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Mourners line Bangkok streets to pay respects to Thailand’s Princess Bha

As the sun began to set on the golden spires and gilded finials of Bangkok’s Grand Palace, the gates were open, waiting for the return of a princess. Since December 2022, Princess Bajrakitiyabha had been in hospital, having collapsed while out training her dogs. After nearly four years in a coma, the princess died earlier this week. On Saturday afternoon, her body finally left the hospital in a royal funeral procession of flashing motorcycles and cars travelling through the city centre’s empty streets, which were closed to traffic but lined for kilometres with nurses from the hospital bowing prostrate, thousands of Thai citizens dressed in black, and ending with officials in white suits with black armbands. They had been waiting for hours for the princess’s arrival in a silver van, with her father, the king, in a cream-coloured car behind her. The officials present saluted, while the crowd – remaining seated on the sidewalk – silently bowed their heads towards their hands. Many were in tears. From morning, mourners had gathered on the edges of the streets with umbrellas and fans to cope with the hot and humid conditions in the heart of the city. Wanida Lainun, wearing a brooch with the princess’s image, told the Guardian her aunt was part of Princess Bajrakitiyabha’s project to help underprivileged people in Chiang Mai in the country’s north. The princess, known affectionately in Thailand as Princess Bha, trained as a lawyer, and served the country in several official roles including as an ambassador to Austria and in the royal security command. But it was the care she took for the ordinary citizens of Thailand, including campaigning for the rights of female prisoners, that those gathered on Saturday remembered. “The work she’s done in Thailand has touched my heart,” said Anchalee, who asked that her last name not be used, and cited her project to help people during natural disasters. “Herself and her team go there right away to help them.” After devastating floods hit Bangkok in 1995, Bajrakitiyabha and her mother personally cooked meals, packed medicine and waded into cut-off areas to deliver aid directly to the stranded, according to local media. In October that year she founded the Friends in Need (of ‘Pa’) project, under the Thai Red Cross Society, that provided people with tools to evacuate before disaster struck, as well as frontline services, and helped people affected by the floods out of poverty. She was 47 years old when she died on Thursday evening. Anchalee, being the same age, said she had always felt close to the princess, whom she met as a college student. “She wouldn’t remember me, but I will always remember her,” she said. Anchalee, who had been waiting on the streets for the procession since 10am, said she was shocked when the princess first fell ill. “We all hoped she could get better from the coma. We waited for years and we all prayed for her to get better.” She had already waited hours in line earlier in the morning to participate in the funeral bathing ceremony at the Grand Palace that the king had invited the country to attend – a Buddhist ritual of pouring holy water into a ceremonial bowl placed before a portrait of the princess. “We pray for the princess to go to a beautiful place in heaven,” Anchalee said. The prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, led members of the Thai cabinet in performing the bathing rite. From 27 June, after the 15 days of the royal merit-making ceremony, involving Buddhist monastic chanting, the public will also be allowed to pay their respects to the royal remains at the Grand Palace’s throne hall. When King Bhumibol Adulyadej died in October 2016, his body lay in state for more than a year before an elaborate royal cremation ceremony. A date has yet to be announced for the princess’s cremation ceremony.

US claims it is not responsible for strikes on Ecuadorian fishing boats – so who is?

Captain Hernán Flores was fishing with his crew about 170 miles off the coast of Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands on 17 March when an explosion cut through the air and an unmanned drone crashed into the cabin of his boat, exploding into flames. Flores’s nephew was hit. The attack split his face and cracked his foot, exposing the bone. “Some guys looked for an extinguisher, but the fire was already spreading,” Flores, who has commanded the Negra Francisca Duarte for about 20 years, said. “So some of our crew leapt into the water.” An expansive US military campaign that has so far killed nearly 200 people across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September 2025 appears to have reached the fishing fleets of Ecuador and left eight men missing and presumed dead. But the Trump administration insists it had no part in these particular operations, like the one that set Flores’s boat aflame. Flores recounted his story to members of the Human Rights Commission (CDH) while in his home town in San Mateo, Ecuador. When Flores’s ship was hit, the US Coast Guard cutter Bertholf was patrolling the eastern Pacific Ocean, a spokesperson said, when its crew reported hearing “MAYDAY, MAYDAY, vessel on fire” over the ship’s radio. A Coast Guard spokesperson said that it assumed responsibility for coordinating a “search and rescue” and dispatched the Bertholf to respond. Meanwhile, Flores and his crew continued to sail their damaged ship searching for help. As they manoeuvred east, Flores said that a small observation plane followed them. “We kept our eyes fixed on it for fear it would drop another bomb.” After 40 minutes, Flores said they reached another ship that “seemed to be changing course to sail away”. “As we approached with the wounded man, we saw several Americans pointing guns at us,” Flores said. “They were yelling ‘hands up’ in Spanish, using translators. I was the first to go up; they handcuffed me behind my back, put a hood over my head, and took me to the top of the boat. They sat us down one by one on the deck. “Around three in the afternoon, they gave us a bottle of water, and the boat set sail,” Flores recalled. The next morning, Flores said his crew were transferred on to a large Salvadorian coastguard vessel, where they were reported as a “shipwrecked crew”. He said they spent eight days sailing north to Puerto Unión, a coastal city in El Salvador, and were placed in temporary detention. The fishermen said they were never charged with any wrongdoing and were issued emergency travel permits to return to Ecuador by the end of the month. Conflicting accounts Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and CDH have been looking into the alleged interactions between US vessels and fishing boats in the eastern Pacific. So far, the Pentagon and the US Coast Guard have both publicly denied participating in operations involving Ecuadorian fishing vessels. “We have no knowledge of, nor were Department of War forces involved in, the incidents described in those reports,” a spokesperson for United States Southern Command (Southcom) said in a statement to the Guardian. “US forces conduct operations under established legal authorities and hold its forces to the highest standards of professionalism, safety, and compliance with US and international law.” The state department did not return a request for comment on whether it had any communication with Ecuador over these maritime incidents and whether it was aware crew members were being transferred to El Salvador. The Coast Guard also said that it had no knowledge of, nor were any Coast Guard forces involved in, the incident described in reports on attacks on Ecuadorian fishermen. A spokesperson added that the US Coast Guard does not operate armed drones. Latin American experts have said that something about the various reports does not add up. “There are strange aspects to the official ‘rescue’ story in the Negra Francisca’s case,” Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) said, which was “disputed by the crew, who publicly claim they were captured and taken to El Salvador – that none of the three governments has clarified. “We do not have smoking gun evidence to say this was a US strike,” Will continued. “But who else might have taken these men – found so far from El Salvador – to that country?” Embassy representatives from Ecuador and El Salvador did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A search for answers In a letter obtained by the Guardian, the Democratic representatives Joaquin Castro of Texas and Bill Keating of Massachusetts in the House foreign affairs committee confront senior administration officials with survivor testimony, UN intervention, and a direct challenge to the Pentagon’s denials to demand whether the United States has been telling the truth. “These incidents have resulted in eight persons still missing or unaccounted for, credible survivor accounts of arbitrary or unlawful detention, abuse, and extrajudicial use of force by US personnel, and the formal intervention of the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances,” the two lawmakers wrote to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, and coast guard commandant, Adm Kevin Lunday. Their letter was delivered on Thursday. The letter, which sets a response deadline of 10 July, focuses on three incidents in the eastern Pacific. The Fiorella, an Ecuadorian fishing vessel, disappeared on 20 January after its captain sent a final satellite message describing what [he] said was a US aircraft, a UAV, and a blue patrol ship that had been following the vessel for three days. Eight crew members have not been seen since. The Negra Francisca Duarte II, captained by Flores, reported being struck by a drone on 17 March near the Galápagos, and its crew reported being hooded, handcuffed and held on a blue patrol vessel bearing the word “Spear” on its hull before being transferred into Salvadorian custody. Trump’s counternarcotics program spanning the Americas is nicknamed Operation Southern Spear. Fishermen onboard a third Ecuadorian ship, the Don Maca, also described being stopped and arrested by an American patrol boat after catching swordfish, albacore and dogfish along one of their regular fishing routes. “As we boarded, they handcuffed and hooded us all,” crew member John Sebastián Palacios said in testimony to CDH. “After we were hooded, they fired two more shots at the boat. After half an hour, they sank it. We were so scared we didn’t even dare reach for our phones to record, thinking that if we made a wrong move they would shoot us again.” Palacios said that the first vessel transferred his crew to a Salvadorian patrol. The US has long denied involvement in the three incidents targeting the Ecuadorian boats. The House armed services committee chair, Mike Rogers, on 4 June, read a Pentagon statement into the record during an NDAA markup that said the US “did not board the Don Maca and conducted no kinetic strikes against it”, was “unaware of any strikes” against the Fiorella, and equally unaware of any strikes against the Negra Francisca Duarte II. Castro and Keating now ask whether that denial covers every entity that could have been involved: specifically the DEA, the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection and any intelligence agencies or contractors operating under US authority. A fraught moment The questions also land at a moment of rapidly deepening US military engagement with Ecuador. In November 2025, President Daniel Noboa hosted then-DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, at the Manta naval air station to discuss establishing a US military base. On 6 March, the US participated in strikes on an armed group inside Ecuador, which Hegseth celebrated on X, writing that the United States was now “bombing Narco Terrorists on land”. Ecuadorians rejected the expansion of US military bases into their country in a November vote, stalling plans to advance US “anti-narcoterrorism” operations there. The small coastal nation is located between Peru and Colombia – the world’s top cocaine producers – and the US Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency have long operated interagency patrols that monitor the eastern Pacific Ocean corridor for drugs that may be headed to the United States or Europe. Then, in April, Ecuadorian navy vessels trained alongside the Nimitz carrier strike group in the Pacific. At a Senate foreign relations committee hearing on 2 June, Senator Tim Kaine pressed Rubio on targeting criteria, revealing that striking a vessel does not require evidence of narcotics being onboard. Kaine had called that description “odd”, though Rubio defended the program, saying every strike involves a legal officer making a determination on legality. Among the handful of questions, Castro and Keating are asking whether detained crews were ever searched for contraband, whether they were given access to lawyers or consular officials, and whether survivors were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. They also demand “all videos, photographs, and audio recordings taken by US personnel or US aircraft, UAVs, or other modes of surveillance” during those three incidents. The three vessels remain the clearest evidence yet that Washington’s supposed war on drugs in the eastern Pacific has quietly expanded into a shooting war against the fishermen. “[I]f it was drug traffickers, pirates, or the crews themselves who set fire to their vessels,” Freeman said, “why has the Ecuadorian government been so unwilling to launch a serious investigation?”

Swiss wait to hear result of ballot on capping population at 10 million

A national ballot on an unprecedented far-right proposal to limit Switzerland’s population to 10 million concludes this weekend, amid warnings of devastating consequences for the country’s economy if voters back the initiative. A “yes” vote would require the Swiss government to take steps to cap the population at 10 million by 2050, enacting tough restrictions on family reunification, residency permits and asylum if the number reaches 9.5 million before that date. If the 10m threshold is still exceeded before 2050, the proposal by the far-right Swiss People’s party (SVP) would oblige the government to pull out of the country’s free movement agreement with the EU – ending its access to the bloc’s single market. Switzerland’s system of direct democracy allows for “popular initiatives” that are put to a referendum if they get 100,000 backers within 18 months. Typically held four times a year, plebiscites are a long-favoured tool of the anti-immigration SVP. Switzerland’s population has grown far faster than that of surrounding EU states, rising by 23% since the free movement agreement came into effect in 2002. Economic output has risen by about 24% over the same period, government figures show. About 27% of Swiss residents are not citizens. Supporters of the “No to a Switzerland with 10 million” initiative say the influx of mainly EU workers puts housing, schools, transport, welfare and the Swiss way of life itself under unbearable strain. “Uncontrolled immigration is causing Switzerland to grow far too quickly. The negative consequences are palpable in all areas of life,” the SVP, the largest party in Switzerland’s parliament since 1999, argued in its campaign. The seven-member government, made up of ministers from Switzerland’s four biggest parties, including the SVP, is collectively against the initiative, warning it would threaten national stability, harm the economy and hurt Swiss prosperity. Clear majorities in both houses of parliament have also recommended rejecting the proposal, as have the Swiss trade union federation, the Swiss Employers’ Association and Economiesuisse, the country’s main business umbrella organisation. Rudolf Minsch, Economiesuisse’s chief economist, said the proposal was a populist attempt to fix complex problems with a simplistic artificial cap. “It sells the illusion of a free lunch, and will not solve our housing or traffic problems,” he said. Thomas Matter, an SVP MP, dismissed the concerns as scaremongering. “We are not against immigration, but it has to be moderate and controlled,” he said. “Before, we had qualitative immigration; now we have quantitative immigration.” Populist rightwing parties in Europe have successfully exploited – and inflamed – concerns over immigration, reflected in Britain’s 2016 Brexit vote and in surging support for parties such as France’s National Rally and the AfD in Germany. However, while many nations limit immigration, no country has ever voted explicitly to cap its population, Philippe Wanner, an expert in demography at the University of Geneva, said – although countries such as China have legislated to reduce growth. Like many European countries, Switzerland needs immigration because birthrates are falling and it faces a steadily ageing population, with the proportion of people aged over 65 due to climb to more than 27% from 21% by 2055. Recent opinion polls suggest the campaign against the proposal has gained ground since the referendum was announced in February, but most surveys have pointed to a close race, with the “no” camp predicted to win with about 52% of the vote. Polling stations will open briefly on Sunday to allow in-person votes, but up to 90% of voters in Swiss referendums typically vote by post. To pass, the initiative must win both the popular vote and a majority of Switzerland’s 23 full and six half cantons. Results should be known by mid to late afternoon on Sunday.

Jessie J’s triumphant return puts lucrative Chinese market in spotlight

One week after announcing she was “cancer free”, the British pop star Jessie J did what any recovering patient would do and travelled thousands of miles around the world to perform for an audience of more than a billion people. On 29 May, the singer-songwriter, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, belted out a stage-rattling rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way on the stage of Singer, a hugely popular Chinese singing competition similar to The Voice. She also performed her new song, California, briefly adapting the lyrics to change California to Changsha, the Chinese city where Singer is hosted. Returning to China was really “nostalgic”, Cornish wrote to her 821,600 followers on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. “The fact that I’m still so widely recognised and loved by everyone means more to me than people can imagine.” Cornish says she was “instantly hooked” on China. “I just think in life you should go where you’re celebrated and I feel so celebrated there,” she told the Guardian. One Jessie J fan wrote on Weibo: “In China, everyone thinks no one in the world can sing better than you.” In a country of 1.4 billion people, having less than a million followers does not exactly make you a household name. But there is no denying that Cornish’s pivot to China, which came at moment when her career in the west seemed to be floundering, has allowed her to tap into a lucrative market – and other western pop stars are trying to follow suit. Cornish first burst on to the Chinese scene in 2018 when she entered, and won, that year’s series of Singer, a show that can garner more than 20bn views for a single episode. Back then, the potential of the Chinese market was already evident. Hundreds of millions of digitally-savvy and culturally hungry young music fans had already created an energetic music scene that was rapidly growing. The government had recently cracked down on illegal music streaming, strengthening copyright protections and earning potential for musicians. Since 2018, the Chinese recorded music market has climbed up the global ranks from seventh biggest to fourth, recently overtaking Germany. Chinese stars have always been dominant, a trend that has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. Covid “raised the bar for how interesting you have to be to the Chinese music consumer in order for it to be lucrative,” says Alex Taggart, the founder of Isle Of, an artist management and music consultancy who worked for several years in China. “With no foreign artists able to come into China, the domestic music industry massively raised its game.” He adds: “Before Covid, it was much easier to be a random western artist in China doing well.” Now, international acts have to work increasingly hard to win over Chinese fans. Perhaps no act has worked harder than Westlife. The Irish boyband first performed in China more than 20 years ago and have been steadily building up a following since. “We’ve performed in China more than 20 times and it’s become one of the most special relationships we have anywhere in the world. The scale of the support still amazes us,” says Shane Filan, one of the band’s members. Kian Egan, another band member, says Chinese fans “know every lyric, every album track, every harmony, sometimes better than we do ourselves”. In 2023, the band performed a song entirely in Mandarin at a show in Wuhan, a cover of The Ordinary Road by the Mandopop star Pu Shu. For a country with a strong sense of national pride, few things are likely to impress Chinese fans more than learning the language. This year, the foursome performed at China’s flagship Spring Festival Gala, to an audience of more than 650 million. Charli xcx, before she became Brat-famous, impressed Chinese fans when she collaborated with the Chinese electronic musician Howie Lee to produce a Mandarin version of her hit song Boys. Part of the appeal of Westlife and Jessie J is their penchant for ballads, a musical style adored in China. “The thing that Chinese music listeners really care about is, one, melody over everything, and two, they really respect pure singing ability,” says Taggart. “They love somebody with pipes. That is a big part of the reason why Chinese fans love Jessie J so much.” Cornish says part of what she enjoys about performing in China is “how much they respect and celebrate voices and technique … I really miss people just listening”. Performing in China has its challenges. As well as navigating the language barrier, Cornish says the rules on showing tattoos on television have tightened since she first appeared on Singer – it was officially banned in 2018. She had to plan her outfits to ensure none of her tattoos were visible. Several mid-tier British indie bands have also found unexpected success in China, including the alt-rock ensemble Sea Power, who garnered a large following in the country after they scored a popular video game. Although the Chinese market may be harder to break into post-Covid, China is hopes to attract more international stars to help boost its flagging economy. In 2024, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, announced a surprise show in the tropical south Chinese island of Hainan, which sold out within minutes. The controversial rapper, who has been widely criticised in the west for racist and antisemitic comments, was not the most obvious choice to perform in China, where all performances are subject to censorship review and where the government generally discourages explicit content. But the show reportedly generated 373m yuan (£41.2m) in tourism revenue, and other cities were soon clamouring to host their own version. West performed again in Shanghai last year. For all West’s tirades, he has never publicly crossed Beijing’s red lines. A music industry professional who asked to remain anonymous because of professional links to China says: “It’s not necessarily about explicit lyrics. Those are allowed on Chinese platforms … it would be more of a political thing. If someone was outspoken against the Chinese government, they would struggle to build a career in China.” Before the show in Hainan, West abruptly cancelled a scheduled performance in Taiwan. Perhaps his team had learned from Katy Perry’s mistake. The Hot N Cold singer was reportedly banned from China after she performed in Taiwan wearing the Taiwanese flag as a cape. But, perhaps mindful of the consumer spending that Perry could generate, the Chinese authorities apparently forgave her last year when she was allowed to enter the county to perform five sold-out shows. On returning to the stage in Shanghai, Perry said the Chinese were her “best fans”. Additional research by Yu-chen Li

‘Looks like Chornobyl’: life in Kyiv’s most bombed neighbourhood as Ukraine braced for new mass strike

On Lukianivska Square, in Kyiv’s most bombed neighbourhood, the white letters on a busy McDonald’s have melted from a fire that engulfed a nearby shopping centre during the last major attack, on 24 May. Inside, however, the restaurant is busy – until an air raid alarm goes off, sending staff and customers down the escalators of the metro next door to shelter deep underground. The last strike collapsed a section of the metro’s ceiling and filled the platforms with a fog of dust. The McDonald’s has been damaged three times this year alone (a Kyiv resident jokes that the chain’s golden arches logo has become a “symbol of resistance”). On heat maps showing the frequency of air raids in Kyiv, the area around Lukianivska Square and the wider area of Shevchenkivskyi stand out for the concentration of strikes over the past four years. Local residents say the situation has only got worse in recent months. In a large and sprawling city where evidence of war damage is swallowed up, this corner of Kyiv looks more like a scene from far closer to the frontlines. The ostensible reason why is located across the busy street from the metro entrance: the long, red, shattered facade of the gutted Artem plant, once a weapons factory, now largely ruined and partly covered with a huge mural. The recent massive strikes, however, have hit civilian structures. A glass tower that looms like a ship’s prow over the street is without many of its windows. A pair of burnt-out cars sit by the kerb. The entrance hall of the metro, which has been hit five times, is boarded in large areas, while passersby pause to look up at a scorched and eviscerated building. Aside from the station and restaurant, most activity in the neighbourhood is now centred on the small collection of flower and vegetable stalls in the little market that is still open beneath one of the ruined structures. Drinking her coffee before going to work is Anastasiia Prymak, 23, a product manager who lives in one of the tower blocks nearby. “I moved to Kyiv from Nikopol two years ago because of the constant bombardment there. Now we have had massive bombardments here in recent months,” she says. First was a drone strike on the rough of a nearby apartment building on 28 April. “I thought I could hear planes. Then I told myself it can’t be planes because of the war. Then I looked out and saw the explosion on the roof,” Prymak says. “I’ve been diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder. I have anxiety all the time even with no reason, and panic attacks.” She opens a picture on her phone that shows the view from her apartment window. Below, a building is burning with flames like jets coming out of the windows. “Last month there were these huge strikes. My boyfriend took me to the shelter and I was praying even though [I] don’t believe in God. Now I’m begging [my] boyfriend to move to Lviv [in western Ukraine]. Then the neighbourhood was hit again a couple of weeks ago. This is just outside my building.” Prymak shows a video of wrecked buildings. “I say to friends that it looks like Chornobyl. It is becoming more and more dangerous here. I sleep curled up like an embryo because I am afraid drone or a rocket will hit. I want to be killed in one go. I don’t want to lose a limb.” In a long-range and escalating air war between Russia and Ukraine, the damage in this single neighbourhood serves as a warning of the direction of the conflict. Kremlin officials and Vladimir Putin have flagged Russia’s intention of launching heavier and “systematic” strikes against Ukraine’s urban concentrations. The increase in Russian missile threats against Kyiv and other cities comes as Moscow has sought to take advantage of a global shortage of missile interceptors – most notably for the Patriot system – that has been exacerbated by the US-Israeli war against Iran. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has scrambled to secure promises of more interceptors, warning the leaders of the UK, France and Germany during a visit to London on Sunday of “the urgent need to scale up” Ukraine’s air defences and deep-strike capabilities. Sitting at her flower stall, Faina Polishchuk says that while most of the stallholders have come back, the customers have gone. “It’s dangerous,” she says. “After the last massive strike in May, most of my colleagues here were crying and nervous and didn’t want to come back at first for a few days. But this is my livelihood.” She saw the last strike from her apartment window. “The whole building was shaking. I went to the shelter then and there was a young man who came and showed me what was happening on his phone. He said everything is burning.” At first, Faina says she will stay come what may, and expresses optimism. “I’m not afraid,” she says, but she quickly adds a caveat. “If it does get worse then I’ll go to Vinnytsia [her original home city].”

Dutch far-right party pays damages to court artist after changing image with AI

A Dutch court artist has received damages after an MP for the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) used one of her drawings without permission and manipulated it with AI to make the subjects look more menacing. Petra Urban, a court artist for 19 years, was shocked to discover a drawing she had made last year of two Syrian brothers jailed for the murder of their sister had been reworked and used in a video on Instagram and Facebook by the party’s Noord-Brabant region. “There are three things that upset me,” she said. “One is that my work was used without asking my permission. Secondly, this was done for a political party, when I want to work as neutrally and independently as possible. And thirdly – and this makes it really strange – the distortion was done with AI.” Under Dutch law, creators are not only protected by copyright but also have moral rights to object to any distortion of their work that could harm their reputation. There was widespread shock in May after Urban shared the images with fellow court reporters, and the case had widespread press coverage. Urban said that after her union issued a legal demand for licensing rights and damages, the PVV MP Maikel Boon called her to apologise and has now paid the damages – which have not been made public. Since the MP had previously been accused of using AI to manipulate images for campaign purposes, she felt “no mercy” in demanding compensation. “I hope it’s clear that this is a worrying development and that we need to stay alert,” she said. “You need to be able to assume that journalistic work is written, drawn, photographed or filmed as neutrally as possible. If this is manipulated, then the flood gates are open. There’s no knowing where it will end.” She also distanced herself from the far-right party led by Geert Wilders. “Honestly, the PVV is a long way from my political views, but even if it had been closer to my own politics I would not have wanted this,” she said. “It compromises my neutrality.” Boon and the PVV have been approached for comment. The MP has publicly accepted responsibility and told De Telegraaf he had thought an altered image would no longer be subject to copyright but that it had been a “very stupid act”. The film about a new asylum centre has been removed from the internet.

US military says it downed Iranian attack drones – as it happened

We’re about to close this live page now but here’s our latest full report, and a recap of the day’s key developments, as the US and Iran signal that a peace agreement is close but reports of conflicting claims cast uncertainly over whether it will eventuate. Thanks for joining us. The US military’s Central Command said its forces downed multiple Iranian drones it said were trying to hit commercial vessels in the strait of Hormuz. The post on X early on Saturday, Middle East time, came even as Washington and Tehran cited progress in peace talks. “The international trade corridor remains open for transit,” Centcom said. US president Donald Trump earlier reposted a social media post by Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araqchi that said a memorandum of understanding to end the Iran war had “never been closer”. Araqchi echoed that sentiment on Iranian state TV a few hours later, but also repeated some points about the agreement that Trump had previously declared “fake news”. One of those points was about the strait of Hormuz – the US and Iran agree that it will reopen once the memorandum is signed, but Araqchi said transit through the strait would be under Iranian management. “Our sword will always hang over the strait of Hormuz.” Araqchi also said the agreement did not include anything about Iran’s nuclear programme and that nuclear talks with the US would only take place at a later stage. Trump has insisted the interim deal includes Iran giving up its nuclear programme, while Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was fully agreed with Trump on keeping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Araqchi also said ending the war in Lebanon was part of interim deal, which would mean Israel’s withdrawal from occupied areas. Israel Katz, the Israeli defence minister, said Israel would not withdraw from security zones in Lebanon, Syria or Gaza. Switzerland offered to host the peace deal signing ceremony after a number of US media outlets cited sources who said it may happen in Geneva ahead of or during the G7 summit that starts in France on Monday. Araqchi said the signing would take place “digitally”, with each side signing remotely. Hezbollah said on Friday that its fighters had confronted Israeli forces advancing towards a southern Lebanese town, as Israel pressed on with its strikes in Lebanon. The Iran-backed militia said its fighters first targeted Israeli troops advancing towards Majdal Zoun, about 5km from the western side of the border, on Thursday evening “with repeated rocket barrages, forcing them to retreat”. The Israeli military said it struck 310 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon over the past week, claiming to have killed “80 terrorists”. Global oil prices dropped on Friday to lows not seen since the first week of the Iran crisis on hopes of a US-Iran deal, with Brent crude falling to $87.33 a barrel.