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New York Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
US woman with tattoos and nose piercing may be descendent of Queen Victoria's secret lovechild
A Midwestern therapist with a mullet, tattoos and nose piercing may be a descendant of Queen Victoria's secret lovechild, a British historian has claimed. Angela Webb-Milinkovich, a mental-health practitioner from Minnesota, was named as a possible living testament to a scandalous affair between the British monarch and her devoted manservant, John Brown, by historian Fern Riddell. Webb-Milinkovich, who is in her 40s, according to online records, doesn't look like a royal but is prepared to get a DNA test to prove whether she is. 3 Angela Webb-Milinkovich, a healthcare worker in Minnesota, may be a living descendant of Queen Victoria's secret lovechild. bettylooper/Instagram Advertisement 'I feel pretty confident that there's some legitimacy to [the theory],' Webb-Milinkovich told the Times of London. 'It's not something that I myself would ever be able to confirm. 'The story that my family grew up with is that John Brown and Queen Victoria had a romantic relationship,' she said, referring to the loyal aide who the royal matriarch became particularly close to after her husband Prince Albert's death. 'They went on a long boat journey. After that, a child was produced, and from that child came my family's lineage,' Webb-Milinkovich said of Brown and the queen. Advertisement 3 Queen Victoria asked to be buried with a picture of her manservant and suspected lover John Brown. Rumors have swirled that Mary Ann Brown, Webb-Milinkovich's great-grandmother, was their lovechild. Victoria and Brown's closeness sparked rumors in Britain, and in 1866, a Swiss newspaper reported the pair had secretly married. Victoria even dedicated her book on highland life, published after Brown died in 1883, to him and asked to be buried with his picture. Advertisement 3 Brown was suspiciously close to blue-blooded boss Victoria, some historians say. The rumored affair was the subject of the 1997 movie 'Mrs Brown,' which won Dame Judi Dench an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Victoria. Although the alleged affair has been dismissed by many historians, Riddell said she has unearthed new evidence indicating a relationship. The evidence includes a cast of Brown's hand ordered by the monarch in the days after his death, something she had previously done for her late husband. Advertisement A previously secret diary entry from Victoria also describes how she and her 'beloved John' confessed their love for each other. 'Their relationship has been downplayed and sanitized,' Riddell told the Times of London. 'I hope we give John Brown back his place in history and his legacy, which is that he was Victoria's de facto royal consort for 20 years,' said the researcher, author of the book 'Victoria's Secret.'


New York Post
6 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Russia is sending kidnapped Ukrainian teens to the frontlines, Kyiv says: ‘Fighting against their own people'
Russia is forcing the children that it's kidnapped from Ukraine to fight against their own country once they turn 18 as part of a direct order from President Vladimir Putin, Kyiv officials said. Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff, said soldiers on the battlefield are coming face-to-face with the young men, with one rescued 19-year-old recounting the Kremlin's re-education process that he was made to endure for three years, the Times of London reported. 'We were made to sing the Russian anthem every morning, then physical training — jumps, squats, running, crawling — and we also learned how to shoot,' Vlad Rudenko told the outlet. Advertisement 6 Moscow is deploying Ukrainian teens to the frontlines along with Russian conscripts, Kyiv alleges. Sputnik via AP 6 Moscow has touted its re-education camps, where children taken from Ukraine are brought up as Russian citizens, with older kids undergoing military training. Newsflare 'The 16- and 17-year-olds were given dummy rifles and the older ones used live ammunition,' he added. Rudenko was one of the many children who were taken from their homes when Russian soldiers stormed through the southern town of Kherson in October 2022. Advertisement He was only 16 when the foreign troops found him hiding in his mother's apartment, taking the boy by gunpoint and transferring him to a re-education camp in occupied Crimea, where he and other children underwent combat training. Rudenko, who was smuggled over the frontlines with the help of his mother last year, considered himself lucky when compared to some of the other 35,000 children Russia has kidnapped. 6 Andriy Yermak confirmed that the bodies of young Ukrainians were discovered on the opposing side of the battlefield. AFP via Getty Images Advertisement 6 Ukraine estimates that some 35,000 children have been kidnapped from their parents and homes since Russia began its invasion in 2022. AP 'The Russians didn't manage to take anything from me though, they just deprived me of my childhood,' he said. 'I am lucky, because there are Ukrainians now who are fighting against their own people.' Yermak, who slammed Moscow as a 'terroristic regime,' said the kidnapping and re-education of countless Ukrainian children serves two goals. The first is for Russia to fill its ranks with expendable soldiers as Moscow continues to beef up its military numbers in the face of hundreds of deaths a week along the frontlines. Advertisement 6 Kyiv says part of Moscow's plan is to bolster its frontline forces amid the hundreds of deaths and injuries that occur every week. REUTERS The second is far more sinister: to force Ukrainian soldiers to fight against their own children, Yermak said. The top Ukrainian official confirmed that soldiers have already begun identifying the bodies of their own countrymen on the opposing side of the battlefields. 'The Russians want to destroy the new generation of the Ukrainians, and they are building new soldiers against the country where they were born. It is terrible,' he said. 'Putin's goal is [that] he doesn't want Ukraine to exist.' 6 Demonstrators place the toys of missing Ukrainian children on the streets of Brussels, condemning the mass kidnappings by Russian soldiers. Getty Images Experts at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab helped Kyiv raise the alarms of Russia's mass kidnapping and re-education ploy last month. The US research team has been working to keep track of Ukrainian children that have disappeared since the start of Russia's 2022 war on Kyiv and has identified dozens of 'Russification' camps — at least 13 in Belarus and 43 in Russian-annexed Crimea and across mainland Russia. There, the kids are indoctrinated into Putin's ideal citizens and raised to speak Russian and not their native Ukrainian. Advertisement Some of the children have been shown on Russian state TV being paraded around Moscow, with even the Kremlin's Children's Rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, publicly bragging about adopting a boy from the city of Mariupol, which was seized in 2022 following a bloody, months-long siege. The mass kidnappings are among the charges that led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin back in 2023.


New York Post
11-07-2025
- General
- New York Post
English church wants to exhume skull of Tudor saint decapitated by Henry VIII
An English church wants to exhume and preserve the remains of a martyr whose head was lopped off and speared on a London Bridge spike. St. Dunstan's Church in Canterbury is asking parochial leaders to open its tomb of Thomas More ahead of the 500th anniversary of his 1535 murder, the Times of London reported. More, a Tudor lawyer to the English monarchy, was decapitated on Tower Hill on the orders of King Henry VIII after refusing to recognize the axe-happy monarch as the head of the Church of England during the English Reformation's separation from the Vatican. St. Thomas More was executed in 1535 after he refused to recognize King Henry VII as head of the church. Getty Images After the execution More's body was tossed in a mass grave at the Tower of London, while his head was parboiled and stuck on a spike over the Thames for passersby to see. And it would have been tossed into the river had More's daughter not paddled down the waterway and retrieved it — and kept it preserved and hidden away until she died years later, with the head being encased in lead and buried with her at St. Dunstan's, according to legend. Over the coming centuries More gained a following as devotee of his faith, and in 1935 — the 400th anniversary of his execution — was made a saint by the Vatican. And now the church council at St. Dunstan's wants to exhume whatever remains of More's skull to begin preserving it for the 500th anniversary of his death, but needs permission from Canterbury's commissary court before any action can be taken, the Times reported. 'We could just put it back in the vault, maybe in a reliquary of some kind, or we could place the reliquary in some sort of shrine or carved stone pillar above ground in the Roper chapel, which is what many of our visitors have requested,' St. Dunstan's said in a statement. More's skull is entombed at St. Dunstan's Church in Canterbury. Benefice of St. Dunstan / Facebook Nobody is quite sure what state the skull's remains are even in. The vault containing the skull was accidentally opened in 1835 during construction, and in 1997 it was placed in a secured niche in the vault's wall — but it hasn't been seen since. During both of those years, the lead casing around the skull was seen broken open and the bones were fragmented. 'Having the relic deteriorating in a vault is not good enough for many who venerate Thomas More. He's here, he's staying here — despite many of our Catholic visitors who would like him back — and we need to consider our ecumenical responsibility,' the church added. The exhumation would seek to preserve whatever remains of the skull, and the church is seeking nearly $70,000 in donations for the process.


USA Today
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
I saw the new liberal 'Superman' movie and it gave me the woke mind virus
The last thing I want to do is go to the movie theater and hear something that doesn't precisely conform to my worldview. I listened to warnings about the new 'Superman' movie from my friends at Fox News and others in the conservative fear-o-sphere. They told me libs had turned the Man of Steel woke. They warned the movie might propagandize me into thinking immigrants are not entirely evil. But because I'm brave and believe in doing my own research, I decided to venture out of my Marxism-proof bunker and drive – in a gas-powered car, as God intended – to the local theater to see what the Democrats had done to my favorite superhero. I had reason to worry. Jesse Watters of Fox News said this version of Superman 'fights for truth, justice, and your preferred pronouns,' joking that he has 'MS-13' on his cape, which is a really funny joke if you don't understand how jokes work, which I don't. Does Superman represent basic human kindness? Classic liberal talk. Director James Gunn sparked the sensible Republican super-outrage by telling the Times of London, 'I mean, Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country. But for me, it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.' Easy there, Mr. Lefty Movie Director. Human kindness? That sounds like soft, liberal talk, not the kind of toughness I want to see in a fictional character who, as long as I ignore everything about Superman laid out in decades of comic-book and film lore, stands for being an America-first, take-no-prisoners badass. Opinion: Dear Grandma: Trump took your Medicaid, so it's time for you to work the fields In my MAGA-centric world, under the great leadership of President Donald Trump, a proper superhero would be flying around America rounding up migrants while wearing a mask that hides his identity and bravely violating the rules of due process. Because … you know … USA! How dare they make a superhero movie that makes me question my values Conservative commentator Clay Travis responded to Gunn's soyboy blah-blah, posting: 'I'm going to skip seeing Superman now. Director is an absolute moron to say this publicly the week before release. America is desperate for apolitical entertainment, and Hollywood is unable to deliver it.' Travis is right. The last thing I want to do is go to the movie theater and hear something that doesn't precisely conform to my worldview, even if it involves a Superhero who, when he first appeared in a comic book in 1938 written by two men who were the sons of Jewish immigrants, was described as: 'Superman! Champion of the oppressed. The physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!' Everyone who wears a MAGA hat knows that we – the REAL AMERICANS who support President Trump – are the oppressed. We're the ones who need a champion, an invincible hero who will make us feel good about espousing Christian beliefs while wanting to lock immigrants up in camps with names like 'Alligator Alcatraz.' We're the ones who need to believe we're the good guys! The new Superman movie tried to make me less hateful. Nice try! Is Superman technically an 'alien' from another planet who was welcomed to Earth by an adoptive family in middle America? Sure. Is his arch-nemesis a billionaire with a thirst for power, a fact that makes me a little uncomfortable, as if there's some kind of hypocrisy at play in my belief system? Yes. But I can easily ignore both those facts to avoid the mental anguish of recognizing my own broken logic. Which brings me to the despicable woke messages I witnessed on opening night of 'Superman.' For starters, there was way too much caring. This Superman cared about innocent people who don't look exactly like me, including people in a foreign country. He cared about people believing he was a good person. At one point, he even saved an alien baby and reunited it with its parent, when he should have been taking that alien baby AWAY from its parent and putting them both behind bars surrounded by alligators. Stupid, Hollyweird. Opinion: Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, is now 'MechaHitler.' Is Tesla's robotaxi antisemitic, too? 'I'm as human as anyone' is classic Woke Superman claptrap At one point, Superman's clearly woke adoptive father tries to defend his son's alien-ness, referring to him by his given first name and saying: 'Your choices, Clark, your actions. That's what makes you who you are.' WRONG! It's where you're from and how well you align with MAGA ideology that makes you who you are, pops. I can't believe they let kids get exposed to this kind of aggressive humanity. Late in the movie, Lex Luthor, who should be viewed by Trump supporters as a billionaire hero, screams 'ALIEN!' at Superman. To which the super-lib responds: 'I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that's being human. And that's my greatest strength. And someday, I hope, for the sake of the world, you understand that it's yours too.' BARF! That's a transparent suggestion that I should look at other human beings and recognize we're all fundamentally the same, worthy of love, kindness and a fair shake. As if I should wish the best for my fellow humans, even if I don't like or agree with them. Superman needs to keep his left-wing morals to himself Well, if I were to believe that, then everything about President Trump and his administration's actions against immigrants and espousal of casual cruelty would seem … I dunno … kinda bad, I guess. So forget it, Woke Superman. Acknowledging hypocrisy is my Kryptonite. You keep that stuff away from me. Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @ and on Facebook at


New York Post
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
King Charles axes century-old royal tradition in bold Buckingham Palace shake-up
Out with the old, in with the new. King Charles has made the decision to scrap a strict, century-old dress code at Buckingham Palace in a major shake-up toward modernizing the monarchy. The monarch, 76, has axed the traditional all-white attire that governed the palace's private tennis court since 1919, the Times of London reports. Advertisement 5 King Charles has made the decision to scrap a strict, century-old dress code at Buckingham Palace. Getty Images Previously, only those wearing white were allowed to partake in a match on the exclusive court — similar to the long-standing tradition that is still upheld at the annual Wimbledon Championships. In an effort to create more of a relaxed atmosphere at the palace, Charles has now axed the strict rule, saying while it's 'preferable' for players to follow it, it's no longer 'essential.' Advertisement The all-white rule, which was introduced at Wimbledon in 1877, was established to minimize the appearance of sweat stains. The tennis court at Buckingham Palace, dubbed the Windsor Court, was first built in 1919 during the reign of King George V, Charles's great-grandfather. 5 The monarch, 76, has axed the traditional all-white attire that governed the palace's private tennis court since 1919. Mischa Schoemaker/Dutch Press Photo/INSTARimages While it was only used by members of the royal family at first, including King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, it became available for use to Buckingham palace staff in later years. Advertisement It has also been used by tennis greats, including Fred Perry, Björn Borg and John McEnroe — with the latter pair reliving their 1980 and 1981 matches by going head-to-head in 2000 in a charity match. Over the years, the annual tennis competition — which is currently taking place in full swing — has seen many members of the royal family attend the Royal Box. 5 The tennis court at Buckingham Palace, dubbed the Windsor Court, was first built in 1919 during the reign of King George V, Charles's great-grandfather. AFP via Getty Images 5 In addition to work being done on the tennis court, Buckingham Palace is currently in the midst of several pricy refurbishments. Getty Images Advertisement While King Charles and Prince William are more fond of other sports over tennis, Princess Catherine is an avid tennis lover and is no stranger to attending the annual tennis championships. In addition to being a patron, Middleton has been watching matches in the royal box on the center court for years. The mom of three typically attends the men's and women's finals and presents the winners and runners-up with their trophies. Start your day with all you need to know Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters In 2023, the beloved royal joined forces with tennis legend Roger Federer to perform a ball girl task ahead of the championships. The princess engaged with the Wimbledon ball boys and girls, and even enjoyed a sparring session with the Swiss star — an eight-time champion of the prestigious tournament. 5 While King Charles and Prince William are more fond of other sports over tennis, Princess Catherine is an avid tennis lover. CameraSport via Getty Images Advertisement In addition to work being done on the tennis court, Buckingham Palace is currently in the midst of several pricy refurbishments. These include the palace's heated swimming pool, which Charles has chosen to keep a few degrees cooler to reduce unnecessary costs.