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Meghan shares rare glimpse of her and Prince Harry's rescue beagle Mia in latest As Ever promo - amid uncertainty about the future of her lifestyle brand

Meghan shares rare glimpse of her and Prince Harry's rescue beagle Mia in latest As Ever promo - amid uncertainty about the future of her lifestyle brand

Daily Mail​2 days ago

Meghan Markle has given fans a rare glimpse of her and Prince Harry 's rescue beagle Mamma Mia in a promo post for As Ever amid uncertainty over the future of her lifestyle brand.
On Wednesday, the Duchess of Sussex, 43, shared a sweet snap of the pooch, Mia, sniffing the contents of her woven bag that was filled with fresh vegetables grown in her garden on Instagram.
Referring to Mia, who the Sussexes rescued in 2022, Meghan captioned her post: 'The unofficial quality inspector of this morning's garden haul.'
The 'haul' comprised of broccoli, carrots, corn, red peppers and squash as well as spring onions and an assortment of fresh herbs as Mia buried her face in the produce.
The latest post on As Ever's social media page comes one day after Meghan revealed she plans to 'step back to assess' what the lifestyle brand had achieved in its first year - and what it could become in the future.
Meghan, who unveiled the company at the start of the year, recently revealed she may never restock her famous jam - one of the many homely products she sold under the As Ever brand - in an interview with The Fast Company.
The Duchess was speaking about her business and balancing work with motherhood as the first series of her podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, drew to a close yesterday.
Asked about As Ever, Meghan said she 'step back, gather data from the launch, and figure out exactly what' the company's future holds - as she confirmed new products won't go live until the first quarter of 2026.
The Duchess of Sussex, 43, shared a sweet snap of the pooch, Mia, sniffing the contents of her woven bag that was filled with fresh vegetables grown in her garden on Instagram
Meghan also revealed the surprising turn As Ever could take - hinting at a future step into the fashion industry that she deemed an 'interesting space for me'.
The inaugural run of As Ever products, such as jams, honey and teas, sold out within 45 minutes of the launch.
Her previous store sold out in 45 minutes and contained homely items as well as her long-awaited pots of jam.
Meghan and Harry's rescue, beagle Mia, was first seen in the family's Christmas card last December.
Among six pictures included in the festive greetings card was one which featured the Sussexes with their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, as well as their rescue dogs including Mia, beloved beagle Guy - who passed away earlier this year - and their labrador Pula.
Nine-year-old Mia was rescued by the couple from an animal testing centre in 2022
The pup was one of 4,000 dogs bred for Envigo breeding and research facility in Virginia. Mia had arrived at the rescue centre having just given birth to eight puppies.
The dogs had been bred for pharmaceutical and biotech research - but inspections of the centre had found dozens of violations of federal law over a two year period.
Animal lover Meghan has adopted a number of rescue dogs over the past few years and brought her American rescue beagle Guy to the UK when she married Harry.
Also in the picture was the couple's black Lab, Pula, who was introduced to the family ahead of Archie's birth in 2019.
The pooch's unique name is the currency in Botswana, a country the couple visited in the early days of their relationship.
Though not included in their greetings card, the Sussexes also own several rescue chickens, who live with them at their $14m, seven-acre mansion in Montecito, California.
Meghan's latest As Ever post comes one day after the Duchess released the eighth and final episode of her podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, featuring Spanx entrepreneur Sara Blakely.
Promoting the podcast and As Ever, Meghan told The Fast Company that she wouldn't know 'what to call herself' if she had to write a resume.
She said: 'If I had to write a résumé, I don't know what I would call myself.
'I think it speaks to this chapter many of us find ourselves in, where none of us are one note. But I believe all the notes I am playing are part of the same song.'
Meghan added that the 'mom moments' push her to success in the business world, with plans in the future ranging from home goods to fashion.
Revealing her son Archie has begun to lose his teeth, she described becoming the tooth fairy and leaving coins and a little dinosaur underneath his pillow.
She said: 'I had a lot of business meetings the next morning, but I still chose to cuddle with him the rest of the night. Those mom moments energize me to be a better founder, a better employer, a better boss.'

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Why gold mining shares are too cheap, according to JP Morgan analysts
Why gold mining shares are too cheap, according to JP Morgan analysts

Daily Mail​

time30 minutes ago

  • Daily Mail​

Why gold mining shares are too cheap, according to JP Morgan analysts

After a strong run for precious metals, gold mining shares still look undervalued. That's the view from JP Morgan's latest note on listed producers, which argues there's room for substantial upside, especially if its bullish forecast for the precious metal proves right. Its commodities team is pencilling in a price of $4,100 an ounce for 2026. That's well above current spot levels of $3,320 and would mark a new all-time high. Based on that estimate, JP Morgan sees around 40–50 per cent upside to average analyst expectations for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation across the sector. While the American bank focused on the larger producers, citing names such as Fresnillo and Hochschild, there's plenty of value lower down the evolutionary chain. Stocks on this layer of the pyramid are increasingly disconnected from the rising gold price, rather than moving in step. Of course, being small and mid-cap companies, it often takes time for the market to focus on inherent value, even when backed by gold. These smaller players are also more prone to operational mis-steps that larger organisations can absorb. Below is a far-from-scientific roll call of gold stocks that have thus far flown under the radar. Probably the pick of the bunch is Pan African Resources, which, with a £940 million market capitalisation, has broken free from the small-cap bracket. While its share price is up around 30 per cent year to date, it still lags the performance of Endeavour (+51 per cent) and Fresnillo (+80 per cent). Dropping down a division, Caledonia Mining stands out. Its performance has been stronger than Premier African and it comes with a very decent dividend. As valuations shrink, the link between the gold price and share price weakens. A case in point is Ariana Resources, which has modest production from its Turkish operations but ambitious growth plans in Zimbabwe. Panmure Liberum analysts, fresh from a site visit to Ariana's Dokwe project, described it as a potential multi-million-ounce asset with strong development prospects. That optimism is in stark contrast to Ariana's stock market performance, down more than 40 per cent year to date. It suggests value and opportunity may be buried in AIM's twilight zone. Ariana is preparing to list in Australia, a savvy move in a market where investors, both private and institutional, know how to value smaller gold companies. Appetite for diggers and prospectors is strong, supported by self-directed flows from Australia's generous superannuation schemes. So, watch this space. Wider market moves Turning to the wider market, the AIM All-Share continued to outperform its benchmark, rising 1.3 per cent to 746.39 and outpacing the FTSE 100, which nudged just 0.4 per cent higher. This reflects growing confidence, underlined by a slew of successful fundraisings that made May a bumper month for companies replenishing their coffers. The week's standout performer was Blue Star Capital, which jumped 150 per cent after news of its investment in cross-border crypto payments platform SatoshiPay. Avacta rose 43 per cent, a performance that would have topped the leaderboard most weeks. The appointment of two heavyweight independent directors helped ease investor concerns over a delay to the company's results. One of the new recruits, Richard Hughes, brings deep capital markets experience, possibly signalling a strategic shift for the precision medicines group. ATOME climbed 35 per cent following the launch of a new renewable energy division, initially focused on Latin America. And the laggards… At the other end of the table, Totally fell 84 per cent as investors digested the healthcare provider's semingly insurmountable funding position. Watkin Jones dropped 21 per cent after the developer of student housing and build-to-rent properties posted a loss and painted a gloomy picture of current trading. Finally, the small-cap market, especially where trading is thin or controlled by market makers, tends to react sharply to news, with professional price-setters often moving to protect positions rather than reflect true value. A case in point is hVIVO. Shares slumped 45 per cent on Friday following the loss of one contract and the postponement of another. Seasoned small-cap investors will know that sanity usually prevails, but it can take time for stocks like hVIVO to find their footing. In the meantime, it's worth remembering this is a business with £47million of contracted revenue already secured for the current year and, as of its last results, £44million in cash.

Leslie Dilley obituary
Leslie Dilley obituary

The Guardian

time34 minutes ago

  • The Guardian

Leslie Dilley obituary

Leslie Dilley, who has died aged 84 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, won the first of two Oscars as an art director for his work on the original 1977 Star Wars film. His creation, the much-loved little robotic droid R2-D2, with a silver and blue dome head and rocket boosters that enabled him to fly through space, appeared on screen for more than 40 years (1977-2019), spanning the first three movies and both the prequel and sequel trilogies. He recalled the 'head-scratching' challenge in those pre-CGI days. 'We started out with a cardboard drum, added cardboard arms and then tried to walk it,' he said. First he built different versions based on conceptual designs drawn by Ralph McQuarrie. Then Dilley, along with the director, George Lucas, and John Barry, the production designer on the first movie (which was later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope), decided to go with one that would allow a human – short in stature – to step inside, walk and operate it. 'We brought in some actors who we thought would work, but many of them just weren't strong enough,' Dilley told Star Wars Insider magazine. Eventually, Kenny Baker auditioned and fitted the role – and the prop. Dilley was also responsible for the colour and detail of Luke Skywalker's hovering landspeeder anti-gravity craft, conceived by McQuarrie and the modelmaker Colin Cantwell, and for R2-D2's humanoid robot friend C-3PO, whom McQuarrie based on the female robot from Fritz Lang's 1927 silent classic Metropolis. After working on Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Dilley won his second Oscar for the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford as the globetrotting archaeologist. For the making of one of its best known scenes – Jones fleeing from a South American cave temple with a giant boulder tumbling at his heels – Dilley's work on set even extended to physical exertion. 'I was called upon to help with another bloke to get behind the rolling boulder, pushing it as it chases after Harrison Ford,' he said. Dilley also worked as an art director on Alien (1979) with the director Ridley Scott. He built sets based on the paintings by the Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger that inspired the screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, who jointly wrote the sci-fi horror classic about an extraterrestrial creature stalking and killing the crew of the Nostromo spacecraft. On set for another scene that has gone down in cinema history, Dilley recalled: 'When John Hurt's chest breaks open and we see the baby alien for the first time and blood is spraying everywhere, the actors' reactions were real – they were caught completely off guard, with blood on their clothing and mouths open in fright and surprise.' Dilley went on to become a production designer on films that similarly featured fantasy elements. For The Abyss (1989), whose large amount of underwater filming provided special challenges, he and a construction team turned Ron Cobb's conceptual blueprints for a huge oil-drilling platform into reality – built in a tank of water – as one of the sets in an abandoned nuclear power plant in South Carolina. For The Exorcist III (1990), he created several illusions, including a large hospital set with all the rooms and areas joined together by hallways, one of them appearing to go on for ever, but actually with consecutively smaller arches and a progressively lower ceiling. 'You can create the depth with smaller people at the back,' he said, with a laugh. He also built a 'ceiling' on the floor for the filming of a possessed woman crawling along it in the supernatural horror film. Dilley was born in Pontygwaith, Mid Glamorgan, during the second world war, and grew up in Wembley Park after his parents, Leslie, a chauffeur, and Doreen (nee Willis), returned to their home in Middlesex in 1946. From the age of 15, he studied architecture and building construction at Willesden technical college while on a plastering apprenticeship at the Associated British Picture Corporation. He did plaster work on the 1963 James Bond film From Russia with Love and worked his way up to become assistant art director on Kelly's Heroes (1970), The Devils, Macbeth, and The Boy Friend (all 1971) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), and an art department draughtsman on another 007 movie, The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). His initial films as art director were The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequel, The Four Musketeers (1974), and he also took that role on The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977), Superman (1978), An American Werewolf in London (1981), Eureka (1983), Never Say Never Again (1983) and Legend (1985). Establishing himself as a production designer, Dilley moved to Los Angeles in 1985. On the Disney comedy sequel Honey, I Blew up the Kid (1992), he was responsible for building two replicas of the family home chosen for filming in California, one of them scaled down 43 per cent for scenes in which the toddler, Adam, appears to be 7ft tall. On that movie and several others, he was also the second unit director. His last feature film as a production designer was Little Man (2006), although he returned to Britain to work on the BBC children's television series Teacup Travels (2015-17), starring Gemma Jones as Great Aunt Lizzie telling her two grandchildren stories from ancient times. He received further Oscar nominations, for his art direction on Alien, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back and The Abyss, and Bafta Cymru's 2020 outstanding contribution to film and television award. Dilley is survived by his second wife, Leslie Lykes, whom he married in 1987, and their daughters, Sophia, Ivory and EmmaJane, and son, Leslie; by Georgia, the daughter of his first marriage, to Amanda Parish, which ended in divorce; and by four grandchildren. Ivor Leslie Dilley, art director and production designer, born 11 January 1941; died 20 May 2025

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