Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the second biggest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has revealed his frustration with the fallout from the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
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Jordan’s efforts to maintain stability in the face of the turbulence of the Arab spring suffered a new blow on Thursday when the prime minister resigned – the third time this has happened in the last 18 months.
Awn Khasawneh submitted his resignation without warning after six months in office following a backlash against proposed electoral reforms in the western-backed kingdom that were seen by critics as an assault on civil liberties. A statement from the royal palace said the resignation had been accepted, without elaboration.
His replacement is Fayez al-Tarawneh, who was prime minister in the late 1990s. Jordanian responses to the news suggested it would not be seen as a significant change.
In his public appearances, King Abdullah has acknowledged pressure for reform in the spirit of protests across the Middle East and north Africa but he has been widely criticised for failing to set a timetable to allow the formation of governments based on a parliamentary majority.
Over the past 15 months Jordanian demonstrators have demanded political and economic changes, official accountability and an end to corruption.
Overwhelmingly peaceful protests have never seemed to threaten the regime. But Jordan’s problem is that, unlike Saudi Arabia, it does not have the financial resources to buy off dissent.
“Jordan will seem ‘stable’, until it’s not. And then it will be too late,” commented Middle East analyst Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha centre on Twitter.
Labib Kamhawi, a Jordanian analyst, predicted that the resignation would increase pressure on the king to bring in reforms. “There will be increased tension between the palace and popular movements seeking reforms,” Kamhawi told AP.
In a recent report the International Crisis Group criticised Abdullah’s responses. “The king has shuffled cabinets and then shuffled them again, using prime ministers as buffers to absorb popular discontent,” it said. “He has charged committees to explore possible reforms, but these remain largely unimplemented.”
A draft election law limited the number of seats that opposition parties can hold in parliament. It was supplemented by a proposed ban on political parties that have been established on a religious basis. Both these moves were seen as targeting the Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and Jordan’s leading political party, which – like its equivalent in Egypt – would probably gain power in any free and fair election.
Opinion formers hold politicians in low regard. “The state of the Jordanian parliament today reminds me of the Dead Sea,” commented blogger Naseem Tarawnah. “It’s the lowest point on earth, it’s a body of water where nothing can survive, and it continues to recede every year, causing an increasingly dire situation. The events in parliament that have transpired in the past few days and weeks have come to demonstrate the degree to which our parliament has hit rock bottom.”
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When Paradise Gems was ransacked and burned to the ground during last summer’s riots in Tottenham, north London, owner Steve Moore expected to be back in business again quickly.
Eight months on, the jeweller remains out of work. Of the 50 or so mainly family-owned businesses on the High Road damaged by rioters, his is the only one not to have started trading again.
Moore, 57, says it was not the damage done in the riots that left him unable to pick up the pieces. What devastated the business he ran for 20 years with his wife and daughter was the loss of six safes, which survived the looting and fire intact – but were emptied afterwards as they lay in the rubble of his building.
Last week, police arrested a 27-year-old man concerning the theft and issued CCTV footage to encourage witnesses to come forward.
About 90% of Moore’s stock was in the fireproof safes, including £500,000 worth of jewellery, held as security for customers of his pawnbroking business. For weeks after the riots, Moore was confident of getting the contents back. “The safes had been sitting on wooden floors and I expected them to have collapsed into the basement. I just thought they would still be sitting there underneath all the rubble and it would just be a case of digging them out,” he says.
When Moore was allowed back on to the site where his building had stood, he was in for a shock. The doors had been ripped off two safes and another four were missing altogether. Of his 12 safes, he recovered the contents from six.
“I was already on the floor, with losing the business, and I didn’t think I could have gone much lower at that point. I don’t think I was a very well person for quite a while,” says Moore.
He reported the theft to Tottenham police station on 5 September 2011, but claims he could not convince them to treat the case as a priority. It was only when he explained his plight to the Prince of Wales, during a royal visit to mark six months since the riots, that things began to change.
“It felt like police were dragging their heels. I think they had so much on their minds with trying to catch the rioters and everything else, they probably looked at it and thought, ‘he must be insured; let him get on with it’,” Moore says. Police, he claims, initially failed to grasp that most of what had been lost was not easily replaceable stock but the often treasured pieces of jewellery he was holding for 200 customers as security for short-term loans.
Soon after the meeting in February 2012, one of Prince Charles’s aides phoned Kay Horne, at the prince’s charity, Business in the Community, asking her to take up Moore’s case and saying that the prince wished to be kept informed of progress.
Horne, who works with riot-affected businesses, says Moore’s story clearly struck a chord with the prince. “In the seven months I have been working in Tottenham, I have seen an awful lot of people who have suffered very badly from the riots. Businesses are still suffering from major loss of trade because people are afraid to come into the area. However, as far as I’m aware Steve is the only trader not to have been able to find alternative premises and return to the High Road. Everyone else has managed to get their businesses up and running. He is stuck in limbo.”
Moore says the loss of the safes cost him not just his business but his good name. “My reputation on this high road is destroyed now completely, along with my pension and everything else. It’s gone. I was a pawnbroker and I’ve lost £500,000 of customers’ goods.”
Initially, police told Moore not to tell his customers about the thefts for fear of compromising the inquiry, a silence that allowed damaging rumours to circulate. “The police said keep quiet, so I didn’t say anything – so I had my customers and other people saying I had run off with the stuff.”
Moore has worked in Tottenham for 35 years – all his professional life – but says he became nervous of returning to the area because of the hostility he faced: “A lot of my phone calls are people being quite nasty to me. I don’t hang around there too much.”
With news of the recent arrest and continuing police investigation, Moore hopes things will return to normal. Less easy to resolve is the fact that many customers will be left out of pocket because they are too late to apply for compensation from the government’s riot damages scheme. Moore says they missed the 42-day deadline through no fault of their own and an exception should be made. “It’s the only fair thing to do,” he says.
Last summer was not the first time Paradise Gems had suffered. On average, Moore’s shop was robbed about once a year, the worst time being about seven years ago, when two men trussed up his wife and stabbed him in the leg with a samurai sword.
Whereas Moore has always bounced back before, this time he is not so sure: “I would love to open up again, but it’s impossible.” Having been out of work for the first time in his life, Moore has some sympathy with the rioters. “I know how they felt … with the frustration of never having a job, I can now understand that. I would give my right arm for a job.”
The interest shown by the prince has left him feeling more optimistic. “It knocked me away, what he has done.”
A spokesman for Clarence House said that during their visit to Tottenham the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall had been “touched by the experiences of those they met, including Mr Moore, and have encouraged their charities to support them wherever possible”.
A Metropolitan police spokesman said: “We can confirm several officers were present at the community meeting that Prince Charles attended in Tottenham in February.
“Assistant Commissioner Simon Byrne spoke to the owner of Paradise Gems about his concerns. Following the meeting, Chief Superintendent Sandra Looby, Haringey borough commander, was able to confirm that this was very much an active investigation. A 27-year-old man was arrested on 5 April in connection with the theft and is at present on police bail.”
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A pair of pearl earrings that were kept in the back of a desk drawer for 35 years because the owner did not like them could fetch £500,000 at auction.
The piece was a gift from a Romanian king to his mistress, who left them to a British friend upon her death in 1977.
She had no idea of their worth and kept them in the desk drawer for years as they struck her as too big and ostentatious to wear. They were inherited by her nephew, who casually showed them to a shocked auctioneer when he was selling some other items.
Their emergence has generated huge interest from collectors around the world and they are being tipped to sell at auction for £500,000 or more.
Jonathan Edwards, from Woolley and Wallis auction rooms in Salisbury, Wiltshire, said: “The couple who own them brought in a few bits and pieces to sell, then mentioned these pearls almost as an afterthought. They had been kept in a box in a desk drawer since the late 70s. The man’s auntie never liked them.
“The couple had no idea of their value and never gave them a second thought. They were blown away when I told them the estimate.”
Edwards said the pearls were wonderful objects with an interesting story behind them. King Carol II of Romania bought them for his mistress Elena.
Carol abdicated following the romance and he and Elena lived in exile in Portugal. After Elena’s death some of her jewellery was left to a British friend she knew in Portugal. The unnamed woman brought them back to Wiltshire but consigned them to the drawer.
In the catalogue they are estimated to be worth up to £120,000 but Edwards said they could fetch five times that. The market has boomed in recent years thanks to interest from the Middle East and China.
The pearls have been examined by the Swiss Gemmological Institute. It concluded the pearls “possess outstanding characteristics and merit special mention and appreciation”.
The institute added: “Their colour is white with rose and blue overtones. It is very rare to assemble a matching pair of pearls of this size and quality. Thus, the described pair of natural pearls represent a very exceptional treasure.”
The auction takes place in Salisbury on Thursday.
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They were once the star royal family of Europe, seen as hard-working, frugal, modern and genuinely popular among ordinary Spaniards who adored King Juan Carlos as the great bringer of democracy.
But now Spain’s royals have revealed an ability to shoot themselves in the foot, both literally and metaphorically, in a way that has left angry citizens wondering if they even notice how ordinary people are suffering.
As unemployment reached 24%, austerity measures bit and the economy headed back towards double-dip recession, the 74-year-old monarch had publicly claimed he lay in bed at night worrying about the plight of the young jobless. But a fall as he walked to the bathroom in an exclusive safari camp in Botswana, where he had gone to shoot elephants, water buffaloes and other exotic animals, has revealed a different story.
While Spaniards desperately sought work or struggled to meet basic needs, the king was on a hush-hush, all-expenses-paid hunting trip, blasting at animals in one of the world’s most exotic landscapes – Botswana’s Okavango delta.
His big-game-slaying holiday was estimated to cost €10,000 (£8,000) a day, with a Syrian businessman close to the Saudi royal family rumoured to be picking up the tab.
It was not the kind of thing Spaniards wanted to hear as the government announced health and education cuts and fears grew of a bailout accompanied by years of harsh austerity.
“We all have to tighten our belts a bit because of the difficult times for the economy,” the king had told them over the summer, as he backed austerity.
The hunting trip was just the latest in a series of gaffes which have seen Spain’s normally respectful press tear up a decades-old deal not to scrutinise the royal family.
That agreement had stayed in place since Juan Carlos inherited General Francisco Franco’s powers after the dictator’s death in 1975 and oversaw the restoration of monarchy and democracy. His role in quashing a 1981 coup attempt appeared to cement his position.
In recent months, however, the king has struggled to separate the monarchy from a corruption scandal surrounding his son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarín, Duke of Palma.
The duke, a former Olympic medal winner with Spain’s handball team, denies allegations that he used charities as fronts for taking millions of euros in public money, some of it hidden from tax authorities, so that he could cash in on his royal title by appearing at events alongside politicians.
“Everyone, especially those of us with public functions, must behave correctly, in an exemplary fashion,” the king solemnly declared in his Christmas broadcast as the scandal snowballed and the monarchy’s popularity tumbled in opinion polls.
He hired a new public relations chief, former El País columnist Javier Ayuso, with glowing pro-monarchy editorials appearing in the centre-left daily and other newspapers. The royal palace’s accounts were also made public in what Spaniards were told was a new era of transparency.
But Juan Carlos’s attempts at portraying his family as hard-working, humble and law-abiding had taken a blow when his 13-year-old grandson, Froilán Marichalar, shot himself through the foot with a 36-calibre shotgun just a few days before the Botswana incident.
Newspapers reported that Froilán was too young to use the shotgun legally, raising further questions about whether the royals felt normal rules did not apply to them.
“These people just don’t understand the reality of this country,” complained Mercedes Munarriz, a sound engineer. “They even seem to be running a perfect campaign against themselves.”
But it was the king’s Botswana fall, which required him to fly back for a hip operation in Madrid, that provoked an unprecedented torrent of criticism of a monarch unused to harsh words from the press or mainstream politicians.
“The king should choose between responsibility and abdication,” said Tomás Gómez, head of Madrid’s Socialist party, as pressure grew for Juan Carlos to make way for his son, Felipe.
“The African elephant scandal is not anecdotal,” said Ignacio Escolar, one of Spain’s most popular bloggers. “It cannot be so when the Spanish monarchy has spent months going from scandal to scandal, when the economic crisis makes Spaniards question all their institutions and when even his own family cannot escape the stain of corruption.”
Even the king’s private life, where rumours of lovers have always been rife, is no longer out of bounds – and neither is his friendship with a German aristocrat whose name is widely available in Spain and Germany, but whose lawyers say she denies any inappropriate relationship and have threatened legal action against any British newspapers that reveal her name.
“The failure of his marriage to Queen Sofia, from whom he is practically separated, is public knowledge,” said José Antonio Zarzalejos, a former editor of the conservative ABC newspaper, in his online column.
Officials at the king’s Zarzuela palace declined to say who had travelled with him or paid for a trip that they described as private, nor would they comment on his personal life.
A more ferocious debate was taking place on social networks and the internet. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said it had received more than 80,000 internet complaints against the king – its honorary president in Spain – for shooting elephants for fun.
“The impact is huge in Britain, Germany, Holland, the United States and other countries,” said WWF Spain’s boss, Juan Carlos del Olmo, explaining why it was considering sacking the king. “It is more of an image problem, both national and international, than a conservation question.”
Palace officials said they had not been formally told of any plans by the WWF to break with the monarch.
Foreign Policy magazine blogger Joshua E Keating added to Spain’s sense of humiliation by asking whether the king had deliberately sought the least politically correct holiday. “Was the baby-seal-clubbing junket all booked up?” he wondered.
The Spanish government has also received a deluge of requests that taxpayer funds given to the king should not be excluded from a new transparency law. All this pales, however, beside the latest allegations made by defence lawyers representing a business partner of the king’s son-in-law.
This week they provided copies of emails which allegedly showed that Juan Carlos acted as an intermediary between Urdangarín and public officials, trying to persuade politicians to get involved with the creation of a new America’s Cup sailing project. Urdangarín had allegedly hoped to earn money from it.
There was no suggestion the king had done anything illegal, though his status excludes him from the legal process anyway. Officials said the emails reflected his support for sailing, one of his family’s favourite sports. The news magazine Interviú this week claimed anticorruption investigators are trying to find up to €5m allegedly kept in tax havens by Urdangarín – whose appearances in court have proved an embarrassment. On Wednesday the king appeared on his crutches to issue an 11-word apology for his behaviour. “I am very sorry. I made a mistake and it will not happen again,” he said.
“I applaud the apology, but am left with a question. Exactly what is it that won’t happen again?” asked Escolar.
Even ministers find themselves getting tangled up in the lexicon of royal gaffes, as the expression “shoot yourself in the foot” gains new significance in Madrid. The foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, had to apologise for using it as a way of describing Argentina’s nationalisation of the Spanish-owned oil company YPF this week. “It was an unfortunate expression,” he said. “I meant no double-meaning.”
• This article was amended on 26 April 2012. The original caption said the photograph showed King Juan Carlos “on his €10,000-a-day hunting safari in Botswana, which had been hushed up before he fell and broke his hip”. This has been corrected.
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This article titled “Jordan’s prime minister quits suddenly” was written by Ian Black, Middle East editor, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 26th April 2012 16.49 UTC