Two Beefeaters sacked from Tower of London for bullying first female Yeoman

By Sophie Borland and David Wilkes


Two Beefeaters have been sacked for bullying the first woman to join their ranks.

Colleagues said Mark Sanders-Crook and Bob Brown had been dismissed and would have to leave their grace-and-favour homes in the Tower of London after being found guilty of harassing Moira Cameron.

Tower authorities started the internal investigation last month following allegations that Miss Cameron's entry in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia had been tampered with, 'nasty' notes were left in her locker and her uniform defaced.

The case against a third Yeoman Warder - the Beefeaters' official title - was not proven.


Bullied: Two male Beefeaters have been sacked following an investigation into allegations of harassment by the first female Beefeater Moira Cameron

Former Grenadier Guardsman Mr Sanders-Crook, 44, was the first Yeoman Warder in the Tower's history to follow in his father's footsteps when he was sworn in to his job in 2005. His father Ray worked there from 1983 to 2000.

Last night Mr Sanders-Crook's mother Maureen accused the Tower authorities of blowing the incident out of proportion and claimed her son was being punished simply for not talking to Miss Cameron.

She said: 'He spent 22 years in the Army and he was the most decorated soldier at the Tower.

'He has been charged with not talking to her outside working hours. How is that harassment? He has been absolutely stitched up - and all just for keeping himself to himself.


Fired: Mark Sanders-Crook will have to leave his grace-and-favour home in the Tower of London

'They don't understand what it's like to live in a tight-knit community like all the Beefeaters do at the Tower. To put a single woman in that community was wrong in the first place.

'It was Mark's dream to be a Beefeater since he first visited the Tower when he was 17. He is very upset at what's happened. He went there for the honour and loyalty of the job and they have treated him like dirt.

'This has now made him homeless. He has a wife and has two children at school. What Moira Cameron's done by complaining will affect all of them.

'The whole thing could have been avoided if someone senior had just told Mark and Moira to sort it out by talking things through.'

Mr Brown, 57, is believed to have worked at the Tower for around three years.

Like Mr Sanders-Crook, he is understood to be a family man with children and to live in accommodation at the Tower.

Miss Cameron, 44, is said to have lost her hair through stress-related alopecia during the alleged hate campaign.

Last night she was on guard outside the Tower of London. She refused to be drawn on the sackings, saying: 'I'm afraid I can't say anything about it.'

But a friend, who would not be identified, said: 'We're very happy about this. It's justice and they deserve to go. They made her life very miserable. I believe the two of them just conspired between themselves.'

A Tower of London spokesman said the two sacked men have the right to lodge an appeal within a week, and the third will return to work shortly.

Miss Cameron, from Argyll in Scotland, joined the Army at the age of 20 and served in Northern Ireland and Cyprus, rising to the rank of Warrant Officer Class 2.

She qualified to be a Yeoman Warder in July 2007 after completing the required minimum 22 years in the armed forces.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230902/Two-Beefeaters-sacked-Tower-London-bullying-female-Yeoman.html

Susan Boyle on the Today Show, Nov. 23, 2009

Singing outdoors in the wind in NY in November is brave. The singers on the floats in the Thanksgiving parade mostly lip sink with recordings because this is so very hard to do.

Trump halts dealings with Menie resident

Michael Forbes is a vocal objector to the Trump venture


The Trump organisation has said it will have no further dealings with one of the property owners refusing to sell up to make way for a £1bn golf resort.

The move to sever links with Aberdeenshire resident Michael Forbes comes after a personal attack on him by Donald Trump.

Mr Forbes lives on the Menie Estate where the resort is due to be built.

Mr Trump, from his offices in New York, said Mr Forbes was a "loser" who was damaging the image of Scotland.

The attack came after Mr Forbes' mother, Molly Forbes, launched a legal challenge in a bid to stop the building of the golf course on her land.

The 84-year-old said she was seeking an interim interdict over the decision to grant planning permission for five pockets of land not owned by Mr Trump's company.

'Personal vendetta'

Papers lodged with the court claim Aberdeenshire Council did not determine the planning applications correctly, and that Trump Golf Links Scotland did not give enough information about why it now needed the land.

But Mr Trump said the claims were "misguided" and not based on fact.

He went on to accuse Mr Forbes of exploiting his elderly mother to further his cause.

Donald Trump Jnr oversaw the initial work on the estate


In a statement he said: "It is tragic that an elderly woman is being exploited to further the personal vendetta of Michael Forbes and his few supporters.

"He [Mr Forbes] is a loser who is seriously damaging the image of both Aberdeenshire and his great country."

He added: "We will not be distracted by the rants of the local village idiot and intend to vigorously defend any challenge to our project."

But Mrs Forbes said that Aberdeenshire Council had rushed to allow the project to go ahead and it had "grievously let down local residents".

She added that she would not be giving up her battle and she urged both the council and the Trump empire to think again about going ahead with the project.

Mrs Forbes is being represented by the Environmental Law Centre Scotland, a charity offering legal advice and help on environmental matters.

If you have a daughter or grandaughter please watch this?

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

by Mary Pipher

Dr. Mary Pipher is a clinical psychologist and best-selling author. Dr. Pipher's work combines her training in both the fields of psychology and anthropology, examining how American culture influences the mental health of its people. She has received two American Psychological Association Presidential Citations. Dr. Pipher has appeared on the Today Show, 20/20, The Charlie Rose Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and National Public Radio's Fresh Air.

This is the groundbreaking work that poses one of the most provocative questions of a generation: Why are American adolescent girls falling prey to depression, eating disorders, suicide attempts, and dangerously low self-esteem? Dr. Pipher posits that it's America's sexist, look-obsessed "girl-poisoning" culture-one in which girls are constantly struggling to find their true selves. In Reviving Ophelia, these girls' uncensored voices are heard from the front lines of adolescence. Personal and painfully honest, this is a compassionate call to arms, offering strategies with which to revive these Ophelias' lost senses of self.
Annotation

A therapist who has worked extensively with young girls reveals firsthand evidence of the damage that can be caused by growing up in a "girl-poisoning culture, " raises a call to arms, and offers parents compassion and strategies for survival. A perfect book to commemorate "Take Your Daughter to Work Day."
Publishers Weekly

From her work as a psychotherapist for adolescent females, Pipher here posits and persuasively argues her thesis that today's teenaged girls are coming of age in ``a girl-poisoning culture.'' Backed by anecdotal evidence and research findings, she suggests that, despite the advances of feminism, young women continue to be victims of abuse, self-mutilation (e.g., anorexia), consumerism and media pressure to conform to others' ideals. With sympathy and focus she cites case histories to illustrate the struggles required of adolescent girls to maintain a sense of themselves among the mixed messages they receive from society, their schools and, often, their families. Pipher offers concrete suggestions for ways by which girls can build and maintain a strong sense of self, e.g., keeping a diary, observing their social context as an anthropologist might, distinguishing between thoughts and feelings. Pipher is an eloquent advocate.

Complaint Box | Picky Eaters

November 20, 2009, 10:38 am

By SUSAN GOLDBERG

P.C. Vey

Having friends over for dinner used to involve a minimal and fairly unremarkable to-do list: There were groceries to buy, along with flowers and a couple of bottles of semi-respectable wine. I would put out some guest towels and a collection of fancy soaps that were off limits to blood relatives, and then — voilà! — dinner was served. Preparing for a dinner party these days is far more complex, thanks to a vast and bewildering array of dietary needs that seem to have suddenly overtaken everyone I know.
Complaint Box
Steamed?

Dish out the peeves. Send your essays — no more than 500 words, please — to: metropolitan@nytimes.com.


An unscientific survey of family and friends turns up one acquaintance who is kosher, two who are more like kosher-style, in addition to two vegans, a smattering of lacto-vegetarians and a couple who cannot digest gluten of any kind. Accommodations must be made for my mother-in-law, who is lactose intolerant, and a friend who is dangerously and inconveniently allergic to peanuts. I must know at least a dozen women who have declared lifelong war on complex carbohydrates. And then there’s my daughter, a wispy and tender-hearted flower child who prefers not to eat “anything with a face” (although she will sometimes make random and completely unreasonable exceptions for hot dogs and pepperoni).

Just thinking about feeding this crowd makes me want to lie down in a darkened room for several uninterrupted hours. The head chef at Beth Israel Medical Center would be hard-pressed to meet the dietary needs of this particular group.

Being a hostess also requires me to navigate the tricky political ramifications of dinner, which means keeping the menu free of veal, foie gras and a host of endangered sea creatures. There are, I have found, an astonishing number people who are breezily neutral on the subject of Kim Jong-il, but consider an entree of Chilean sea bass the moral equivalent of grand-scale marine genocide.

Because of these restrictions, having a simple dinner with the people I love now requires a nutritionist, an Excel spreadsheet and considerably more patience and culinary skill than I possess.

The very last straw was a friend who called before her family came for dinner and — without a hint of shame — presented me with a detailed list of their food requirements: Her husband doesn’t care for shrimp, her son requires a pasta side dish with every meal, and none of them eat the dark meat of chicken, which she dismissed savagely as “dreck.”

I have had enough with people who want to have it their way, and I am done catering to the quirks of food-obsessed numskulls. If you eat in my home, I will grudgingly respect medically diagnosed allergies, since it puts a pall on conversation when a guest goes into anaphylactic shock at the dinner table. But beyond that, I expect you to eat what you can, ignore the rest and not make trouble. On Thursday, 15 people are sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner at my house, and with God as my witness, I promise you this: There will be dark meat.

Susan Goldberg is a freelance writer and editor and a consultant on college admission essays who lives in Mount Kisco, N.Y.

US Senator says Lockerbie bomber should return to jail

A US senator has written to Prime Minister Gordon Brown calling for the Lockerbie bomber to be returned to prison.

Democrat senator Charles Schumer said Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released early on the assumption he only had three months to live.

Mr Schumer questioned the severity of Megrahi's prostate cancer given that the three months had now passed.

The Scottish government stood by its decision to release Megrahi.

Mr Schumer, who represents the State of New York in the US Senate, said there was "speculation" that the severity of Megrahi's condition had been exaggerated. The bottom line is Megrahi should have never been released in the first place.



In his letter to Mr Brown, he said the UK should seek the "immediate" return of Megrahi to jail.

He said: "The bottom line is Megrahi should have never been released in the first place but it would be even more outrageous if he were to be able to live a long and free life after his release.

"The victims of Pan Am Flight 103 didn't get a second chance at life and neither should Megrahi.

"Justice in this case was life in prison, no exceptions."

Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, was freed from Greenock Prison on 20 August before being flown home to Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

He was serving a life sentence for the 1988 Pan Am jumbo jet bombing which claimed 270 lives and his early release was greeted with anger by American relatives of those killed, many of whom were students at Syracuse University in the State of New York.

'Reasonable estimate'

The decision to release him was taken by Scotland's Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, who said at the time: "There are no fixed time limits but life expectancy of less than three months may be considered an appropriate period."

In a statement issued in response to Mr Schumer's letter on Friday, a Scottish government spokesman said Mr MacAskill's decision was based on recommendations by the parole board and prison governor, and was supported by a medical report.

The clinical assessment by the Scottish Prison Service health director was that a three-month life expectancy was "a reasonable estimate for this patient".

The spokesman said: "Mr Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer and was sent back to Libya to die.

"As Mr MacAskill said when he announced his decision, he may die sooner or may live longer, given the nature of his terminal disease."

Talent star Susan Boyle's debut album goes on sale in UK

Susan Boyle will appear on NBC's Today Show to promote her debut album


Britain's Got Talent star Susan Boyle's debut album, I Dreamed A Dream, is to be released later.

The recording has already become the biggest CD pre-order in the history of global online retailer Amazon.

The Scot is set to appear on America's premier breakfast TV programme, the Today Show, and is favourite to have the Christmas Number One album.

Boyle became a star after her April appearance on Britain's Got Talent. She eventually finished runner-up.

'Incredible achievement'

The 12-track album was named after the song from the musical Les Miserables that made her famous.

The record is a mix of pop covers such as You'll See by Madonna and The Monkees' Daydream Believer, as well as Christian stalwarts including Amazing Grace and Silent Night.

Bookmaker William Hill said it was so sure Boyle, from Blackburn, West Lothian, would achieve sales of one million by Christmas it would only offer an even money bet.

The album is hot favourite to be Christmas Number One


And the firm has installed her 6/4 favourite to have the Number One album at Christmas, ahead of stars such as Leona Lewis, Rihana and Take That.

After an appearance on Sunday night's X-Factor on ITV1, Boyle was set for a tour of the US, starting off in the NBC studios for the Today Show.

Amazon said Boyle's album was the biggest CD pre-order in the 14-year-history of its website.

Julian Monaghan, head of music buying at Amazon.co.uk, said: "Just eight months ago, no-one was aware of the talents of Susan Boyle.

"Now, she has generated more Amazon pre-order CD sales globally than any other artist.

"That is an incredible achievement and is testament to the fact that she has captured the hearts of people all over Britain, America and the rest of the world."

Steve Barnett, chairman of Boyle's record label, Columbia Records, part of Sony Music, said: "One of the things that is so unique about Susan Boyle is her ability to touch people around the world.

"We're excited that I Dreamed A Dream holds the new record for global pre-orders and that Amazon's customers have supported her album in this way."