Word: frenched
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...other tourists were not so lucky. Three Germans, two French, two South Africans, two Finns and a Lebanese were herded onto the boats with nine Malaysian and two Filipino resort workers. Under cover of darkness they were taken to Jolo island, in the southern Philippines, about an hour away. For days the captors' identity was a mystery, with speculation running from plain pirates to Abu Sayyaf, the most feared Muslim rebel group in the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines. At midweek the Philippine Defense Secretary confirmed that the hostages were being held by Galib Andang, a.k.a. "Commander Robot," the Abu Sayyaf...
Cinco de Mayo traditionally commemorates May 5, 1862, the day when Mexican troops, outnumbered two to one, defeated French invaders in the infamous Battle of Puebla...
Turns out, and this really does come as a shock to many French, that all of them were pretenders. The boy who died in Temple prison and whose body was dumped in a mass grave really was Louis Charles, DNA tests have revealed. Scientists Jean-Jacques Cassiman and Bernd Brinkmann compared the mitochondrial DNA of the boy's mummified heart with samples from locks of hair taken from his mother, two of her sisters and two living maternal relatives. The sequences were all identical. Cassiman pronounced the results definitive, while conceding that "the heart was not ideally preserved for this...
Anyway, this isn't the first attempt to solve the 205-year-old mystery. The prince's mass grave was exhumed twice in the 19th century, and both times its only tubercular remains were declared to belong to an older boy. Still, Philippe Delorme, a French historian who had pressed for the DNA tests, is convinced by Cassiman and Brinkmann's work. "Clearly, the finding spells the end of this example of the eternal myth--that of the little prince and the hidden king," says Delorme. "Perhaps we should undertake, as I do, the spiritual and philosophic venture of looking...
...descendants of the Prussian clockmaker, Karl-Willhelm Naundorff, aren't prepared to do that; they have rejected the DNA analysis. After all, the claim of this pretender was supported by a former Versailles maid, who swore he was the same boy she'd seen at the palace, by some French royals, and by his tombstone, which reads HERE LIES LOUIS XVII, DUKE OF NORMANDY, KING OF FRANCE AND NAVARRE. May they both rest in peace...