ANTRIM, United Kingdom: A new statue of Queen Elizabeth II has met mixed reviews, with one non-plussed critic assessing that it looks more like “an old lady buying potatoes at the market” than Britain’s longest-reigning monarch.
The statue of the queen, who died in September 2022 aged 96, was unveiled last week in Antrim Castle Gardens park in Northern Ireland, and also features her husband Prince Philip and two of her beloved corgi dogs.
Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council said at the unveiling that the work captures “Her Majesty in a dignified pose, reflecting her grace, steadfastness and lifelong dedication to public service.”
The local authority posted images of artist Anto Brennan’s work on its social media sites but switched off comments after adverse comments.
One online commentator even likened it to Robin Williams’s elderly female housekeeper Mrs. Doubtfire in the 1993 Hollywood comedy-drama.
But while the council conceded that art can prompt “diverse opinions,” it said it was “delighted” with the “generally positive” response.
Walking his dog at the gardens on Wednesday, Ivor Ritchie, 67, called the sculpture “terrible.” “It looks no more like her than the man-in-the-moon,” he said.
“I just don’t think it looks like her face,” added another passer-by, Eddie Smyth, a 52-year-old laborer also from Antrim, a half-hour drive northwest of Belfast.
English tourist Lorraine Barker, 58, agreed. “In fact the corgis are better than the queen I’d say,” she said.
The sculpture, one of the first of the queen in the UK since her death, is attracting increasing attention — and curious visitors to the 400-year-old gardens.
“We came over to see it as we’d heard people talking about it,” said Noel Wilson, 62, who drove from the nearby town of Ballymena with his wife Dorothy, 61, to have a look.
Hungarian tourist Gabor Laszlo, 50, struggled to see the queen’s likeness but conceded: “Prince Philip is OK.”
The queen, who ruled for 70 years, is depicted in a country jacket and tweed skirt, wearing a headscarf and carrying her trademark handbag.
Laszlo was unimpressed, saying it made her look “like an old lady at the market buying some potatoes.”
Yet the depiction still has its fans.
“It’s a really good replica of how warmly and fondly she is remembered by the British public, I think it’s an excellent job,” said English visitor Stephen Barker.
For 90-year-old Canadian tourist Roy Hill the work is “a wonderful depiction, very impressive.”
“It brings back a lot of memories, I am old enough to remember Queen Elizabeth as a young person, at the coronation,” he said.
Another local out for a walk in the park, Muriel McCandless, 81, expressed sympathy with the sculptor, who has yet to comment on the controversy.
“I actually think it’s quite good,” she laughed.
New Queen Elizabeth II statue panned in Northern Ireland
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New Queen Elizabeth II statue panned in Northern Ireland
- Sculpture was unveiled last week in Antrim Castle Gardens park in Northern Ireland
- The sculpture is attracting increasing attention – and curious visitors to the 400-year-old gardens
Artist of ‘distorted’ portrait says Trump complaint harming business
WASHINGTON: The artist who painted US President Donald Trump in what he criticized as a “purposefully distorted” portrait has said his remarks have harmed her business.
Colorado removed the official portrait of Trump from display in the state’s capitol building last month after the president complained that it was deliberately unflattering.
“Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol... along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on March 24.
“The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst,” Trump said.
The 78-year-old Republican called for the oil painting to be taken down, and said the artist, Sarah Boardman, “must have lost her talent as she got older.”
The Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature said the same day as Trump’s complaint that the painting would be removed from the gallery in the capitol’s rotunda — where it had been hung since 2019 — and placed in storage.
Boardman has responded to Trump’s critique in a statement on her website, saying she completed the work “accurately, without ‘purposeful distortion,’ political bias, or any attempt to caricature the subject, actual or implied.”
“President Trump is entitled to comment freely, as we all are, but the additional allegations that I ‘purposefully distorted’ the portrait, and that I ‘must have lost my talent as I got older’ are now directly and negatively impacting my business of over 41 years,” the British-born artist said.
Boardman added in the undated statement that for the six years that the portrait of Trump hung in the Colorado capitol, she “received overwhelmingly positive reviews” on the commissioned work.
However, since Trump’s comments “that has changed for the worst,” she said.
In addition to Trump and former president Barack Obama, Boardman was also commissioned to paint a portrait of ex-president George W. Bush.
Nostalgia fuels UK boom in vintage video game repairs
- The shelves lining Luke Malpass’s home workshop are a gamer’s treasure trove stretching back decades, with components of vintage Game Boys, Sega Mega Drives and Nintendos jostling for space and await
STOKE ON TRENT: The shelves lining Luke Malpass’s home workshop are a gamer’s treasure trove stretching back decades, with components of vintage Game Boys, Sega Mega Drives and Nintendos jostling for space and awaiting repair.
Parcels from gamers seeking help arrive from around the world at RetroSix, Malpass’s Aladdin’s cave.
He has turned a lifelong passion for gaming into a full-time job, answering the common question of what to do with old and worn machines and their parts.
“I think it can be partly nostalgic,” said Malpass, 38, as he surveyed the electronics stacked at his home in the central English city of Stoke-on-Trent.
He said the huge revival in retro games and consoles is not just a passing phase.
“Personally, I think it is the tactile experience. Getting a box off the shelf, physically inserting a game into the console... it makes you play it more and enjoy it more.”
Electronic devices and accessories, some dating back to the 1980s and the dawn of the gaming revolution, await to be lovingly restored to life.
Malpass has between 50 to 150 consoles needing attention at any one time, at a cost of between £60 ($78) and several hundred pounds.
It’s not just nostalgia for a long-lost childhood.
He believes it’s also a way to disconnect, unlike most online games which are now multi-player and require skills honed over long hours of practice to reach a good level.
“Retro gaming — just pick it up, turn it on, have an hour, have 10 minutes. It doesn’t matter. It’s instant, it’s there, and it’s pleasurable,” he told AFP.
With vintage one-player games “there’s no one you’re competing against and there’s nothing that’s making you miserable or angry.”
Malpass, who is a fan of such games as “Resident Evil” and “Jurassic Park,” even goes so far as to buy old televisions with cathode-ray tubes to replicate more faithfully his experience of playing video games as a kid.
Video clips he films of his game play, which he publishes to his YouTube channel, have won him tens of thousands of followers.
“I think people are always going to have a natural passion for things that they grew up with as a child.
“So I think we’ll always have work. It’ll evolve. And it won’t be, probably, Game Boys,” Malpass said.
“There’s always going to be something that’s retro.”
This week a survey organized by BAFTA, the British association that honors films, television, and video games, voted the 1999 action game “Shenmue” as the most influential video game of all time.
“Doom,” launched in 1993, and “Super Mario Bros.,” in which Mario first started trying to rescue Princess Peach way back in 1985, came in second and third place.
And on Wednesday, Nintendo unveiled details of its long-awaited Switch 2 console.
It includes new versions of beloved favorites from the Japanese giant — “Mario Kart World” and “Donkey Kong Bonanza.”
Held every four months, the London Gaming Market, dedicated to vintage video games, has been attracting growing numbers of fans.
“I’m a huge ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ fan... You never know what you’re going to find when you’re out here so I’m just always on the lookout,” said Adrian, a visitor wearing a T-shirt with a Sonic image.
Collectors and gamers sifted carefully through stacks of CD discs and old consoles hoping to find hidden treasures.
For Andy Brown, managing director of Replay Events and organizer of the London event which is now in its 10th year, the Covid-19 pandemic marked an upturn in the return to vintage games.
“I think people were stuck at home, wanting things to do that made them remember better times because it was a lot of doom and gloom around Covid,” he told AFP.
A study earlier this year by the US association Consumer Reports found 14 percent of Americans play on consoles made before 2000.
And in September, Italian customs busted a gang smuggling counterfeit vintage video games, seizing 12,000 machines containing some of the most popular games of the 1980s and 1990s.
Sahara desert, once lush and green, was home to mysterious human lineage
- Archaeological evidence indicates that these people were pastoralists, herding domesticated animals
TRIPOLI: The Sahara Desert is one of Earth’s most arid and desolate places, stretching across a swathe of North Africa that spans parts of 11 countries and covers an area comparable to China or the United States. But it has not always been so inhospitable.
During a period from about 14,500 to 5,000 years ago, it was a lush green savannah rich in bodies of water and teeming with life. And, according to DNA obtained from the remains of two individuals who lived about 7,000 years ago in what is now Libya, it was home to a mysterious lineage of people isolated from the outside world.
Researchers analyzed the first genomes from people who lived in what is called the “Green Sahara.” They obtained DNA from the bones of two females buried at a rock shelter called Takarkori in remote southwestern Libya. They were naturally mummified, representing the oldest-known mummified human remains.
“At the time, Takarkori was a lush savannah with a nearby lake, unlike today’s arid desert landscape,” said archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, one of the authors of the study published this week in the journal Nature.
The genomes reveal that the Takarkori individuals were part of a distinct and previously unidentified human lineage that lived separated from sub-Saharan and Eurasian populations for thousands of years.
HIGHLIGHTS
• Sahara was lush green savannah 14,500 to 5,000 years ago
• Isolated lineage of pastoralists inhabited ‘Green Sahara’
“Intriguingly, the Takarkori people show no significant genetic influence from sub-Saharan populations to the south or Near Eastern and prehistoric European groups to the north. This suggests they remained genetically isolated despite practicing animal husbandry — a cultural innovation that originated outside Africa,” Krause said.
Archaeological evidence indicates that these people were pastoralists, herding domesticated animals. Artifacts found at the site include tools made of stone, wood and animal bones, pottery, woven baskets and carved figurines.
The ancestry of the two Takarkori individuals was found to have derived from a North African lineage that separated from sub-Saharan populations around 50,000 years ago. That roughly coincides with when other human lineages spread beyond the continent and into the Middle East, Europe and Asia — becoming the ancestors of all people outside Africa.
“The Takarkori lineage likely represents a remnant of the genetic diversity present in northern Africa between 50,000 and 20,000 years ago,” Krause said.
“From 20,000 years ago onward, genetic evidence shows an influx of groups from the Eastern Mediterranean, followed by migrations from Iberia and Sicily around 8,000 years ago. However, for reasons still unknown, the Takarkori lineage persisted in isolation for much longer than expected. Since the Sahara only became habitable about 15,000 years ago, their original homeland remains uncertain,” Krause said.
Their lineage remained isolated throughout most of its existence before the Sahara again became uninhabitable. At the end of a warmer and wetter climate stage called the African Humid Period, the Sahara transformed into the world’s largest hot desert roughly around 3,000 BC.
Members of our species Homo sapiens who spread beyond Africa encountered and interbred with Neanderthal populations already present in parts of Eurasia, leaving a lasting genetic legacy in non-African populations today. But the Green Sahara people carried only trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA, illustrating that they had scant contact with outside populations.
Although the Takarkori population itself disappeared around 5,000 years ago when the African Humid Period ended and the desert returned, traces of their ancestry persist among various North African groups today, Krause said.
“Their genetic legacy offers a new perspective on the region’s deep history,” Krause said.
Gaza heritage and destruction on display in Paris
- Bouffard said the damage to the known sites as well as treasures potentially hidden in unexplored Palestinian land “depends on the bomb tonnage and their impact on the surface and underground”
PARIS: A new exhibition opening in Paris on Friday showcases archaeological artifacts from Gaza, once a major commercial crossroads between Asia and Africa, whose heritage has been ravaged by Israel’s ongoing onslaught.
Around a hundred artifacts, including a 4,000-year-old bowl, a sixth-century mosaic from a Byzantine church and a Greek-inspired statue of Aphrodite, are on display at the Institut du Monde Arabe.
The rich and mixed collection speaks to Gaza’s past as a cultural melting pot, but the show’s creators also wanted to highlight the contemporary destruction caused by the war, sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023.
“The priority is obviously human lives, not heritage,” said Elodie Bouffard, curator of the exhibition, which is titled “Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History.”
“But we also wanted to show that, for millennia, Gaza was the endpoint of caravan routes, a port that minted its own currency, and a city that thrived at the meeting point of water and sand,” she told AFP.
One section of the exhibition documents the extent of recent destruction.
Using satellite image, the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO has already identified damage to 94 heritage sites in Gaza, including the 13th-century Pasha’s Palace.
Bouffard said the damage to the known sites as well as treasures potentially hidden in unexplored Palestinian land “depends on the bomb tonnage and their impact on the surface and underground.”
“For now, it’s impossible to assess.”
The attacks by Hamas militants on Israel in 2023 left 1,218 dead. In retaliation, Israeli operations have killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and devastated the densely populated territory.
The story behind “Gaza’s Treasures” is inseparable from the ongoing wars in the Middle East.
At the end of 2024, the Institut du Monde Arabe was finalizing an exhibition on artifacts from the archaeological site of Byblos in Lebanon, but Israeli bombings on Beirut made the project impossible.
“It came to a sudden halt, but we couldn’t allow ourselves to be discouraged,” said Bouffard.
The idea of an exhibition on Gaza’s heritage emerged.
“We had just four and a half months to put it together. That had never been done before,” she explained.
Given the impossibility of transporting artifacts out of Gaza, the Institut turned to 529 pieces stored in crates in a specialized Geneva art warehouse since 2006. The works belong to the Palestinian Authority, which administers the West Bank.
The Oslo Accords of 1993, signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, helped secure some of Gaza’s treasures.
In 1995, Gaza’s Department of Antiquities was established, which oversaw the first archaeological digs in collaboration with the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF).
Over the years, excavations uncovered the remains of the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, the ancient Greek port of Anthedon, and a Roman necropolis — traces of civilizations spanning from the Bronze Age to Ottoman influences in the late 19th century.
“Between Egypt, Mesopotamian powers, and the Hasmoneans, Gaza has been a constant target of conquest and destruction throughout history,” Bouffard noted.
In the 4th century BC, Greek leader Alexander the Great besieged the city for two months, leaving behind massacres and devastation.
Excavations in Gaza came to a standstill when Hamas took power in 2007 and Israel imposed a blockade.
Land pressure and rampant building in one of the world’s most densely populated areas has also complicated archaeological work.
And after a year and a half of war, resuming excavations seems like an ever-more distant prospect.
The exhibition runs until November 2, 2025.
US tariffs take aim everywhere, including uninhabited islands
- The Australian territory in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean was slapped with 10% tariffs on all its exports
WASHINGTON: The world’s remotest corners couldn’t hide from US President Donald Trump’s global tariffs onslaught Wednesday — even the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands.
The Australian territory in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean was slapped with 10 percent tariffs on all its exports, despite the icy archipelago having zero residents — other than many seals, penguins and other birds.
Strings of ocean specks around the globe, including Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands and the Comoros off the coast of Africa, were likewise subjected to 10 percent new tariffs.
Another eye-catching inclusion in the tariffs list was Myanmar, which is digging out from an earthquake that left nearly 3,000 people dead, and whose exports to the United States will now face 44 percent in new levies.
Britain’s Falkland Islands — population 3,200 people and around one million penguins — got particular punishment.
The South Atlantic territory — mostly famous for a 1982 war fought by Britain to expel an Argentinian invasion — was walloped with tariffs of 41 percent on exports to the United States.
The Falklands’ would-be ruler Argentina only faces 10 percent new tariffs.
According to the Falklands Chamber of Commerce, the territory is ranked 173 in the world in terms of global exports, with only $306 million of products exported in 2019. This included $255 million in exports of mollusks and $30 million of frozen fish.
