In a testament to Kim Kardashian’s power to grab the spotlight, the head of Nasa felt compelled last week to set the record straight when the reality TV queen said she believed a well-worn conspiracy theory that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was a fake.
In a new episode of Hulu’s long-running family saga The Kardashians, the show’s star said she thinks the lunar landing by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin was fiction. What convinced her, she said during the segment, was a video she saw online of an Aldrin interview. Kim said she interpreted his comments in that interview to mean the moon landing never occurred.
Since the 1970s, sceptics have floated the notion that the mission — viewed live by tens of millions of people around the world — was actually staged. That theory has waxed and waned over the years, but Sean Duffy, US transportation secretary and Nasa’s acting administrator, wasted no time in shooting it down after Kardashian told her 4-million viewers that she was embracing the idea.
“Yes, @KimKardashian, we’ve been to the moon before... six times!” Duffy wrote on the X social media platform.
Stranger Things
Final season promises action and emotion
Fans can expect more action and plenty of emotion in the highly anticipated fifth and final season of Stranger Things, which will wrap up the Netflix phenomenon after nine years, its creators said on Friday.
Speaking at the first global promotional event for season five in the Italian city of Lucca, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer said they were anxious and excited for fans to see the final instalment after working on it for three years.
“Bringing it out in the world is nerve-racking, but we’re ready to finally show it,” Ross Duffer said. “The scale of it is bigger... it’s more action and more special effects, but it’s also by far the most emotional season because it’s the end of the story for all of these characters,” Matt Duffer added. Reuters
Antiquities
Cairo opens grand museum near pyramids
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty descended on Cairo on Saturday to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the Pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities.
The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, pandemic and wars in neighbouring countries.
“We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a press conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a country whose history goes back more than 7,000 years.”
Spectators, including President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, gathered late on Saturday before an enormous screen outside the museum, which projected images of the country’s most famous cultural sites as dancers in glittering pharaonic-style garb waved glowing orbs and sceptres.
The dancers were accompanied by Egyptian pop stars and an international orchestra decked out in white beneath a sky lit with lasers, fireworks and hovering lights that formed into moving hieroglyphics. By opening the museum, Egypt was “writing a new chapter in the story of this ancient nation’s present and future,” Sisi said at the opening. Reuters
Sculpture
Netherlands to return stolen Egyptian art
The Netherlands will return a 3,500-year-old sculpture that turned up at a Dutch art fair to Egypt, Prime Minister Dick Schoof said on Sunday during a visit to the country, where he met President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The artefact in question, which depicts a senior official from the 1479–1425 BCE reign of Pharaoh Thutmose III, is believed to have been stolen and illegally exported, most likely during the unrest of the 2011 Arab Spring, before appearing on the international art market.
The “historic cultural artefact [was] confiscated at a Dutch art fair” in Maastricht in 2022, Schoof said, after someone anonymously tipped off the authorities about its illicit origin. An investigation by Dutch police and the cultural heritage inspectorate confirmed that the sculpture had been plundered and unlawfully removed from Egypt.
The dealer who had the piece voluntarily surrendered it following the inquiry. The Dutch government said they expect to hand over the artefact to the Egyptian ambassador in the Netherlands by the end of this year, although no specific date has been set. Reuters
