More than 500 years after his death in battle, scientists announced Monday that they had definitively identified a skeleton unearthed in northern England last summer as that of Richard III, the medieval king portrayed by William Shakespeare as a homicidal tyrant who killed his two young nephews in order to ascend the throne.–AP.

NEW YORK (AP) — Former Mayor Ed Koch, the combative, acid-tongued politician who rescued the city from near-financial ruin during a three-term City Hall run in which he embodied New York chutzpah for the rest of the world, died Friday. He was 88.

 

Now is the winter of our discontent

So over! Dug up from cement

A king whose spine, not soul, was bent

As we’ve been misconstruing.

 

(Now also in this moment bluish

We buried someone loud and shrewish

New Yorkish and did we say Jewish?

So tell us: How’s he doing?)

 

Was king the victim of the Bard

Serving up a base canard?

Should we call in Scotland Yard

To look inside the Tower?

 

And if it was all Tudor smears

And history absolves and clears

His name after five hundred years,

Will truth have beaten power?