Monday, May 14, 2012

Claims To The Russian Throne With A Touch Of Filipino Flair

The whole article published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer's website has generated a lot of buzz recently.
It is about a Russian immigrant who had an eccentric lifestyle and told fascinating stories to her grandkids about her old homeland.
Turns out, her story mirrors that of someone living in a palace and was raised affluently. Now, in comes the headlines in a newspaper that is supposedly one of the country's best, FILIPINO'S GRANDMAMA COULD BE RUSSIA'S ANASTASIA and boom! Watch the Google search results soar for Romanov and Anastasia.

I find it personally disgusting that a paper who claims to uphold the truth would even publish something like this without doing a personal research. I know the story is quite interesting but it remains to be that, just a story. Not fit to be in a newspaper really but more like those romance novels sold for P15 each.

This may sound harsh to most, but if you come out of the public with an outlandish claim do have something tangible to back it up and not just an old photograph and some "results" of a spirit of the glass session.

And just to quell all these rumors please do a simple search. Really it does help. Spreading lies and fueling ignorance is something a paper like the Philippine Daily Inquirer should be ashamed of.

Oh wait... We are talking about PDI here after all. It is just another story for them no doubt. Carry on...


From Wikipedia:


Her (Anastasia Romanov's) possible survival has been conclusively disproven. In January 2008, Russian scientists announced that the charred remains of a young boy and a young woman found near Ekaterinburg in August 2007 were most likely those of the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich and one of the four Romanov grand duchesses. Russian forensic scientists confirmed on April 30, 2008, that the remains were those of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his four sisters.[1] In March 2009 the final results of the DNA testing were published by Dr. Michael Coble of the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, proving conclusively that the remains of all four Grand Duchesses have now been accounted for, and no one escaped.

Do these two really look alike?


Updates:

For the people who got their panties all up in a bunch because I linked from Wikipedia which many say is an unreliable source of information here is the Scientific paper published regarding this issue.

And for those who wish to open their copies of Britannica or some other fancier encyclopedia acquiring dust on the bookshelf, here's "news" for you too.  Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica