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.

Prayut is scheduled to hold full-scale bilateral meeting with Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena, have a breakfast discussion with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and meet opposition leader Rajavarothiam Sampanthan during his two-day visit in the South Asian country.

The agreements to be signed will cover cross-border criminal transfer and enforcement and economic development on strategic partnerships.

They will also involve signings between the Sri Lankan Ministry of Social Empowerment, Welfare and Kandyan Heritage and Thailand’s Kasetsart University on academic cooperation, as well as a cooperation on the sustainable development of a model village based on Sufficiency Economy Philosophy.

Last year, Thailand and Sri Lanka’s share trade value was $512.74 million (Bt17 billion), a year-on-year increase by 8.69 per cent. Thailand has a trade surplus of USD 371.82 million as its export value to Sri Lanka is USD 442.28 million, a 2.42 per cent year-on year increase, and import value of USD 70.46 million.

In a series of extraordinary broadsides, Trump told Friday’s edition of The Sun that May’s plan for post-Brexit ties with the EU would “probably kill” the prospects for a trade deal with the US.

Trump also said former foreign minister Boris Johnson, who resigned this week in protest over the plan, would make “a great prime minister”.

He said London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has allowed protesters to raise a giant diaper-clan balloon mocking the US president next to parliament on Friday, was doing “a terrible job” on crime.

The comments will plunge the transatlantic “special relationship” to new lows, making for extremely awkward talks with May when the two meet at her country retreat of Chequers later on Friday.

As he began a four-day visit to Britain on Thursday, Trump, a major supporter of Brexit, told The Sun that he had advised May to go about leaving the EU in a different way but was ignored.

“I would have done it much differently. I actually told Theresa May how to do it but she didn’t agree, she didn’t listen to me. She wanted to go a different route.

“I would actually say that she probably went the opposite way. And that is fine. She should negotiate the best way she knows how. But it is too bad what is going on,” he told the tabloid, Britain’s best-selling newspaper.

Referring to the Brexit blueprint, which was outlined by the government on Thursday, he said: “The deal she is striking is a much different deal than the one the people voted on.

“It was not the deal that was in the referendum. I have just been hearing this over the last three days. I know they have had a lot of resignations. So a lot of people don’t like it,” he said.

May is facing a rebellion by Brexit hardliners over the proposals, including the resignation of Johnson and Brexit minister David Davis this week, although moderates and big businesses have been supportive.

‘Kill the deal’

May has insisted that her Brexit deal will allow Britain to strike its own lucrative trade deals with countries like the US once her country has left the bloc as planned in March next year.

She pressed Trump about the deal on Thursday at a gala dinner at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Britain’s World War II leader Winston Churchill.

Brexit “creates an opportunity to reach a free trade agreement that creates jobs and growth here in the UK and right across the United States,” she said.

But Trump poured cold water on May’s offer.

Referring to the Brexit deal, he said that: “If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the UK, so it will probably kill the deal”.

Trump flew in to Britain on Thursday, having already subjected NATO allies to a roasting over their levels of defence spending.

The president spent the night at the US ambassador’s residence located in a London park behind a “ring of steel” fencing, stalked by noisy demonstrators.

‘Politics of fear’

The agenda for Trump and May on Friday includes discussion on relations with Russia, ahead of a summit in Finland on Monday between Trump and President Vladimir Putin.

Complicating matters, Putin’s government is accused by May’s of unleashing a deadly nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury. Moscow denies the charge, and Trump has given no indication that he intends to raise the issue with Putin.

Trump will later Friday take tea with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle, before spending the weekend in Scotland on a private visit that will likely take in 18 holes at one of the property magnate’s golf courses, where more protestors await.

While his schedule studiously avoids any high-profile events in London, the British capital will see a mass demonstration and rally Friday, one of several protests across Britain including a tuneful one by a group of opera singers.

An inflatable mockup of Trump in a nappy will fly next to the British parliament earlier in the day.

The balloon was authorised by Khan, who has crossed swords with Trump several times after the president posted factually incorrect messages over a series of terror attacks in Britain in 2017.

Trump said Khan had done “a very bad job on terrorism” and said he had “not been hospitable to a government that is very important”.

“Now he might not like the current president, but I represent the United States,” Trump said.

Khan earlier urged Londoners to keep Friday’s main protest “peaceful and good-spirited”, saying the message went broader than Trump.

“I know Londoners are resolutely opposed to the politics of fear and despair. The US has always stood by our side as a beacon for tolerance, openness and respect,” he said.

“But having a special relationship means that we expect the highest standards from each other, and it also means speaking out when we think the values we hold dear are under threat.”