news. continues five days of funeral ceremonies for its revered king, a year after his death. the rituals began with the king lighting candles in the grand palace in front of his father's coffin. later he will light the royal pyre to cremate his father. they have spent a year building a crematorium beside bangkok's grand palace. this shows thousands of mourners on the streets of bangkok ahead of the procession and cremation. you can see live coverage beginning here in half an hour on bbc world news from midnight gmt. now it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk.

i'm stephen sackur. in the united states, the sheriff has always had a special status as the defender of the community, the embodiment of law, justice and the american way. but sheriffs can be politically controversial figures too. none more so than my guest today, joe arpaio, sheriff of maricopa county, arizona for 2h years until last year. a self—styled tough guy, convicted of criminal contempt and controversially pardoned by president donald trump just two months ago. did joe arpaio betray the american values he pledged to uphold? joe arpaio in phoenix, arizona, welcome to hardtalk. well, thank you.

thanks for having me. it's great to have you on the show. of course, you are not longer wearing the sheriff's badge after nearly a quarter of a century. is it now time for you to acknowledge the mistakes you made while in office? well, you know i'm a big frank sinatra, my way the song, always says, regrets i've had a few but too few to mention. if you talk about mistakes, everybody makes mistakes. by the way, i want to thank your country. you mentioned the elected sheriff, which originated years and years ago. it came to the united states, the western sheriff. we now have 3000. chief law enforcement

officer for the county. so i'm very proud to have spent 2a years serving the people. no one would doubt your success in terms of re—elections. i believe you were re—elected five times. but let us be honest, nobody in maricopa county chose you, elected you, to violate the constitution, but that is clearly what you ended up doing and i'm just wondering whether you are prepared to say sorry for that now. i did not violate the constitution. it is an issue that a judge decided to repeat or report during a trial, so we are appealing that. this is a misdemeanour. the same time you can get for barking dogs. it took eight years when 0bama and the attorney general, former, holder went after me. after 60 days taking over. here we are at the end

on a misdemeanour, a contempt of court, and this chapter is not over yet, believe me, because the truth will come out very soon. right. but when you suggest to me that there's something political at the heart of this, i would simply reply to you that the keyjudgement in your case was surely that from the district court in 2013, handed down byjudge murray snow, who is a known conservative, appointed to his post by george w bush, and he is the one who concluded that the evidence clearly demonstrates that your office, the sheriff's office in maricopa county, specifically equated being an hispanic or mexican labourer with being an unauthorised alien. and that, in his view, was unconstitutional. well in 2013, after that there was no violation. prior to that we had the authority under the us government to act as immigration officers.

so, that was his decision and then he wanted to make sure that he would do everything to get me out of office, according to his wife. there's so much involved in this that i'm not going to talk about it now. but you'll be hearing about the real story about the judicial system and how they went after this sheriff, took them eight years on a contempt of court, a small crime and that's where we stand. hang on a minute, sheriff, if i can still call you sheriff, because you had 2a years at it, so i think i can. hang on a minute. as the chief lawman in maricopa county i can't imagine what possessed you to consistently flout the order of a court and to end up in contempt. you were the lawman. how could you defy the authority of a court?

first of all, there was no intention. that's a civil case you are talking about with snow. the conviction had to do with a criminal misdemeanour charge. think of that. 0nejudge refused to give me a jury. wrong charge. i can go on and on. on a contempt of court. it had nothing to do with racial profile or anything regarding the profiling, if you want to call it that. it's strictly a contempt of court. ido... i do want to call it... i do want to call it profiling because at the heart of this case, for those who don't know, are the orders you gave to your men to specifically target latinos when it came to police stops on the basis that you were looking for, it seems, illegal immigrants, in a way that the courts decided was completely in contravention of the constitution, as i've said. the bottom line is, many people

in your own county saw your activities as fundamentally racist. well, that's not true. when you say in the county. by the way, i keep getting re—elected so evidently the people feel that i'm doing a job and defending them and going after the criminals. i'm not going to get into everything on this case, but let me say this — we had the authority under the federal government to act as immigration officers. we don'tjust pick up people on the street because of the colour of their skin. when you arrest people on any charge and they happen to be here illegally, of course we would turn them over to the government where they would, in most cases, be deported. you were convicted... so, i'm not going to keep talking about this case because it's not over yet. i am appealing this misdemeanour conviction of contempt of court and then i will be speaking out so you and everybody else will know

how ourjudicial system is somewhat corrupt. when you mention the judge was conservative, appointed by bush, actually that was at the tail end, recommended by a certain us senator, so i don't care... judges make their own decisions. if i may say so, sheriff, the point surely is this. you have a criminal record now. you say you are appealing and, of course, you have been pardoned. but i want to get to the heart of the matter, which is the impact of that pardon, which was issued by donald trump a couple of months ago. did you see that as payback for the staunch support that you gave to donald trump from the very beginning of his campaign? i did not ask for the pardon, he decided to do it when he heard the facts of this case.

i welcome that pardon. i was with him from day one, july, 2015, and i'll be with him to the end. it had nothing to do with the pardon. that was a right thing he did. i'm not guilty. i will continue to fight. you said i have a criminal record. well, i do have a criminal record because of the latest decision of anotherjudge on that contempt of court, so we'll appeal that. but the pardon is there. sheriff, have you paused for a second to consider the impact of that pardon on some of the people who were victimised by your officers during that period when you were the sheriff of maricopa county? how do you think they feel about your pardon? well, i don't know how they feel.

there are certain open border... 0r those who believe that people can come into this country illegally and get by with it, so maybe we should also look at all those hundreds and thousands that have violated the constitution, have come into this country illegally with a high percentage committing other crimes and look at that. when you say... well... wait a minute. when you say how the victims feel, where are all the victims? well... ididn‘t see... i didn't see any victims go to court and complain. i'll tell you about one victim. one man who lives in phoenix, he was a plaintiff in the aclu class—action lawsuit against maricopa county. this is what he said after you were pardoned. these are powerful words. he said, "by pardoning him," that is you, "trump is saying to the nation that it is ok to insult another race or another culture. instead of making america great, trump is making america a lot more divided, just likejoe arpaio did here in phoenix." well, when you talk about one person

or two people that complained, i'm not going to get into that case on a probable cause. but when you have one or two, where is the uproar? where are all the victims? not even appearing in court to testify. you want more. i'll give you more. the mayor of phoenix. you know what he said after the pardon? he says, this pardon of arpaio is a slap in the face to the people of maricopa county, especially the latino community and all of those he victimised, systematically and illegally violating their civil rights. well, that's the mayor that's running for office. this is all politics, with him speaking out. he ought to worry about his police department enforcing the law, which the supreme court said we can do, all law enforcement. so i'm not going to get into the mayor where he's speaking out right now since he wants to run for congress.

you are picking out a couple of people that made these statements for political reasons, without knowing all the facts. i'm not blaming you for that. thanks for not blaming me. i mean, as you may recall, i came to visit you a few years ago in maricopa county and you very kindly showed me around some of your installations, including the tent city. yeah, yeah, sure. i put this point to you. now that you are no longer sheriff and you're not wearing the badge, maybe you can reflect a little bit on some of the things you did. for example, in 2008 you are caught on video referring to your tent city as a "concentration camp". i guess you must regret that now. no, i don't regret it. i made one statement when i was leaving the italian—american club and there's a crowd of demonstrators because everywhere i go we had demonstrators. when you know that there are many critics of yours in your own county who feel that your record is racist, to refer to your own initiative, the tent city where more than 1000

prisoners were kept in, sometimes in the summer, 130 degree fahrenheit heat, to refer to that as a concentration camp does raise serious questions about your judgment, if nothing else. let me tell you, i am very proud of the tent city, started that 2a years ago. it's been a great programme, a great deterrence, because many, many people do not violate the law here because they do not want to end up in tent city. let me say this, including your country, and our country fighting... fighting... 0ur soldiers fighting for our countries and they're living in tents. so when you are going to complain about convicted, they are all convicted, serving some time in tent city and we haven't had that many problems. one of the greatest programmes in this country. so a lot of people don't like it.

but still, i still get people who thank me about it. if they're a criminal. if i may say so, you have had a lot of problems. you had a justice department investigation which found serious problems, including latina detainees in your system being denied basic sanitary items, being put into solitary confinement for extended periods of time just because of their inability to understand english. and you also had an extraordinary rate of suicides in yourjails which outstripped anything that i could find when i looked through the record of big cities like la, new york, chicago. the amount of suicides as a proportion of overall deaths in yourjail system was truly extraordinary — 24%. why do you think that was? that's all wrong. you are reading from other periodicals. you are way off base. we haven't had 24% suicides. we run a safe jail system and i'm going to tell you another thing. probably the safest jail system in the country. when you really analyse

the truth and stats. statistical stats. i'm quoting you stats that come from various official departments. i'm not saying 24% of all prisoners, i'm saying 24% of those deaths in yourjails were deemed to be suicides. are you denying that? yes, i am denying that. of course i am. now, if you have five deaths... now, they say there's 200—300 people have died or are suing me, that's not true. so, thejustice department did look into it, on english in the jails, we alleviated that problem. so if it's so bad... if it was so bad in 2a years, how come i've never been charged with anything? think of that. they've been after me for years. you have been charged with something, we've already been

through that already. that's a contempt of court. no, i understand that. that is a contempt of court. it has nothing to do with any charges, criminal charges, that was a contempt of court because a judge said we did not follow his order. that is the only charge in 2a years, and it's a misdemeanour. do you happen to know how much the various lawsuits and pay—outs that were given during your regime as sheriff over 2a years, how much it amounted to that in the end came down to the tab of the maricopa county taxpayers, and the arizona taxpayers? do you know what the sum was? i would say maybe $100 million. yeah, they reckon $140 million. 0k. you divide that up with 2a years. we would put our record against any law enforcement agency in this country. so, this is very difficult to get the story, the true facts, out. you are hitting me with all these questions. unfortunately, you don't have the right information.

but that's ok. i am glad to talk to you. yeah, well, i'm glad to talk to you as well. the thing is, sheriff, you did deliberately adopt a high profile — you styled yourself the toughest sheriff in the united states of america. you also took stands on other issues which, frankly, had nothing to do with maricopa county at all, one of which was your adamant insistence that barack 0bama was not a genuine american, you were one of the birthers who questioned the validity of his passport and his citizenship. no. once again, you are wrong. i never questioned where he was born. from day one, i said we are going to investigate a false government document. i don't care where he came from. it's a false birth certificate, official document. let's get that story straight. not so long ago, you and your staff came out with your findings,

as you put it, from a five—year investigation which you say proved 0bama's birth certificate was a fake, you talked about nine different points of forgery on the document. my question really is, why was the sheriff of maricopa county doing this? because the people of this county came to me, wanted me to look into the investigation since the federal government, or no one, would develop and look into that investigation. it had to do with the election process, which people do vote in this county too for presidents of the united states. so i took this on strictly to go after someone with a false government document. that was day one. it stays today. and i'm not done with it yet. would you style yourself a republican? are you a member of the republican party? yes, iam. what difference does that make?

it's just interesting to me because if we're going to talk about your political impact, and i think we have to, because you've chosen to be such a high—profile figure, why is it that so many fellow republicans of the highest profile, including your local senatorjohn mccain, the speaker of the house paul ryan, john kasich who also ran for president and may do so again, all of them have condemned you, and in particular, condemned donald trump for pardoning you? that's the political situation. you named three or four that don't like the president. 0k? but what about everybody else who supports me on the pardon? the people of this country support me. you have a few politicians that hate the president and will say anything to embarrass the president. so let them do it. itjust strikes me there might be something deeper than that going on. is it not possible that a lot of republicans look at you, your profile, your message,

and your impact, and they see someone who is toxic to their efforts to reach out to minority voters but in particular to the growing, very fast—growing, latino population of the united states of america? well, i don't know. you say the republicans... i'll tell you four presidential candidates visited the tents. they loved the tent city. i have great support. people come to me every time people run for president, including 2012. they come to me, including this time around, they want my endorsement. evidently, the republican party still want my endorsement even after this misdemeanour conviction. they still want my endorsement when they run for office. well, you say that. let me just quote to you mike madrid, he's a republican political consultant of long standing in california, after you very recently went

to a fundraiser event in fresno — i believe it wasjust a month or so ago — this is what mike madrid said. he said, "it is an unmitigated disaster." he meant having arpaio in his neighbourhood. he said, "it's beyond belief a man convicted of racial profiling is held up as an iconic figure in the party of reagan and abraham lincoln. well, you talk about one individual. you're not talking about the 300 republicans that showed up to hear me speak. you can quote one or two people all you want, the majority of the republicans support me. because you are a committed republican, how do you believe the republican party is going to reach out to this demographic, the latino community, which even in your own state of arizona is growing exponentially? they reckong that by 2023, minorities will be the majority in your own home state of arizona. you republicans need to address that, don't you? and it seems to me you're not addressing it at all. well, you know, i'm

a law enforcing guy. i spend 55 years, including working in england and turkey as the head of the federal us drug enforcement administration, mexico city, i was a director, south america, texas, arizona. in my other hat that nobody talks about, the federal hat. but i'm an equal opportunity law enforcement guy. i lock everybody up. i don't care if they're republicans, democrats, whatever. i enforce the laws. now, naturally, when you run, for sure, you have to be a politician to get elected. you have to do that. you have to wear that hat too. in my 55 years, i don't care who they are, what status they have, what nationality, i enforce the laws. that's the way i have been doing it. before we end, we are almost out of time, ijust need a thought

from you on your friend, donald trump, who just pardoned you — the latest gallup poll i've just seen suggests his approval rating is at 35%, it's pretty much as low as it's ever been. approval rating, 35%. his disapproval rating, 60%. george w bush the other day said this of the times we are living in in trump's america. "bigotry seems emboldened," he said, "0ur politics more vulnerable to conspiracy theory and outright publication. " "bigotry in any form," that's former president bush said, "is blasphemy against the american creed." he is very worried about trump's america. are you? well, first of all, i was a campaign guy honourary for bush and mitt romney and rick perry. you say his so—called polls have him at 33%. he's still higher than your profession, the media, and he's still higher than congress. i think the president's doing pretty good. address my point, particularly

with regard to what george w bush said about bigotry right now in america seeming emboldened. are you worried about what you see from the white house and what the tone of trump's america is? no, i'm not worried about it. let me say this, my mother and father came here from italy, legally, of course. immigrants made this country great and that will continue. but they must come across into our country legally, not illegally. and that's the whole question or that's the fight that's been going on. it's great. let them keep coming into our country, but do it legally. sheriffjoe arpaio, we have to end there but i thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you. good morning. there are significant

changes to come over the next few days. on wednesday, it was another mild day with more sunshine around and we saw temperatures as high as 20 degrees in the south. 0ver and we saw temperatures as high as 20 degrees in the south. over the next few days, the wind direction would change and will drag down some colder air as well. at the moment this weather front is on the scene having moved southwards, it is now moving northwards, driving mist and murky damp weather into england and wales. north of that, clearer skies in scotland but enough of a wind to prevent temperatures getting too low. lighter winds for northern ireland, patchy, mistand

low. lighter winds for northern ireland, patchy, mist and fog in the morning. clouds spilling into northern england, bit of dampness around. low cloud across wales, the midlands and east anglia. hill fog likely, low—level fog in the south—east where there isn't much wind at the moment. it might brighten up across southern counties of england. we have the sunnier skies in scotland away from the northern showers. sunshine for northern showers. sunshine for northern ireland but in the northern england bash microphone north of england, we could see a little rain and drizzle through much of the day across east yorkshire and lincolnshire. the weather front is wea k lincolnshire. the weather front is weak and it is going to get pulled apart as high pressure builds in overnight into friday. it is going to drag down with the high drier air and clearer skies. more sunshine on the way of friday. a chilly start, maybe a touch of frost on the grass. 0therwise, maybe a touch of frost on the grass. otherwise, are brighter day, more sunshine and temperatures where they

should be at this time of the year. things change on saturday. you had noticed the wind picking up and there will be more cloud around and there's likely to be showers around. all because an area of low pressure is running close to our shores. that will dive into europe and bring some wet and windy weather into much of europe this weekend. the position of this high pressure behind that is crucial because it means for us, on sunday, we are going to get an northerly wind and that will drag down some colder air across the uk. you will notice it feeling much chillier, especially in the wind which will be stronger stand the eastern side of the uk. temperatures 13, 14 in the south, struggling to eight or nine in the north where there may be one or two showers and as the winds drop out overnight it could be frosty, particularly in the countryside on monday morning. i'm rico hizon in singapore — welcome to special coverage

of the funeral of thailand's king. hundreds of thousands of mourners have converged on the capital — bangkok — for a five—day buddhist ceremony. i'm jonathan head live at the funeral procession — there are still long lines of people hoping for a chance to get into the cremation area and see a final farewell to the late king. welcome to newsday where it's 8am in singapore and 7am in the thai capital bangkok, where hundreds