Free Republic

Mohamed Al Fayed, the former Harrods boss whose son Dodi was killed in a car crash alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, has died aged 94. Born in Egypt, he built a business empire in the Middle East before moving to the UK in the 1970s. However, he never realised his ambition to gain a passport for his adopted country. He spent his later years questioning the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Dodi and Diana. Mr Al Fayed had remained largely out of the public limelight in the past decade, living in his Surrey mansion with his wife Heini.

Mohamed Al Fayed, the Egyptian-born businessman who owned the department store Harrods, has died aged 94. His death comes almost 26 years to the day after the car crash in Paris that killed his eldest son, Dodi, and Diana, Princess of Wales, on 31 August 1997. Fayed was born in Alexandria and was the son of a schoolteacher. In his homeland, he launched his own shipping business, before becoming an adviser to one of the world’s richest men, the Sultan of Brunei, in 1966. When he arrived in the UK in the 1970s, he joined the board of the mining...

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE - Pope Francis said Tuesday that the latest round of financial scandal at the Vatican is actually a success story, because the situation was revealed thanks to an internal Vatican probe, which he said demonstrates that new controls are working. The pontiff also called both owning and deploying nuclear weapons “immoral,” saying that point should be added to the Catholic catechism, and suggested that it might be time to re-think the veto power wielded by a handful of countries in the United Nations Security Council. His comments came during an airborne news conference on the return...