Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II on Monday allowed her grandson Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, to split their time between Canada and Britain during a “transition period” in which the family would figure out how to deal with their shock resignation from front-line royal duties.
The monarch said she held “very constructive” talks between Harry, his older brother, Prince William, and their father, Prince Charles, aimed at charting a course through the fallout of the bombshell announcement.
Meghan reportedly joined the conversation by telephone from Canada after jetting out of Britain last week.
Photo: AFP
Their effective resignation on Wednesday last week followed a year filled with rumors of infighting between the brothers and reports of Meghan feeling unwelcome in the highly traditional and structured royal family.
“My family and I are entirely supportive of Harry and Meghan’s desire to create a new life as a young family,” the 93-year-old queen said in a statement after the first day of meetings at her Sandringham estate in eastern England.
The couple said they wanted to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution” — a statement that some read as a slight at the way the royal family has been run under Britain’s beloved monarch.
The queen frankly admitted that their decision was not welcome news.
“Although we would have preferred them to remain full-time working members of the royal family, we respect and understand their wish to live a more independent life as a family while remaining a valued part of my family,” she said.
The monarch stressed the couple told her “they do not want to be reliant on public funds,” but did not address the issue of whether they would keep their royal titles.
Harry and Meghan are formally known as the duke and duchess of Sussex. Five percent of their income comes from public funds. The rest comes from Prince Charles’ Duchy of Cornwall heredity private estate.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s officially declared wealth is fairly modest: some savings and a jointly owned villa in Budapest. However, voters in what Transparency International deems the EU’s most corrupt country believe otherwise — and they might make Orban pay in a general election this Sunday that could spell an end to his 16-year rule. The wealth amassed by Orban’s inner circle is fueling the increasingly palpable frustration of a population grappling with sluggish growth, high inflation and worsening public services. “The government’s communication machine worked well as long as our economic situation remained relatively good,” said Zoltan Ranschburg, a political analyst
RSS