Princess Andre says she feared for her life during carjacking with mum Katie Price
Speaking to her sibling during the second episode of The Princess Diaries, which was released on Sunday (10 August), the 18-year-old reflected on the 2018 incident, where the family were held at gunpoint by six men in South Africa.
Recalling the terrifying ordeal, she said: 'I looked out the window and I remember it not feeling real, and the guy was just staring into my soul. Then they were like 'we've got guns, we're going to shoot you'.'
She speculated that she was targeted because of her blonde hair and blue eyes, stating that she heard the men instruct her mum to 'give them the kids'.
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Times
7 hours ago
- Times
Sandy Grimes obituary: CIA analyst who helped to catch traitor
In 1991, after three decades with the CIA, Sandy Grimes was winding down in anticipation of her retirement. Then a request came for her to take on one last assignment. It involved Dmitri Polyakov, a Soviet general who had been the CIA's highest-ranking double agent during the Cold War. Grimes had been one of the analysts working on the intelligence he had provided. Then he had gone 'silent' in 1986 along with at least eight other CIA 'assets'. It later emerged that they had been tried for treason by the Soviets and executed. At the time Grimes had been chief of the CIA's Africa branch, and in response to the disappearance of the assets she had been tasked with a large-scale (though secret) overhaul of security procedures. Would she stay on to investigate who in the CIA had betrayed Polyakov? ' 'Without hesitation,' I replied. They had made me the only offer I could have never refused,' she said. 'Our dead sources deserved advocates and so began my participation in what later became known as the Ames mole hunt.' Joining a team of four, Grimes investigated what had gone wrong — there had either been a mole in the CIA or their system had been hacked. It was exhausting work that eventually led them to Aldrich Ames, the CIA's counterintelligence chief for Soviet operations. Ames and Grimes had been friends since the early Seventies, when they were case officers together. 'We grew up together,' she recalled. 'We car-pooled. I had seen what I always called the old Rick. I liked him and if anybody had ever told me in the 1970s that Rick Ames would be one of the most famous spies of all time for the opposition, I never would have believed it, never in a million years.' Although she recalled how much he changed in the mid-Eighties — 'It wasn't the capped teeth, it wasn't the clean fingernails, it wasn't the Italian suits and the $600 shoes and the silk men's hose,' she said. 'His posture was different. He stood erect. He exuded arrogance' — she needed concrete evidence. This came through methodically and retrospectively documenting Ames's every move: where he went for lunch with his Soviet contacts, his cigarette breaks, his credit card charges. The final breakthrough came when they discovered that on May 17, 1985, Ames had reported a lunch with his contact, Sergey Dmitriyevich Chuvakhin, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington. The following day there was a deposit into his bank account for $9,000, one of three such payments. 'It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell what is going on here,' she said to colleagues. 'Rick is a goddamn Russian spy.' Ames was arrested in 1994 and handed a life sentence without parole. The mole hunt was a masterclass in data-collecting — it was the first time a spy had been discovered through sheer analysis — but there was congressional wrath over how long it had taken the CIA to catch him. And Grimes, for her part, had a hard time understanding his motivations beyond the money (he sold the CIA's secrets for a reported $2.7 million). 'I think Rick has always wanted to be special, to be important,' she proposed. 'I do know he felt himself intellectually superior to all of us. His career was not going anywhere. He was not being recognised for his abilities. And maybe this was revenge.' Sandra Joyce Venable was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1945, 'a certified product of the Cold War', in her words. Her parents, Isaac and Mary (née Twitty), were Tennessee natives who met working on the Manhattan Project, the covert project during the Second World War to develop the world's first atomic bomb. Schooling began in Los Alamos, in the hills of New Mexico. From there Sandy moved to Denver, Colorado, where she attended a string of schools before leaving for college in 1963. Swapping physics for a Russian language course, she joined the Slavic languages department of the University of Washington, one of few women on the course. She was recruited to the CIA four years later — out of sheer luck, she noted, rather than any wish to travel or sense of patriotic duty to serve her country. She had run into an old boyfriend one afternoon who said that the CIA was recruiting on campus and that she would make a 'perfect spy'. Assigned to the Soviet Bloc division as a secretary, her first case was to cover Polyakov. 'I was what I described as the low man on the totem pole,' recalled Grimes, who ran the Xerox machine and filed 'personality information' that Polyakov reported on Soviets on a typewriter that she didn't know how to use. 'I used Scotch tape and scissors to extract his reporting on particular subjects,' she said, 'and I cut and pasted.' Gradually handed more responsibility, she was eventually made a senior intelligence analyst and converted to 'professional status' in 1970. During the interview she was asked if she planned on getting pregnant, for motherhood, the officer said, would probably end her career. 'Taken aback by the inappropriateness of such a question,' said Grimes, who sported an Anna Wintour bob and steely, measured gaze to match, 'I responded by inquiring as to his plans for additional children.' Shortly afterwards she gave birth to two daughters, neither of whom compromised her career. As an officer in the Soviet division for the next 11 years she was brought, one by one, into the cases of Soviet assets until in 1981 she transferred to career management staff: it was a relief to shift from a world of spies to 'secretarial-clerical personnel management', she said, though it was also, pointedly, the year that the CIA lost contact with Polyakov. A year earlier he had left a posting in Delhi on what they assumed would be a short trip to Moscow. 'He did not return,' she said. 'I waited for a year, hoping he would reappear in the West or re-establish contact with us in Moscow, but there was silence.' By 1983 Grimes was back on the front line of CIA activity against the Soviets as chief of operations in Africa, the division in which Ames worked. At the time the CIA's operations against the Soviets were successful — they knew more about the KGB, Grimes said, than most individuals within it — and they had no indication of the 'impending disaster'. By the end of 1985 four agents had been arrested and Grimes was tasked with overhauling the staff communications system within the division. Cable traffic between HQ and the field stations was scrapped: case officers would indirectly travel to meet a source in a safe house and transfer encrypted notes back to Washington from a laptop. Grimes led the operation, which became known as the 'back room', at the same time as heading the Africa division. By the late 1980s she had been made chief of the Soviet and east European branch. She is survived by her husband, Gary Grimes, and two daughters: Kelly and Tracy.+ In 2012 Grimes published an account of the mole hunt, Circle of Treason, with her colleague Jeanne Vertefeuille. The Ames case always felt personal for her. Polyakov had been her first 'teacher' and his execution in 1988 made her reflect on the nature of her work. 'I was devastated,' she said. 'He became a personal friend. I thought he would have survived. It was a terrible, terrible reminder of the seriousness of what we did for a living.' Sandy Grimes, CIA chief, was born on August 10, 1945. She died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on July 25, 2025, aged 79
The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
Mali's former prime minister Maiga taken into custody amid corruption probe
Former Malian prime minister Choguel Kokalla Maiga was taken into custody on Tuesday on accusations of corruption, his lawyer said, as the West African country 's military junta has ramped up arrests of top politicians in recent weeks. Maiga's lawyer, Cheick Oumar Konaré, told The Associated Press the former prime minister was taken in for questioning earlier this month by the National Economic and Financial Unit, which is responsible for fighting corruption, as part of an investigation into allegations of misuse of public property. 'Former Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maiga has been taken into custody by officers from the brigade of the National Economic and Financial Unit,' Konaré said. 'We are contesting his detention because the former prime minister has no intention of fleeing the country or destroying evidence,' he added. In November 2024, Maïga was dismissed from his role as prime minister, days after he criticized the military regime for postponing elections. Following his dismissal, Maiga continued to criticize the military regime in the media. Earlier this month, another former prime minister, Moussa Mara, was imprisoned after tweeting his support for jailed critics of the ruling military junta. Mali has been ruled by military leaders since a junta seized power in 2020 and staged another coup the following year. In June, the country's leader, Gen. Assimi Goita, was granted an additional five years in power, despite the junta's earlier promises of a return to civilian rule by March 2024. The move followed the military regime's dissolution of political parties in May.
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘It's not noise. It's a message': the misunderstood misfits of Nigeria's underground rock scene
In the violet hush of a late-night doom scroll, I stumbled across her: a woman clad in lacquered leather and glinting chains, legs laced in harnesses. She stood mid-growl, clutching the mic as if to throttle it, her silhouette framed by a red LED screen that read 'Rock Nights' along with the name of the artist: Clayrocksu. Beneath the stage at Pop Landmark in Lagos, Nigeria, a sparse crowd of silver-studded misfits was filmed thrashing around in a trance. The performance provoked a small moral panic in the comments: cries of 'demonic' and fears that Clayrocksu was 'slipping into darkness'. The darkness Clayrocksu and others move through isn't occult, though – it's obscurity. In the west, goth and emo subcultures offer outsiders a name, a tribe, but in Nigeria they barely exist. The industry here forgets itself every few decades, and since the rise of Afrobeat, and later Afrobeats, rock has been sealed off or paved over. But it's kept alive by DIY shows such as Clayrocksu's Rock Nights series, WhatsApp chats, shared gear, and today's small scene – bands such as LoveSick, ASingerMustDie and the Recurrence – is raw and defiant. Long before Clayrocksu et al ever screamed into a mic, Nigerians were shaping rock to their own rhythm. Between 1967 and 1970, Nigeria fought a brutal civil war after the south-eastern region declared itself the Republic of Biafra. In the aftermath, the Hygrades, who lit up the 1970s with tracks like In the Jungle, came from the east along with the Funkees and the Doves – post–Biafran war kids with guitars, trying to turn trauma into sound. These early bands still leaned on the swagger of Hendrix and the snarl of Jagger, but it wasn't until Fela Kuti – fierce, lyrical, unmistakably ours – that Afro-rock began to speak in a Nigerian voice. But more immediately palatable pop, dance and gospel came to fill the airwaves, while rock had no radio, no label push, no hype. Still, it lived on in the margins, and more recently fan-led WhatsApp groups such as Rockaz World and Rock Republic have kept the flame going, along with the now-defunct Naija School of Rock blog. Clayrocksu isn't just a musician and now a member of the Recording Academy in the US, whose members vote for the Grammys; she's also an ambassador for the scene who set up the collective Afrorockstars in 2024. It's a kind of Justice League for Lagos's indie rock scene, where artists band together, host shows, and keep the flame alive. With her monthly Rock Nights series on hold due to a lack of funding, Clayrocksu has teamed up with Lagos venue Kevwe and Cam for a band showcase called Lagos Misfits Takeover. I head there to find what is left of Nigerian rock. 'I don't remember a time when I wasn't into rock,' Clayrocksu says before going on stage. As a kid, she played bootleg pop-rock CDs on her Walkman. Her dad was a rock head, too – less edgy metal, more Bon Jovi and Michael Bolton – but when Clayrocksu started covering his favourites, she finally got it. 'I can't explain it,' she says of her love of rock. 'The music called to me, and I want others to feel that, too.' She's unfazed by the moral panic she unleashed. 'I don't pay it any mind, honestly,' she says. For the Afrorockstars community, 'rock is just part of life, same as their faith'. She pauses, fingers grazing the crucifix around her neck. 'Some of them wear crosses, too.' She introduces me to LoveSick's frontman Korny, a 31-year-old, soft-spoken man with a bald head and a Jason Voorhees–style hockey mask clipped to his pants, his lucky charm. 'I bought it the night we won Battle of the Bands,' he says, referring to a Lagos event late last year, which was LoveSick's first ever live performance. 'I used my last cash to buy it from a vendor who said everything she sells is blessed. I wore it, we played and we won triple what I paid.' He looks every bit the nerdy IT solutions guy, but that changes when he takes the mic and growls through Guiding, a track whose lyrics – 'I've got 5k [Naira, about £2.50] left in my bank account' – are about surviving Nigeria as a broke youth. The sound at the venue is rough, but 'we can't wait for perfect sound like Afrobeats,' Korny shrugs. 'The show must go on.' His voice – guttural, sharp, sometimes screeching – feels scorched. 'I taught myself back in 2011,' he says. 'Just mimicking my favourites.' They were Korn's Jonathan Davis, Linkin Park's Chester Bennington, Asking Alexandria's Danny Worsnop. Now, he cycles through screams, growls and pig squeals. 'It's not noise,' he says. 'It's a voice. A message.' Also playing at Kevwe and Cam is brother duo ASingerMustDie. 'Hope y'all are ready to die tonight,' one of them deadpans into the mic. The venue's walls are lined with portraits of legends like Oliver De Coque and Fela Kuti, watching over the night's rising acts, and ASingerMustDie's set feels distinctly Nigerian – rock as the vessel, but with a message rooted in lived experience. 'It's all about feelings, experiences, societal issues,' the brothers tell me. Their song Córazon, for instance, was born from a toxic love story and the fear that leaving would hurt more than staying. Phones light up during LoveSick's set, and again for Clayrocksu, as fans look to prove they were here. Xavier, a fan of LoveSick, says he's been into rock for about 13 years: he first heard it on Need for Speed and Fifa, and it hit him like nothing else. 'Power chords and riffs break from traditional music patterns – they're chaotic, but beautiful,' he says. 'In a place as chaotic as Nigeria, rock helped me make sense of it all.' For this crowd, it isn't just music, it's making space to feel seen in a country that doesn't reward difference. 'Even if you don't sing rock,' Clayrocksu tells me, 'you can still be one of the cool kids with us.' ASingerMustDie's new EP Songs to Die For is released 25 August
