It took a while — but pretty Brit Kate Middleton may be getting ready to make an honest man out of England’s Prince William.
Our friends across the pond are wetting their velvet knickers over news that William is planning to formally announce his engagement to his longtime love.
The scoop comes courtesy of Tina Brown – [...]
Hollywood superstar Angelina Jolie is set to restyle herself as Princess Diana after her impending break up with actor Brad Pitt, it has been claimed.
While writing in Daily Mail, writer Ian Harper said that the ‘Tomb Raider’ star will set her sights on a new man from outside the showbusiness world and will help recast [...]
Prince William, The Pauper? British royal Prince William swapped the comfort of Buckingham Palace for the freezing streets of London last week sleeping rough for charity. The 27-year-old heir slept rough for the night after The Centrepoint Charity for The Homeless organized the opportunity for the Prince to experience a night sleeping on the streets.
Wiliam [...]
Britney Spears is the most searched for name on the Internet over the past decade, says a new survey.
Terrorist Osama bin Laden follows the pop star in the second spot, while footballer David Beckham is placed in the third place.
””Some names are popular searches for a year or two and then no more, but a [...]
It looks like Katie Price a.k.a Jordan is on an accusation spree against Peter Andre – the stunner has now claimed that she felt like the singer was “married to two women” during their relationship.
And she suggested that Andre was having a fling with his manager Claire Powell.
The Sun quoted Jordan as saying: “The trouble [...]
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have more in common than their childhood friendship, the Hollywood stars are also distant cousins, it has been claimed.
The New England Genealogical Society have found evidence that the actors are tenth cousins, once removed.
Both were said to have descended from bricklayer William Knowlton Jr., who shifted from England to the [...]
Robert Pattinson and Rupert Grint are competing for the role of Prince Harry in a biopic about the British monarch’s life.
Director Peter Kosminsky — who will helm the project — is casting for The Spare, which will depict pivotal points in Harry’s life, including losing his mother Princess Diana, his romance with on again/off again [...]
By Nick Bryant
BBC News
To the already long list of improbable White House get-togethers – Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Princess Diana and John Travolta – we will be able to add the names of a black professor and a white policeman at the centre of a national uproar over race relations.
Cambridge police sergeant Jim Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard scholar he arrested after responding to a report of a possible break-in at Mr Gates’s home, will sit down with Mr Obama on Thursday for a conciliatory beer.
Admittedly, it is tempting to view the invitation as the ultimate conflation of the age of Obama and the age of Oprah.
Aside from the choice of beverage, there is something very daytime television, something very soft focus, something very soft sofa, about this attempt to defuse the controversy.
Mr Gates was held for disorderly conduct, after he allegedly criticised police behaviour during the incident at the scholar’s home on 16 July. President Obama – a friend of Mr Gates – got involved in the case, saying that the police had acted "stupidily".
Yet startling and novel as Mr Obama’s attempts to diffuse the controversy are, he is merely upholding a long tradition. Presidential racial politics has often been conducted with gestures, symbols and photo opportunities, and this is but the latest example of a well-worn genre.
Obvious gestures
Even since the war, when black voters – or the Negro vote, as it was then known – became a potentially election-deciding force, presidents have embraced symbolic gestures, for the simple reason that they allow them to appeal to blacks without alienating whites.
Often the gestures have been rather obvious. Sometimes they have been so subtle as to be almost subliminal.
Alert to the growing strategic importance of the black vote in key northern battleground states, Dwight D Eisenhower invited the black contralto, Marian Anderson, to perform at his 1956 inauguration. It was a gesture especially redolent with meaning, since in 1939 she had been barred from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington.
His successor, John F Kennedy, happily extended a White House invitation to the world heavyweight boxing champion, Floyd Patterson, hoping it would compensate for his stubborn refusal to offer similar hospitality to Martin Luther King.
"Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race"
Black scholar arrest angers ObamaNot to be outdone by President Eisenhower, JFK also invited Marian Anderson to sing at his inaugural, but then went a few notable steps further by dancing with black women at the balls later on that night.
This kind of imagery has also been used in reverse, using more harmful symbolism.
Ronald Reagan delivered the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town memorialised in the Hollywood movie, Mississippi Burning – where three civil-rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964.
The subject of his speech was "states rights", for some a euphemism for white supremacy.
In 1992, the then-Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, famously attacked the black singer Sister Souljah; and, more infamously, made sure he returned home to Little Rock mid-campaign to oversee the lethal injection of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain damaged black man who had killed a police officer.
Fears and grievances
These kind of techniques are so commonly deployed, largely because they can have such a dramatic effect.
Even as black leaders attacked him for his timidity on civil rights, Mr Kennedy enjoyed high approval ratings among black voters, partly because they had been such full participants in his inaugural celebrations.
Nothing underscored Bill Clinton’s moderate, New Democrat credentials than his attack on a black hip-hop artist.
So history suggests that it would be foolish to underestimate the reconciliatory potential of this Budweiser moment, however dubious it sounds.
After all, conflict resolution often turns on the mutual and public acknowledgement of each side’s fears and grievances, along with the photo-opportunity that accompanies it.
By extending this invitation, Mr Obama also appears to be signalling that neither Prof Gates nor Sgt Crowley were wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong.
The beer at the White House, then, marks an attempt to balance white fears about black lawlessness, whether real or imagined, with black middle-class grievances about white racism, whether real or imagined.
Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race. To be a history-defying candidate he became a history-denying figure, and left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy.
Since winning the presidency, however, he has been much more expansive on the issue, starting with his victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago, where he located his achievement in the context of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, the climatic moments of the civil rights era.
During his recent speech before the civil-rights group, the NAACP, he made reference to these events to emphasise his theme of black self-improvement.
"I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere," he said accusingly.
Biblical language
The Gates controversy has been harder for him to deal with because it deals with more awkward history and touches on the ambiguous legacy of the civil rights era.
White support for the civil rights movement started to wane when blacks demanded affirmative action and reparations. Conversely, racial profiling is an area where blacks feel they are still treated as second-class citizens.
This controversy not only taps into that milieu, but inadvertently brings together two unlikely protagonists: Prof Gates, one of America’s most eloquent advocates of affirmative action, and Sgt Crowley, who for five years taught a class on racial profiling at a local police academy which cautioned against stereotyping.
When you reach back into American history, you often find that racial progress has often come when the case for reform or reconciliation has been framed in Biblical language or used faith-based allegories.
Rev King’s I Have a Dream speech is the most obvious and glorious example.
Now Barack Obama is conjuring up a modern-day parable: the story of the professor, the policeman and the president. But can he turn beer into progress
Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
By Nick Bryant
BBC News
To the already long list of improbable White House get-togethers – Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Princess Diana and John Travolta – we will be able to add the names of a black professor and a white policeman at the centre of a national uproar over race relations.
Cambridge police sergeant Jim Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard scholar he arrested after responding to a report of a possible break-in at Mr Gates’s home, will sit down with Mr Obama on Thursday for a conciliatory beer.
Admittedly, it is tempting to view the invitation as the ultimate conflation of the age of Obama and the age of Oprah.
Aside from the choice of beverage, there is something very daytime television, something very soft focus, something very soft sofa, about this attempt to defuse the controversy.
Mr Gates was held for disorderly conduct, after he allegedly criticised police behaviour during the incident at the scholar’s home on 16 July. President Obama – a friend of Mr Gates – got involved in the case, saying that the police had acted "stupidily".
Yet startling and novel as Mr Obama’s attempts to diffuse the controversy are, he is merely upholding a long tradition. Presidential racial politics has often been conducted with gestures, symbols and photo opportunities, and this is but the latest example of a well-worn genre.
Obvious gestures
Even since the war, when black voters – or the Negro vote, as it was then known – became a potentially election-deciding force, presidents have embraced symbolic gestures, for the simple reason that they allow them to appeal to blacks without alienating whites.
Often the gestures have been rather obvious. Sometimes they have been so subtle as to be almost subliminal.
Alert to the growing strategic importance of the black vote in key northern battleground states, Dwight D Eisenhower invited the black contralto, Marian Anderson, to perform at his 1956 inauguration. It was a gesture especially redolent with meaning, since in 1939 she had been barred from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington.
His successor, John F Kennedy, happily extended a White House invitation to the world heavyweight boxing champion, Floyd Patterson, hoping it would compensate for his stubborn refusal to offer similar hospitality to Martin Luther King.
"Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race"
Black scholar arrest angers ObamaNot to be outdone by President Eisenhower, JFK also invited Marian Anderson to sing at his inaugural, but then went a few notable steps further by dancing with black women at the balls later on that night.
This kind of imagery has also been used in reverse, using more harmful symbolism.
Ronald Reagan delivered the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town memorialised in the Hollywood movie, Mississippi Burning – where three civil-rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964.
The subject of his speech was "states rights", for some a euphemism for white supremacy.
In 1992, the then-Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, famously attacked the black singer Sister Souljah; and, more infamously, made sure he returned home to Little Rock mid-campaign to oversee the lethal injection of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain damaged black man who had killed a police officer.
Fears and grievances
These kind of techniques are so commonly deployed, largely because they can have such a dramatic effect.
Even as black leaders attacked him for his timidity on civil rights, Mr Kennedy enjoyed high approval ratings among black voters, partly because they had been such full participants in his inaugural celebrations.
Nothing underscored Bill Clinton’s moderate, New Democrat credentials than his attack on a black hip-hop artist.
So history suggests that it would be foolish to underestimate the reconciliatory potential of this Budweiser moment, however dubious it sounds.
After all, conflict resolution often turns on the mutual and public acknowledgement of each side’s fears and grievances, along with the photo-opportunity that accompanies it.
By extending this invitation, Mr Obama also appears to be signalling that neither Prof Gates nor Sgt Crowley were wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong.
The beer at the White House, then, marks an attempt to balance white fears about black lawlessness, whether real or imagined, with black middle-class grievances about white racism, whether real or imagined.
Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race. To be a history-defying candidate he became a history-denying figure, and left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy.
Since winning the presidency, however, he has been much more expansive on the issue, starting with his victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago, where he located his achievement in the context of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, the climatic moments of the civil rights era.
During his recent speech before the civil-rights group, the NAACP, he made reference to these events to emphasise his theme of black self-improvement.
"I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere," he said accusingly.
Biblical language
The Gates controversy has been harder for him to deal with because it deals with more awkward history and touches on the ambiguous legacy of the civil rights era.
White support for the civil rights movement started to wane when blacks demanded affirmative action and reparations. Conversely, racial profiling is an area where blacks feel they are still treated as second-class citizens.
This controversy not only taps into that milieu, but inadvertently brings together two unlikely protagonists: Prof Gates, one of America’s most eloquent advocates of affirmative action, and Sgt Crowley, who for five years taught a class on racial profiling at a local police academy which cautioned against stereotyping.
When you reach back into American history, you often find that racial progress has often come when the case for reform or reconciliation has been framed in Biblical language or used faith-based allegories.
Rev King’s I Have a Dream speech is the most obvious and glorious example.
Now Barack Obama is conjuring up a modern-day parable: the story of the professor, the policeman and the president. But can he turn beer into progress
Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Maintaining a healthy weight is not about your daily intake of fat — and it is not about cutting out the carbs!
Anya Hindmarch’s timeless carryalls and evening bags have become a staple in the world of luxury accessories, spotted on public figures such as Reese Witherspoon, Angelina Jolie, and Princess Diana since the brand’s inception in the early ’90s.
Hundreds of thousands of Brits have headed to the sun seeking a Spanish idyll. But the economic crash has left many facing disaster
The British butcher has gone and the karaoke nights at Jack’s and the Big Ben bar are all but dead. You can still get all-day British breakfasts and John Smiths on tap in San Fulgencio but a row of dusty, unkempt shop windows is all that remains of the internet cafe, the installer of pirated British TV channels and the Property Choice estate agent.
“It’s like a ghost town,” says Dennis Conway, 76, who is thinking of joining the exodus of Britons from this once bustling estate of bungalows and modest two-storey houses a few miles from Spain’s eastern Mediterranean coast. “It’s devastating. My pension is slowly disintegrating and there is nothing we can do about it. It is bloody frightening to think what might still happen.”
Dennis has been here for 15 years. He has seen the La Marina estate in San Fulgencio go from a sleepy outpost of retired Brits to a boomtown of holidaymakers, second home-owners and young families trying to make a go of it in Spain, to the current bust. “I’ve never seen it this bad. I’m thinking of going back.”
Britain’s fevered obsession with the Spanish good life is over. Once, ex-pat bars up and down the Mediterranean coast heaved with happy talk about cheap beer, low council taxes and why it was so much better to be in Spain. Now the drinkers are more likely to curse the pitiful pound, discuss who missed the last outing of the British pensioners’ club, and swap stories of friends who are moving home. There are whispered tales, too, of repossessions and of people packing up, dropping their keys at the bank and trusting easyJet to save them from Spanish creditors.
San Fulgencio is not alone. The removal trucks are busy in all the “urbanizaciones“, the vast housing estates that Brits now call “urbanisations”. They are places like La Marina, Ciudad Quesada, La Siesta, El Raso and all the others that line the dual carriageway inland from the beach town of Torrevieja, 35 miles south of Alicante. The trucks are also grinding their way up the narrow, twisting roads to the small hillside villages colonised by the last wave of Britons to catch Spain fever and come looking for sunshine, property and independence.
Removals companies confirm the tide has turned. “I’d say 70% of our work is now taking people back,” says one of the many cash-in-hand British “white van men” working without licences outside the Spanish tax regime. He did not want to be named. “We’ve had retired people calling us and saying they are going to Bulgaria or places like that,” explains Angie Russell, whose Union Jack company near Benidorm has been moving Brits – legally – for 22 years.
Television shows such as Channel 4′s A Place in the Sun promised adventure, swimming pools and the good life. A collapsing pound and the credit crunch have brought a harsher reality: homesickness, financial hardship and something those who call themselves “expats” rarely take into account, that they are immigrants – often with all the problems of not understanding the language or the rules. Interestingly, a surprising number of them list immigration as one of the things they dislike about Britain. Few, indeed, come from Britain’s own ethnic minorities.
For some, Spain has become a nightmare. Judy and Bill are going back to the West Country this month. Both served in the armed forces, then ran a fish-and-chip shop before coming to a rented villa with a swimming pool and views of the beautiful Jalón Valley in northern Alicante. That was two years ago. Frustration, boredom and their own naked prejudice are driving them home. Encounters with Spanish housing developers and their British estate agents – who scare them so much they do not want their real names used – have left them bitter. “This is a country with no law,” proclaims Judy. “We in England abide by the rules but here they don’t bother. Even the Brits here rip you off. I think most people would go back if they could. It’ll be a relief to get home. It’s not as cheap as people think.”
“We’re unsettled,” admits Barbara Moseley, who is selling her house in San Fulgencio and moving to Lancashire. “I miss the grandchildren. I’m on the phone every day to them. I’ll miss the easy pace of life here but the family comes before that.” Her ex-policeman husband Terry does not want to go, but admits the winters now feel chillier and their unsteady pensions dwindled by up to 30% as the pound lost value dramatically last year. The rollercoaster exchange rates saw them losing €500 a month at one stage. The Moseleys will have to wait to go home. The market is flooded with unsold homes. “We’ve only had two people come to view it in 12 months.”
A million Britons live for all or most of the year in Spain, according to the British embassy, although only 375,000 have registered formally at local town halls. Many would rather the Spanish authorities, especially those who collect taxes, did not know they were there. The one million figure makes them Spain’s biggest immigrant group.
Brits in Spain are usually associated with the southern Costa del Sol, near Malaga. It has glitzy, corrupt Marbella and once boasted Sean Connery, Barbara Windsor and glamorous East End gangsters among its denizens. Even Princess Diana visited. The biggest population of Britons, however, lives in Alicante province, along the long stretch of coast from Denia to Torrevieja. There is little glamour – and no princesses – here. Incomes are low, and the black market, English-speaking economy has attracted a legion of ill-prepared chancers trying to live off their – sometimes invented – skills as plumbers, electricians, hairdressers, gardeners, pool cleaners or labourers. “It’s the younger people who are moving back to Britain,” says Barbara Chadwick, at the Home 2 Home removals firm near Javea. “They just can’t make it here.”
But even the true Spanish devotees are finding the going tough. Phyllis and Ron Hillman, both in their late sixties, have found two state pensions no longer fund the good life they once had in San Fulgencio.”It sounds shocking, but we never had to budget before,” says Phyllis. “We are down €300 a month. What do you do? You cancel your gym membership and you don’t go out nearly as much. And we couldn’t afford the British butcher any more.”
Penny Lapenna is another of the genuine Spain-lovers. She and husband Joe sold their house in London’s East End nine years ago, and bought a house outright in the charming inland village of Parcent. They learned Spanish, got jobs, put their three daughters into the local school and enjoyed life. “We swapped our grey clothes for bright clothes,” says Linda. “I have loved living in Spain.”
Then her husband’s computer business folded and Linda lost her job on an English- language newspaper. Now she is applying for jobs in the UK. Her sister and at least three other British families from the village have already gone. “We’ve seen many families come and go in nine years. They fall into two groups: one lot with crazy notions and no command of the language who ended up having an extended holiday; and the other lot who made quite a go of it and set up businesses. But, like any immigrant, if your business struggles you have no fall-back.”
A Spanish bank manager in San Fulgencio confirms that people are dropping off their keys. “They are wrong to do that,” she says. “That does not cancel a mortgage in Spain.” Already banks are hiring lawyers in Britain to track debtors down. “I’m getting calls from people who are having houses repossessed almost twice a week,” says Michael Wroot, at the second-hand furniture store he has run in Javea for 26 years. “It’s probably the worst it has ever been.”
While the young move home, the old have few options. “Some people are having real problems paying the bills,” explains the owner of a private old people’s home for expats in Alicante. Even the dead try to save money. Seventy percent of the corpses donated for science to Alicante’s Miguel Hernández University belong to Britons – in some cases simply to avoid the expense of a funeral. “Some of those who have approached me don’t have much money,” admits Lionel Sharpe, who helps the university recruit future corpses.
In contrast, Helen and Len Prior actually found the kind of Mediterranean paradise promised in the glossy brochures. Orchards of lemon trees line the road to their home at Vera, inland from the spectacular, volcanic coastline of Almeria. A garden, built up over six years, contains an acre and a half of palm trees and exotic plants. There is a heated swimming pool and a workshop-cum-garage area. There is, however, no house. That was bulldozed 17 months ago by the local authority, five years after they had moved in.
Where there was once a two-storey, £300,000 home – built with money from the sale of their old home in Wokingham – there is now just a large slab of concrete. “We’d be standing in the hall now,” says Len, beside the workman’s metal shed that now serves as their outside loo. Their dog Bonzo, traumatised by the men in big yellow machines, cowers from strangers.
The Priors, both 64, live in their garage while Spanish courts argue whether the local authority was right to declare their home illegal and knock it down. They won the most recent case, but will not get compensation any time soon. The glory days of gardening, swimming and relaxing in the sun have given way to worry and ill-health. Unlike others who bought illegally built homes without asking questions, the Priors did their homework and got their licences. “It was a dream,” says Helen. “We were really happy here.”
What they did not count on, however, was different levels of the Spanish administration, run by opposing parties, using them to wage a political war. The Priors admit that their Spanish is “awful” and so depend completely on their lawyer. To them the regional government is not socialist but “communist”.
Their case has sent shivers through the British community, where fear of the demolition man is spreading. The letters pages of the Benidorm-based Costa Blanca News bubble with angry rants against Spanish tax authorities, police officers, town halls and, occasionally, Spaniards as a whole. For everyone who moans, though, another one leaps to defend the country they have all chosen to live in.
The Priors, who have more reason to complain than others, have not joined either the exodus or the anti-Spanish chorus. “People came and helped us who we had never seen before. We’ve had little old people hugging us and asking whether we have enough to eat,” says Helen. “Spain is a wonderful country. We will still stay. We would never go back” •
