Harry invited to King’s coronation
LONDON - Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have received an invitation to his father King Charles’s coronation but will not yet confirm publicly whether they will attend, a spokesperson for Harry said on Sunday.
Preparations for the event in May have been overshadowed by the couple’s damning revelations about the King, Harry’s elder brother Prince William and other royals in his recent memoir, a Netflix documentary and a series of TV interviews.
His recent high-profile and stinging criticism of his family had led to speculation over whether Harry, who stepped down from royal duties in 2020, would be invited to the coronation and, if he was, whether he would attend.
“I can confirm The Duke has recently received email correspondence from His Majesty’s office regarding the coronation,” a spokesperson for Price Harry said.
“An immediate decision on whether The Duke and Duchess will attend will not be disclosed by us at this time.”
Buckingham Palace is yet to respond to a request for comment.
ATHENS - A Greek railway employee was jailed on Sunday pending trial over a deadly train crash that killed at least 57 people, as Greeks seethed with anger over the worst rail disaster in living memory.
Protests continued to reverberate days after a head-on collision of a passenger train and a freight carrier on the Athens-Thessaloniki route late in the evening of February 28.
Clashes erupted between police and demonstrators in Athens on Sunday, after thousands rallied to protest over the crash.
The 59-year-old Larissa station master faces multiple charges of disrupting transport and putting lives at risk.
The man, who cannot be named under Greek law, was questioned for seven hours before a magistrate on Sunday before being detained.
“For about 20 cursed minutes he was responsible for the safety of the whole of central Greece,” his lawyer Stefanos Pantzartzidis said.
On Thursday, Mr Pantzartzidis said that his client was devastated and had assumed responsibility “proportionate to him” but other factors were also at play, without elaborating.
Railway workers say the country’s rail network has been creaking under cost-cutting and underinvestment, a legacy of Greece’s debilitating debt crisis from 2010 to 2018.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who blamed the crash on human error, acknowledged that decades of neglect could have contributed to the disaster.
“As prime minister, I owe everyone, but most of all the relatives of the victims, an apology,” he wrote on his Facebook account. “Justice will very fast investigate the tragedy and determine liabilities.”
After protests over the past three days across the country, some 10,000 people gathered in an Athens square on Sunday to express sympathy for the lives lost and to demand better safety standards on the rail network.