A Royal Marine, after receiving the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross, the British military's second highest honor behind the Victoria Cross, from Charles, the Prince of Wales, in the Queen's ballroom at Buckingham Palace, took the opportunity to go down on one knee and propose to his girlfriend.
He was being honoured for his heroic actions in Afghanistan after picking up and throwing back an insurgent's grenade and lying on a comrade to shield him from the blast.
The romantic serviceman let the heir to the throne in on his secret proposal as he collected his medal during the investiture.
'I told him I was going to propose and he said 'Many congratulations in advance',' he said.
His newly betrothed, Miss Rebecca Daniel, 29, from Budleigh Salterton, Devon, who was wearing her white gold and solitaire diamond engagement ring, said afterwards in the Palace quadrangle: 'It was totally unexpected. It's a day that's not going to be trumped for a while.
'It was an immediate 'yes'. I think he's been putting me off the scent for a while.'
Continued on Page 47
[Al Jazeera] Sectarian festivities involving hundreds of people continued for a second night in Northern Ireland in the worst violence in the province in years, police said.
A press photographer was shot in the leg and two other people suffered burns on Tuesday evening as up to 700 people threw fireworks, petrol bombs and other missiles at each other in a Catholic enclave in east Belfast.
Police fired stun grenades as festivities broke out and groups of hooded and masked men pelted each other with stones and missiles, and many attacked police vans.
'Worst violence'
The violence first erupted on Monday after suspected Protestant gangs, who support British rule in the province, attacked homes overnight in Short Strand, a Catholic district in mostly Protestant east Belfast, local officials said.
Police blamed members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), one of the deadliest pro-British paramilitary groups during the province's long-running sectarian conflict, for initiating the first night of disorder.
The violence reignited late on Tuesday as local television station UTV reported that a man was seriously ill in hospital after his skull was fractured by a breeze block.
"It is probably the worst violence we have seen in that area for some considerable time," said Assistant Chief Constable Alistair Finlay of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
Niall O'Donnghaile, Belfast's mayor and a councillor for the republican Sinn Fein party, said it was a "tense and dangerous situation".
"They've hit homes with paint bombs, pipe bombs and petrol bombs. There's a number of Short Strand residents who are injured and a number of homes have been damaged," he added.
'Unprovoked attacks'
Michael Copeland, an Ulster Unionist politician, confirmed that several hundred people had been engaged "in hand-to-hand fighting."
O'Donnghaile claimed that the attacks were unprovoked, but Copeland claimed the violence was in response to attacks by Catholic republicans, who favour a united Ireland, on Protestant properties over the last week.
"It doesn't really matter who is responsible at this stage. It's getting it stopped that is the problem. You have two sides to these stories," Copeland said.
Unionist and republican-backed parties share power in the Northern Ireland Assembly, which was set up following a 1998 agreement that ended years of sectarian violence, known as "The Troubles", in which around 3,500 people died.
The area affected by the rioting is one of more than 30 areas of Belfast where high barricades separate Catholic and Protestant areas.
Such barricades, called "peace lines" locally, have grown in number and size, despite the success of 1998 peace accord.
Sectarian tensions typically flare in the build-up to July 12, a divisive holiday when tens of thousands of Protestants from the Orange Order brotherhood march across Northern Ireland.
The parades commemorate British victories and are supported by the Protestants who want to remain part of the United Kingdom. But Catholics regard the marches as provocative.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
06/23/2011 00:00 ||
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I was going to say, it's a little early for marching season. But it sounds like marching season is getting like the Christmas shopping season - starts earlier every year.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
06/23/2011 11:06 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
