Queen Elizabeth II has topped the list of Britains’s most powerful women but surprisingly the Royal family’s newest member, the Duchess of Cambridge, features nowhere in the list.
Judges decided Kate was “influential” but not “powerful”. Olympic heroine Jessica Ennis is perhaps another surprise omission. The list of Britain’s 100 most powerful women, was announced on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme and the Queen is a safe choice as number one, as she has the power to refuse Royal Assent to laws, choose prime ministers and deny a government’s request to dissolve Parliament, Daily Mail reported.
However, some would argue that, in practice, the woman in second place — home secretary Theresa May — wields more executive power in her daily job than the monarch.
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Rare Elizabeth I portrait on show
London: A rather unflattering painting of a 60-something Queen Elizabeth I, depicting her with facial wrinkles, has gone on public display in the US.
The portrait is being exhibited at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
Produced by the studio of Gheeraerts in the early-mid 1590s, the painting now owned by the Elizabethan Gardens in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, is having its first public showing after conservation and authentication in 2010-2011.
Thomas Herron, the exhibition’s co-curator, an author and English professor at East Carolina University, noted that the reason for the portrait’s obscurity may lie in Elizabeth’s efforts to control her image. — PTI