Money
EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Never mind Charles’s slimmed down monarchy, Alan Titchmarsh might have fallen victim to the King’s slimming down his friendship group….

Never mind Charles’s slimmed down monarchy, poor old Alan Titchmarsh might have fallen victim to the King’s slimming down his friendship group, too.
Asked if he has received an invite to next month’s Coronation of his close pal, the 73-year-old presenter, says: ‘No. I want to spend the day at home watching it on TV with my wife Alison.
‘We’re watching at home before joining the family for a bit of a party.’
The broadcaster, who played a key role in hosting the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, has been asked to cover the Coronation as a presenter, but would rather spend the day with his nearest and dearest.
‘I’m not working, though I have been asked. I am not going to, but I am very grateful for the offers.’
Why waste money on expensive photoshoots? TV presenter Nick Knowles has a cheeky way of keeping costs to a minimum when attempting to acquire professional quality snaps of his glamorous girlfriend Katie Dadzie.
Appearing at a recent bash with the 33-year-old business owner, and knowing that photographers would ‘far rather have a few shots of Katie on her own’, the 60-year-old BBC’s DIY SOS host enquired: ‘Actually, If any of you have any good ones of her, can you email them to me? Seriously, I could do with some.’
He’s already blessed with three children, quite aside from being heir to a 7,000-acre estate and ancestral seat in Hampshire, plus another 2,300 acres in southern Spain — and the magnificent house known as ‘Number 1 London’.
Now, though, there’s a distinctly intimate reason for Arthur Wellesley — formally, the Marquess of Douro, elder son of the Duke of Wellington — to be of good cheer. I can disclose that he’s to marry Canadian firecracker Hayley Whitehead.
‘Everyone’s delighted for them,’ a friend tells me, adding that an early autumn wedding is on the cards.
The happy news comes three years after Arthur, 45, parted from his first wife, Jemma Kidd, elder sister of model Jodie Kidd, and seven years after he and Hayley both joined investment firm Oakley Capital.
In 2021, it became apparent that Arthur and Hayley’s relationship had transcended the merely professional when they were photographed together on Ibiza. Hayley, 36, then left Oakley to join investment firm CVC.
Traditionally, marital celebrations are at the home of the bride’s parents, as they were when Arthur married Jemma in a glamorous wedding in 2005, held at Holders, the Kidd family estate in Barbados.
But the couple may opt to emulate one of Arthur’s sisters, Lady Charlotte Wellesley, who preferred the family’s Dehesa Baja estate in Spain for her wedding to Colombian- American billionaire Alejandro Santo Domingo.
Arthur’s cousin Sofia Wellesley and her husband, super crooner James Blunt, were guests on that occasion. So, too, was the then Duchess of Cornwall, who’s likely to be more duty-bound come this autumn…
Strictly winner Rose Ayling- Ellis, the show’s first-ever deaf contestant, is glad there’s someone on TV that those suffering the same affliction can relate to.
‘It’s so nice for deaf children to have someone to look up to nowadays — which I never had when I was a child. I want to keep working on that, but I have to remember I want to do stuff for me too,’ she tells me at a party in Central London.
‘I can’t put on the pressure to represent everyone though, because it’s impossible. I can only do my best,’ adds the 28-year-old former EastEnders star. But she is calling for more disabled people to work on scripts for soaps.
‘I have now joined the Writers’ Access Group, which is run by the BBC, and what we’re trying to do is find more disabled writers because at the moment we can play these roles but no one is writing them.’
Money
Meet the cheapest US states to buy a house

A new study analyzing Zillow data has found that the monthly median sale price of a house last year was more than $500,000 in Utah, California and Colorado — and more than a staggering $800,000 in Hawaii.
The study, conducted by Studio City realtors, found that Hawaii clocked in as the most expensive state in the U.S. for homebuyers. On the island, the average home price was $805,775 — hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the cheapest state on the list.
Studio City realtor Tony Mariotti noted that market turbulence contributed to a “significant increase” in house prices across the U.S.
Home prices went up nationwide in February after months of declines amid low inventory and a small uptick in demand — and experts have said they expect affordability will continue to be a problem for prospective homebuyers in the months ahead.
Here are the priciest and cheapest U.S. states to buy a home:
The most expensive states to buy a home
Eight states and Washington, D.C., saw a monthly median sale price of a house last year of $400,000 or higher, with Oregon sitting at that exact figure.
Washington state, Nevada, Montana and Washington, D.C., came in between $402,900 and $487,500.
California, Colorado and Hawaii were the top three most expensive, at $537,000, $537,125 and $805,775 in monthly median sale prices last year, respectively.
Costs differed in different areas within states: for example, the median monthly sale price of a house last year in California’s cheapest city of Red Bluff was $320,000 — while the ticket in its most expensive city of San Jose was $1,370,000.
Money
Don’t just hug a tree this Arbor Day — plant one, too

Nearly five years ago, Hurricane Michael became the first Category 5 storm to hit the United States in 25 years. It left a trail of destruction in its wake, and my community of Panama City — located in the Florida Panhandle — was hit especially hard. Since then, working together as neighbors and citizens, we’ve made significant progress in key recovery areas, including rebuilding key and vital infrastructure, enhancing quality of life, developing our downtown, and attracting new businesses across a mix of industries. However, one of our most important recovery efforts lies within our tree canopy restoration — an often overlooked but vital area of disaster recovery and prevention.
When Hurricane Michael uprooted nearly 80 percent of Panama City’s trees — approximately a million trees, generating 5.7 million cubic yards of debris within the city — it created serious challenges. Not only did we lose the beautiful canopy from 100-year-old oak trees, but the vital function of the trees was lost, the first of which was the absorption of groundwater. The loss of so many trees significantly increased the risk of flooding in our community,
where we now experience flooding in areas that haven’t typically flooded in the 114-year history of the city. The second function lost from the lack of trees is shade.
Trees serve to mitigate the urban heat island effect, where an entire city is warmed by concrete being heated by the sun. These increased temperatures not only result in uncomfortably hot weather but can also lead to other extreme weather events like wildfires. Since the storm, Panama City has experienced increased flooding whenever thunderstorms roll through, in addition to wildfires that consumed over 40,000 acres last year – both due in part to the damaged tree canopy and loss of trees.
Money
The problems facing VA modernization are bigger than its software systems

The list of criticisms of the new Veterans Affairs (VA) electronic health record system, Oracle Cerner, is long.
Thousands of doctors’ orders went missing, putting patient safety at risk. Its downtime has been high compared to the old system, though it has improved. The new system is expensive: $16 billion so far, up from the $10 billion originally estimated. And, so far, it has been rolled out at just five of the VA’s 171 sites.
One of the problems is that the old record system, VistA, has its own lengthy list of reasons why it cannot continue to serve as the main software for VA hospitals. VistA was coded in Mumps, a computer language so old that few programmers are available to work on it. This old system is also not cloud-based, and cloud-based systems are now standard. And each VA location has customized VistA for its own particular needs, which means that each system is, in its way, unique, and interoperability is not-at-all simple.
Even those who still love VistA concede that sticking with the old software is not a long-term solution. And even in the short-term, VistA is expensive to maintain, costing $900 million for this purpose just last year. So VA has been sinking money into two different electronic health record systems, each one broken in its own way.
As of last Friday, VA has called for a complete reset of the modernization program and a halt to any further Oracle Cerner rollouts.
How did this implementation go so wrong? And what should be done now?
Electronic health record (EHR) implementations often take a long time and go over budget. And while the VA implementation of its new EHR software has been challenging for a number of reasons, all of these reasons could be, and indeed were, anticipated.
VA is unique in its geographical breadth — most EHR rollouts occur in a single health care system that is physically situated in one state, not across 50. Most EHRs, including the new Oracle Cerner system, are designed around billing, which is not a focus for providers in VA hospitals. The VA patient population is also different than the general public, with different frequencies of disease (more PTSD and missing limbs; less pregnancy and pediatric care), and it requires management of referrals and care outside the VA system.
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