its own wave of online hate speech, as conservative groups exploit social media to spread lies and target minorities.

Authorities are worried inflammatory material posted online could crack open social and religious fault lines in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country ahead of presidential elections in April.

Some 800 Saracen-linked accounts, 207 pages, 546 groups and 208 Instagram accounts linked to the group have been yanked from the network, Gleicher said.

About 170,000 people followed at least one of the pages, and more than 65,000 followed at least one of the Instagram accounts.

The groups and accounts were shut down “based on their behaviour, not the content they were posting”, Gleicher said.

Facebook has moved to stamp out efforts by state actors and others to manipulate the social network using fraudulent accounts.

The US firm began looking into these kinds of activities after revelations of Russian influence campaigns during the 2016 US election, aimed at sowing discord.

“We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people,” Gleicher said. Facebook has a fact-checking partnership with AFP in multiple countries.

“This move aims to strengthen enforcement of such offences,” according to a joint statement by the Housing and Development Board, Land Transport Authority, National Environment Agency, Singapore Police Force and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

According to the statement, about 60,000 foreign vehicles enter Singapore daily.

“The majority of foreign motorists are law-abiding. However, there are some who break our rules but do not settle their outstanding fines for offences committed.

“We take a serious view of those who do not do so. To remind foreign motorists to settle their outstanding fines, flyers have been distributed, and billboards displayed, at land checkpoints.

“Traffic police and other government agencies have also been conducting operations at the land checkpoints to detect such vehicles, to get them to settle their outstanding fines,” the agencies said on Friday (Feb 1).

Despite these measures, the agencies said some foreign motorists continue to disregard their outstanding fines, reported Bernama.

“To further deter such behaviour and more effectively enforce against those who fail to settle their fines, foreign vehicles with a number of outstanding fines for vehicle-related offences may be denied entry into Singapore from April 1, 2019,” they said.

To avoid being denied entry into Singapore, foreign motorists are strongly advised by the agencies to check if they have any outstanding fines for vehicle-related offences and settle them promptly.

All fines can be checked at http://www.axs.com.sg.

Payment for the fines can be made through four channels namely AXS kiosks, AXS website and AXS mobile app; respective agencies’ websites; respective agencies’ customer service counters; and SingPost Post Offices (applicable for all agencies except Traffic police).

The statement said foreign motorists who wish to seek clarifications on their offences may contact the Housing and Development Board at 1800 2255432 or email: hdbcarparks@mailbox.hdb.gov.sg; Land Transport Authority

(1800 2255582); National Environment Agency (6225 5632); Singapore Police Force (Traffic police) (6547 0000); and Urban Redevelopment Authority (6329 3434).

Bahraini soccer player with Australian refugee status Hakeem Al-Araibi is currently detained in Thailand since last December.

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“The tension between China and the US is unlike the tension between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” said Yan Xuetong, chief of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University. He is also secretary-general of the World Peace Forum in Beijing.

Yan was speaking at a forum titled “An Uneasy Peace: China in a Divided World”, where he addressed the changing geopolitical dynamic between China and the US, and what that entails for Asean.

“Instead of focusing on military accumulation, ideological conflicts and nuclear threats, competition between the superpowers China and the US will be in the realms of economics and technology,” Yan said, calling the rivalry an era of “uneasy peace”.

The economic dispute between the two countries is only one aspect of the conflict and will be followed by technological tensions, he added, citing the recent arrest of Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, in Canada.

Thanks to President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, the US has been playing a smaller role in international politics, retreating from regions such as Asean. However, China lacks the capacity to take the United State’s place in international politics, which now leaves Asean members with the manoeuvring ground to take charge of their region’s management, Yan said.

The international relations expert agreed that Asean has been presented with an important opportunity to drive forward the cohesive integration of the region during the apparent geopolitical power vacuum.

Yan further suggested that while Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy has led to a general decline in multilateral relations around the world, the Asean region is an exception. Multilateral negotiations such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP) and the Lanchang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) are still promising, he said.

Other participants agreed that there was a window for Asean multilateral cooperation to grow.

“For this reason, Thailand’s position as Asean chair is extremely important, as it will set in motion the necessary diplomatic and trade initiatives to cope with the changing world order,” said Kavi Chongkittavorn, senior fellow of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) Thailand, and former chief editor at Myanmar Times.

One of Thailand’s most ambitious goals as the chair is to conclude the RCEP negotiations, which has been going on for seven years.

If successful, RCEP will be the largest multilateral trade deal in history, between the 10 Asean member countries and China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

The key challenge for Thailand in negotiating the RCEP agreement will be to bind together China and India, the two superpowers that have conflicting interests, Kavi added.

“Completing the RCEP is not just significant for Thai trade, but it is also symbolic of Thailand’s commitment to push forward the notion of ‘Asean Centrality’,” he said later in an interview on the sidelines of the forum.

According to the Department of Trade Negotiations, the US-China trade war has made Thailand and other countries in the region determined to conclude the mega-trade pact’s negotiations by the end of this year.

Kavi believes that even though the negotiations have been dragging on for the past seven years, RCEP will finally be concluded in 2019 under the current external pressures.

“Our handling of the RCEP will say whether Asean is still relevant in the geopolitical field as a region. It will also improve Thailand’s image internationally for being able to reconcile opposing interests of various superpowers into a single mega-trade pact,” he said.

However, Yan has a more sobering view of the RCEP negotiations.

“Due to the sheer size of the deal and the conflicting interest of the economic powerhouses involved, the chances of concluding RCEP by the end of this year are slim, as are other regional negotiations that will be set in place,” he said.

“However, Thailand must keep the dialogue on issues such as RCEP on the table during its chairmanship to ensure that the region remains as one entity and that cooperation in the region continues to progress gradually.”

An 18-year-old Indonesian woman (centre R) is caned in public in Banda Aceh on January 31, 2019, as punishment for being caught cuddling with her boyfriend. // AFP PHOTO

Flogging is used as punishment for a range of offences in the region at the tip of Sumatra island, including gambling, drinking alcohol, and having gay sex or relations outside of marriage.

    Hundreds of spectators watched as a female university student and her boyfriend, both 18, were whipped 17 times each outside a mosque in the provincial capital Banda Aceh.

A 35-year-old man was also flogged with a rattan cane for being intimate with a woman — aged 40 — in a local grocery store.

All four had served several months in prison before the punishment.

An Acehnese man (R) is caned as punishment for having a sexual relationship outside of marriage in Banda Aceh, Aceh, Indonesia, 31 January 2019.// EPA-EFE PHOTO

On Thursday, the 40-year-old woman pleaded to be caned in an apparent attempt to get out of jail immediately, but a medical team postponed her flogging after they deemed her physically unfit.

Aceh is the only province in the world’s biggest Muslim majority country that imposes Islamic law.

“People outside of Aceh who think Islamic Sharia (law) is cruel can now see that it is actually very tolerant and humane,” Banda Aceh deputy mayor Zainal Arifin told reporters.

In December, two men caught having sex with underage girls were whipped 100 times each.

An 18-year-old Indonesian woman (C) is assisted by Sharia police after being caned in public in Banda Aceh on January 31, 2019, as punishment for being caught cuddling with her boyfriend. // AFP PHOTO

Rights groups slam public caning as cruel, and Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has called for it to end.

But the practice has wide support among Aceh’s mostly Muslim population — around 98 percent of its five million residents practise Islam.

Earlier this year, Aceh said that flogging would be carried out behind prison walls in future, but some local governments have continued public whippings.

Aceh adopted religious law after it was granted special autonomy in 2001, an attempt by the central government to quell a long-running separatist insurgency.

Liu Xinglian, 64, and Yan Kefen, 44, spent 125 days marooned in the transit area of Taoyuan airport after they arrived from Bangkok in September last year.

The pair ran from China because of their political activism and were granted refugee status by the UN in Thailand.

But they fled once more after receiving repeated visits from police in Thailand, a country that has a track record of deporting dissidents back to China and does not recognise asylum claims.

    The two men have pending refugee applications in Canada and were hoping Taiwan would allow them to stay while those claims were processed.

Immigration officials refused to grant them entry because they did not have a valid visa. But the democratically elected government in Taiwan was also wary of deporting them, leaving them trapped.

On Thursday Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), which manages relations with Beijing, said the two men had been granted a temporary visa on humanitarian grounds which would need to be renewed each month.

“They have to leave eventually,” MAC spokesperson Chiu Chui-cheng told reporters.

AFP contacted the pair via social media for comment and received the brief response: “We are very well.”

In recent decades the Taiwanese government have been loathe to allow in those fleeing the authoritarian mainland, fearful of angering Beijing or encouraging a deluge.

But the government of President Tsai Ing-wen has also trumpeted its human rights record and has balked at sending any dissidents back to the authoritarian mainland.

Taiwan has no laws for refugees and officials were keen to stress the pair’s entry does not represent a change in policy.

“I have to stress that the assistance we give to these individuals, these methods and processing of asylum cases are not the norm and certainly not standard procedures,” Chiu said.

In an interview with AFP earlier this month, Liu and Yan described their bizarre ordeal of living inside an airport.

“We can’t breathe fresh air and there’s no sunlight,” Liu told AFP by phone from the fluorescent-lit fourth-floor room in a transit lounge, subsisting on a diet of boxed meals provided by airlines.

Liu and Yan had expressed gratitude to the Taiwanese government for not deporting them, saying they “do not want to create trouble for Taiwan”.

They had said they hoped to be allowed in to Taiwan for Chinese New Year, which begins on Tuesday.

Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), which is probing the disappearance of the light aircraft over the Channel on January 21, said the cushions were discovered on the Normandy coastline on Monday.

“From a preliminary examination we have concluded that it is likely that the cushions are from the missing aircraft,” it said in a statement.

The plane transporting Sala — who had just been transferred from French team Nantes to Premier League club Cardiff City in a 17-million-euro ($19.3-million) move — and British pilot Dave Ibbotson vanished from radar around 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the Channel island of Guernsey.

Police there suspended the official search for the aircraft last Thursday after an intensive hunt involving planes and boats failed to locate it.

The AAIB said with the help of Britain’s Ministry of Defence it had now commissioned a “specialist survey vessel” equipped with sonar equipment to search the seabed for the plane.

“If the wreckage is found, a remotely operated vehicle will be used to visually examine the wreckage,” it added.

The agency said due to weather and sea conditions, it expected to start the three-day underwater search at the end of the weekend.

The AAIB said it had now identified a priority search area of approximately four square nautical miles “based on a detailed assessment of the flight path and last known radar position”.

It said it was in contact with David Mearns, a shipwreck hunter hired by Sala’s family, who announced on Monday his Bluewater Recoveries firm was planning to begin an underwater search on Sunday.

“We are liaising closely with those involved to maximise the chance of locating any wreckage and ensure a safe search operation,” the AAIB said.