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AFP and other news agencies removed from their services on Sunday the first official photo of Britain’s Princess Kate Middleton to be released since her abdominal surgery, saying the image was found to have been manipulated.
The 42-year-old princess, whose husband Prince William is heir to the British throne, has been recovering mainly at their home in Windsor, west of London, since leaving hospital on January 29.
The photo released by Kensington Palace to mark Mother’s Day in Britain shows the smiling Princess of Wales sitting on a garden chair, dressed in jeans, a sweater and a dark jacket, surrounded by her three laughing children, George, Charlotte and Louis.
“Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last two months,” read a message accompanying the photo on the social media platform X.
“Wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day,” said the message, which was signed “C” for Catherine.
Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last two months.
Wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day. C
📸 The Prince of Wales, 2024 pic.twitter.com/6DywGBpLLQ
— The Prince and Princess of Wales (@KensingtonRoyal) March 10, 2024
In a statement, the palace said the photo was taken “in Windsor earlier this week” by Kate’s husband, Prince William.
However, multiple news agencies including AFP later pulled the image over concerns it had been manipulated.
“It has come to light that the Handout issued by Kensington Palace today of Kate and the kids had been altered, therefore it was withdrawn from AFP systems,” the agency said in a note to clients accompanied.
The family photograph was the first official image of Kate released by the royal family since her hospitalisation at the London Clinic on January 16 for an abdominal surgery.
The future queen was last pictured in public during a Christmas Day walk in Sandringham, eastern England.
Photos published by TMZ earlier in March showed Kate wearing sunglasses while being driven in a car, with the celebrity news site saying they were taken near Windsor Castle.
UK media outlets including the Daily Mail and The Sun chose not to publish the pictures.
The sighting came after a flurry of conspiracy theories on social media over the famously hard-working and dutiful princess’s absence from the spotlight.
The speculation came despite Kensington Palace clearly saying at the time of her surgery that she would be “unlikely to return to public duties until after Easter”.
It also said the surgery was not related to cancer.
Kate’s hospitalisation came almost simultaneously with the announcement that William’s father, King Charles, had been admitted for surgery for a benign prostate condition and subsequently diagnosed with an unrelated cancer.
Charles, 75, visited his daughter-in-law’s bedside after being admitted himself on January 26.
The king withdrew from public duties during his treatment, though he attended church services and held his weekly audience with the prime minister.
Charles’s wife Queen Camilla, 76, has been the most visible senior royal, stepping in to cover many of her husband’s public duties during his treatment.
She is now on a break until March 11, when she is expected to join William and other senior royals at the annual Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey.
She is reported to be on holiday this week, effectively meaning all four of the most senior royals are out of action.
The princess is one of the most popular members of the royal family.
She and William have taken on more royal duties since his younger brother Prince Harry and his wife Meghan left for the United States in 2020, and the king’s brother Prince Andrew stepped back because of his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
As the Russia-Ukraine conflict raged in 2022, the United States started “preparing rigorously” for a potential nuclear strike by Moscow against Kyiv, in what would have been the first nuclear attack since the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly eighty years before, CNN reported citing two senior administration officials.
The report stated that outreach from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other countries also played an important role in averting the crisis.
The Biden administration was specifically concerned Russia might use a tactical or battlefield nuclear weapon, the officials said.
Amid the fears, the US sought to enlist the help of non-allies including India, to discourage Russia from such an attack, as reported by CNN.
“One of the things we did was not only message them directly but strongly urge, press, encourage other countries, to whom they might be more attentive, to do the same thing,” the senior administration official said.
US officials say that outreach and public statements from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others helped avert a crisis.
“I think we believe showing the international community the concern about this, particularly the concern from key countries for Russia and the Global South, was also a helpful, persuasive factor and showed them what the cost of all this could be,” CNN quoted a senior administration official as saying.
“I think the fact that we know, India weighed in, China weighed in, others weighed in, may have had some effect on their thinking,” the senior administration official added. “I can’t demonstrate this positively, but I think that’s our assessment.”
Regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict, India has always condemned civilian killings and called for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
In a major statement, PM Modi told President Putin that “this is not the era of war” on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Uzbekistan last year. The statement even made to the G20 communique under the presidency of India.
During this period from late summer to fall 2022, the National Security Council convened a series of meetings to put contingency plans in place “in the event of either a very clear indication that they were about to do something, attack with a nuclear weapon, or if they just did, how we would respond, how we would try to preempt it or deter it,” the senior administration official said.
Notably, late summer 2022 was also proving a ‘devastating period’ for Russian forces in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces were advancing on Russian-occupied Kherson in the south, the city which had been Russia’s biggest prize since the invasion.
As these Ukrainian forces advanced, entire Russian units were in danger of being surrounded. The view inside the administration was that such a catastrophic loss could be a “potential trigger” for the use of nuclear weapons, according to CNN.
Also, at the same time, Russia was allegedly circulating a new “false flag story” about a Ukrainian dirty bomb, which US officials feared could be intended as a cover for a Russian nuclear attack.
In October 2022, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, made a series of phone calls to defence officials in the US, the UK, France and Turkey, telling them that the Kremlin was “concerned about possible provocations by Kyiv involving the use of a dirty bomb.”
But, it is pertinent to note that at no time did the US detect intelligence indicating Russia was taking steps to mobilize its nuclear forces to carry out such an attack, CNN reported.
“We obviously placed a high priority on tracking and had some ability at least to track such movements of its nuclear forces,” a senior administration official said. “And at no point did we ever see any indications of types of steps that we would’ve expected them to take if they were going down a path toward using nuclear weapons.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)