The optics of the royal tour of the Caribbean have not been great, writes @mounth
📷The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge looked more than a little awkward as they “shook their waists like nobody’s business” and played the drums in Belize and Jamaica
The royals’ visit coincided with a swelling wave of republicanism in the Caribbean.
🇧🇿 First, farmers in Belize, protesting about land rights, stopped the couple’s first appointment
🇯🇲Then, when the Cambridges got to Jamaica, Prime Minister Andrew Holness made it plain that the country’s true ambitions are “as an independent, developed, prosperous country”
Prince William did his best to fend off anti-colonialist attacks in his Jamaica speech, expressing his “profound sorrow” for slavery which “should never have happened”.
❓But was it too little too late?
👑Is the monarchy rapidly becoming an anachronism in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Commonwealth?
And will the Commonwealth itself soon be a thing of the past – not just when the Queen sadly goes but even before that?
🗣️ “Once the Queen is gone, I suspect the Commonwealth will be finished. This Caribbean tour seemed patronising and outdated. Kate and William dancing and drum-beating was excruciating" says royal biographer Anna Pasternak
It is possible to maintain that umbilical link between the monarchy and the Commonwealth, writes @mounth
➡️But few would argue against a need for the monarch and their advisers to establish a modern and delicate balancing act – to maintain the Commonwealth as a club of equals
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.