The government, which has been conducting airstrikes, had earlier claimed it had "made gains" in the battle, but has yet to fully retake the city.
Senior military officials told reporters that they believed the
militants were hiding in an extensive network of underground shelters,
built years ago.
"There are underground tunnels and basements that
even a 500-pounder (bomb) cannot destroy," said Maj Gen Carlito Galvez,
head of the military command in the Western Mindanao region.
Government and military estimates on the number of militants left in Marawi have ranged from 40 to 200.
In other developments:
The Philippine government has denied claims that its soldiers were looting Marawi,
saying that troops had handed in more than 79m Philippine pesos (£1.2m,
$1.6m) in cash and cheques found in a house used by militants.
President Rodrigo Duterte has
increased the bounties for top militant leaders Isnilon Hapilon and the
Maute brothers, with a total of 27.4m pesos now offered for their
"neutralisation". The US is offering a separate $5m bounty for Hapilon.
The US is supplying weapons, including
machine guns and grenade launchers, to the Philippines which has said
they will go to soldiers fighting in Marawi.
Officials had said that foreign nationals were among the militants in Marawi, but the list of countries now includes Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen, India and Chechnya.
The militants were also apparently well-prepared for a possible
siege, and had placed supplies in mosques and religious schools - which
are off-limits for air strikes - days before seizing the city, said
officials.
Military spokesman Lt Col Jo-ar Herrera told AFP news agency that
these buildings contained at least a month's worth of food, as well as
weapons such as machine guns.
The gunman had also collected
ammunition and provisions from the city after ransacking Marawi's jail
and armouries, said presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella who was quoted
in The Philippine Inquirer.
When
the conflict first broke out, officials had said fighters from the
Maute group, linked to the so-called Islamic State, stormed the city
after an attempt by Philippine troops to capture Hapilon.
The Maute group is named after founders and leaders Abdullah and Omar Maute.
BBC NEWS
Apple reveals HomePod smart speaker
Apple has announced a voice-activated loudspeaker powered by its virtual assistant Siri.
Like
devices by Amazon and Google, Apple's HomePod speaker can respond to
questions and control smart home gadgets such as lights.
Analysts
say Apple has been slow to improve its Siri virtual assistant and launch
a smart speaker, after Amazon launched its Echo in 2014.
The company has pitched HomePod first and foremost as a music player.
"Apple
being very clever by launching its Siri speaker as a music speaker
that's smart, because Siri isn't great," said Tom Warren from the
technology news site The Verge.
"Interesting that home assistant was the last feature they talked
about. Focusing on music is smart, main use case for smart speakers,"
said Ben Bajarin, of the Creative Strategies consultancy.
The announcement was made at the tech giant's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California.
"It's
a logical step for Apple, to ensure that they don't miss the
opportunity to get a smart device right in the centre of people's
homes," said Ben Wood, an industry analyst at CCS Insight.
"There has been a huge amount of hype around Amazon Echo and Google Home, but we are really at the start of this technology.
"This does a great job of extending the tentacles of Apple services."
Analysis - Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter, at WWDC
At more than double the cost of Amazon's Echo, the HomePod is a typical Apple move.
The company is once again banking on its reputation as a creator of intuitive, luxury products that justify a hefty price tag.
What's
interesting about Apple's approach here is that the company has
positioned HomePod as a music device first and foremost, a big contrast
to the approach of Google which touted its Home speaker as a day-to-day
assistant for many aspects of your life.
So - a cynic might say Apple has just launched the world's most-hyped bluetooth speaker - not much imagination there.
But
let's face it, before AI and machine learning really matures, most home
assistant devices are essentially voice-controlled speakers, and so
Apple dedicating its effort into making it sound great is probably a
smart move.
Then again, you might wonder if its "smart"
capabilities are being downplayed due to Siri just not being as advanced
as its competitors.
Mixed reality
Tools that let app designers add virtual objects to a real-world view from the phone's camera, in real time, were also revealed.
The mobile game Pokemon Go is a well-known example of mixed-reality technology in action.
Apple said the new ARkit would make use of the dual-lens camera on
the iPhone 7 Plus, making the integration of virtual objects and the
real world more realistic.
"By truly enabling all modern iPhones
to become augmented reality platforms, Apple will have the largest
potential reach for AR development day one," said Mr Bajarin.
However, he questioned the practicality of augmented reality on a smartphone.
"The benefit to a headset or glasses in these demos is not having to hold the device up thus arms getting tired," he said.
Safety in the car
Apple
also announced the next version of its mobile operating system - iOS 11
- which will include a new setting for people who use their iPhone in
the car.
In January, the company was sued by a US couple whose daughter was killed by a driver allegedly using FaceTime on his iPhone.
The
new driving mode silences notifications, turns the phone's display off,
and can automatically reply to messages to warn friends that you are
driving.
Samsung is testing a similar feature for its Android-powered phones.
Apple also announced:
a deal bringing the Amazon Prime Video streaming service to the Apple TV set-top box
an update to its Safari web browser, which will now stop websites from tracking visitors and stop videos playing automatically
speed upgrades to its iMac and Macbook
range of computers, plus a new iMac Pro which the company says is the
most powerful Mac ever made
BBC NEWS
London attack: Goodwill and planning got NHS through
The NHS puts lots of effort into
planning for a major incident - whether it is a terrorist attack, a
cyber-attack, an outbreak of infectious disease or simply a major power
cut.
But what the past few months have shown is that the dedication and goodwill of staff play a vital role.
After
both the Westminster Bridge and Manchester concert attacks, hospitals
ended up turning away doctors, nurses and other staff who were
volunteering to come in.
The actions of Dr Malik Ramadhan,
divisional director of emergency care and trauma at the Royal London
Hospital, where 12 of the London Bridge and Borough Market victims were
taken, are a perfect illustration of this.
Multiple casualties
Dr Ramadhan had finished his shift and was cycling home over Tower Bridge at the time of Saturday night's attacks.
"I
was completely oblivious," he says, "and as I got to the Old Kent Road a
large number of police vehicles came whizzing past, more than I've seen
before, and I thought that's a bit unusual.
"Given what's been happening, I thought I had better go back to work."
Dr Ramadhan got back to the hospital and was told it had been put on a major incident alert and to expect multiple casualties.
Clearing beds
"We don't get told specifics," he says.
"We get told something really bad has happened, and we have a plan to prepare for something really bad."
The team started clearing beds, contacting on-call staff and messaging colleagues to see who might be able to come in and help.
"By the time patients arrived, we had fully staffed resuscitation bays to receive each of the patients," Dr Ramadhan says.
"The 12 were all very badly injured. The people who were stabbed had been stabbed with the clear intent to kill."
Dr Ramadhan says the injured were badly shocked - startled to the point where they could not speak.
But hospital staff were prepared.
Staying sober
"People are ready," he says.
"The major trauma system in London has been preparing itself for something to happen."
Dr
Ramadhan says off-duty doctors who might normally go out on a Saturday
night have been staying sober in case they are needed.
"Doctors like myself who might have been going to Borough after a night in work [are not]," he says.
First decisions
"As Saturday night is testament, we had a lot of people who were completely sober and ready to help the public."
NHS
England chief executive Simon Stevens says the weekend's attack once
again shows the NHS is "ready and able to respond to such attacks thanks
to the professionalism and bravery of our staff".
One of the first decisions senior managers need to make is just how many staff are needed.
An
incident on a Saturday night - when staffing is at its lowest -
requires many more being brought in than an incident in the middle of
the day during the week.
Emergency services
For
example, at the time of the attack the Royal London Hospital had just
one operating theatre open, but that quickly became five.
But a single hospital is just one part of the jigsaw when it comes to major incidents.
The victims of the London Bridge attack were treated at five hospitals.
They
came under the control of the Gold Command system, whereby senior
officers from the emergency services take strategic control of incidents
from a control centre.
Each hospital has its own contingency
plans in place - in fact they were asked to review these just over a
week ago after the Manchester attack.
With three terror incidents and a cyber-attack in just three months, the NHS must be primed for any eventuality.
BBC NEWS
The National Front member who fell in love with Calais Jungle migrant
Béatrice Huret stood on a beach on
the northern French coast before dawn, watching as her lover headed off
across the English Channel in a rickety boat. Would she ever see him
again? Had she been taken for a ride, used by a man she met just a few
weeks earlier to help him fulfil his dream of a new life in England?
Would he drown on the way?
As the boat disappeared over the dark horizon, Béatrice returned to her car, her head full of hope but also full of doubt.
The
45-year-old had just a couple years previously been a card-carrying
member of the far-right National Front (FN), and she was the widow of a
policeman who she says was racist.
Now here she was helping her
migrant lover, Mokhtar, whom she had met in the so-called Jungle migrant
camp in Calais, to sneak into Britain.
She recounts the story of
how her life changed the day she offered a lift to a teenage migrant in a
new book titled Calais Mon Amour.
Béatrice says that before his
death from cancer in 2010 her husband had been one of the huge number of
police officers deployed in Calais to keep migrants from breaking into
the Channel Tunnel terminal or the ferry port, in their bid to get to
the UK.
As a policeman he was not legally allowed to join a
political party, so he got his wife to sign up instead to Marine Le
Pen's FN, which paid her to distribute pamphlets.
She says that, unlike her husband, she was not really
racist. But she admits she was worried about "all these foreigners, who
seemed so different, and who were getting into France".
Béatrice
lived with her teenage son and her mother about 20km (12 miles) from the
Jungle, but she had never seen the giant shantytown built of tents and
shacks on waste ground on the outskirts of Calais.
On her way home
from work one very cold day in 2015, she took pity on a Sudanese boy
and agreed to drop him off at the camp, which at its peak last year was
home to 10,000 people, most of whom had fled war or poverty in Africa,
the Middle East, or Afghanistan.
Then, for the first time, she saw for herself what conditions there were like.
"I
felt as though I was in a war zone, it was like a war camp, a refugee
camp, and something went 'click' and I said to myself that I just had to
help," she says.
Suddenly migrants were no longer just a word, no longer an abstraction.
Béatrice,
who works at a centre where young people are trained to become carers,
started to bring food and clothing to people in the Jungle, roping in
friends and family members to help. Slowly she got to know the camp and
its people, ranging "from shepherds to lawyers to surgeons".
Then,
in February last year, she laid eyes on Mokhtar, a 34-year-old former
teacher who had had to flee his native Iran, where he faced persecution,
and was ostracised by his own family for having converted to
Christianity.
She met him just at the moment when photos of him, and of several of
his compatriots, were being published in newspapers around the world,
because they had sewed their lips together in protest at the appalling
living conditions in the Jungle.
"I sat down and then he came over
and very gently he asked me if I would like a cup of tea, and then he
went and made me tea, and it was a bit of a shock. It was love at first
sight," she says.
"It was just his look, it was so soft. There they were with their lips sewn up and they ask me, do I want some tea?"
But communication was an obstacle, as Mokhtar spoke no French and
she, unlike him, had little English. Their solution was to use Google
Translate.
A romance blossomed and Béatrice offered to put up
Mokhtar and some of his friends in her house, ignoring advice from her
friends that she was making a big mistake.
She was under no
illusions about her new lover's goal. Mokhtar had already tried to get
to England by hiding in the back of lorries and now he was about to try a
change of tack. He and two friends gave Béatrice about 1,000 euros
(£980; $1,130) and got her to buy a small boat for them.
On 11 June last year, Béatrice towed it to a beach near
Dunkirk, and the trio of migrants, none of whom had been in charge of a
boat before, set off at about 04:00 on a perilous journey across the
world's busiest shipping channel.
"We dressed them up so they would look like men out on a fishing trip, with fishing rods," she says with a smile.
That
was the moment when the whole thing might have ended, when Béatrice
hoped for the best but worried that she might have been had, and worried
that Mokhtar and his friends might even drown.
That very nearly came to pass, when the boat started taking water around 06:30, as it approached the English coast.
It was terrifying, but with hindsight there was something comic about it.
"The
youngest was vomiting from fear, the toughest one was smoking
cigarettes and saying 'Well, if you have to die, you have to die, that's
life,' and there was Mokhtar scooping out the water and phoning the
emergency services at the same time," she says.
The British coastguard sent out a helicopter which eventually spotted them and sent a boat out to the rescue.
The
three migrants were later questioned by immigration officers, and after
a couple of days Mokhtar was sent to an asylum centre from where he
could finally contact his beloved, who had been waiting anxiously on the
other side of the Channel.
"He gave his address in Wakefield. I went to see him the next weekend," Béatrice says.
And
ever since then she has taken a ferry every second week and driven up
to see her lover, who is now in a refugee hostel in Sheffield and who
has successfully applied for asylum in the UK. They keep in touch via
webcam nearly every night
So what of the future? The couple have no plans, Béatrice says, noting that "it hurts when you make plans that don't work out".
"If our relationship ends, then so be it [but] I owe Mokhtar a beautiful love story, the most beautiful one of my life."
The
story for her does not end on a purely happy note. Last August she was
arrested and charged with people smuggling. She laughs when she speaks
of the charge, as for her the idea that she was in it for the money is
nothing short of ridiculous.
She was taken into custody at the
same police station where her late husband used to work. Released on
bail, she was placed under judicial supervision, and has to report to
police once a week, as she waits for her trial to begin later this
month.
If found guilty, she could in theory be sentenced to 10
years in prison and fined 750,000 euros, though in her case the penalty
would probably be less severe.
Béatrice has also been put on the
government watchlist of people who are deemed a potential threat to the
security of the state. Most people on this list are radical Islamists.
This too makes her laugh.
Was it all worth it?
"Yes," she replied without hesitation. "I did it for him. You do anything for love."
Béatrice Huret's book, Calais Mon Amour, is ghost-written by Catherine Siguret
BBC NEWS
US warns Beijing on South China Sea islands
The US will not accept China's
militarisation of man-made islands in the South China Sea, Defence
Secretary James Mattis has warned.
Speaking at a security conference in Singapore, he said such moves undermined regional stability.
China's territorial claims in the resource-rich South China Sea are contested by several nations.
At the same time, Gen Mattis praised Beijing's efforts to restrain North Korea's missile and nuclear activity.
In his speech at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue forum, Gen
Mattis said: "We oppose countries militarising artificial islands and
enforcing excessive maritime claims.
"We cannot and will not accept unilateral, coercive changes to the status quo."
President
Donald Trump and other senior US officials have repeatedly stated that
they would protect its interests in the South China Sea, a key shipping
route.
During his nomination hearing earlier this year, Secretary
of State Rex Tillerson warned that the US was "going to have to send
China a clear signal that first the island-building stops, and second
your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed."
In response, the Chinese foreign ministry said Beijing would "remain firm to defend its rights in the region".
But in Singapore Gen Mattis also struck a positive note on US-China
relations, saying that while competition between the two countries "is
bound to occur, conflict is not inevitable".
The biggest question
amongst Asian delegates attending the forum has been how much of a role
the US will continue to play in this increasingly tense region, the
BBC's Karishma Vaswani in Singapore reports.
She adds that Gen Mattis sought to reassure his peers that the US was not turning its back on Asia.
Rival countries have wrangled over territory in the South China Sea
for centuries, but tension has steadily increased in recent years.
Its islets and waters are claimed in part or in whole by Taiwan, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei.
Beijing
has been building artificial islands on reefs and carrying out naval
patrols in waters also claimed by these other nations.
Although
the previous US administration of Barack Obama insisted it was neutral,
it spoke out strongly against the island-building and sought to build
ties with, and among, the South East Asian nations whose claims overlap
those of China.
In July 2016, an international tribunal ruled
against Chinese claims, backing a case brought by the Philippines, but
Beijing said it would not respect the verdict.
The frictions have sparked concern that the area is becoming a flashpoint with global consequences.
BBC NEWS
India launches 'monster' rocket
India's space agency has successfully launched its heaviest rocket.
The 640-tonne rocket blasted off from a launching site off the Bay of Bengal in Sriharikota.
As
one website put it, "it's been a big day for India". The rocket will
reduce the Indian Space Research Organisation's (Isro) reliance on
European vehicles to launch heavy satellites.
Such
comparisons highlight the importance of the launch for the country,
which is aggressively competing to get a bigger share of the global
commercial satellite launch market.
India has so far relied on other countries to send heavy satellites into space, which is expensive and a drain on Isro's budget.
The
GSLV Mark III can carry put a payload weighing more than three tonnes
into the high altitude orbit occupied by the spacecraft that relay TV,
telephone calls and broadband connections.
But it's far from being the world's heaviest rocket because Nasa's Saturn V,
which was used between 1967 and 1973, still holds the record at 2,676
tonnes when fully fuelled for lift-off - or about 400 fully grown
elephants.
The NDTV website says the rocket is as heavy as five Jumbo jets. And
the weight matters because communication satellites are quite heavy.
Experts say the rocket gives India more flexibility in launching different kinds of satellites.
"We
were able to send [satellites weighing] up to two tonnes previously.
This is a double quantum jump for India," Ajay Lele from the Institute
for Defence Studies and Analyses told the AFP news agency.
Isro hopes hopes that the rocket, called the "monster" by one newspaper, will be able to carry an astronaut to space by 2024.
India wants to become the fourth country after the US, China and Russia to send a person into space.
Experts say the successful launch will give impetus to India's indigenous space programme.
In
the spirit of finding fun facts, the BBC also did some research on the
height of the rocket and found that it's taller than the Statue of
Liberty.
The rocket is 43m (141ft) tall, while the statue stands at 33.83m, minus the pedestal foundation.
Cartoons by the BBC's Kirtish Bhat
BBC NEWS
The countries that cane their convicts
wo men are due to be caned in public after they were caught in bed together in Aceh, Indonesia.
It
is the only Indonesian province where Sharia is in force. According to
human rights campaign group Amnesty International, 108 people were
punished for various offences in 2015.
Their offences ranged from gambling to alcohol, adultery and public displays of intimacy outside of marriage.
Pictures
of these public punishments - designed to humiliate as much as to
injure - show people being led onto a raised platform, and made to kneel
or stand as a hooded man beats them with a long, thin cane while a
large crowd watches.
Caning is considered so barbaric that Amnesty says it could be considered akin to torture.
But flogging as a punishment for transgressions in countries where Islamic laws are followed is relatively common.
One woman flogged for doing just that described on the Iranian
Facebook page My Stealthy Freedoms how she was led into a room in
shackles and beaten by a woman.
"With the impact of the first
lash, I jumped out of my [seat] uncontrollably," the woman wrote. "I was
so shocked that even my tears would not drop. I wanted to scream, but I
could not even control my voice."
So
far, authorities have only carried out the first 50 lashes. The public
outcry appears to have had some success in halting the sentence, but it
still hangs over him.
In the Maldives, where Sharia law is mixed
with English common law, flogging is also legal punishment, most
commonly used on those convicted of having extramarital sex. The
majority of cases are women.
Caning is also used as a punishment in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, a legacy of British colonial rule in the 19th Century.
Unlike
the public floggings in Aceh, however, these punishments take place
behind closed doors, with the accused tied to specially constructed
frames and carried out with a doctor in attendance.
Its use is relatively widespread: in Singapore 2,203 people were
caned in 2012, including 1,070 foreigners, the US State Department said.
Since 2010, at least three Europeans
have been sentenced to be caned for vandalism, including Swiss software
consultant Oliver Fricker, who spray-painted graffiti on a train.
But the numbers pale in comparison to Malaysia.
In
2010, Amnesty International released a report saying some 10,000
prisoners and 6,000 refugees were being caned each year, punishment for
more than 60 crimes - including drug-related and sexual offences, as
well as migration violation
