A diver died on Friday during preliminary operations to recover British tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s superyacht from the waters off the coast of northern Sicily, local police said.

The 56-meter-long (184-foot) Bayesian was moored off the small port of Porticello, near Palermo, in August last year when it was likely hit by a downburst, a very strong downward wind, killing seven people, including Lynch and his daughter Hannah.

The accident happened on Friday happened while the diver was underwater in Porticello, police said, adding that the precise cause of death was still unknown.

The attempt to lift the yacht off the sea bed is expected later this month and should help shed light on how a supposedly unsinkable vessel disappeared into the sea.

Italian news agencies reported that the diver was a 39-year-old Dutch national who worked for the Dutch specialist salvage company Hebo Maritiemservice.

Hebo was not immediately available for comment.

In the southern Philippine city of Davao, a spirited mayoral election campaign is in full swing, with candidates and their supporters out canvassing for votes.

But one of the leading contenders is conspicuously absent from the stump. Instead he’s 7,000 miles away, languishing in the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is awaiting trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity, over a brutal war on drug dealers that killed possibly thousands of people, including many innocents and bystanders, with barely any kind of due process.

None of this affects the 80-year-old’s eligibility for the role of mayor of Davao – a job he held, on and off, for two decades. Under Philippine election law, only a criminal conviction in a local court can keep a candidate off the ballot.

Duterte could well win Monday’s election, thanks to his enduring popularity in the region, where many credit his two-decade iron grip with tightening up law and order, before he took his brutal zero-tolerance policy nationwide as president from 2016 to 2022.

“I grew up here all my life and when I was younger it was very dangerous, killings and fighting everywhere,” said Ian Baldoza, 46, a native of Davao who remains a loyal Duterte supporter.

“But as I grew older, I started to understand that those who were killed were drug addicts, dealers and troublemakers.”

Many Davao voters feel similarly, said Cleve Arguelles, a political scientist and head of polling firm WR Numero.

“His ICC arrest doesn’t really shake their core of who Duterte is but rather, paradoxically, it only reinforces what Duterte stands for,” he said.

Baldoza, the Duterte voter, said he witnessed neighbors killed by hitmen under Duterte’s drug war, yet his Facebook profile is full of pro-Duterte posts.

“We’re not looking for a saint, we’re looking for a leader with political will, and the Duterte family has that, especially in the patriarch,” he said.

While he has not commented publicly on the race, Duterte’s daughter Sara, the Philippine vice president, thanked supporters on her father’s behalf at a rally on Thursday.

“President Rodrigo Duterte thanks you all for your love, your continued support, and your prayers that he will one day be brought back to our country,” she told a crowd in the capital Manila, under heavy rain.

Thousands of local posts are up for grabs in the midterm elections across the archipelago nation of about 120 million people, ranging from district councilors and mayors all the way up to legislators.

Three generations of the Duterte clan are fighting elections. Duterte’s son Sebastian, the incumbent Davao mayor, will be his father’s running mate, while his other son, Paolo, is seeking re-election to the national congress. Two of Paolo’s sons are running for local council seats.

While his popularity seems impervious to decline, Duterte is not politically immortal. His old age and frail health also raise questions on the succession for the dynasty, which has not been as solid as it once was, said Ramon Beleno, a political analyst and former professor from Ateneo de Davao University, who has observed elections in the Duterte clan’s bailiwick for more than a decade.

“The people of Davao have this perspective that a political dynasty is OK if it’s working,” Beleno said.

“But it’s only working as long as the patriarch, the person who established the political dynasty, is still strong.”

Opposition camps, in the elder Duterte’s absence from the country, are re-emerging across Davao, according to Beleno.

Among them are descendants of the late former national House speaker Prospero Nograles, reigniting a decades-old family rivalry that typifies the nation’s clan-tinged politics.

Karlo Nograles is running against Rodrigo Duterte for the mayoralty while his sister, Margarita, a lawyer and rising TikTok influencer, is challenging Paolo.

Scandal-hit political dynasty

And cracks in the Duterte family name are beginning to show.

Vice President Sara Duterte is in a long-running feud with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and faces calls for her impeachment for alleged corruption, which she denies.

“In the past months my name and my family name has been dragged through the mud,” she said at the recent rally.

“I have repeatedly said this before, and I will say it again now – I am not the problem of this country. The Dutertes are not the problem of the Philippines,” she said, in a vailed dig at the incumbent Marcos administration, the family’s allies turned enemies.

Marcos Jr. hails from perhaps the most famous political family in the nation – he is the son of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Paolo Duterte and his bodyguards were recently embroiled in a nightclub brawl, prompting a businessman to file a complaint against him. He said in a video statement that the clip of the melee circulating on social media was “taken a very long time ago.”

If Duterte wins the mayoral election, he can still be sworn in by proxy or in absentia – possibly by a Zoom call, if the ICC allows it, according to political scientist and pollster Arguelles. His day-to-day duties would be delegated to the vice mayor.

But if Rodrigo Duterte is not allowed to be sworn in virtually, the runner-up – projected to be Karlo Nograles – would ascend to the seat.

Duterte ran the Philippines for six turbulent years, during which his brutal crackdown on drugs – which he openly boasted about – killed many young men from impoverished shanty towns, shot by police and rogue gunmen.

According to police data, 6,000 people were killed – but rights groups say the death toll could be as high as 30,000.

Duterte’s tough approach on drugs prompted strong criticism from opposition lawmakers who launched a probe into the killings. Duterte in turn jailed his fiercest opponent and accused some news media and rights activists as traitors and conspirators.

The ICC has set his next hearing for September 23.

The leaders of Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Poland have arrived in Kyiv for meetings with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, a symbol of a united European position to publicly pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Friedrich Merz, the new German Chancellor, French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk arrived together Saturday morning at Kyiv’s main railway station, where they were met by Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak.

The meetings are a sign of a renewed diplomatic urgency aimed at achieving a ceasefire in the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is grinding on despite US efforts to broker peace.

“There is much work to be done and many issues to discuss. This war must be ended with a just peace. Moscow must be forced to agree to a ceasefire,” Yermak wrote on his Telegram channel.

The first stop for the European leaders was Kyiv’s Independence Square where they stood to honor fallen Ukrainian soldiers.

Ukraine, supported by the Europeans, has been calling for an immediate unconditional 30-day ceasefire, something that US President Donald Trump is also demanding.

Russia has so far refused to commit, saying it supports the idea of a 30-day ceasefire in principle but insists there are what it calls “nuances” that need addressing first.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in an interview with ABC News on Saturday suggested that one of these “nuances” was putting a halt to the supply of US and European weapons to Ukraine.

Putin has often spoken about the need to address what he calls “root causes” – which are taken to mean, among others, the eastward expansion of NATO.

In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump wrote that “if the ceasefire is not respected, the US and its partners will impose further sanctions,” adding to a sense he is growing frustrated with Russian stalling.

The inauguration of Trump in January ushered in a complete change in the US’ diplomatic focus on the war, with Ukraine and key allies fearful of a significant tilt in US policy towards Moscow.

European leaders have convened a series of meetings in response, aimed both at showing the US that Europe can do more to support Ukraine militarily, as well as providing a single voice urging the US president not to take Russia’s side in the war.

“A just and lasting peace begins with a full and unconditional ceasefire. That is the proposal we are advancing with the United States,” French President Macron wrote on his X account Saturday morning.

“Ukraine accepted [the ceasefire proposal] on March 11. Russia, however, delays, sets preconditions, plays for time, and continues its war of invasion. If Moscow continues to obstruct, we will step up the pressure—together, as Europeans and in close coordination with the United States. We welcome President Trump’s call to move forward in this direction,” Macron added.

Around 160,000 people in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region were warned to stay inside on Saturday after a fire at an industrial estate caused a toxic cloud of chlorine over a wide area, emergency services said.

The blaze at a swimming pool cleaning products company started at 2.20 a.m. local time (8:20 p.m. Friday ET) in Vilanova i la Geltru, a town 48 kilometers (30 miles) south of Barcelona and caused a huge plume of chlorine smoke over the area.

“If you are in the zone that is affected do not leave your home or your place of work,” the Civil Protection service said on social media site X.

No one has been hurt in the fire, Catalan emergency services said on Saturday, but residents in five towns were sent a message on their mobile phones telling them to remain inside.

“It is very difficult for chlorine to catch fire but when it does so it is very hard to put it out,” the owner of the industrial property, Jorge Vinuales Alonso, told local radio station Rac1.

He said the cause of the fire might have been a lithium battery.

Trains which were due to pass through the area were held up, roads were blocked and other events were canceled.

The fire was under control, Civil Protection spokesperson Joan Ramon Cabello told the TVE television channel.

Pope Leo XIV indicated on Saturday that his papacy will follow closely in the footsteps of the late Pope Francis, telling church cardinals that they should take up that “precious legacy” and identifying artificial intelligence as a main challenge for working people and “human dignity.”

Pope Leo, born in Chicago as Robert Prevost, was elected Thursday, becoming the first US-born pope to the surprise and delight of many Catholics across the Americas.

In his first formal meeting with cardinals, which began with a standing ovation, the new pontiff said he chose his papal name to continue down the path of Pope Leo XIII, who addressed “the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”

Pope Leo XIII ruled the Roman Catholic Church from 1878 until his death in 1903 and is remembered as a pope of Catholic social teaching. He wrote a famous open letter to all Catholics in 1891, called “Rerum Novarum” (“Of Revolutionary Change”), which reflected on the destruction wrought by the Industrial Revolution on the lives of workers.

“In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” the new American pontiff said Saturday, speaking in fluent Italian.

Wearing the white robes of the papacy, he strongly signaled to the cardinals that his leadership will build upon Pope Francis’ church reforms and legacy of social justice.

“It has been clearly seen in the example of so many of my predecessors, and most recently by Pope Francis himself, with his example of complete dedication to service and to sober simplicity of life, his abandonment to God throughout his ministry and his serene trust at the moment of his return to the Father’s house,” Pope Leo told the gathering. “Let us take up this precious legacy and continue on the journey, inspired by the same hope that is born of faith.”

He went on to ask the other senior church leaders to renew their commitment to the pivotal Second Vatican Council, which enacted sweeping church reforms in the 1960s. The modernizing reforms included allowing Mass to be celebrated in local languages rather than Latin for the first time.

Setting out that vision on Saturday, Leo said the church should be guided by a missionary focus, “growth in collegiality and synodality,” courageous dialogue with the contemporary world and “loving care for the least and the rejected.”

He also suggested that he will approach the weighty office with humility and fraternity.

“You, dear cardinals, are the closest collaborators of the pope. This has proved a great comfort to me in accepting a yoke clearly far beyond my own limited powers, as it would be for any of us,” Leo added.

“Your presence reminds me that the Lord, who has entrusted me with this mission, will not leave me alone in bearing its responsibility,” he said, also specifically thanking Dean of the College of Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re and the Camerlengo Cardinal Kevin Joseph Farrell, who was responsible for shepherding the church through the papal transition.

Pope Leo will appear on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica for a second time on Sunday to greet crowds of people in the square below. His installation Mass will take place the following week on Sunday, May 18.