Despite his "sweetheart" deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Epstein's arrest has again brought increased media attention to many of his famous friends, the current president among them.

Many questions have since been asked about how much Epstein's famous friends knew of his activities and exactly what Epstein was up to. The latter arguably received the most attention after it was reported that Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein's "sweetheart" deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump's Labor Secretary following Epstein's arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for "intelligence."

Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues — whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway — with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.

Claims of Epstein's links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes.

In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA's "love traps." If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia.

When most members of the general public think of the Stone Age, they probably envision an adult male hominin wielding a stone tool. That picture is laughably incomplete. It assumes that only adult males made and used stone tools, and that stones were the only materials in these ancient people's everyday tool kits.

Both assumptions are at best questionable; at worst, they are simply wrong.

First, let's tackle the stereotype about raw materials. Recent discoveries in Kenya suggest that the earliest stone tools may be as much as 3.3 million years old. Other recent discoveries in China suggest that bone tools — used, for example, to re-sharpen stone axes — may be as much as 115,000 years old. A logical inference from these studies might be that our human ancestors crafted stone tools for nearly 3 million years before making and using tools created from perishable materials such as bone.

But can it possibly be true that our primate ancestors exclusively created stone tools for more than 3 million years, 30 times longer than they made tools out of materials that break down, like bone, wood, and fiber? It's possible, but it defies logic to think that was the case. A better explanation lies in the fact that perishable materials don't preserve well over time, whereas stone tools remain well-preserved for eons.

That difference in preservation rates has long affected our scientific understandings of the prehistoric past — and not for the better.

In the 1830s, Danish archaeologist and curator Christian Jürgensen Thomsen defined the "three age system." In that interpretive framework, Thomsen divided human history (as he understood it) according to the types of tools he found in archaeological sites in northern Europe. Thomsen didn't have any absolute dating techniques available to guide his analysis (like radiocarbon or tree-ring dating); instead, he used the law of superposition — a fancy way of saying that the oldest material found in an archaeological site is, barring any disturbance, buried deepest. Think of the garbage can in your office: At the end of the week, debris from Monday will be at the bottom, debris from Wednesday in the middle, and debris from Friday at the top.

A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush's South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey's, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about. After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinnett published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.

Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear.

Excavations carried out by LMU archaeologists in Ur, an important trading center in Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE, provide fascinating new insights into the lives of its inhabitants.
Ur is one of the world's oldest cities. What was life like for its inhabitants some 4000 years ago? A team led by Adelheid Otto, Director of the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology at LMU, is carrying out excavations at Ur, which promise to provide some answers to this question. The team has now returned from Southern Iraq, having completed their second season due to the kind permission by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. This year's dig, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Munich University Association, lasted for 9 weeks. Its target was a residential building that was located on the edge of the city, and has been dated to the period around 1835 BCE. The excavation forms part of a larger project led by Professor Elisabeth Stone of Stony Brook University in New York State.

The LMU group began work on the site 2 years ago, and has now uncovered the whole house, together with a vaulted tomb in which the remains of 24 individuals were discovered. To accomplish this task, the team, which included Bachelor's and Master's students as well as doctoral candidates worked 6 days a week on the site. "They did a fantastic job," says Adelheid Otto. "We began work every morning at 5 and worked until 10 or 11 o'clock at night."

More than two decades after researchers discovered the 3,800-year-old remains of "Jomon woman" in Hokkaido, Japan, they've finally deciphered her genetic secrets.

And it turns out, from that perspective, she looks very different from modern-day inhabitants of Japan. The woman, who was elderly when she died, had a high tolerance for alcohol, unlike some modern Japanese people, a genetic analysis revealed. She also had moderately dark skin and eyes and an elevated chance of developing freckles.

Surprisingly, the ancient woman shared a gene variant with people who live in the Arctic, one that helps people digest high-fat foods. This variant is found in more than 70% of the Arctic population, but it's absent elsewhere, said study first author Hideaki Kanzawa, a curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

A Pictish man with a rugged face who was brutally murdered 1,400 years ago may have been royalty, new research finds.

After his murder, the approximately 30-year-old man's remains sat undisturbed in a cave on the Black Isle of the Scottish Highlands for more than a millennia. Archaeologists found the man's skeleton in a strange position; rocks pinned down his arms and legs, his skull was fractured, and his legs were crossed. Forensic artists published a virtual reconstruction of his face in 2017, catapulting him into internet fame.

Now, a new analysis indicates that this fellow, known as Rosemarkie Man, was likely a prominent person in his community, perhaps a member of royalty or a chieftain, according to news sources.

The Picts were a group of tribes that lived in what is now Scotland during the Iron Age and Medieval times. They routinely fought against the Romans, who dubbed these tribes "Picts," likely from the Latin word "picti," which means "painted ones," as the Picts had distinctive tattoos and war paint.

The remains of an Iron Age warrior and his possessions - hailed as a "spectacular discovery" by archaeologists - are to go on display.

Weaponry and other artefacts were found alongside the ancient fighter during excavations at a site near Chichester, West Sussex.

It is thought the grave belonged to someone of high status.

The man, who may have fought alongside a Roman king, will be the centre-piece of an exhibition at a city museum.

This is for the benefit of those that haven't yet seen the subsurface radar scan of Gobekli Tepe. The above image is from Deitrich et al., Antiquity vol. 86 (2012), freely available on the internet.

The little portion of Gobekli Tepe so far excavated corresponds to the detailed portion of the map, bottom right, which includes the main circular enclosures A to D. As you can see, even Enclosure D, the oldest and largest enclosure yet uncovered, corresponding to the uppermost green circle is small relative to some of the remaining structures.

"People do not truly want an end to suffering in all cases...They need challenges in order to feel the thrill of victory, guilt over their actions to have a chance at redemption, and the possibility of rejection and hatred to feel any deep form of love."

Introduction

'Plato, Rousseau, Fourier, aluminum columns — all that is good only for sparrows, not human society. But since the future form of human society is needed right now, when we're finally ready to take action, in order to forestall any further thought on the subject, I'm proposing my own system of world organization. Here it is!' he said, tapping his notebook. 'I wanted to expatiate on my book to this meeting as briefly as possible, but I see it's necessary to provide a great deal of verbal clarification; therefore my entire explication will take at least ten evenings, corresponding to the number of chapters in my book..' (More laughter was heard) 'Moreover I must declare in advance that my system is not yet complete.' (Laughter again). 'I became lost in my own data and my conclusion contradicts the original premise from which I started. Beginning with unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism. I must add, however, there can be no other solution to the social problem except mine.' --Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils

In his great if overlong book The Devils, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky weaves a black comedy about a group of radicals who want to take over a small Russian town as a stepping stone to a general revolution. Most of them parrot various platitudes about how their coming utopia will be best for everyone, expressing universal compassion and sympathy for the poor and dispossessed. But in their personal behavior, none of these conceits bear out. In their meetings, the radicals are vain, overestimate their abilities, and constantly seek to one up one another. Far from really believing in equality, each radical tries to outdo the others with their affectations about how much they care or by developing ever more radical "systems" to prove their genius. The parody reaches its pitch with the intellectual Shigalyov, who is the group's unofficial philosopher in chief. He gives a speech at their meeting expressing his alleged desire for the perfect society, but admitting that his original desire to achieve unlimited freedom ended with calling for "unlimited despotism." It turns out Shigalyov's system, the only "solution to the social problem" according to him, is about taking all freedom away from 90 per cent of the population and vesting power in the hands of a small group who is to organize everything. No credit for guessing who is to make up this group and lead the masses.

Author Sue Ellen Browder once aligned with 1960's pro-abortion feminism. As a former writer for Cosmopolitan Magazine, she was also complicit in promoting the sexual revolution, which she now believes reduced women to ambitious sex objects. After years of research, Browder concluded that her thinking was being manipulated by a propaganda machine which would unite two movements — the feminist movement and the sexual revolution — to push abortion. She compiled her findings in the captivating book, "Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women's Movement."

Browder, who was trained as an investigative journalist at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, spoke in an interview with Live Action founder Lila Rose:

"People don't remember how bad it was for women"

"In 1963, that was the relaunch of the women's movement in the 20^th Century," Browder told Rose. "People don't remember how bad it was for women."