Carole, matriarch of the Middleton family, grand mother to the heir to the heir to the throne is in embarrassment her Party Pieces mail order firm having collapsed into administration. Debts of £2.5 million, mainly owed to small suppliers, along with unpaid tax and a covid loan appear to be due to be written off … Read more
Boris Johnson flouncing off in a narcissistic rage, spewing bile and blame in all directions, appears to have shot his bolt with only a few die-hards still bleating his cause. There will be three byelections when Tories’ polling numbers are down but the party on present evidence looks unlikely to tear itself apart. Though … Read more
Pat Robertson, the televangelist, who has died at 93, is notable not just because he turned God into a cash machine. But more damagingly he spearheaded the intrusion of religion into the Republican Party and US politics, which has led to the present day furore over abortion, gay rights and racism. He saw Trump as … Read more
Francoise Gilot, a prolific and acclaimed artist, whose talent was underplayed because of her relationship with Pablo Picasso, has died at 101. Aged 21 in occupied Paris during WW11 she met Picasso, forty years her senior, while he was still married to the Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova and she replaced Doris Maar as his lover … Read more
Golf enthusiasts are outraged and scathing about the PGA selling out to the Saudi Investment Fund for a reputed $3 billion and merging with the breakaway LIV Golf whom until recently they were castigating as renegade mercenaries complicit in the legitimising of a bloodthirsty Saudi regime. The PGA bashed the Saudis constantly, citing their human … Read more
A dam in South Ukraine has been sabotaged flooding nearby towns and potentially jeopardising the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, which depends on cooling water to run emergency diesel generators. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russian troops of blowing up the plant “from inside” at 02:50 local time, while Moscow claims it was a “deliberate … Read more
Princess Eugenie has announced the birth of her second child, another boy, named Ernest. who arrived on 30 May at 8.49am in London. He is going to be a mover and shaker with a power-packed chart with a flamboyant Mars in Leo in his 1st house in an ultra-determined opposition to Pluto in his 7th … Read more
The epitome of English upper class chic and light-hearted devil-may-care wit, Noel Coward grew up in relative poverty and left school at nine to become a child performer. Prolific and versatile, he exuded effortless charm, acid wit and lauded a life of dilettante indulgence, while working like a Trojan writing 50 plays from his teens … Read more
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, voted the world’s greatest living composer in a 2019 survey by BBC Music Magazine, has died aged 70 of brain cancer. Her ‘sinuously alluring’ music was acclaimed for its sparkling beauty – meditative, mystical and complex, often informed by the sound of the wind, footsteps in the snow or the rush … Read more
Montenegro has a new president, replacing the strongman Đukanović, whose party held sway for three decades and whose abuse of power led the country to be designated a hybrid regime instead of a democracy. Montenegro is part of the Balkans, bordered by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Croatia and the Adriatic Sea. It … Read more