Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, has appeared at the International Criminal Court, accused of crimes against humanity.

The 79-year-old appeared in the Netherlands via video link on Friday.

His lawyer said he was suffering from “debilitating medical issues” but the judge in The Hague, Iulia Motoc, said the court doctor had found him to be “fully mentally aware and fit”.

She said he was allowed to appear remotely because he had taken a long flight.

Wearing a jacket and tie, Duterte spoke briefly to confirm his name and date of birth.

He was read his rights and formally informed of the charges. His supporters contest his arrest and say the court does not have jurisdiction.

If convicted, he faces life in prison.

His daughter Sara Duterte, the current vice president of the Philippines, said she was hoping to visit her father and have the hearing moved after meeting supporters outside the court.

Back home in the Philippine capital region, large screens were set up to allow families of suspects killed in the crackdowns to watch the proceedings.

Prosecutors accuse Duterte of forming and arming death squads said to have killed thousands of drug dealers and users during a brutal crackdown on illegal drugs.

Police say more than 6,200 people were killed in what they describe as shootouts while he was president from 2016 to 2022.

They claim he was an “indirect co-perpetrator” in multiple murders, allegedly overseeing killings between November 2011 and March 2019.

Before becoming president, Duterte was the mayor of the southern city of Davao.

According to the prosecution, he issued orders to police and other “hitmen” who formed the so-called “Davao Death Squads” or DDS.

Estimates of the death toll during his six-year presidential term vary, from more than 6,000 reported by national police, to 30,000 claimed by human rights groups.

The warrant for his arrest said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Duterte bears criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of murder”.

Duterte has said he takes full responsibility for the “war on drugs”.

He was arrested on Tuesday amid chaotic scenes in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, after returning from a visit to Hong Kong.

He told officers “you have to kill me to bring me to The Hague” during a 12-hour standoff, a Philippine police general said.

He also refused to have his fingerprints taken and threatened Police Major General Nicolas Torre with lawsuits before he was bundled onto a government-chartered jet at a Philippine air base and taken to The Hague, Maj Gen Torre told the Associated Press.

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Steve Witkoff didn’t stay long in the Russian capital.

According to footage posted of his motorcade leaving and returning to Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, he was here for little more than 12 hours.

And for most of that, it seems, he was left waiting.

Trump’s fixer leaves Moscow – peace talks latest

Mr Witkoff, a former property mogul who has become Donald Trump’s chief negotiator, and is often referred to as the president’s ‘fixer’, had been dispatched to Moscow to deliver the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire to Vladimir Putin.

His visit had been scheduled near the start of the week, following the US-Ukraine talks in Saudi Arabia.

But after arriving around lunchtime on Thursday, he was left twiddling his thumbs for at least eight hours before being called into the Kremlin.

Mr Putin was apparently too busy meeting someone else – Belarusian leader Aleksander Lukashenko – for a hastily arranged state visit that had been announced the day before.

Was ally’s visit a classic Putin power play?

We don’t know for sure if the timing of Mr Lukashenko’s visit was deliberate, but it certainly didn’t feel like a coincidence.

Instead, it felt like a classic Putin power play.

The Kremlin leader doesn’t like to be backed into a corner and told what to do, especially on his own turf.

This felt like a message to the Americans – “I’m the boss, I set the schedule, and I’m not beholden to anyone”.

He did eventually grant Mr Witkoff that all-important face time, once night had fallen and behind closed-doors.

We don’t know how long they spoke for, nor the exact details of their discussion, but I think we can make a pretty good guess given Mr Putin’s comments earlier in the evening.

At a press conference alongside Mr Lukashenko, he made it abundantly clear that he’ll only sign up to a ceasefire if he gets something in return.

And it’s not just one thing he wants.

All Russia’s red lines remain

By the sounds of things, he still wants everything.

His comment regarding the “root causes” of the conflict suggests all of Russia’s red lines remain – no NATO membership for Ukraine, no NATO troops as peacekeepers, and for Russia to keep all the territory it has seized.

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According to Russian media outlet Radio Mayak, Mr Putin’s meetings in the Kremlin finished at 1.30am.

Around half an hour later, Mr Witkoff was back at the airport – leaving Russia, it seems – not with Mr Putin’s agreement but with a list of demands.

It’s now up to Mr Trump to decide what to do next.

One thousand feet above the world’s largest iceberg, it’s hard to believe what you’re seeing.

It stretches all the way to the horizon – a field of white as far as the eye can see.

Its edge looks thin in comparison, until you make out a bird flying alongside and realise it is, in fact, a cliff of ice hundreds of feet high.

Scientists who have used satellites to track the iceberg’s decades-long meanderings north from Antarctica have codenamed the iceberg A23a.

But up close, numbers and letters don’t do it justice.

It’s a seemingly endless slab of white, fringed by an aquamarine glow – the ocean at its base backlit by a sill of reflective ice below.

Monotonous yet magnificent; we’re flying along the coastline of a nation of ice.

And it’s also hard to believe you’re seeing it at all.

Where it has run aground – 50 miles off the small island of South Georgia – seems impossibly remote.

We’re 800 miles from the Falkland Islands and 900 miles from the icy wastes of Antarctica.

With no runway on South Georgia, there’s only one aircraft that ever flies here.

Once a month or so, a Royal Air Force A400 transport plane based in the Falklands carries out Operation Cold Stare – a maritime surveillance and enforcement flight over the British Overseas Territory that includes the neighbouring South Sandwich Islands.

It’s a smooth, albeit noisy, two-hour flight to South Georgia.

But as the dramatic peaks of the island come into view, the ride – for us inexperienced passengers at least – gets scary.

Gusts off the mountains and steep terrain throw the plane and its occupants around.

Not that that stops the pilots completing their circuit of the island.

We fly over some of its 500,000 square mile marine protected zone designed to protect the greatest concentration of marine mammals and birds on the planet that is found on South Georgia.

Only then do we head out to the iceberg, and even though it’s only a few minutes flying from South Georgia it’s at first hard to see. It’s so big and white it’s indistinguishable from the horizon through the haze.

Until suddenly, its edge comes into view.

It’s immediately apparent the A23a is not too long for this world. Large icebergs hundreds of metres across have already broken off and are drifting closer to South Georgia.

All along its edges, cracks are appearing and arches at its base caverns are being eroded by the warmer ocean here, undercutting the ice, weakening it further.

The iceberg might present a problem for some of South Georgia’s super-abundant penguins, seals and seabirds. A jumble of rapidly fragmenting ice could choke up certain bays and beaches in which colonies of the animals breed.

The trillion tonnes of fresh water melting out of the iceberg could also interfere with the food webs that sustain marine life.

However, the breeding season is coming to an end and icebergs are also known to fertilise oceans with sediment carried from the Antarctic continent.

The impact on shipping is more relevant. There’s not much of it down here. But fishing vessels, cruise ships and research teams ply these waters and smaller lumps of ice called “growlers” are a regular risk.

A23a will create many.

Icebergs this big are too few for scientists to know if they are becoming more frequent or not.

But they are symptomatic of a clearly emerging trend. As our climate warms, Antarctica is slowly melting.

It’s losing around 150 billion tonnes of ice a year – half of it breaking off the continent in the form of icebergs calving from glaciers, the rest melting directly from its vast ice sheets as temperatures gradually rise.

The pace of A23a’s disintegration is far, far faster. It will disappear in months, not millennia.

But watching its edges crumble and slide into the South Atlantic, you can’t help seeing it as the fate of a whole continent in miniature.