Washington, United States |

President Donald Trump  publicly introduced Conan, the dog that became a hero for its role in the US raid that led to the death of Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

"The dog is incredible," Trump said at a brief ceremony as the Belgian Malinois sat beside him with a handler. Also present were First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

"So brilliant, so smart. Conan did a fantastic job," Trump added.

In the raid last month, Conan chased al-Baghdadi into a dead-end tunnel in his Syrian hideout, where the cornered IS leader detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and two children, according to the US account.

Conan was injured by the electric cables exposed in the detonation but seems to have made a full recovery. 

"Conan was very badly hurt, as you know. They thought maybe he was not going to recover. He recovered actually very quickly and has since gone on very important raids," Trump said.

The dog's identity had been a closely guarded secret until it was declassified by Trump, who retweeted a picture of the pooch after the raid at Baghdadi's lair.

Details about Conan's life, achievements and family background are scant, although he certainly comes from good stock: US Navy SEALs used a Belgian Malinois in the 2011 raid in Pakistan that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The head of US Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie, has said Conan was a "critical member of our forces" and mentioned his impressive record of 50 combat missions in four years of service.

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Yogyakarta, Indonesia | As he scarfed down a traditional Indonesian meal, Adi Karyanov got himself the two-in-one special at a new restaurant offering pedicures by fish.

The tables and chairs at Soto Cokro Kembang in Indonesia's cultural capital Yogyakarta sit in ankle-deep water, home to thousands of little fish that nibble dead skin off the feet of diners.

"I felt the fish biting my feet -- it was ticklish but nice," Karyanov said.

"They make it fun to eat here. It's kind of unique."

Many spas across southeast Asia have for years touted a fishy pedicure as an unproven but novel way of treating various skin conditions.

But restaurant owner Imam Nur, who opened in June, has gone a step further by offering it alongside his traditional Javanese "sole food".

Nur credits his father for coming up with the idea for the open-air restaurant, which has some 7,000 Red Nile Tilapia swimming around its patrons.

"We initially opened this restaurant just for locals living nearby," he said.

"But what's happening now is beyond what we had initially planned. It's become like culinary tourism. Many people are coming here from different cities."

Pressing fish into service to remove dead skin is not without controversy.

Some cities in North America and Europe have banned it over concerns about bacterial outbreaks, while People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has warned over both the health risks and possible cruelty to animals.

Still, visitors like Anna Widia were keen to give the fish treatment a whirl.

"I've never seen any place like this," she said.

"And it's big enough to bring the whole family."

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Beijing, China | Private sleuth Sun Jinrong brings heat detectors, tiny surveillance cameras, and a blow dart loaded with a tranquiliser to his search for one desperate client's missing loved one: A cat named Duoduo.

Unlike Jim Carrey's goofy Ace Ventura character, the man dubbed by China's media as the nation's first pet detective is a stoney-faced animal lover who solves cases with the help of high-tech gear worth thousands of dollars.

With dogged determination, Sun has reunited around 1,000 missing pets with their owners since he launched his business seven years ago.

Clients pay 8,000 yuan ($1,130) for the service provided by his company, which has 10 employees and is based in the eastern city of Shanghai.

Sun often gets calls from anguished pet owners in the middle of the night and rushes to cities and towns across the nation to help.

Dog ownership was banned as bourgeois vanity under Chairman Mao Zedong, but Chinese society's views of pets have changed and there are now 91.5 million cats and dogs in the country, according to Pet Fair Asia and pet website Goumin.com.

Sun says pets are sometimes stolen rather than lost, and dogs are occasionally sold for their meat.

"Most pet owners get very flustered," Sun said.

"They don't even own a flashlight. They can only look for cats in the dark by the weak light of their phones," he said.

"We have advanced equipments and accumulated cases over the years to analyse the data. We can think of 10 things to do while the owner can think of one or two."

Around 10 other pet detectives have appeared in the past two years, Sun adds.

- Quake equipment -
Sun boasts a success rate of around 60-70 percent.

But could he find Duoduo?

The owner, Li Hongtao, hired Sun to come to Beijing and find his much-loved cat.

The British shorthair had last been seen in an underground garage two days before the search, reducing the chances of finding him.

"He's family to me," Li explains.

Sun set right to work, unpacking a 50-kilo black suitcase containing three thermal imaging cameras, an endoscope, and a hand-held machine used to detect life under the rubble after earthquakes.

He walks around pointing a heat detector around the garage. He inspects some excrement on the floor, but determines it is not from the animal he's looking for.

"Cats have hair in their faeces. The colour here is not right," Sun concludes.

The eagle-eyed detective then finds a big clue: Paw prints on dusty pipes, leading him to determine Duoduo fled into a nearby grassy area outside.

To lure the cat, a speaker hanging from Sun's suitcase blares the recorded voice of his owner.

Sun and his assistant, Huang Yan, also place Duoduo's favourite cat food inside a grass-coloured cage with a trap door.

When Sun spots an opening in a rock, he pushes the small lens of the endoscope -- a small camera at the top of a long chord -- inside the gap.

Duoduo isn't there.

Sun attaches a camera sensor on a tree and waits for nightfall.

"We have no predecessors in this industry. We are all crossing the river by feeling the stones," he explains, using a famous Chinese saying.

He adapted techniques he learned from hunters.

"You have to be extremely careful when capturing pets. You can't catch small dogs like pomeranians with a net. Their hearts are very small. It could kill them," warns Sun.

- Night watch -
Sun mainly works late at night, when it's less noisy, raising the chance that a lost animal will emerge from hiding.

He stays up, sometimes in a tent, waiting for any sign of the pet.

At around midnight, as he waits for any sign of Duoduo, a figure flashes across the monitor.

Huang and Sun scan the area and see the cat in the bushes.

He opts not to use the blow dart, instead he phones the cat's owner, Li, who can barely contain his excitement when he arrives and sees Duoduo.

Li calls to him but the stressed pet wouldn't budge.

After 10 agonising minutes, Li approaches Duoduo and grabs his cat.

"Let's go home!" Li told Duoduo, stroking the prodigal cat's fur.

Those are some of Sun's favourite words.

"When our case is solved, it's basically a reunion," he muses, adding: "It's a happy moment."

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London, United Kingdom | A midnight blue velvet gown worn by Princess Diana when she danced with actor John Travolta at the White House is being put up for sale, an auction house said Monday.

She wore the Victor Edelstein dress when she and her then husband Prince Charles attended a state dinner hosted by then president Ronald Reagan on November 9, 1985.

It was immortalised when Diana was photographed dancing with Travolta to the song "You Should be Dancing" from his film "Saturday Night Fever".

Estimated at £250,000-£350,000 ($324,000-$454,000), the dress is one of three being sold by Kerry Taylor Auctions on December 9.

They also include a long-sleeved dress from 1986 by Katherine Cusack, also in midnight-blue velvet, and a Catherine Walker navy wool day dress from around 1989.

The Edelstein dress was part of a collection of outfits that Diana herself sold for charity at auction in June 1997, just weeks before she was killed in a car crash in Paris.

Paris, France |They are the defining images of newsmakers down the decades from Princess Diana to Brigitte Bardot to Pope John Paul II.

And now some 130 of the most iconic pictures taken by the French magazine Paris Match are to be auctioned on November 25 in Paris for prices of between 1,500-4,000 euros ($1,660-4,400).

The auction of the celebrated covers and double-spreads will mark the 70th anniversary of a publication whose trend-setting influence has always gone well beyond France.

The pictures include powerful images from nature and conflict zones and also of politicians ranging from the deposed shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to Charles de Gaulle and late French president Jacques Chirac.

But among the most unforgettable are those those of personalities who have shaped the zeitgeist of the last decades.

Perhaps the most famous is the image of Britain's Princess Diana, sitting alone on the diving board of a luxury yacht as a bird flies by, just a week before her death in a Paris road accident in 1997.

"Yes, it is a paparazzi photo, but it's one that has gone down in history. This photo is Diana, it's Lady Di and she only had eight days to live," said Marc Brincourt, former photo editor-in-chief at Paris Match and curator of the exhibition at the Cornette de Saint Cyr auction house in Paris.

"She is alone, on the diving board. And then the seagull going by," he added.

Another image, by photographer Jack Garofalo from 1974, celebrates the 40th birthday of actress Brigitte Bardot, her chest exposed and flowers in her hair.

"In order to pose like that in front of Jack Garofalo, you need to have trust," said Brincourt.

"There is a trust between star and the photographer. Why? Because in that era, the stars were friends with the photographers and the Paris Match reporters," he added.

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Washington, United States |President Donald Trump  honored Oscar winner -- and one of his rare public supporters in Hollywood -- Jon Voight, recounting fighting tears while watching one of the actor's films.

Voight, 80, was among eight people given the National Medal of the Arts and the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony, the highest state honor for artists.

Later in the day, Voight accompanied Trump to Dover, Delaware where the president receive the bodies of two servicemen who were killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan on Wednesday.

Voight said he was invited by Trump during the medal ceremony, and added that he did not meet the service members' families.

The actor won a 1979 best actor Academy Award for "Coming Home," in which he played a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran alongside Jane Fonda.

He made a star turn in "Midnight Cowboy" with Dustin Hoffman and also played in "Deliverance" and the "Odessa File," among other hits.

Trump said another Voight film, "The Champ," was the "greatest boxing movie of all time."

"Everyone was crying at that movie. I tried not to, Jon, but it wasn't easy," Trump said.

Voight stands out as a highly public supporter for the Republican Trump in Hollywood, breaking ranks with the bulk of his acting colleagues who have long leaned to the Democrats.

His daughter, the actress Angelina Jolie, is a fierce Trump critic. She was not seen at the medal ceremony in the White House's East Room.

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Baghdad, Iraq | 

Taking vibrant spray paint to Baghdad's grimy concrete walls, Iraqi artists protesting against the government -- many of them young and female -- are sketching out their vision for a brighter future.

In plastic gloves covered in paint smudges, 20-year-old Fatima Hussam commands a team of artists-cum-activists producing today's fresco.

Their murals have transformed a monochrome tunnel leading into the main protest camp in Tahrir (Liberation) Square into a revolutionary art gallery. 

"We have plenty of artists in this country but nowhere they can express their art, so we decided to use Tahrir for an art revolution in addition to a national revolution," says Hussam, her white veil covered in pink flowers.

Among her works is a version of World War II-era feminist icon "Rosie the Riveter," now with an Iraqi flag painted on her cheek and announcing in speech bubble: "This is what our women are like!"

Iraq, where around 60 percent of its 40 million people are below 25, remains a largely conservative country.

Baghdad is more open-minded than the tribal south, where it is rare to see women interact with men who are not their relatives or spouses.

But protests in the capital and Shiite-majority southern provinces have seen women break the taboo, joining thousands of demonstrators en masse to demand regime change.

Hussam has joined them this week, with her older brother cautiously but proudly looking on as she paints.

Her latest is an ode to fellow women taking part: a veiled woman holding a sign bearing one of the popular uprising's many slogans: "I want my country."

- 'Joy and colours' -

Such slogans are 23-year-old Mohammad Abdelwahab's inspiration. 

The young artist takes a brush daubed in white paint to a large black background in the tunnel, inscribing popular protest chants into the shape of a map of Iraq.

"We are the generation of change -- change for the better!" says Abdelwahab.

Dozens of other young artists are working on their own pieces.

One mural shows the three-wheeled rickshaw known as a tuk-tuk, now a beloved symbol of the protest movement for its role in ferrying wounded demonstrators to safety.

Another displays the word "LOVE" spelled out by bloodstained hands -- a testimony, the artist says, to those who have died facing off against security forces. 

Nearly 300 people have died since the protests first erupted on October 1, according to an AFP tally.

Half of them lost their lives in an initial six-day wave of protests in early October, and the rest in deadly clashes with security forces or in fires set to party offices since rallies resumed on October 24.

Authorities have acknowledged the protests but say that "infiltrators" embedded in them are looking to plunge the country back into instability.

Iraq has only recently emerged from decades of back-to-back conflict, including a 1980s war with Iran, the US-led invasion in 2003 and a battle against the Islamic State group that ended in late 2017. 

Abdelwahab says the protest movement is about the next phase of Iraq's future.  

"We're not here to attack the state. We want to bring it joy and colours," he insists.

- A growing underground -

Mission accomplished, says 38-year-old Mohammad Abbas.

"In 16 years, I've never seen this place so beautiful. Our country really needed this," marvels Abbas, who has driven down the same tunnel to get to work for years.

"Usually, the walls are dirty and black," he says.

Baghdad, a sprawling city of nearly 10 million inhabitants, is usually choked off by traffic, smog and checkpoints.

"Young people were able to achieve what the state hasn't been able to do while spending billions on Baghdad," says Abbas, on his way to more swelling protests above ground.

Oil-rich Iraq is OPEC's second biggest producer, but one in five people live in poverty and youth unemployment stands at 25 percent, according to the World Bank.

Public services including electricity, water provision and street maintenance are poor, and the country is ranked the 12th most corrupt worldwide by Transparency International.

But the art developing underneath Tahrir is not just visual.

Every afternoon, musicians bring their clarinets and flutes for impromptu concerts, as woodworkers sell key chains and other statuettes immortalising the tuk-tuk.

"With few means, these artists send a peaceful message to the world," says Ibrahim, 39, a bypasser.

Through them, he says, "we're telling the world that the Iraqi people are alive and well."

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Los Angeles, United States | 

It was the one they all wanted -- the black leather jacket and high-waisted skin-tight pants worn by Olivia Newton-John in the finale of "Grease" electrified a Beverly Hills auction, selling for $405,700.

Now part of Hollywood history, the iconic musical comedy starring Newton-John and John Travolta still arouses passions more than 40 years after it first appeared in movie theaters.

Newton-John donned the outfit to sing "You're the One that I Want" with Travolta, her transformation into a sexy greaser girl complete.

The final price paid Saturday night was twice the pre-sale estimate, according to Julien's Auctions.

Released in 1978, the most successful movie musical ever tells the high school love story of Sandy (Newton-John) and Danny (Travolta), set in the 1950s.  

A poster signed by Travolta, Newton-John and other members of the cast that had carried a $1,000 pre-auction estimate sold for $64,000.

Part of the proceeds from the sale of items from the actress' collection will go to fund the Olivia Newton-John center for cancer research. 

The actress was diagnosed with cancer for a third time in 2018.

HBO recently announced plans for a series inspired by "Grease," which will revisit certain songs and characters from the film.

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Madrid, Spain 

Shepherds guided a flock of around 2,000 sheep through the streets of Madrid  in defence of ancient grazing and migration rights increasingly threatened by urban sprawl.

Tourists and local residents lined the streets to watch as the bleating, bell-clanking parade passed the Spanish capital's most emblematic locations, cutting traffic.

The herd was accompanied by musicians and dancers dressed in regional costumes that have been worn by rural workers for centuries.

Shepherds halted at the town hall so the chief herdsman could hand local authorities 50 "maravedies" -- copper coins first minted in the 11th century -- as payment for the crossing.

The parade started in the Casa de Campo, a former royal hunting ground that is now Madrid's largest park, then made its way through the Puerta del Sol -- the main square -- and past the Bank of Spain's headquarters before ending up at the town hall.

Every year since 1994 sheep farmers have paraded their livestock through the city along a route that once cut through undeveloped countryside on their way to winter grazing pastures in southern Spain.

Since medieval times, shepherds have had the right to use herding paths crisscrossing a landscape that was once woodland and grazing space.

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Doha, Qatar | 

The organisers of the inaugural World Beach Games that kicked off this week have heaped praise on Qatar for stepping in to host the event at short notice after San Diego pulled out.

More than 1,500 athletes competing in sports from beach volleyball to skateboarding have descended on the tiny peninsula emirate for the event, which organisers hope will raise the profile of smaller sports.

"It's a great choice because Qatar is used to organising big sports competitions," said Gunilla Lindberg, secretary general of the Association of National Olympic Committees.

"I'm absolutely sure (Qatar) was the right choice."

ANOC was left to scout out alternatives to San Diego when the California coastal city pulled out in May after four years of planning, citing financial constraints.

While several other cities put in a bid to host, Doha won out because of its experience staging major events and ready-made infrastructure, Lindberg told AFP.

The event, partially held at Doha's beachside Katara cultural village, has avoided the thin crowds that dogged the early days of the recent World Athletics Championships.

The World Beach Games were created by the world's Olympic committees and announced in 2015, with 97 countries sending competitors to the Doha event that started Friday and ends Wednesday. 

A beach tennis qualifier between Chile and Portugal on Saturday saw the temporary sea-view stands filled by small but noisy contingents from each country, alongside hundreds of curious expat workers.

- 'It's amazing' -

"It's a new event, so the stands are not so big -- but we have opened up for everyone to come," said Lindberg.

Qatar has invested heavily in infrastructure for big-ticket events like the 2022 World Cup and the World Athletics Championships. 

But Doha has also hosted smaller competitions, including the 2015 World Handball Championship and the 2016 cycling Road World Championships.

Simon Chadwick, professor of sports enterprise at Britain's Salford University, said ahead of the athletics championships that Qatar sees sporting events as part of its national security effort.

Such events help make Qatar "visible, relevant and important" as well as deterring potential aggressors, he said.

Qatar is embroiled in a bitter two-year-long dispute with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which accuse Doha of backing Saudi regional rival Iran and radical Islamists.

They have cut direct transport links, closed airspace to Qatari aircraft and restricted their citizens from visiting over the claims, which Doha denies.

French three-on-three basketball coach Yann Julien praised Qatar for preparing the games in "record time". 

"It's really well organised," he said, applauding the transportation and provision of air conditioned tents for athletes to cool down in.

The beach games' first edition was due to take place in San Diego .

Reports said organisers were struggling to raise funds to put on the event.

Qatar has "done a good job with the transportation and the setup of the venues," said Lindberg, adding that organisers had just six days to shift from the athletics championships to the beach games.

"It's amazing."

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