Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II will abdicate on January 14 next year after 52 years on the throne, she announced during her traditional New Year’s Eve speech.
The monarch, famed for her chain-smoking as well as her flamboyant sense of style, will be succeeded by her eldest son Crown Prince Frederik.
The 83-year-old queen, who took over the throne in 1972, is the longest-serving monarch in Europe following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022.
In February, she underwent
They are snapshots of a bygone age when foreign holidays were adventurous, exotic and simply had to be recorded with a postcard to home.
Millions of beach, street, hotel, matador and flamenco dancer postcards washed through the British postal system every summer as tourists discovered the Spanish Costas and revelled in sun, sangria and souvenirs in the 1970s.
A treasure trove of postcards sent from Spain has just emerged and with it a fascinating glimpse of a culture in which
Stephen Gold: Probate document bears the seal of the High Court of Justice and a pretty little silver wafer seal, though the paper is flimsy – but what can you expect for £273?
Stephen Gold is a retired judge and author who recently acted as executor for his beloved late aunt.
In part one of a series exposing the frustrating ordeal of being an executor, he explained how to force financial institutions to pay compensation for unacceptable errors and delay.
A construction team working on a highway expansion in Maryland in 1979 discovered human remains on the grounds of an 18th-century ironworks. Eventually, archaeologists uncovered 35 graves in a cemetery where enslaved people had been buried.
In the first effort of its kind, researchers now have linked DNA from 27 African Americans buried in the cemetery to nearly 42,000 living relatives. Almost 3,000 of them are so closely related that some people might be direct descendants.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
Remains of the first ever family of Neanderthals have been discovered in a cave in southern Siberia, Russia.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany analysed the DNA of 13 individuals from two caves in the Altai Mountains.
Individuals from the Chagyrskaya cave, who date back around 59,000 years, were found to be closely related, including a father and his teenage daughter, along with a pair of second-degree relatives.
This is the first known description of
That year it started early — on Christmas morning itself — with the sound of glass smashing. Then a heavy thump as my father stumbled drunkenly against the kitchen table. Raised voices, Mum screaming, ‘You always manage to ruin it! I hate you!’
Later, Mum sitting in her red paper crown, tears rolling silently down her nose and onto her untouched lunch, Granny gamely organising a round of crackers to maintain the lie that we were all having a wonderful
