“There has not been a blue whale harpooned by anyone for the last 50 years until this one,” Sea Shepherd, an international non-profit marine conservation movement, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The group, which published photos of the mammal being butchered for export at an Icelandic whaling station on the night of July 7, said the fishermen “posed for photos next to and even on top of the whale in a sign they knew very well this was a rare blue whale”.

But Icelandic experts are not completely certain whether it is indeed the world’s largest leviathan, which the International Whaling Commission has been protecting since 1966.

They’re also not sure if it could be the endangered fin whale, the second largest animal on the planet, which can only be legally hunted in Iceland despite an international moratorium on whaling.

Kristjan Loftsson, CEO of Hvalur hf, the whaling station which slaughtered the animal, said they did so believing it was a fin whale.

Most of the fin whales killed are exported as meat to Japan.

“We see blue whales all the time and identify them by their blowholes…but we leave them alone,” he told AFP.

DNA tests

For Gisli Vikingsson, a scientist at the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute in Reyjkavik, the butchered whale’s characteristics are similar to both the blue and fin whale.

“There is a large dorsal side with a small dorsal fin like a fin whale…this explains perhaps why it was hunted as such,” he told AFP, adding its “size and markings on the side are like those of a blue whale.”

He added the whale could even be a hybrid species resulting from cross-breeding between the fin and blue whale, which is a rare phenomenon.

Since 1987, five such animals have been observed in Icelandic waters and they are known to be infertile.

All killed whales in Iceland undergo DNA tests after the hunting season and the results are released during the fall.

However, due to the controversy surrounding this particular case, a test will be done earlier than planned and the results are expected at the end of July.

But Sea Shepherd said the fishing crew which butchered the animal mixed its parts with previously caught fin whales, making “it difficult or impossible to locate during potential inspections by the authorities”.

“This shows how inaccurate and imperfect this hunting is and there is no need to continue it,” Sigursteinn Masson, Iceland representative for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, told AFP.

Should the killed whale be confirmed as a hybrid, then things could become even more complicated as there are no laws to protect them.

“Hybrids are much more rarer than the blue whales,” Masson said.

The decision followed a June 11 inter-ministerial meeting convened by the foreign ministry and attended by officials from government agencies overseeing national security, police administration, investigation, immigration, tourism, and economy and trade.

The visa-free treatment for nationals from these three countries will continue for another year from August 1, 2018, through July 31, 2019.

This measure is being continued to attract visitors from Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy partner countries for tourism and business purposes, and to increase people-to-people exchanges.

The programme may be extended after a review of the results.

According to statistics from the Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau, nationals from New Southbound Policy partner countries made a total of 2,284,382 visits to Taiwan in 2017, a significant year-on-year increase of 27.65 per cent over the 1,789,503 visits made in 2016. The country saw its visa-free policy as achieving the expected effect.

The charges were drawn up by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who is looking into Russian interference in the November 2016 vote and whether any members of Trump’s campaign team colluded with Moscow.

Democratic leaders immediately called for Trump to cancel Monday’s scheduled meeting with Putin in Helsinki, but the White House said the summit would go ahead.

“It’s on,” spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

The 29-page indictment accuses members of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU of carrying out “large-scale cyber operations” to steal Clinton campaign and Democratic Party documents and emails.

“There’s no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in announcing the charges at a press conference in Washington.

“There’s no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime,” Rosenstein added, although the “conspirators corresponded with several Americans during the course of the conspiracy through the internet.”

However, he said, “there’s no allegation in this indictment that the Americans knew they were corresponding with Russian intelligence officers.”

Rosenstein said he briefed Trump about the indictment before Friday’s announcement and that the timing was determined by “the facts, the evidence, and the law.”

News of the indictment came as Trump was meeting Queen Elizabeth II and just 72 hours before his meeting with Putin.

“This indictment makes clear just how vast this operation was — including Russian intelligence officers’ intrusion into the website of a state election board and theft of information related to approximately 500,000 voters,” Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Tom Perez tweeted.

“The Russian government attacked our democracy in 2016, and the DNC was a primary target of that attack,” he wrote.

Calls to cancel Putin meeting

Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, urged Trump to cancel the Putin talks.

“These indictments are further proof of what everyone but the president seems to understand: President Putin is an adversary who interfered in our elections to help President Trump win,” Schumer said in a statement.

“President Trump should cancel his meeting with Vladimir Putin until Russia takes demonstrable and transparent steps to prove that they won’t interfere in future elections.”

Republican Senator John McCain said the summit should be called off if Trump is not ready to warn Putin there is a “serious price to pay for his ongoing aggression towards the United States and democracies around the world.”

“If President Trump is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit in Helsinki should not move forward,” McCain said.

Speaking in Britain before the indictments were unveiled, Trump said he would ask Putin about the allegations of election meddling.

“I will absolutely, firmly ask the question, and hopefully we’ll have a good relationship with Russia,” he told a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

But he simultaneously denounced the Mueller investigation as a “rigged witch hunt,” and said he has been “tougher on Russia than anybody.”

The US president recalled that 60 intelligence officers were expelled from the Russian embassy in Washington in response to a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain.

Russia has denied any involvement in the attack and rejected accusations that it interfered in the US presidential election in a bid to help Trump win.

– No ‘knowing involvement’ by Team Trump –

In a statement, the White House highlighted Rosenstein’s remarks that no Americans had been charged.

“Today’s charges include no allegations of knowing involvement by anyone on the campaign and no allegations that the alleged hacking affected the election result,” it said. “This is consistent with what we have been saying all along.”

Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said on Twitter that the indictments were “good news for all Americans.”

“The Russians are nailed. No Americans are involved. Time for Mueller to end this pursuit of the President and say President Trump is completely innocent,” Giuliani said.

Rosenstein called for unity in the face of Russian meddling.

“When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans,” he said.

The indictment alleges that beginning in March 2016, the GRU agents began targeting over 300 employees and volunteers of the Clinton campaign, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the DNC.

“The conspirators covertly monitored the computers of dozens of DCCC and DNC employees, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code, and stole emails and other documents,” it said.

Around June 2016, they began releasing tens of thousands of the stolen emails and documents using “fictitious online personas, including ‘DCLeaks’ and ‘Guccifer 2.0,'” the indictment said.

Some of the documents and emails were released through a website identified in the indictment only as “Organization 1” — believed to be Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks.

Other documents and emails were made public through a website and Twitter account known as DCLeaks, which the GRU falsely attributed to a group of “American hacktivists.”

Mueller previously indicted 13 Russians and three companies for allegedly interfering in the presidential vote.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been charged with money laundering and other crimes, while former national security adviser Michael Flynn has admitted lying to the FBI.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo led the high-level delegation to meet the leftist leader known as “AMLO,” who will take office on December 1 after winning a landslide election victory.

Trump’s son-in-law and senior aide Jared Kushner, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were also along for the one-day trip, which included meetings with Mexico’s outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto and Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray.

Pompeo was all smiles as he met Lopez Obrador on the leftist leader’s own turf — an aging Mexico City house with scant security where he has set up his transition team’s offices.

“We look forward to working with President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador,” Pompeo said later at a press conference.

“It was a priority for me to begin building our relationship with him and his team.”

Lopez Obrador’s pick for foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, also said the meeting had been positive.

“It was a frank, respectful and cordial dialogue. It was a successful first conversation,” he told a separate press conference.

“I believe we can be reasonably optimistic that Mexico will be able to find a basis for understanding and have a better relationship with the United States.”

– Putting Trump ‘in his place’? –

US-Mexican relations have been strained since Trump won the 2016 presidential election after a campaign laced with anti-Mexican insults, attacks on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and vows to make Mexico pay for a wall on the common border.

Since then, US tariffs on Mexican steel and aluminum, Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy on undocumented immigrants, and Pena Nieto’s two abrupt cancellations of visits to Washington have only added to the tension.

Lopez Obrador, 64, pledged during the campaign to “put (Trump) in his place.”

But both men say they had a positive phone call the day after Mexico’s July 1 election, and Lopez Obrador has invited Trump to his inauguration.

Lopez Obrador won the polls with over 53 percent of the vote — more than 30 points clear of his nearest rival — by promising to end corruption, govern for the poor and fight brutal violence driven by Mexico’s powerful drug cartels.

Despite their ideological differences, some commentators have drawn parallels between Trump and Lopez Obrador: both are free trade skeptics who mobilized a disgruntled base with anti-establishment campaigns.

Trump has even reportedly taken to calling Lopez Obrador “Juan Trump” in private.

Touchy issues

Lopez Obrador’s arrival gives both countries an opportunity to turn a page on their recent acrimony, said Carin Zissis, a Mexico specialist at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas.

Pompeo’s visit “gives them the chance to take this moment when there’s a chance for change and revisit the relationship,” she told AFP.

However, she added, “we all know that the Trump administration is unpredictable… All it takes is an angry tweet at 6:00 in the morning, and everything appears to be undone.”

Ebrard said Lopez Obrador had presented the US delegation with a comprehensive plan to improve US-Mexican relations.

The future foreign minister — who worked on Latino get-out-the-vote campaigns on behalf of Trump’s 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton — said the plan touches on what Lopez Obrador sees as the four key issues in the relationship: trade, development, migration and security.

Migration is a particularly sore spot at the moment.

The Homeland Security Department had said Nielsen would raise the issue of Central American migrants who cross Mexico to reach the United States, insisting on a “shared responsibility” to stem migrant flows and keep them from reaching the US.

Pena Nieto had his own demands on the issue.

The Mexican president “asked the Secretary of State to ensure that (migrant) families separated at the border are quickly reunited,” his office said after a private meeting with the US delegation.

But the outgoing president and the Americans sought common ground on NAFTA. Pena Nieto said they had agreed to continue working “constructively” to renegotiate the 1994 deal.

The 43-year-old man, who was not named, arrived on a flight from Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday when the shocking material was discovered.

He was held in immigration detention and sent home Friday after his tourist visa was cancelled and his phone confiscated.

Australian Border Force regional commander for Western Australia Mark Wilson said the images were abhorrent and contravened Australian regulations, without going into details of what was depicted.

”Videos depicting extreme sexual depravity and acts of horrific violence are not acceptable in our community and anyone caught engaging in this behaviour risks forfeiting their right to be here,” he said.//AFP

“We are not heroes. What we do is very calculating, very calm. It’s quite the opposite,” he said.

“We were very pleased and we were very relieved that they were all alive but I think at that point we realised the enormity of the situation and that’s perhaps why it took a while to get them all out,” he told Sky News when he arrived at Heathrow airport.

Volanthen and his diving partner, Rick Stanton, discovered the boys on July 2, 10 days after they went missing in Tham Luang cave. They have been dubbed the “ATeam” of world divers as they had to dive through underwater passages with little visibility in the murky water.

He praised Saman Kunan, 38, a former Navy SEAL diver, who died while replenishing air tanks four days before the operation to evacuate the boys from the cave began.

Volanthen said Saman’s death last Friday had brought a “bittersweet” taste to an otherwise “excellent” operation.

The Telegraph online reported that Volanthen returned home to Bristol to be reunited with family. Seven other Britons, five of them divers, involved in the rescue were due to arrive home early on Friday.

Bill Whitehouse, vice chairman of the British Cave Rescue Council, said that psychological help would be offered to cope with the aftermath of the underwater drama.

“Some of them have been on pretty hairy recovery dives before in various countries and reading between the lines, the actual dives in this case were not particularly deep and nothing too extraordinary.

“But it was what they faced, and what they had to do in there, which was extraordinary,” he told The Telegraph.

    Richard Stanton, one of a pair of British caving experts who located the “Wild Boars” team, gave reporters Friday a first-hand account of the moment he saw the boys emerge from behind a rock face onto a muddy ledge kilometres (miles) inside the Tham Luang cave.

“That was a massive, massive relief. Initially we weren’t certain they were all alive — as they were coming down I was counting them until I got to 13,” he said.

“We couldn’t see them initially — they had to come round the corner.”

The discovery prompted the stunning rescue of the boys which captivated Thailand and the world, with the final members finally emerging safely Tuesday after 18 days underground.

In order to rescue the boys, divers had to contend with a treacherous escape route made up of narrow, water-filled tunnels, with the threat of heavy rain injecting urgency to the bid.

The mission was “an order of difficulty much higher than anything that’s been accomplished anywhere around the world by any other cave diving team,” said Stanton.

Footage of the moment Stanton and John Volanthen discovered the 12 dishevelled and emaciated boys was viewed millions of times after it was posted on the official Facebook page of Thai Navy SEAL, prompting hope for their rescue.

“You hear on the video, John said ‘How many?’,” Stanton said. “I’d already counted them, they were already there.”

Fellow diver Chris Jewell provided new details of the operation, describing how Thai authorities had diverted rivers on the mountaintop to help control water levels in the cave.

The measure “brought us additional time to get this outcome,” Jewell said.

Stanton rejected suggestions the divers were heroes.

“We were just using a very, very unique skill set which we normally use for our own interest,” he said. “Sometimes we are able to use that to give something back to the community and that’s what we did.”

The reports cited a Justice Ministry investigation, but the ministry declined immediate comment.

The reports are likely to revive criticism of the foreign trainee programme, which has been accused of placing workers in substandard conditions and jobs that provide few opportunities for learning.

The misconduct was uncovered in a probe by the justice ministry conducted after a Vietnamese trainee was found in March to have participated in cleanup work in Fukushima, public broadcaster NHK said.

A powerful earthquake in March 2011 spawned a huge tsunami that led to meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant, causing the world’s worst such accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

The justice ministry said after the March discovery that decontamination work was not appropriate for foreign trainees.

It was not immediately clear how many trainees were forced to take part in the decontamination work. Local media said one of the four companies has been slapped with a five-year ban on accepting new foreign trainees.

The ministry has finished its probe into 182 construction companies that hire foreign trainees, and will look into another 820 firms by the end of September, local media said.

Japan has been accepting foreign trainees under the government programme since 1993 and there were just over 250,000 in the country in late 2017.

But critics say the trainees often face poor work conditions include excessive hours and harassment.

The number of foreign trainees who ran away from their employers jumped from 2,005 in 2012 to 7,089 in 2017, according to the ministry survey. Many cited low pay as the main reason for running away.

The report comes as Japan’s government moves to bring more foreign workers into the country to tackle a labour shortage caused by the country’s ageing, shrinking population.

The government in June said it wanted to create a new visa status to bring in foreign workers, with priority given to those looking for jobs in sectors such as agriculture that have been hardest hit by the labour shortage.

The workers would be able to stay for up to five years, but would not be allowed to bring their family members.

The government put the number of foreign workers in Japan in 2017 at 1.28 million people.

But more than 450,000 of those are foreign spouses of Japanese citizens, ethnic Koreans long settled in Japan, or foreigners of Japanese descent, rather than workers coming to Japan simply for jobs.

Another nearly 300,000 are students.

It is the latest twist in a matter that has seen several thousand lawsuits filed against J&J.

According to the victims’ lawyer, Mark Lanier, a jury composed of six men and six women in St Louis, Missouri, ruled in favor of the women after a six-week trial and eight hours of deliberation. The damages include $550 million in compensation and over $4.1 billion in punitive damages.

The plaintiffs said using the talc for personal hygiene had caused ovarian cancer.

“For over 40 years, Johnson & Johnson has covered up the evidence of asbestos in their products,” Lanier said in a statement.

“We hope this verdict will get the attention of the J&J board and that it will lead them to better inform the medical community and the public about the connection between asbestos, talc, and ovarian cancer,” he said, calling for talc to be pulled from the market.

J&J said it was “deeply disappointed in the verdict.”

In a statement, it described the trial as “a fundamentally unfair process that allowed plaintiffs to present a group of 22 women, most of whom had no connection to Missouri, in a single case all alleging that they developed ovarian cancer.”

“The result of the verdict, which awarded the exact same amounts to all plaintiffs irrespective of their individual facts, and differences in applicable law, reflects that the evidence in the case was simply overwhelmed by the prejudice of this type of proceeding.”

The company said its talc does not contain asbestos or cause ovarian cancer, and vowed it would “pursue all available appellate remedies.”

Several similar trials have already taken place, with a Los Angeles appeals court last October dismissing a $417 million verdict against J&J, saying the complainant’s arguments were insufficient and vague.

The blast occurred at 6:30 pm Thursday night at an industrial park in Sichuan province’s Yibin city, according to a statement on the website of the local work safety administration.

The injured had been taken to hospital and were in stable condition, county officials said, adding that the resulting fire had been put out.

Photos on a local news site showed what appeared to be the burned out shell of a building surrounded by rubble.

The company that owns the building where the fire occurred is a chemical manufacturer named Hengda, according to the official Xinhua news service.

China has been rocked by several industrial accidents in recent years.

A septic tank explosion last November destroyed a wide swathe of a light industrial area in Ningbo, just south of Shanghai.

In 2015, giant chemical blasts in a container storage facility killed at least 165 people in the northern port city of Tianjin.

The explosions caused more than $1 billion in damage and sparked widespread anger at a perceived lack of transparency over the accident’s causes and its environmental impact.

A government inquiry eventually recommended 123 people be punished. Tianjin’s mayor at the time of the accident was sentenced to 12 years in prison for graft in September.