When Canadian-born Michael Ibsen, 55, was invited to the dig to find the Plantagenet king Richard III, he felt “pretty surreal.”
In 2005, a historian, John Ashdown Hill, after years of painstaking research, had telephoned Ibsen’s mother, Joy.
Joy, a UK-born journalist who emigrated to Canada in her 20s, was, he informed her, the 16th-generation niece of Richard III — a direct female descendant of his eldest sister, Anne of York.
“My mother was quite skeptical, but he was persuasive and she agreed to give a DNA sample. We thought it was something so abstract it was difficult to be emotionally involved, just a nice story to tell grandchildren, if we ever have any,” Ibsen said.
When Joy died four years ago, Michael, a furniture-maker who moved to London, and his brother and sister in Canada promptly forgot about it.
Then Michael received a call.
There was to be a dig and, as a 17th-generation nephew, would he like to be present? Oh, and would he mind giving a fresh DNA sample?
He was delighted.
“I really hope it is him,” he said of the remains found. “It’s been so surreal, I feel stunned. It’s one thing to have in some way a link to history. It’s another altogether to be directly involved in something of such historical significance.”
“At first, there was just a car park. Now you can see the trenches and you think if you just hop down, you would be walking the same path trodden by those who brought Richard III for burial,” he said.
The mitochondrial DNA being tested is passed along the female line. Michael, who has no children, and his brother both have it, but their sister, who also has no children, is the only one capable of passing it on.
“So, once she’s gone, that’s it. I feel John Ashdown Hill got there in the nick of time,” he said.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
BIGGER ROLE: Beijing has said it maintains an impartial stance on the war in Ukraine, but by training Russian troops, China is far more involved than previously known China’s armed forces secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel in China late last year, and some have since returned to fight in Ukraine, according to three European intelligence agencies and documents seen by Reuters. While China and Russia have held a number of joint military exercises since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Beijing has repeatedly said that it is neutral in the conflict and presents itself as a peace mediator. The covert training sessions, which predominantly focused on the use of drones, were outlined in a dual-language Russian-Chinese agreement signed by senior Russian and Chinese officers in Beijing on
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