A MAN who was arrested after he claimed to be an SAS
soldier sent to protect the Queen has been sent
"indefinitely" to a secure hospital.
Gregory Pailthorpe, 39, was ordered to be detained after
he was found to be carrying a knife and a what was
initially feared to be a bomb.
The former commercial photographer was overpowered
by police after he approached a security cordon at Darling
Harbour and told officers that he was a member of a
British special forces protection squad.
He had been due to appear today before magistrates at
the Sydney Central Local Court on charges of illegal
possession of a weapon and cannabis following
psychiatric assessment overnight. Allan Moore, a
magistrate, told a hearing yesterday, however, that
Pailthorpe had been committed directly to the Rozelle
Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney.
Pailthorpe, who claimed that he had been assigned to
protect the Queen, the former American President George
Bush, and John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister,
was arrested outside a convention centre where the
Queen was due to have lunch after an official welcoming
ceremony for her tour of Australia. He was carrying an 8in
kitchen knife and a jumble of batteries and wires in a
backpack.
The incident happened near the spot where a man lunged
at the Prince of Wales with a starting pistol six years ago.
~*~
Drug girl in car driven by Prince's
godson(UK Times)
BY HELEN JOHNSTONE
A GIRL aged 16 who was found with drugs in a car
driven by the Prince of Wales's godson, Nicholas
Knatchbull, had been led astray by an affluent older
crowd, a court was told yesterday.
The girl, who had been returning from a millennium party,
admitted being a cannabis user since she was 13. She said
that her older friends introduced her to "new stuff".
Mr Knatchbull, 18, who was "mentor" to Prince William
when he first went to Eton, is in a gap year since leaving
school. He was not suspected of any drugs offence.
Ecstasy and cannabis were found in a wooden box
underneath the girl's seat when he was stopped by police
at Winchester, Hampshire, at 10am on New Year's Day
for speeding. The officers smelt cannabis. Two boys, aged
17 and 18, who were also passengers had drugs hidden in
their socks and were given police cautions.
The girl, from South Kensington, London, who cannot be
named for legal reasons, admitted at Alton Youth Court,
Hampshire, possessing 24.9g of cannabis resin valued at
£90 and two Ecstasy tablets. She was given a conditional
discharge.
Her father told magistrates that a number of teenagers had
been returning from the party in two cars. "There were 10
or 11 boys who had been up all night, taking all sorts of
things," he said.
"These people in this car were all very well off. She was
moving in a different class from that which she had been in
her previous state school. Now she knows they are not to
be respected and are not good role models."
Jolian French, representing the girl, said: "Her father does
feel that she is being treated somewhat unfairly, given that
the adults are not being seen before the court."
~*~
Prince hairnet prompts cheese checks(BBC News)
The Duke of Edinburgh has been caught up in a
stir over contaminated cheese.
The duke, who is touring Australia with the
Queen, breached hygiene regulations during a
visit to a cheese-making factory.
He failed to put on a hairnet as required by the
regulations.
And now a vat
containing 24
cubic-feet of cheese
may have to be
destroyed.
While the Queen was
carrying out
engagements in
Sydney, the duke went to the farming town of
Wagga Wagga to visit the Charles Stuart
University, which boasts its own
cheese-manufacturing laboratory.
Silly-hat ban
Officials who went ahead of him were evidently
worried about his having to put on a hairnet
and bootees, which everyone entering the
factory is required to do.
BBC correspondent
Nicholas Witchell says
that perhaps mindful of
the stir caused by
Prince Charles wearing
a silly hat in the
Caribbean recently, the
officials said there was
no way the duke would
wear a hairnet.
Now the
cheesemakers, whose
ricotta won a gold
medal at the Sydney
Agricultural Show last year, will have to decide
whether the cheese is fit for human
consumption.
Cheesemaker Barry Lillywhite said he would be
doing tests to see whether it could be saved.
"It would be nice to make a special batch of
Prince Philip cheese," he added.
Buckingham Palace said the prince was not
required to wear a hairnet and, in any case,
the cheese process had been only a test.
The duke was not the only one allowed in
without a hairnet: before he arrived, a police
sniffer dog went over the entire premises.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman later said any
suggestion that the Duke had contaminated
cheese was "nonsense".
"The cheese-making was set up as a
demonstration and there was no requirement
for the Duke or any member of his party - or
the media - to wear sterile clothing," said the
spokesman.
~*~
'Girl raped at Princess Beatrice
school'(Evening Standard)
by John Marshall and Colin Freeman
A 15-year-old girl has been raped and two other girls
sexually assaulted at the Swiss school where the Duke and
Duchess of York plan to send their daughters, it was
reported today.
The three pupils at Aiglon
College in Villars were asleep in
their beds when an intruder
crept into their room and
subdued them with a powerful
anaesthetic spray before his
attack, according to Swiss
newspapers.
The 15-year-old woke up once
the drug had worn off to find a
young man naked on a bunk
bed beside her, it is claimed. She is said to have
screamed, waking the other two girls, but the assailant
grabbed his clothes and disappeared through a window
before the schools' security officers reached the scene.
The alleged incident comes six months before Princess
Beatrice, 11, is due to enrol at the £17,000-a-year school,
which prides itself on providing a highly secure
environment for the offspring of some of the world's
wealthiest families. Past pupils include the children of
Roger Moore, Sophia Loren, Jonathan Aitken and Jackie
Stewart among others.
Princess Eugenie, who is 10 tomorrow, is expected to join
her sister there once her primary education is completed.
Police spokesman Maurice Gehri said the attack took
place around 3am last Friday. "We can confirm that a
sexual attack took place at the school involving three
students," he said.
"It was an attack with forceful sexual aggression."
The intruder is believed to have sneaked into one of the
school's chalet-style dormitories, which each
accommodate three pupils in a double bunk and a single
bed.
Reports said he then sprayed the girls with
trichloroethylene, a powerful anaesthetic used by dentists.
The 15-year-old is said to have raised the alarm around
5am after the effects wore off, it was claimed. Both her
roommates had also apparently been stripped of their
clothes. All three girls were found in a state of severe
shock.
However, despite widespread reports of the incident in the
Swiss media this morning, and a tightening of security on
the school premises, the Aiglon College authorities
appeared to cast doubts on the girls' story today.
Dr Frank Klein, director of external relations at the school,
said: "An intruder allegedly entered Exeter House at
Aiglon College between five and 6am on March 17. He is
said to have entered a room where three girls were
sleeping. The girls claimed he was chased away. The
police were informed at once."
According to some reports today, the parents of two of
the girls have issued a civil and criminal complaint against
the perpetrator, the school and its governors following the
attack.
The reported incident is likely to prove highly
embarrassing for the school's security regime. It is
supposed to have both external and internal security staff
24 hours a day, while many of the pupils have their own
personal bodyguards, who live in the nearby village.
Aiglon, which is about 30 miles north of Lake Geneva, is a
sister school to Gordonstoun, where Prince Andrew and
his brothers were educated, and has about 300 pupils
aged nine to 18 from 53 countries.
The Duke announced last month that his daughters would
be attending the school after Beatrice passed the entrance
exam, making her the first member of the current Royal
Family to be educated in a foreign country.
In the light of ongoing reviews of the cost of providing
security for minor royals, it was unclear at the time
whether she would retain her round-the-clock police
protection when she goes abroad.
~*~
Stirling Moss does a lap of honour at the Palace(Electronic Telegraph)
STIRLING MOSS, 70, Britain's favourite Grand Prix driver in the Fifties
despite never winning a world championship, was knighted by the Prince of
Wales yesterday. Sir Stirling said the ceremony at Buckingham Palace had
been more nerve-racking than a race starting line.
Edmundo Ros, 89, the Caribbean bandleader who came to in Britain in 1937,
received an OBE. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, creators of Steptoe and
Son and Hancock's Half Hour received OBEs for services to television
comedy.
~*~
Queen visits the stadium she cannot
open (UK Times)
FROM ALAN HAMILTON IN SYDNEY
THE biggest stadium ever built
for an Olympic Games cowered
under the torrential Sydney rain,
its 110,000 green and blue
plastic seats dripping and
deserted and its athletics track
waterlogged. The only sign of
life emanated from four giant
electronic scoreboards with the
message: "Welcome to Stadium
Australia - Your Olympic
Stadium."
It was the wrong message, and
officials awoke to the fact with
15 minutes to spare. By the time
the Queen arrived yesterday
afternoon to inspect the empty
arena the boards were welcoming her to "The Olympic
Stadium". It is not hers; Australian politics have decreed that
she will be the most notable absentee at the opening
ceremony of the Millennium Olympiad in September.
Touring the splendid but lifeless site seemed a poor
recompense for the Queen, who will be replaced at the
opening by Sir William Deane, the Governor General,
despite the Olympic rule that Games are always opened by
the head of state of the host country.
The decision is a compromise. John Howard, the Australian
Prime Minister, had wanted to open the Games himself, but
after last November's referendum narrowly voted to keep
the Queen as head of state, he nominated her representative
to perform the ceremony. Inviting the monarch herself, it was
felt, would have been too strong meat for the country's
increasingly significant Republican element.
The view was not shared by at least one distinguished former
Olympian and committed republican whom the Queen met
over lunch at the site yesterday. Dawn Fraser, the former
swimming gold medallist and now, at the age of 70, voted
Australia's Athlete of the Century, was strongly in favour of
tradition despite having featured last year in a television
commercial promoting the republican cause.
"I did the commercial because I believe Australia is growing
up," she said yesterday. "But I have always admired the
Royal Family and I still do. I first met the Queen in 1963
when I was invited to lunch on board Britannia in
Melbourne. I said last year that I didn't think the Prime
Minister should open the Games; I would have preferred to
see the Queen because I know what it would have meant to
all the athletes."
Over lunch she and the Queen discussed 1960s swimming
pools. "I told her that we swam in open air pools in my day.
It's a little bit easier now and they swim faster."
Present-day athletes who met the Queen were less
concerned about who should open the Games. Kirsten
Towers, a midfield player in Australia's world-beating
Hockeyroos hockey team, said: "I think it would be
wonderful if someone Australian opened the Games." The
Governor General will fulfil her wish.
Bob Carr, the New South Wales Premier, hosted the lunch
in the Superdome, which will host the artistic gymnastics and
basketball events. He boasted how the site, ten miles west of
central Sydney, had been built on time, within budget and
with no debt. Once farmland, it had variously been a
racecourse, a meat-packing factory and an industrial
dumping ground.
Mr Carr told the Queen in a welcome speech: "Your
Majesty knows more than most the sacrifices made, the
disappointments and joys of Olympic competition as a
mother, after all, of a famous Olympian." The Princess Royal
was a three-day eventer at Montreal and is now a British
representative on the International Olympic Committee.
Later, Mr Carr disclosed that he and the Queen had
discussed the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and plans for the
new Wembley with which, he said, the Queen was fully
familiar. Shortly before leaving the site, the Queen saw an
unscheduled athletic display. As she entered the
purpose-built aquatic centre which will host the swimming
events, 28 pensioners were going through a session of aqua
aerobics in a side pool. They were conscious that the Queen
was present but were kept at their exercises by a female
instructor of drill-sergeant demeanour.
The instructor finally relented. "Right turn, wave!" She
commanded, and 28 elderly Australians bobbed round in the
water and greeted the Queen in perfect unison. It was a
touching moment, and the Queen laughed.
The visit to the Olympic site was marked by clearly
heightened security in the wake of the scare created the
previous day. Movement was severely restricted, and
journalists were told that only two places were available to
watch the Queen in the stadium.
Earlier, during a visit to the Sydney Children's Hospital, the
Queen met young patients including Peta-Anne Cisyak, aged
nine, a wheelchair-bound spina bifida sufferer who handed
over a posy. As the Queen engaged her in conversation,
Peta-Anne's attention was distracted by the photographers
nearby. She turned from the Queen and gave them a wave.
The royal visitor burst out laughing.
The Queen also met Lucy Turnbull, president of the Sydney
Children's Hospital Foundation and wife of the chairman of
Australia's republican movement. Mrs Turnbull did not
curtsy. Her lawyer husband Malcolm, who represented
Peter Wright in the Spycatcher case, says he hopes that the
Queen's presence in Australia, while welcome, would be her
last as head of state.
~*~
Queen visits 'back of beyond'(BBC News)
The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh have
travelled to the "back of beyond" during their
tour of Australia.
Fresh from the high-rise world of Sydney -
with its glittering, hi-tech Olympic Stadium -
the royal couple travelled to a very different
Australia and met members of the country's
Aborigine community.
The remote settlement of Bourke, 500 miles
north west of Sydney, has only 3,600
residents.
"Back 'o Bourke" means the back of beyond or
middle of nowhere in Aussie-speak.
The town has a reputation for racial tension
and three years ago hundreds of disaffected
Aborigines rampaged along the main street,
smashing shops and cars.
'Success stories'
The authorities are grappling with serious drink
and drugs problems and black unemployment is
high.
The Queen and Prince Philip were shown the
town's success stories: a mixed-race primary
school, an Aboriginal community radio station,
a fruit farm and a cotton farm.
But there was no place
on the itinerary for
Alice Edwards Village,
an Aboriginal ghetto on
the edge of town
which many white
people regard as a
no-go area.
Built on the banks of
the Darling river in the
19th century, Bourke
was once a bustling
part with
paddle-steamers
carrying wool from the surrounding sheep
stations on the first stage of their journey to
the markets of the British Empire.
But the town fell on hard times and now the
authorities are trying to rebuild its fortunes
through tourism and diversified agriculture.
On Wednesday hundreds of people turned up in
the town's Central Park, to see and hear the
royal couple.
'Strengthening your community'
The Queen, made a round trip of almost 1,200
miles from Canberra for the visit which lasted
barely 90 minutes.
She said: "Flying here this morning has
reminded us of the great distances between
the rural communities in New South Wales.
"This sense of space is such a defining feature
of the outback.
"Our visit today is
giving us the chance to
see the ways in which
you are reducing those
distances and
strengthening your own
community here in
Bourke which is so very
special to you all."
She said: "All
communities need
building with patience
and understanding in
ways such as these.
"It has been a great pleasure for us to come
here today, to meet many of you, and to be
able to give recognition to the way in which
you, and so many Australians like you who live
not in the cities but in Australia's wide open
spaces, are contributing to the success of this
great land of Australia."
'Need for reconciliation'
Councillor Wayne O'Mally, mayor of the
staunchly royalist town, replied: "Your
Majesty, Queen of Australia, thank you for
coming to Bourke, for recognition of the
existence and achievements of the people of
this area."
The republican Premier of New South Wales,
Bob Carr, welcomed steps taken in Bourke to
promote reconciliation between whites and
Aborigines.
He said: "What happens here matters to the
rest of Australia."
Following the knife scare in Sydney, security in
Bourke was tight with large numbers of police,
including bomb squad officers, checking the
Royal route.
'A funny day'
On her return the Queen attended a State
Banquet at Government House in Canberra.
"I've had a funny day," she told Prime Minister
John Howard.
The Queen, wore a
white pearl
embroidered lace dress,
Queen Mary's 1921
diamond tiara,
three-string necklace
of 105 diamonds and
the garter star of the
Australian Order, for
the occasion.
She and Prince Philip
are due to fly to
Melbourne on Thursday
after completing the
New South Wales leg of their Australian tour.