LONDON — Britain’s Prince William will marry his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton next spring or summer in London, the royal family announced Tuesday.

The announcement ends years of rumored splits, reconciliations and will-they, wont-they speculation. It will be the biggest royal wedding since Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer almost 30 years ago.

Prince Charles’ Clarence House office said the heir to the British throne was “delighted to announce the engagement of Prince William to Miss Catherine Middleton.” It said the couple got engaged last month during a vacation in Kenya.

William’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, and her husband Prince Philip “are absolutely delighted for them both,” Buckingham Palace said.

Prime Minister David Cameron was delighted, too, wishing the couple “great joy in their life together.” He said he announced the news during a Cabinet meeting, and it was greeted by cheers and “a great banging of the table.”

The couple were to give their first joint interview later Tuesday. Middleton has rarely, if ever, spoken about William in public.

“I love the uniform. It’s so, so sexy,” — her assessment at William’s graduation from Sandhurst — was a rare slip.

‘National celebration’
The news was not, however, a surprise. Kate and William’s engagement was the safest bet in Britain, considered so certain that bookies had stopped taking bets on a 2011 wedding. The date avoids London’s Summer Olympics and the queen’s Diamond Jubilee, both being held in 2012.

Visions of a royal wedding were stoked by the visit several weeks ago of Kate’s parents — Michael and Carole Middleton — to Balmoral, Queen Elizabeth II’s 50,000-acre estate in Scotland. It marked the first time the Middletons had been invited to such an intimate royal gathering.

Britain’s royal watchers said the invitation to Balmoral was a way of welcoming the middle class Middletons into the very highest realm of British society. Middleton is not from the aristocracy. Her parents worked for British Airways before founding Party Pieces, a successful party-supply business. She works for the family business.

“We thought it was going to happen, now that it has it’s an opportunity for a welcome national celebration,” said Patrick Jephson, former secretary to Princess Diana, adding that her son’s nuptials would be “a masterclass” in wedding planning.

Wedding venue
Recent speculation about the site of the event has focused on Westminster Abbey, where the funeral for the prince’s mother, Princess Diana, was held in 1997. But the palace remained mum on details. “Further details about the wedding day will be announced in due course,” the statement said.

For pomp itself, the ceremony is likely to fall between the extraordinary spectacle of Charles and Diana’s 1981 wedding in St. Paul’s Cathedral and Charles’ subdued second marriage to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall at Windsor Guildhall in 2005.

Clarence House said after the wedding, the couple will live in north Wales, where William is based with the RAF.

Middleton will now be protected by Scotland Yard, and William recently requested a female bodyguard for her, royal expert and News of the World correspondent Robert Jobson said on TODAY.

Jobson also speculated that the pair will be given new titles before their wedding. William will likely be known as the Duke of Cambridge and she will be knows as the Duchess of Cambridge, he said.

Couple’s courtship
William, who is second in line to the throne after Charles, once told an interviewer he wouldn’t marry “until I’m at least 28 or maybe 30.” He turned 28 in June.

Middleton, also 28, met William at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. They shared a student house in the seaside university town, where William initially studied art history before switching to geography.

In 2002, William paid 200 pounds to sit in the front row at a charity fashion show where Middleton was modeling in a daring outfit — they are thought to have started dating the following year.

She attended Marlborough College, an elite private school, where she played tennis and field hockey, before studying art history at St. Andrews.

Once the couple’s relationship became public with a joint photo on a Swiss skiing holiday in 2004, Middleton became a media darling — especially after both graduated, ending a media agreement to leave William alone while he was at university. With her confident good looks and long brown hair, Middleton became one of the most photographed women in Britain.

The brunette fashion buyer was photographed attending public events, going to work, even getting a parking ticket — a level of attention that evoked the romance of William’s parents, Charles and Diana.

Middleton was there when William was commissioned as a British Army officer after graduating from Sandhurst military college in 2006.

William was determined that Middleton would not suffer the same media hounding endured by his mother, who died in a Paris car crash in 1997. He appealed through his office for the media to leave her alone.

In 2007 Middleton filed a harassment complaint against a newspaper. She accepted an apology and admission of error from the Daily Mirror.

It was widely thought the couple would soon announce their engagement. The retail chain Woolworths even commissioned mugs, plates and other Wills-and-Kate memorabilia.

But only weeks later in 2007, media reported — and Clarence House did not deny — that the couple had broken up. Newspapers pored over the apparent end of the relationship in long stories sourced to anonymous “friends.” William’s army training kept them apart, said some. The media pressure was too much for her, said others. Still others murmured that senior courtiers felt Middleton’s middle-class background wasn’t royal material.

Soon, however, the same newspapers were reporting that the pair had rekindled their romance. They were photographed leaving a London nightclub together, and Middleton was snapped on a stag hunting expedition at the royal family’s Balmoral estate alongside Prince Charles.

When William graduated from his first flying course in the spring of 2008, Middleton applauded from the sidelines — although his training was not without incident. The Ministry of Defense confirmed that William had landed a helicopter on Middleton’s parents’ lawn during a training flight and flew a Chinook to a friend’s stag party on the Isle of Wight.

William later served a two-month deployment with the Royal Navy before training to become a Sea King search-and-rescue pilot with the Royal Air Force. He recently completed that training.

It has been widely reported that for the last six months, the pair have lived together on the Welsh island of Anglesey, close to the RAF base where the price is based. William is also a frequent visitor to the Middleton family house in the affluent village of Bucklebury, 50 miles west of London.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (pictures): WHYFAME, TOPNEWS, DIANAQUEENOFHEAVEN

An atheist advertising campaign has been launched on buses across Britain.

A fund-raising drive for the promotion, carrying the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”, raised more than £140,000.

The campaign, which will also feature on the Tube, is backed by the British Humanist Association and prominent atheist, Professor Richard Dawkins.

The Church of England said Christian faith allowed people to put their life into a “proper perspective”.

A spokesman said: “We would defend the right of any group representing a religious or philosophical position to be able to promote that view through appropriate channels.

“However, Christian belief is not about worrying or not enjoying life.”

Pressure group Christian Voice has questioned the campaign’s effectiveness but the Methodist Church said it would be a “good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life” and suggested it showed there was a “continued interest in God”.

The advertisements will run on 200 bendy buses in London and 600 vehicles in England, Scotland and Wales.

The British Humanist Association said the buses carrying the slogan outside London would operate in Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, Leeds, Newcastle, Dundee, Sheffield, Coventry, Devon, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Swansea, Newport, Rhondda, Bristol, Southampton, and Aberdeen.

‘Exasperation’

Four posters featuring quotations from the likes of Douglas Adams, Albert Einstein, and Katharine Hepburn will also be placed at 1,000 London Underground locations.

The campaign was devised by comedy writer Ariane Sherine.

She was inspired to seek donations after objecting to a set of Christian advertisements on a bus.

When people went to a highlighted website address, they were told that whose who rejected God were condemned to spend all eternity to “torment in Hell”.

Ms Sherine said she sought donations for a “reassuring” counter-advertisement.

She said: “I think there have been a lot of people out there who have been looking at evangelical advertisements and not saying anything and thinking that these advertisements have been approved and just shrugging it off.

“Now finally they have an opportunity to express this feeling of exasperation.”

Professor Dawkins made a donation of £5,500 himself.

He said: “Across Britain we are used to being bombarded by religious interests, not just Christians but other religions as well…

“In the House of Lords we have bishops sitting as of right and we are still very much dominated by religious interests.”

Other supporters at the launch of the poster campaign included philosopher A C Grayling, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, and Graham Linehan, co-writer of the Father Ted TV comedy series.

SOURCE: BBCNEWS

Just after midnight on Christmas morning, the majority of German troops engaged in World War I cease firing their guns and artillery and commence to sing Christmas carols. At certain points along the eastern and western fronts, the soldiers of Russia, France, and Britain even heard brass bands joining the Germans in their joyous singing.

At the first light of dawn, many of the German soldiers emerged from their trenches and approached the Allied lines across no-man’s-land, calling out “Merry Christmas” in their enemies’ native tongues. At first, the Allied soldiers feared it was a trick, but seeing the Germans unarmed they climbed out of their trenches and shook hands with the enemy soldiers. The men exchanged presents of cigarettes and plum puddings and sang carols and songs. There was even a documented case of soldiers from opposing sides playing a good-natured game of soccer.

The so-called Christmas Truce of 1914 came only five months after the outbreak of war in Europe and was one of the last examples of the outdated notion of chivalry between enemies in warfare. In 1915, the bloody conflict of World War I erupted in all its technological fury, and the concept of another Christmas Truce became unthinkable.

HISTORY.COM
Date: 2008-12-25