quietly

Aug. 20 (UPI) — Belgium has a new prince after the 26-year-old former car salesman was recognized by the king’s brother as his son.

Clement Vandenkerkhove reportedly joined the royal family in February in a low-key town hall ceremony, which was disclosed Wednesday. The ceremony was required for him to become a prince.

Prince Laurent, King Philippe’s younger brother, last year publicly acknowledged Vandenkerckhove, who was born during Laurent’s seven-year relationship with Flemish former model turned singer Iris Vandenkerckhove.

The younger Vandenkerckhove now has a royal title and a claim to an inheritance after Prince Laurent, 62. He is not included in the line of succession and will not receive a royal allowance.

Vandenkerckhove told Belgian daily Nieuwsblad that he was unsure if he would adopt the royal name of van Saksen-Coburg. “I am proud of the name Vandenkerck­hove,” he said. “Sacrificing that surname would be a betrayal to everything my mother did for me.”

Vandenkerckhove said he suffered anxiety as a child over his identity.

“My whole childhood I struggled with the question, ‘Who is my father?’ When I knew, the secrecy weighed heavily on me,” he told the newspaper. “Imagine: You know who your father is, but you aren’t allowed to tell anyone. After school, I became a car salesman. I liked that job and did it well. But panic attacks were destroying me.”

He said the anxiety eased after he established a relationship with Prince Laurent.

“What matters most to me right now is that I am a son who is allowed to get to know his father,” Vandenkerckhove said, adding that the men share a love of cars.

Prince Laurent later married British-born Claire Louise Coombs, and they have three children.

ROBBIE Williams has revealed he has been diagnosed with autism at the age of 52 — and pals say he is taking it in his trademark stride.

The music legend recently sought a professional assessment after “feeling like there was something he was missing” about himself.

Robbie, who was also previously diagnosed with ADHD, casually revealed the news during a launch for the autumn/winter collection of his Hopeium clothing brand.

He said: “I’ve got ADHD. I’ve just found out I’ve got a bit of autism as well, which I f**ing love, because it explains so much, and it’s like a get-out-of-jail card now.

“If I do all the weird s*** that I do, I go, ‘Sorry, I’m autistic.’”

The married father of four went on: “With ADHD, you can completely and utterly concentrate on something 100 per cent.

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“But absolutely everything else, you just cannot do it. Ask my kids.”

The former Take That star, who also suffers from clinical depression, opened up about his creativity.

He said: “I’m completely and utterly obsessed with creating images and funny things, and if I’m creating images and making what I think are funny things, I’m not thinking about ‘me’.

“My brain is incredibly creative, and it can be creative about everything in the world, including things that can cause you to panic or be scared.”

He also revealed that he struggles to concentrate with background noise or distractions as he becomes overstimulated, saying: “It really throws me off.”

Since being diagnosed just a few weeks ago, The Sun can reveal the singer has met with an AuDHD expert — someone who specialises in both autism and ADHD.

Robbie hopes the meetings will give him a greater understanding of his behaviour.

A source told The Sun: “Robbie has known for some time about his ADHD, but he always felt there was something he was missing.

“Someone suggested he could be autistic, and so within the past few weeks, he sought private medical advice and underwent an assessment.

It’s still early days, but Robbie has spoken with an AuDHD expert to get a greater understanding of what the diagnosis means for him and what options can be put in place to make life easier.

“Like with everything life throws at him, Robbie is taking the diagnosis in his stride.

“It’s business as usual. The diagnosis just gives a greater understanding of what makes Robbie Robbie.”

The Sun was the only newspaper Robbie met during the intimate launch in front of fashion bigwigs at Flannels on London’s Oxford Street.

He told us he hopes his Hopeium brand will bring some fun into the notoriously uptight and judgemental fashion industry.

His new tongue-in-cheek range includes “Gandhi” football tops and shirts adorned with images of a hand flipping the middle finger. Chuckling, he said he is already planning to bring out a Dalai Lama version.

Robbie had a well-documented battle with alcohol and substance abuse in the nineties and early noughties.

But he claimed he is now addicted to creating art and clothes after being clean and sober for over two decades.

Robbie said: “I really got into drawing and creating. I think it’s my addict’s gene. Look, I can no longer do cocaine. No longer do MDMA, no longer drink, so, you know, where does the addiction go to?

“Well, it goes to several places, and one of them is clothes.”

Robbie went on: “It’s a bit of silliness because I love silliness, and there doesn’t seem to be any silliness in fashion.

“It seems to be outlawed because, you know, as much as I love fashion, it’s properly pretentious and very, very serious, isn’t it?”

Robbie plans to draft in his wife Ayda Field, 47, to model the collection in a bid to boost sales.

Robbie, who has recently dramatically trimmed down after turning to weight-loss jabs, also hopes to make his catwalk debut at London Fashion Week.

He said: “Hopefully we will see me modelling it on the runway.

“I mean, I’m in decent nick now, so yeah. I’ve been looking after myself. I’d be happy if any artist started wearing the brand, and Ayda will wear it too.”

He added of his new clobber: “I should be wearing it on my tour – it would make marketing sense.”

The singer is set to play shows across Europe and South America this autumn.

He is also hotly tipped to play Glastonbury next June for the first time since 1998, with sources saying he could follow in Sir Rod Stewart’s footsteps and play the Sunday Legends slot.

Last month, a clip of Robbie went viral after something appeared to fall out of his nose during an unplanned live appearance on German TV at the World Cup in New York.

Some viewers thought Robbie was back taking cocaine.

Rather than fearing for his career, Robbie laughed off the suggestion he had relapsed, and believes no one cares anyway.

He said: “Can I clear something up, please, as well? I didn’t relapse on cocaine at the World Cup, but now forever and ever and ever the internet will be assured of itself that coke fell out of my nose.

“No, it was Nicorette. The thing is, I thought about it the next day — I was lying in bed, and 50 million people had seen me supposedly relapse on coke at the World Cup, and I was like, ‘If I was on coke, it wouldn’t be a f***ing problem anyway, would it? Who f***ing cares?’”

And he said some people seemed to be pleased at the prospect of him doing class A drugs again.

He went on: “So many comments online were like, ‘Good for you, Robbie. Everyone loves the f***ing packet.’ So I made some new fans due to what they thought I was doing.”

Before Spain took on Argentina in the World Cup final last month, Robbie was front and centre in the closing ceremony, taking to the pitch to sing the official Fifa anthem Desire alongside Nicole Scherzinger and Italian singer Laura Pausini.

In keeping with still feeling like he’s just Rob from Stoke rather than one of the biggest-selling British singers of all-time, he swaggered towards the halfway line in a blue Adidas tracksuit – adorned with diamantes for the momentous occasion.

Robbie said: “The sparkles were added at the artist’s request, and it felt so comfy.

“It’s best to be comfy, so when they said, ‘What do you want to wear?’ I just said, ‘I want to wear a tracksuit. Can you put some jewels on it so it’s a bit showbizzy?’”

Insisting he is still just as ambitious as he was three decades ago, Robbie said of his future plans: “Lots of records. I’m 52, still ambitious, still have this gaping chasm that is unfillable.

“Still want, still need, still want to have purpose, I want to be out there doing things. I am still as ambitious as I was when I was 22 and it’s served me well. I have new music, new tours too.”

Robbie, who has been in the public eye since 1992, also said he would be ignoring snobbish critics, saying: “I don’t need validation from the po-faced fashion industry. I never got that from the po-faced music industry.

“I would like validation from the general clothing-buying public.”

“Cursed be you, State of Israel. Cursed be you,” Hugo Chávez said memorably on state television in 2010. Over his years in power, he floated the ancient antisemitic trope of the Christ-killing people, likened Israeli leaders to Hitler, called for them to be tried at The Hague, and in 2009 broke off relations entirely in response to the Gaza attacks, calling his own diplomats’ expulsion an “honor.” He had already withdrawn Venezuela’s envoy once before in 2006 over the IDF offensive in Lebanon, and three months after the 2009 break he recognized the Palestinian Authority. 

Although Venezuela never stopped trading with Israel, Chávez’s firm anti-Israel rhetoric was central to how the Bolivarian Revolution defined itself abroad, even after his death. Now his heirs are thawing one of the coldest relationships in chavista foreign policy. 

On Tuesday, the foreign ministries of Venezuela and Israel announced they would establish a “coordination mechanism” to provide consular services to their citizens, continuing the ongoing technical cooperation born out of Israel’s response to the June 24 earthquakes. Although the agreement falls short of full diplomatic restoration, with no mention yet of exchanging ambassadors or reopening embassies, it is the first formal coordination channel between the two countries since Chávez severed relations.

Chavista groups took to the streets in Caracas on July 25 to denounce the US-sponsored talks that began on August 1, burning Israeli and US flags.

In 2017, then-Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez said Venezuela wanted to restore ties, and the following year Maduro welcomed then-chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Moshe Amara, to Miraflores, awarding him the Libertadoras y Libertadores order—the same honor given to the Palestinian Authority’s Abu Mazen by Chávez in 2009. 

Although the government was quick to frame the collaboration as a humanitarian matter, it was also military from the jump. Six days after the quakes, a diplomatic and military mission departed to Venezuela from Israel, comprising more than 50 personnel from the Foreign Ministry, the IDF’s Home Front Command, and the National Emergency Management Authority, joined by ZAKA search-and-rescue volunteers. It was led by Brigadier General Elad Edri, chief of staff of the IDF Home Front Command, who in a July meeting presented a “Project for the Reconstruction of the Future” to Rodríguez. Delcy was then photographed alongside uniformed IDF officers, thanked the delegation on camera, and praised its members as “highly trained and professional,” ultimately asking Sa’ar to extend the mission. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally approved the extension.

Newly-appointed canciller Félix Plasencia sealed the agreement with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar after weeks of talks, and a day after holding a meeting with Isaac Cohen, chief rabbi of Venezuela’s Israelite Association. He delivered a letter addressed to Delcy Rodríguez, asking her to consider restoring diplomatic ties between the countries given “the needs of the Jewish community in our country.” 

Plasencia thanked Israel for its earthquake assistance and praised the community’s historic contributions to Venezuela, warm words for a community that chavismo long conflated with the State it was cursing. In 2009, Chávez called on Venezuela’s Jews to answer for a foreign government’s war and linked Jews to the hoarding of the world’s wealth in his 2005 Christmas address. During the 2012 campaign, chavista media hammered Henrique Capriles over his Jewish ancestry, and state security raided the Hebraica Jewish school twice, in 2004 and 2007, as denounced by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Signaling a willingness to rebuild relations with Israel is one more entry on a long list of things that Washington wants and that Rodríguez is willing to concede.

The government has reversed course, but some of its base has not. Chavista groups took to the streets in Caracas on July 25 to denounce the US-sponsored talks that began on August 1, burning Israeli and US flags. As the news of renewed consular relations broke, the Venezuelan Movement in Solidarity with Palestine, Al Awda, rejected “normalization with the genocidal state of Israel,” warning that “diplomacy cannot serve to whitewash crimes against humanity.” 

But the base’s anger misreads the nature of the turn. After a quarter-century defining itself against empire, chavismo is not softening but practicing what former diplomat Imdat Oner calls authoritarian pragmatism: trading diplomatic goodwill for room to consolidate power at home and attract economic opportunities. Since taking the interim presidency, Delcy Rodríguez has reversed much of the confrontational diplomacy of the Chávez and Maduro years, moving closer to Washington, restoring ties with Chile, Perú, and the Dominican Republic, withdrawing from the International Criminal Court, and distancing Caracas from Iran.

Signaling a willingness to rebuild relations with Israel is one more entry on a long list of things that Washington wants and that Rodríguez is willing to concede. Chávez cursed the State of Israel “from the depths of his soul and his viscera”, but his successors have decided that the soul of their revolution is worth sacrificing for their own survival.