Prince Harry accuses Camilla of ‘dangerous’ leaks to UK tabloids
LONDON — Prince Harry has accused his stepmother, Camilla, the queen consort, of leaking private conversations to the media to burnish her own reputation as he promotes a new book that lays bare his story of his life behind palace walls.
In interviews broadcast Sunday and Monday, Harry accused members of the royal family of getting “into bed with the devil” to gain favorable tabloid coverage, singling out Camilla’s efforts to rehabilitate her image with the British people after her longtime affair with his father, now King Charles III.
“That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press,” he told CBS. “There was open willingness on both sides to trade information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being queen consort, there was gonna be people or bodies left in the street.”
Harry spoke to Britain’s ITV, CBS-TV’S “60 Minutes” and “Good Morning America” to promote his book “Spare,” which is to be widely released Tuesday.
Some U.K. bookshops plan to open at midnight to meet demand for the highly anticipated memoir, which has generated incendiary headlines with reports that it includes details of bitter family resentments, as well as Harry and his wife Meghan’s decision to give up their royal roles and move to California.
Children struggling with obesity should be evaluated and treated early and aggressively, including with medications for kids as young as 12 and surgery for those as young as 13, according to new guidelines released Monday.
Obesity in children:
The longstanding practice of “watchful waiting,” or delaying treatment to see whether children and teens outgrow or overcome obesity on their own only worsens the problem that affects more than 14.4 million young people in the U.S. Left untreated, obesity can lead to lifelong health problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes and depression.
“Waiting doesn’t work,” said Dr. Ihuoma Eneli, co-author of the first guidance on childhood obesity in 15 years from the American Academy of Pediatrics. “What we see is a continuation of weight gain and the likelihood that they’ll have (obesity) in adulthood.”
For the first time, the group’s guidance sets ages at which kids and teens should be offered medical treatments such as drugs and surgery — in addition to intensive diet, exercise and other behavior and lifestyle interventions, said Eneli, director of the Center for Healthy Weight and Nutrition at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
NY nurses strike: Thousands of nurses went on strike Monday at two of New York City’s major hospitals after contract negotiations stalled over staffing and salaries nearly three years into the coronavirus pandemic.
The privately owned, nonprofit hospitals were postponing nonemergency surgeries, diverting ambulances to other medical centers, pulling in temporary staffers and assigning administrators with nursing backgrounds to work in wards in order to cope with the walkout.
As many as 3,500 nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and about 3,600 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan were off the job. Talks were resuming
Monday afternoon at Montefiore, but there was no word on when bargaining might resume at Mount Sinai.
Hundreds of nurses picketed, some singing the chorus from Twisted Sister’s 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” outside Mount Sinai. It was one of many New York hospitals deluged with COVID-19 patients as the virus made the city an epicenter of deaths in 2020.
Voting by mail: The U.S. Postal Service delivered more than 54 million ballots for the midterm election, with nearly 99% of ballots delivered to election officials within three days, officials said Monday.
The Postal Service’s post-election analysis showed that on average it took under two days to deliver completed ballots.
By the end of the Dec. 6 Georgia Senate runoff, the Postal Service had delivered 54.4 million ballots to and from voters, officials said. They added that the number could be even
higher because the report doesn’t take into account ballots that were diverted from the normal flow to accelerate delivery and ballots that were not properly identified.
The Postal Service was dogged by backlogs and questions ahead of the 2020 presidential election in which a record-setting number of ballots were cast.
Aid for Pakistan: Dozens of countries and international institutions Monday pledged more than $9 billion to help Pakistan recover and rebuild from devastating summer floods that the United Nations chief called “a climate disaster of monumental scale.”
The flooding killed more than 1,700 people, destroyed more than 2 million homes and covered as much as one-third of the country at one point, causing damage totaling more than $30 billion, U.N. and Pakistani officials said. Large swaths of the country remain under water, with millions living near contaminated or stagnant
waters, the U.N. said.
Wrapping up a day-long conference at the U.N. offices in Geneva, Pakistani Deputy Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said the final tally came in above a target for the international community to meet half of the estimated $16.3 billion needed to respond to the flooding. The rest is expected to come from the Pakistani government itself.
“Taken as a whole, these commitments total more than $9 billion and from what we know so far, these are all additional commitments from what was already given in terms of humanitarian assistance, etc., from both bilateral and multilateral partners,” she said, adding that a number of delegations had also offered in-kind support.
Earth’s protective ozone layer is slowly but noticeably healing at a pace that would fully mend the hole over Antarctica in about 43 years, a new United Nations report said.
A once-every-fouryears
Ozone layer healing:
scientific assessment found recovery in progress, more than 35 years after every nation agreed to stop producing chemicals that chomp on the layer of ozone in atmosphere that shields the planet from radiation linked to skin cancer, cataracts and crop damage.
“In the upper stratosphere and in the ozone hole we see things getting better,” said Paul Newman, co-chair of the scientific assessment.
The progress is slow, according to the report presented Monday at the American Meteorological Society convention in Denver. The global average amount of ozone 18 miles high in the atmosphere won’t be back to 1980 pre-thinning levels until about 2040, the report said.
Scientists across the world have long hailed the efforts to heal the ozone hole — springing out of a 1987 agreement that banned a class of chemicals often used in refrigerants and aerosols — as one of the biggest ecological victories for humanity.