Explosive new recordings released by the Houthi government of Yemen pile more earth atop mountains of existing evidence of the U.S. government's support for the very same terrorists it has claimed to be waging war against for nearly two decades.

The Moral Guidance Department, a branch of the Yemeni Armed Forces of the revolutionary Houthi government of Yemen published last week a number of secret documents and phone calls from the former regime of longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Two phone calls between former president Saleh and the former director of the CIA George Tenet were released. A Yemeni government official has confirmed to me that the calls took place in 2001.

In the calls, the former CIA director can be heard pressuring Saleh to release a detained individual involved in the bombing attacks on USS Cole in October of 2000, which left 17 dead and 37 injured. In the call, Tenet is asked by Saleh's translator about the name of the individual in question.

"I don't want to give his name over the phone," Tenet tells him.

Saleh notes that the FBI team tasked with the USS Cole investigation had already arrived in Sana'a, and asks Tenet if the FBI personnel could meet with him to discuss the matter. Tenet refuses, saying

"this is my person, this is my problem, this is my issue... The man must be released. I've talked to everybody in my government; I told them that I was going to make this call."

About 8500 years ago, hunter-gatherers living beside Eagle Lake in Wisconsin hammered out a conical, 10-centimeter-long projectile point made of pure copper. The finely crafted point, used to hunt big game, highlights a New World technological triumph — and a puzzle. A new study of that artifact and other traces of prehistoric mining concludes that what is known as the Old Copper Culture emerged, then mysteriously faded, far earlier than once thought.

The dates show that early Native Americans were among the first people in the world to mine metal and fashion it into tools. They also suggest a regional climate shift might help explain why, after thousands of years, the pioneering metallurgists abruptly stopped making most copper tools and largely returned to stone and bone implements.

Delicately crafted using silver-gilt, it shows a praying knight emerging from a snail on the back of a goat and may be an example of 13th-century Yorkshire satire. Precisely what the joke was may never be known.

"It is very unusual," said Beverley Nenk, the curator of later medieval collections at the British Museum, which announced its discovery on Monday. "It is such a funny little thing ... I haven't seen anything like it."

The "snail-man" object, just over 2cm long, was discovered by a metal detectorist in a field near Pontefract, West Yorkshire, in September last year.

Anthropologists know of at least two ancient species of tiny humans that lived on the islands of southeast Asia over 50,000 years ago. The origin of these extinct humans is unknown, but new research suggests they're more closely related to Denisovans and Neanderthals — and, by consequence, modern humans — than previously thought.

New research published in Nature Ecology & Evolution has found no evidence of interbreeding between modern humans (Homo sapiens) and two extinct species of short-statured humans, Homo floresiensis (commonly known as the Flores Island "hobbits") and Homo luzonensis (found in the Philippines). Fossil evidence of these two species, described in 2004 and 2019 respectively, suggests these island-dwelling humans stood no taller than around 3 feet and 7 inches (109 centimeters), a possible consequence of insular dwarfism — an evolutionary process in which the body size of a species shrinks over time as a consequence of limited access to resources.

At the same time, the new paper, led by João Teixeira from the University of Adelaide, provides further confirmation of interbreeding between the Denisovans and modern humans, specifically modern humans living in Island Southeast Asia, an area that encompasses tropical islands between east Asia, Australia, and New Guinea. Denisovans — a sister group of Neanderthals — reached the area some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, but archaeologists have yet to uncover a shred of fossil evidence related to these so-called "southern Denisovans." That's obviously weird, given the overwhelming genetic evidence that they lived in this part of the world, but it means there are important archaeological discoveries still waiting to be found. At least in theory.

So, the new paper, co-authored by anthropologist Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London, suggests modern humans interbred with Denisovans but not H. floresiensis or H. luzonensis. That's an important result, because it could help to explain the presence of the diminutive humans, who died out around 50,000 years ago, in this part of the world. Excitingly, it could mean that these "super-archaics," in the parlance of the researchers, "are not super-archaic after all, and are more closely related to [modern] humans than previously thought," explained Teixeira, a population geneticist, in an email.

In other words, H. floresiensis or H. luzonensis might actually be the elusive southern Denisovans.

Baton Rouge - The first documented record of salt as an ancient Maya commodity at a marketplace is depicted in a mural painted more than 2,500 years ago at Calakmul, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. In the mural that portrays daily life, a salt vendor shows what appears to be a salt cake wrapped in leaves to another person, who holds a large spoon over a basket, presumably of loose, granular salt. This is the earliest known record of salt being sold at a marketplace in the Maya region. Salt is a basic biological necessity and is also useful for preserving food. Salt also was valued in the Maya area because of its restricted distribution.

Salt cakes could have been easily transported in canoes along the coast and up rivers in southern Belize, writes LSU archaeologist Heather McKillop in a new paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. She discovered in 2004 the first remnants of ancient Maya salt kitchen buildings made of pole and thatch that had been submerged and preserved in a saltwater lagoon in a mangrove forest in Belize. Since then, she and her team of LSU graduate and undergraduate students and colleagues have mapped 70 sites that comprise an extensive network of rooms and buildings of the Paynes Creek Salt Works.

"It's like a blueprint for what happened in the past," McKillop said. "They were boiling brine in pots over fires to make salt."

Anyone watching the shenanigans at the New York Times of late could be forgiven for thinking it was a modern-dress staging of The Crucible or a Soviet purge. The US's central "newspaper of record" (founded 1851) has recently, it seems, surrendered all editorial balance and autonomy.

Bari Weiss, the op-ed staff editor who quit her job there last August, said in a resignation letter that the paper's editorial staff were effectively in power no longer: "Twitter has become its ultimate editor." She spoke too of "constant bullying" by colleagues, a "civil war ... between the (mostly young) wokes" and "the (mostly 40+) liberals" and a culture of "safetyism" now prevalent in the newspaper. "The right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe," she wrote, "trumps what were previous considered core liberal values, like free speech."

The defenestration of Donald McNeil, a veteran science reporter who'd been with the paper since 1976 and has been nominated for a Pulitzer for his coverage of the pandemic, is a case in point. And McNeil's departure wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Last summer saw editorial-page chief James Bennet forced to walk the plank after printing an op-ed piece by Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas). Eight hundred NYT staffers complained, saying that Cotton's op-ed put them in "danger."

The radical breakdown of editorial authority at the NYT would be of limited interest if it didn't have echoes elsewhere. From the forced resignation of editor Stan Wischnowski at the Philadelphia Enquirer last year for a badly worded headline to the sacking of Eton College teacher Will Knowland for free-speech related offences, one institution after another in the English speaking world seems to have capitulated to the new radical orthodoxy, with dissent punishable by enforced resignation or termination.

In 2018, biologists in Ushuaia, Argentina, were scooping sediment from the bottom of the Beagle Channel, 1.5 kilometers from shore, when they discovered something unexpected in the dredged gravel and sand: a narrow, eight-centimeter-long projectile point made of stone. They alerted Atilio Zangrando, an archaeologist with Argentina's Austral Center for Scientific Research, who immediately realized that he was looking at something remarkable.

According to Zangrando, this is the first time that a projectile point has been found this deep underwater in the Beagle Channel, which zigzags across Tierra del Fuego. The extraordinary find now prompts the question of how the point got there.

Homing in on the projectile point's provenance would tell us something about early humans' relationship to the coast — like whether they hunted at sea, says Zangrando. Illuminating that relationship, however, requires knowing when the point ended up in the channel. That's because the water level in the Beagle Channel has changed dramatically since the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago. Back then, the channel was just a long inland lake. But as glaciers retreated and sea levels rose, the lake flooded, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. By about 9,000 years ago, the lake had become a channel.

So if the projectile point dates to the early stages of this transformation, then the spot where the biologists found it may have still been land, between the rising water and the retreating ice. Conversely, if the projectile point is much younger, then the spot was likely deep underwater. That could imply the point was used as a weapon for hunting at sea, says Zangrando, adding that people began using watercraft off the archipelago at least 7,000 years ago.

There were Cold War preparations underway as early as August 1945 and the two regions selected, Korea and Vietnam, were pre-planned years in advance before the actual wars were to take place, Cynthia Chung writes.

In part one of this series, I discussed how a massive U.S. arms stockpile in Okinawa, Japan that was originally intended to be used for the planned American invasion of Japan was cancelled once the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and was a former Col. in the U.S. Air Force, remarks in his book "The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy," that these massive arms shipments were not returned to the United States but rather, half were transported to Korea and the other half to Vietnam.

The implications of this are enormous.

In a stunningly rare discovery, dozens of 2,000-year-old biblical scroll fragments have been excavated from Judean Desert caves during a daring rescue operation. Most of the newly discovered scroll fragments — the first such finds in 60 years — are Greek translations of the books of Zechariah and Nahum from the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, and are written in two scribal hands. Only the name of God is written in Hebrew in the texts.

The fragments from the Prophets have been identified as coming from a larger scroll that was found in the 1950s, in the same "Cave of Horror" in Nahal Hever, which is some 80 meters (260 feet) below a cliff top. According to an Israel Antiquities Authority press release, the cave is "flanked by gorges and can only be reached by rappelling precariously down the sheer cliff."

Along with the "new" biblical scroll fragments from the Books of the Minor Prophets, the team excavated a huge 10,500-year-old perfectly preserved woven basket — the oldest complete basket in the world — and a 6,000-year-old mummified skeleton of a child, tucked into its blanket for a final sleep.

I'm endlessly fascinated by stories of the quirks that were built into the TV system where the well-laid plans of the system simply fell apart because it was asked to do too many things.

Nearly five years ago, I wrote about one of them, the tale of how radio broadcasters were able to shoehorn an additional FM station into the radio because of the proximity of TV's channel 6 to the rest of the radio feed.

So when I was informed that there was another oddity kinda like this involving the TV lineups, I decided I had to take a dive in.

It's a tale that centers around channel 37, which was a giant block of static in most parts of the world during the 20th century.

The reason for that was simple: it couldn't fend off its scientific competition.