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Meghan Markle appears in first interview since Lillibet’s birth

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meghan Markle has used her first interview since the birth of her and Prince Harry’s daughter, Lillibet Diana, to promote her new book </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bench</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Duchess of Sussex spoke with NPR’s </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weekend Edition Sunday: Picture This</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> radio show and revealed that the book was inspired by a gift she gave her husband for his first Father’s Day - a garden bench.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“As most of us do, you go, what am I going to get them as a gift? And I thought I just wanted something sentimental and a place for him to have as a bit of a home base with our son,” she said.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The 39-year-old said she made a plaque for the bench with a short poem she wrote on it, which sparked the initial idea for her book.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“This is your bench, Where life will begin, For you and our son, Our baby, our kin,” it reads.</span></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bench</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> depicts different types of fathers and sons bonding over activities on or near a bench.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I really hope that people can see this as a love story that transcends the story of my family,” she said.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I often find, and especially in this past year, I think so many of us realised how much happens in the quiet.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“It was definitely moments like that, watching them from out of the window and watching [my husband] just, you know, rock him to sleep or carry him or, you know … those lived experiences, from my observation, are the things that I infused in this poem.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meghan also said her and Harry’s son Archie is a “voracious” reader and “loves” the book.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I knew our son would notice all of those elements, and he loves the book, which is great because he has a voracious appetite for books and constantly when we read him a boko he goes ‘again, again, again’.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“But now the fact he loves </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bench</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and we can say ‘Mumm wrote this for you’ feels amazing,” the duchess said.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meghan also shared that the book contains several personal and family details hidden throughout the book, including Princess Diana’s favourite flower and the Sussexes’ rescue chickens.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I think you can find sweet little moments that we hid in there - of my favourite flower, even my husband’s mum’s favourite flower, forget-me-nots,” she said</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We wanted to make sure those were included in there. There are many, many special details and love that went into this book.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Image: Duke of Sussex / Instagram</span></p>

Beauty & Style

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Sacked journalist hits back over "racist" royal tweet

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A columnist who was fired from </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Telegraph</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> over a “racist” tweet about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s baby has released a follow-up essay blaming “snowflake sociopaths” and “cancel culture” for her firing.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Julie Burchill lost her job after mocking the name of the Sussexes’ daughter Lillibet Diana on Twitter.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“What a missed opportunity,” she wrote. “They could have called it Georgina Floydina!”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The journalist took to Facebook to announce she had been sacked after working for </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Telegraph</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for five years, claiming she had been complaining about the paper rejecting her “edgy column ideas” recently.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Burchill reiterated that she wasn’t “upset in the least” about losing her column in a </span><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9686037/JULIE-BURCHILL-reveals-wont-silenced.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">new essay</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> published in </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Daily Mail</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Newspapers with no original voices will decline even more rapidly than they would anyway in the digital age. It’s ironic that a conservative newspaper which castigates cancel culture cancelled me for castigating wokery.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Burchill insisted her tweet was “sober, wry and entirely without racist intent”, and that she could not “stress enough how much I deplore the murder of George Floyd”.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“What I was mocking was the type of people who - like H&amp;M - live in gated communities while espousing BLM’s politics of social upheaval, without giving any thought to the damage that pro-BLM riots do to poor and black Americans.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This goes against research conducted by </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summers-black-lives-matter-protesters-were-overwhelming-peaceful-our-research-finds/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Washington Post</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> last year which found the Black Lives Matter protests involved very little violence and property damage from protesters. Instead, most of the violence reportedly came from police or counterprotesters directed at BLM protesters.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">She has attributed the backlash to a “sexist and misogynist element” within “wokeness”.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We live in an age of cultural insanity, a topsy-turvy land where men are women, harassment is justice and the Left are jostling to tug their forelocks and call for those of us who criticise royalty to be punished,” she said.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Burchill also touted her new publication on Substack - an online platform that allows writers to create and send email newsletters to paying subscribers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“In the autumn, I’ll be back with my book, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Welcome To The Woke Trials</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">,” she wrote.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“And thanks to Twitter, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Telegraph</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and a pair of hypocritical fibbers whose fantasy land is so fragile brilliant journalists (me) must be silenced in order to maintain the illusion - it will have a whole new ending.”</span></p> <p><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Image: Daily Mail</span></em></p>

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