LONDON, Greater London: Football superstar David Beckham recommended his friend Prince William and his wife Catherine call their baby David if it’s a boy.
The former England captain, 38, who attended the couple’s wedding in April 2011 with his Spice Girl singer wife Victoria, suggested his own name for the new royal arrival.
“David’s pretty good! David’s not bad. I think they should go for David — if a boy!,” he told Sky News television.
British bookmakers make the name David an outsider at odds of between 33/1 and 100/1.
The father of four said the 31-year-old prince’s maturity would help him in his new role.
“They’re going to be amazing parents because they are so loving toward children,” he said.
William has been the president of the Football Association, the sport’s governing body in England, since 2006.
“I’ve seen more of William than I have of Kate but William has been in all of our lives for so many years and we’ve seen him grow from that young boy into an unbelievable gentleman,” Beckham said.
“And that’s an amazing quality that he shows. I think that, as a father, is so important.”
In 2010, Beckham, William and British Prime Minister David Cameron teamed up and flew to Zurich in a bid to bring the 2018 football World Cup to England.
However, the all-out charm offensive flopped, with England only earning two of 22 votes — one of them their own.
Beckham, who won six English league titles with Manchester United, likes to tease William about being an Aston Villa fan.
King Edward VIII, who inherited the throne in 1936 before abdicating, was known in the royal family as David, one of his other given names.
Beckham says call royal baby David
Beckham says call royal baby David
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
