Elton John slams media for criticizing Harry, Meghan

By The Associated Press
August 19, 2019 | 1:00 PM

LONDON (AP) — Singer Elton John says he’s “deeply distressed” by media accounts that criticized the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for taking a private jet to go on vacation despite the flight’s carbon impact of the planet.

John took to Instagram on Monday to slam stories that suggested that Prince Harry and Meghan were hypocritical for accepting jet travel to stay at his home in Nice despite their devotion to eco-causes. John says he has a profound sense of obligation to Harry because of his friendship with the royal’s mother, Princess Diana.

John and his partner “wanted the young family to have a private holiday.” The jet offered a “high level of much-needed protection.”

He says the flight was carbon neutral because it was offset by a contribution to Carbon Footprint.

Analysis: The world Washington built is fraying. What comes next?

By J.J. Green
August 20, 2026 | 8:57 PM

The United States is confronting a global security environment that increasingly resembles the outcome its Cold War adversaries once hoped to produce: a divided West, weakened alliances, economic exhaustion, multiple simultaneous wars and declining confidence in American leadership. That does not mean today’s crises were orchestrated according to some surviving Soviet master plan. The Soviet Union is gone, and the threats facing Washington now come from several different states with different interests. But the strategic effect is strikingly familiar. Early NATO assessments of Soviet intentions warned that Moscow sought to weaken the democratic powers, deny the West a secure European base and ultimately exhaust North America economically. Now, NATO says Russia is again trying to reconfigure the Euro-Atlantic security order through military force, sabotage, cyberattacks, coercion and disinformation. The difference is that much of the pressure now confronting the West is occurring simultaneously — and some of the damage to alliance cohesion is self-inflicted.

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