Exclusive: Australian Troy Birthisel has languished inside a Philippines prison for a decade, maintaining his innocence, waiting for his trial to be completed.

On Friday, 10 years and four days after he was arrested on suspicion of trafficking sex workers, the Queensland father and mining executive finally got a verdict: guilty.

Birthisel was sentenced to life, meaning the 54-year-old is now staring at another 30 years in Lapu-Lapu jail in Cebu province, where he has been jailed since 2013.

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"It was shock, total shock," Birthisel told 9news.com.au over telephone from the prison.

"I really thought I was going home on Friday."

Birthisel, originally from Gladstone, claimed prosecutors had "convicted me on nothing" and said his life had been devastated by waiting 10 years for a judicial outcome.

That painful wait, he said, contravened his human right to a speedy trial.

He said he planned to appeal the verdict, a process that could take 18 months.

In October 2013 Birthisel was detained at Mactan-Cebu International Airport on suspicion of trafficking sex workers from the Philippines.

He was detained along with his Filipino girlfriend and six other Filipino women, while the group was attempting to board a plane to Singapore.

Birthisel said he had been asked to escort the women to Singapore, where they had hoped to secure jobs in the hospitality sector.

Prosecutors later reduced the charges of sex trafficking to illegal recruitment involving economic sabotage; an accusation Birthisel has denied.

He claimed an airport official had tried to extort money from him at the time of his arrest.

According to court documents, four of the women Birthisel had travelled with later denied in affidavits that the Australian was engaged in any illegal activity.

They had initially signed complaints to the contrary, but in subsequent retractions said they had signed because officials had confiscated their passports and they were afraid.

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"I was 99 per cent sure (the verdict) would be in my favour," Birthisel said.

"It was a kick in the guts, but I've got to keep my chin up and keep going.

"I'm not going to give up the fight."

Birthisel said his case, plagued by countless adjournments and delays, had taken so long to conclude that one of his key witnesses had died.

Birthisel's girlfriend Lovely Jane Modina was also given a life sentence.

The pair were also fined 2 million pesos ($48,000).

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Actor Robert De Niro has shouted "Shame on you!" as he testified in a New York courtroom, directing the comments toward his former executive assistant and vice president who is seeking millions of dollars after accusing her former boss of being abusive.

Graham Chase Robinson watched with her lawyers on Tuesday while De Niro's anger built as lawyer Andrew Macurdy pelted him with some tabloid-style accusations his client made about De Niro's behaviour toward Robinson as she served his needs, large and small, from 2008 until several months into 2019.

Robinson, 41, seeks $19 million in damages for emotional distress and reputational harm that she claims has left her jobless and unable to recover from the trauma of her job.

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She was being paid $473,000 annually when she quit, frustrated by her interactions with De Niro's girlfriend and the effect she believed it was having on the actor.

The jury is also considering evidence pertaining to a lawsuit De Niro filed against Robinson in which he claimed that she stole things from him, including five million points that could be used for airline flights.

De Niro is seeking the return of three years of Robinson's salary.

Macurdy asked De Niro whether it was true that he sometimes urinated as he spoke with Robinson on the telephone.

"That's nonsense," De Niro answered. "You got us all here for this?"

Macurdy told De Niro he called Robinson "bitch to her face."

"I was never abusive, ever," the actor snapped back, though he conceded that he might have used the word in conversations with her.

And the claim that he told Robinson he preferred that she scratch his back rather than using a back-scratching device drew another angry rebuke from De Niro, who said it might have happened once or twice, but "never was with disrespect or lewdness."

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Finally, he angrily looked toward Robinson and shouted: "Shame on you, Chase Robinson!"

Quickly, he blurted an apology in a quieter voice, as he glanced toward Judge Lewis J. Liman.

De Niro, 80, has won two Oscars in a six-decade movie career that has featured memorable roles in films including The Deer Hunter and Raging Bull.

He is currently starring in Martin Scorsese's Killers Of The Flower Moon.

Latrell Mitchell has broken his silence surrounding his "traumatic" arrest after police threw out fighting charges against him and Jack Wighton.

Prosecutor Sam Bargwanna decided not to offer any more evidence on Wednesday morning, ending the prosecution of the star NRL duo.

The most senior police officer involved in their arrest – Sergeant David Power – admitted on Tuesday he gave false evidence and lied under oath while testifying.

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https://twitter.com/tiffgenders/status/1719494175471948210

Lawyers for the NRL players flagged civil action would stem from the botched prosecution, with the ACT's attorney-general reportedly considering a review into the case.

Mitchell, who was hugging and giggling with his distant cousin Wighton after the charges were pulled, admitted it had been a hugely difficult process to go through.

"I hope everyone knows and understands the seriousness of what's going on and (it was) a massive hit on the community," he told reporters outside court.

"For the last 10 months it's been very hard for not only myself but my family and what they've had to read and endure … (it's a) traumatic experience that I've had of Canberra."

Power initially said he'd removed former Canberra player Wighton from Fiction nightclub after seeing him with clenched fists, anger in his face and grabbing another man by the shirt in an aggressive manner.

But Wighton's lawyer Steve Boland pieced together a timeline via CCTV footage that forced him to admit his "memory had failed me" and that what he'd said hadn't happened.

Power later addressed Wighton, saying: "Sorry, Jack, if that's what happened mate, I thought I saw something different … I'm sorry."

Wighton wouldn't respond when asked what he made of the apology, instead paying tribute to the support of his former club and its CEO Don Furner.

"You backed me the whole way through and it means a lot to me … I spent so long at this club and in this town and the support is massive," he told reporters.

"You've got to thank your family for backing you through moments like this, it was a long 10 months, there were a couple of big mistakes made and we come up with this result."

The star duo had been at Fiction celebrating Wighton's 30th birthday, before they spilled onto the street when the former Raider was removed from the venue for alleged aggressive behaviour.

Police had accused the pair, who'll be teammates at South Sydney next season, of fighting each other after Wighton was given an exclusion direction.

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South Sydney fullback Mitchell could be heard pleading with police to ease up while they were arresting him, his friends heard telling the officers to stop their "police brutality".

Mitchell, 25, had been charged with affray, fighting in a public place and resisting a territory official, while Wighton, 30, was charged with fighting in a public place and failing to comply with an exclusion direction.

In the weeks leading up to his violent death, former Royal Air Force serviceman Adrian Humphreys grew increasingly excited about taking his new camper on its first trip.

Having purchased it just a month prior, Humphreys had spent countless hours modifying it, adding his personal touches and getting it ready for the rugged terrain of backcountry Taranaki, on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island.

The 57-year-old never got to spend his first full night inside the camper after he'd parked it at the remote Bushlands Campground at Tāngarākau, off State Highway 43, the Forgotten World Highway, Stuff reported.

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Instead, the Rotorua-based Humphreys was stabbed five times as he lay in his sleeping bag before he staggered outside, blood pouring from his torso, his life ending slumped on the grass outside.

Less than six hours later, his body was found by a mentor from START Taranaki, a Kaponga-based organisation that specialises in helping troubled young people.

Enrolled on that course in May last year was 16-year-old Justice Williamson-Atkinson, who the Crown now says murdered the unsuspecting camper with a knife from the campground's kitchen, motivated by a desire to steal Humphreys' car.

In her opening address in the High Court at New Plymouth on Tuesday, Crown prosecutor Jo Woodcock said Humphreys had simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Williamson-Atkinson has denied a charge of murder, and another of committing a burglary with a weapon.

However, Woodcock said the Crown would show through the evidence collected it could only have been him who stabbed Humphreys to death, before he stole his victim's phone and case containing valuables before disposing of them in thick bush surrounding the campground.

Included in that evidence was Humphreys' blood on a sweatshirt found in Williamson-Atkinson's tent, while his DNA was found in the cut marks of the sleeping bag.

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Woodcock said there was also a string of inconsistencies in what the accused said after Humphreys' body was found.

They included a claim that he had heard the victim arguing with "a guy" outside, although his story changed when interviewed by police, when he claimed he was in a deep sleep after taking his medication, something the Crown said he refused to take that night.

In an intercepted phone call between Williamson-Atkinson and his girlfriend, police also heard him say that his mother knew what he had done, but he was told to stick to his story.

He later told police that an associate had killed Humphreys, and he had simply moved the knife.

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Defence counsel Matt Phelps focussed his opening on that point, telling the jury that it was that associate, who was also on the START programme, who had killed Humphreys.

Phelps said his client was not in the camper when Humphreys was killed, and he does not accept any evidence which said he had confessed to the killing to family members.

The first five of 40 Crown witnesses then gave evidence throughout the day, including START mentor Kajin Phillips, who described Williamson-Atkinson as a "good kid" who struggled to follow instructions.

The trial continues today.

This article was reproduced with permission from Stuff.

The cosmos is full of mysteries waiting to be solved, and some of them appear especially eerie with the arrival of Halloween.

A haunting "face" on Jupiter and a ghostly, skeletal hand-shaped nebula are just a couple of creepy celestial features recently spotted by NASA missions.

Jupiter's eerie 'face'

The Juno mission, orbiting Jupiter and some of its largest moons since 2016, made its 54th close flyby of the largest planet in our solar system on September 7.

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The JunoCam instrument captured swirling clouds and storms in Jupiter's northern regions along the planet's terminator, or the line dividing the day side from the night side.

A Picasso-like face appears to emerge from the turbulent atmosphere in a phenomenon called pareidolia, in which viewers spy faces and other recognisable objects within random patterns.

The raw data, available to the public on the JunoCam website, was processed by citizen scientist Vladimir Tarasov. During the close pass, Juno flew about 7700 kilometres above the planet's cloud tops, where the low angle of sunlight added to the dramatic nature of the image.

X-rays spot celestial bones

X-rays were first used by physicist Wilhelm Röntgen to image the bones of his wife's hand in 1895 — and now, two X-ray telescopes have revealed the "bones" of a glowing hand-shaped cloud that formed in the aftermath of a star's collapse.

The cloud of gas and dust, or nebula, was created 1500 years ago when a massive star burned through its interior nuclear fuel and collapsed. The nebula, known as MSH 15-52, is located about 16,000 light-years from Earth.

As the star collapsed, it left behind a dense remnant known as a neutron star. Rapidly rotating neutron stars that have strong magnetic fields are called pulsars. Newly formed pulsars send out jets of energised material and have powerful winds, which created this particular nebula.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory observed the pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, for the first time in 2001. The bright pulsar was spotted within the base of the "palm" of the hand-shaped nebula. A jet from the pulsar can be traced down to the "wrist."

Map of a nebula's magnetic field

More than 20 years later, NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, spent 17 days observing the nebula. This is the space observatory's longest observing campaign since launching in December 2021. The results of the new telescope's operations were published on Monday in The Astrophysical Journal.

"The IXPE data gives us the first map of the magnetic field in the 'hand,'" said lead study author Roger Romani, professor of physics at Stanford University in California, in a statement.

"The charged particles producing the X-rays travel along the magnetic field, determining the basic shape of the nebula, like the bones do in a person's hand."

The telescope's unique observational capabilities are allowing scientists to determine where particles in the nebula are accelerated by turbulent regions within the magnetic field.

An Adelaide funeral home is giving Aussies the opportunity to send the ashes of loved ones to space in a nationwide first.

The new way to remember someone would allow those on earth to follow their loved one's space journey for up to a decade.

New Zealand-based company Stardust Me is offering the service through Adelaide Funeral Home, Alfred James.

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It will see a gram of ashes put into a titanium container and sent into orbit on an Elon Musk-owned Space X Falcon 9 Rocket.

"In a rocket from Cape Canaveral – it goes up and orbits for 10 years and eventually as it re-enters the atmosphere it blazes up as a star," Romeo Barone from Alfred James said.

It's an eternity only previously available to the rich and famous.

"We were trying to change that narrative around death being about finality," Stu Potter from Stardust Me said.

"There is death and there is an end to it but it's also about celebrating all those wonderful things we remember about our family member."

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Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was the first sent where no ashes had gone before, aboard space shuttle Columbia in 1992.

Now those on Earth can follow their loved one's orbit on an app at a cost of just over $3000.

The cost is comparable to a traditional burial.

The average tombstone costs upwards of $2000.

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One family is already ready to launch ashes to be sent from Adelaide to blast off in March.

"They're over the moon to be doing this. Stardust Me offered them a free token and they are super excited," Barone said.

At least 3000 people young and old were out tonight, a resident estimates.

An extraordinary mission to play all 406 golf courses in memory of a beloved teenager.

The master chef outlines her greatest fear, her bucket-list hopes and a vision for NZ.

It was all happening on State Highway 1 from Dunedin to Invercargill on Monday.