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.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS