NEW After hearing thousands of last words, this hospital chaplain has advice for the living
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
It was a rare sight -- a senior member of the Royal Family testifying in a court of law.
What Prince Harry said, both during cross-examination in the witness box Tuesday and in his written witness statement, was just as unusual. By turns defensive, frank and accusatory, his testimony shone a light on life as a royal and on Harry's bitter personal feud with the press.
Here's what to know after a historic day at the High Court in London.
Harry, 38, is suing the publisher of the Daily Mirror over 33 articles published between 1996 and 2011 that he says were based on phone hacking or other illegal snooping methods.
They stories represent a fragment of decades of press coverage that Harry says has warped his life and those of his friends and loved ones.
In his witness statement, Harry claimed that during his adolescence and young adulthood, tabloids cast him in a role -- "the 'thicko.' the 'cheat,' the 'underage drinker,' the 'irresponsible drug taker."'
"I ended up feeling as though I was playing up to a lot of the headlines and stereotypes that they wanted to pin on me mainly because I thought that, if they are printing this rubbish about me and people were believing it, I may as well `do the crime,' so to speak," Harry said. "It was a downward spiral, whereby the tabloids would constantly try and coax me, a 'damaged' young man, into doing something stupid that would make a good story and sell lots of newspapers."
Harry alleged that journalists' behaviour was ruinous to his mental health, spurring "bouts of depression and paranoia."
"I now realize that my acute paranoia of being constantly under surveillance was not misplaced after all," he said.
Many of the articles deal with Harry's relationship with Chelsy Davy, his first serious girlfriend. He says he relationship eventually fell apart under media scrutiny, and accuses newspapers of trying to wreck his relationships "using whatever unlawful means at their disposal."
"I always felt as if the tabloids wanted me to be single, as I was much more interesting to them and sold more newspapers," his statement said. "Whenever I got into a relationship, they were very keen to report the details but would then, very quickly, seek to try and break it up by putting as much strain on it and creating as much distrust as humanly possible, as I shall go into in more detail later in this statement.
"This twisted objective is still pursued to this day even though I'm now married," he said.
Harry has long blamed the press for the death of his mother Princess Diana, killed in a car crash in 1997 while being pursued by paparazzi.
He told the court he was distraught to discover Diana's private conversations might have been hacked by the Mirror Group. He said he felt "sick" to learn of payments by the newspaper to private investigators for information related to Diana.
He lashed out at TV host Piers Morgan, who was editor of the Daily Mirror from 1995 to 2004.
"The thought of Piers Morgan and his band of journalists earwigging into my mother's private and sensitive messages three months prior to her death in Paris, makes me feel physically sick," Harry wrote. He called it "vile and entirely unjustified behaviour."
Harry's anguish is evident, but the lawyer for Mirror Group thought his memory was flawed. Attorney Andrew Green took Harry through the articles one by one Tuesday, asking whether he could remember reading them at the time of publication. In many cases he could not.
Green also said Harry was "In the realms of total speculation" when he said stories must have been acquired by phone hacking or other illicit means.
The lawyer said there have been "many different routes" by which information about Harry had made its way into the media and "it doesn't always require unlawful press activity."
Having left royal life in 2020, citing unbearable media scrutiny and alleged racism toward his wife, Meghan, Harry is on a mission to reform the British media.
His witness statement ends with a call to arms, calling for press regulation and accusing some journalists of having "blood on their typing fingers."
"They claim to hold public figures to account, but refuse to hold themselves accountable. If they're supposedly policing society, who on earth is policing them, when even the government is scared of alienating them because position is power. It is incredibly worrying for the entire U.K.," Harry said.
He's no fan of Britain's Conservative government, either. "Our country is judged globally by the state of our press and our government -- both of which I believe are at rock bottom," he said.
Hospital chaplain J.S. Park opens up about death, grief and hearing thousands of last words, and shares his advice for the living.
French police cordoned off the Iranian consulate in Paris on Friday, where a man was threatening to blow himself up, Europe 1 radio and BFM TV.
More money will land in the pockets of some Canadian families on Friday for the latest Canada Child Benefit installment.
An apparent Israeli drone attack on Iran saw troops fire air defences at a major air base and a nuclear site early Friday morning near the central city of Isfahan, an assault coming in retaliation for Tehran's unprecedented drone-and-missile assault on the country.
American millionaire Jonathan Lehrer, one of two men charged in the killings of a Canadian couple in Dominica, has been denied bail.
Canadian banks that refuse to identify the carbon rebate by name when doing direct deposits are forcing the government to change the law to make them do it, says Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault.
A woman who recently moved to Canada from India was searching for a job when she got caught in an online job scam and lost $15,000.
The World Health Organization and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time on what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives.
Prince Harry, the son of King Charles III and fifth in line to the British throne, has formally confirmed he is now a U.S. resident.
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a grade four student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.
When Les Robertson was walking home from the gym in North Vancouver's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood three weeks ago, he did a double take. Standing near a burrow it had dug in a vacant lot near East 1st Street and St. Georges Avenue was a yellow-bellied marmot.
A moulting seal who was relocated after drawing daily crowds of onlookers in Greater Victoria has made a surprise return, after what officials described as an 'astonishing' six-day journey.
Just steps from Parliament Hill is a barber shop that for the last 100 years has catered to everyone from prime ministers to tourists.
A high score on a Foo Fighters pinball machine has Edmonton player Dave Formenti on a high.
A compound used to treat sour gas that's been linked to fertility issues in cattle has been found throughout groundwater in the Prairies, according to a new study.