Secret HistoryS


Wall Street

Wall Street's corruption runs deeper than you can fathom

Robert Scheer
Truthdig
Sat, 08 Dec 2018 15:47 UTC
Lloyd Blankfein
© Mark Lennihan / AP
Of the myriad policy decisions that have brought us to our current precipice, from the signing of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the invasion of Iraq and the gerrymandering of House districts across the country, few have proven as consequential as the demise of Glass-Steagall. Signed into law as the U.S.A. Banking Act of 1933, the legislation had been crucial to safeguarding the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression. But with its repeal in 1999, the barriers separating commercial and investment banking collapsed, creating the preconditions for an economic crisis from whose shadow we have yet to emerge.

Carmen Segarra might have predicted as much. As an employee at the Federal Reserve in 2011, three years after the dissolution of Lehman Brothers, she witnessed the results of this deregulation firsthand. In her new book, Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street, she chronicles the recklessness of institutions like Goldman Sachs and the stunning lengths the United States government went to to accommodate them, even as they authored one of the worst crashes in our nation's history.

"They didn't want to hear what I had to say," she tells Robert Scheer in the latest installment of "Scheer Intelligence." "And so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used - criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable."
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Star of David

Netanyahu's corruption case could expose secrets about Israel's nuclear weapons program

Ted Snider
Mondoweiss
Sat, 08 Dec 2018 12:32 UTC
Netanyahu Shimon Peres Armon Milchan
© Flash90Former president and prime minister of Israel Shimon Peres (L) with a one-time spy turn Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan (center) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, March 28, 2005.
On Sunday, December 2, Israeli police recommended indicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of bribery and fraud. The charge is that Netanyahu traded regulatory favours to the news website Walla, including approval of its controversial merger with the satellite television company Yes, for publishing articles that flattered him and removing articles that were critical of him. Netanyahu is also accused of attempting to influence Walla's hiring of senior editors and reporters. Walla is owned by Bezec, the biggest telecommunications company in Israel.

This is the third time this year that Israeli police have recommended that Netanyahu be indicted. The other two both involve a mysterious figure named Arnon Milchan.
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Info

'Little Foot' hominin starting to give up it's secret

Colin Barras
Nature
Fri, 07 Dec 2018 07:27 UTC
Palaeoanthropologists
© Patrick Landmann/Science Photo LibraryPalaeoanthropologists recovering Little Foot from a rock inside a cave.
After a tortuous 20-year-long excavation, a mysterious ancient skeleton is starting to give up its secrets about human evolution.

The first of a raft of papers about 'Little Foot' suggests that the fossil is a female who showed some of the earliest signs of human-like bipedal walking around 3.67 million years ago. She may also belong to a distinct species that most researchers haven't previously recognized.

"It's almost a miracle it's come out intact," says Robin Crompton, a musculoskeletal biologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, who has collaborated with the research team that excavated the skeleton.

As well echoing the mythical 'Bigfoot', the nickname Little Foot comes from the small size of the foot bones that were among the first parts of the skeleton to be discovered.

The first signs that there was an invaluable hominin specimen up for grabs came in 1994. Ronald Clarke, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) in Johannesburg, South Africa, was rifling through boxes of fossils at a field laboratory at the Sterkfontein caves, about 40 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg. He realized that a handful of small bones in the collection belonged to an early hominin.

He established that the bones were those of a species of Australopithecus - ape-like hominins that were present in Africa between about 4 million and 2 million years ago, before the human genus Homo rose to dominance1

Clarke and his colleagues then found many more bones embedded in a matrix of solid rock deep in the Sterkfontein caves. They began carefully excavating Little Foot, piece by fragile piece, using hammers and chisels, followed by precision tools. The entire process took them almost 20 years.

"The fossilized bone is actually softer than the matrix,' says Crompton. "It's been an absolute devil to get it out."
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Microscope 1

Did unknown strain of plague discovered in 5000 year old tomb wipe out Europe's stone age civilization?

Lizzie Wade
Science Mag
Thu, 06 Dec 2018 11:00 UTC
sweden burial plague
© Karl-Göran Sjögren/University of GothenburgA young woman who died of an early form of plague was buried in this Neolithic grave in Sweden.
Nearly 5000 years ago, a 20-year-old woman was buried in a tomb in Sweden, one of Europe's early farmers dead in her prime. Now, researchers have discovered what killed her-Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. The sample is one of the oldest ever found, and it belongs to a previously unknown branch of the Y. pestis evolutionary tree. This newly discovered strain of plague could have caused the collapse of large Stone Age settlements across Europe in what might be the world's first pandemic, researchers on the project say. But other scientists contend there isn't yet enough evidence to prove the case.

"Plague is starting to seem like it's everywhere," says Kyle Harper, a historian at the University of Oklahoma in Norman who studies how the disease affected human societies. Ancient plague genomes, such as the one in the new study, show "we have a really long history with this germ," he says.

Until now, the oldest known strain of plague came to Europe with the Yamnaya, herders from the central Eurasian steppe who swept into the continent some 4800 years ago. That was followed, several thousand years later, by the strain that led to both the Justinian Plague, which afflicted the Roman Empire in the sixth century C.E., and the Black Death, which killed half of Europe's population in the 1300s.

Comment: The evidence shows that plague along with changes to weather patterns, increased seismic and volcanic activity, and cometary bombardment, are part of a collection of disasters that relatively regularly visit our planet: And for more on the events that accompany plague, check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

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Dig

50,000 year old "tiara" found in Denisovan cave in Siberia, may be oldest of its kind


Siberian Times
Thu, 06 Dec 2018 12:00 UTC
paleolithic tiara
The remarkable find was made this summer in the famous Siberian cave where over many millennia early Home sapiens lived alongside extinct Neanderthals and another long-gone branch of ancient man known as Denisovans.

The suspicion is that the tiara - or diadem - was made by Denisovans who are already known to have had the technology 50,000 or so years ago to make elegant needles out of ivory and a sophisticated and beautiful stone bracelet.

The tiara maybe the oldest of its type in the world.

It appears to have had a practical use: to keep hair out of the eyes; it's size indicates it was for male, not female, use.

Another theory, although related to tiaras made 20,000 years later by people living around river Yana in Yakutia is that they could have denoted the family or tribe of ancient man, acting like a passport or identity card.

Comment: The exact function of the diadem and the details of its owner remains to be seen, but what is fascinating is the length of time these were being manufactured and the other insights its presence shines on the lives of the Denisovans.

See also:

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Butterfly

The mythical and miraculous places medieval Europe imagined in the westward seas

Matthias Egeler
Medievalists.net
Fri, 07 Dec 2018 18:54 UTC
medieval map atlantic ocean
The Atlantic Ocean and its islands in Abraham Ortelius World Map Typvs Orbis Terrarvm, 1570
If one stands on the limestone cliffs of the island of Aran, off the western coast of Ireland, an unbounded view opens up towards the west. While deep below, on the foot of the cliff-face, the breakers roll in from the ocean and smash against the island's bedrock, in the distance the blue of the Atlantic waters stretches on and on until it merges with the sky, the one blurring into the other in a way which almost obliterates the horizon. Irish storytelling - both the storytelling of modern folklore and that of medieval literature - does not accept that this vast space between the Old World and the New could truly be an empty one.

Local Irish tradition knows of an Árainn Bheag or 'Little Aran', which sometimes can be encountered west of the 'big' Aran of real-world topography. This Little Aran is the same island as the isle of Hy Brazil that appears on maps as prominent in the history of cartography as the world map of Gerhard Mercator and that was the destination (though never reached) of a number of voyages of exploration that set sail from Bristol in the 1480s, just a few years before, from the same harbour, John Cabot put to sea to become the first European after the Vikings to set foot on the North American mainland.

Comment: The author is closer than he thinks to an answer, but just not in the way he imagines.

Where Troy Once Stood: The Mystery of Homer's Iliad & Odyssey Revealed

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Archaeology

The medieval booted man found in Thames River excavation


PhysOrg
Fri, 07 Dec 2018 16:24 UTC
thames river medieval man boots
© Mola Headland Archaeology
A mysterious male skeleton, lying face-down deep in the Thames mud, with a pair of in-situ thigh-high leather boots has been discovered by our archaeologists working on one of the sites being used to build London's super sewer in Bermondsey.

The skeleton was discovered at Tideway's Chambers Wharf site in Bermondsey, where work is currently underway to build the Thames Tideway Tunnel to stop sewage pollution in the River Thames.

Jack Russell, Archaeology Lead for Tideway, said: "The Tideway archaeology programme has allowed us to gather really interesting new evidence for how Londoners have used the river throughout history. As we work towards our goal of cleaning up the Thames and reconnecting London with it, it's really important to acknowledge the lessons we can learn from significant discoveries like this."
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Archaeology

London archaeology dig: Skeletons reveal noxious environs in early industrial Britain

Dalya Alberge
The Guardian
Tue, 04 Dec 2018 16:25 UTC
skeleton covent garden dig
© Wessex ArchaeologyOne of the skeletons’ hands showed signs of bare-knuckle fighting.
The discoveries were made at a 19th-century burial site at New Covent Garden market

News reports and social media anxiety may make us feel that life is tough in Britain today but the extraordinary findings of a new archaeological excavation have provided a salutary reminder that, a couple of centuries ago, it was so much worse.

Archaeologists who worked on an early 19th-century burial site at the New Covent Garden market in south-west London where about 100 bodies were found have said that they contain evidence of arduous working conditions, a noxious environment, endemic diseases, physical deformities, malnutrition and deadly violence.
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Info

Vast land that slipped beneath North Sea 8,000 years ago reveals its secrets

Tom Metcalfe
Live Science
Mon, 03 Dec 2018 11:13 UTC
North Sea
© Anton Balazh/ShutterstockDoggerland, named for Dogger Bank, is now beneath the North Sea off the east coast of England.
A vast plateau of land between England and the Netherlands was once full of life before it sank beneath what is now the North Sea some 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists now hope to find out what the vast landscape looked like before it slipped beneath the salty water so long ago.

To do this, they've hauled up cores of sediment from the bottom of the North Sea in an area called Doggerland. It's named for the shoal called Dogger Bank in the southern part of the North Sea, which in turn is named for a type of medieval Dutch fishing boat called a dogger. The land became ice-free about 12,000 years ago, after the end of the last ice age.

More recently, about 8,000 years ago, the plateau of land between what is now the east of England and the Netherlands was flooded by the sea. This brought an end to the forests and animal life that had colonized the region from other parts of Europe, including early human communities.

The chief marine geoarchaeologist for Wessex Archaeology, Claire Mellett, said that 10 of the sediment cores taken by an offshore wind-farm developer from the North Sea contained ancient deposits of peat. This organic material can form only in marshes on land.

Those cores are now being studied for clues about the flooded region. This research includes studies of ancient pollen grains and other microscopic fossils contained in the peat samples, which would reveal details of the landscape and climate of Doggerland before it sank.
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Dig

Trepanation found on 3,600 year old skulls of disabled brothers in northern Israel

Ariel David
Haaretz
Thu, 29 Nov 2018 12:00 UTC
skul surgery israel
© Ariel DavidTwo 3,600-year-old trephinated skulls from the Judean desert. Bone regrowth showed the individual on the right survived the procedure. The one on the left did not.
Archaeologists digging at ancient Megiddo, in today's northern Israel, have unearthed the remains of two brothers who survived into adulthood even though they were born with congenital anomalies and were hit by debilitating diseases later in life. The researchers found evidence that the men were cared for by their family or the community, to the point that a complex medical procedure was performed on one of them at the end of his life in a desperate - and unsuccessful - attempt to save him.

The discovery points to the existence of a social support system for disabled people in Canaanite settlements of the late Bronze Age, archaeologists say. More broadly, it also highlights that while we may often think of antiquity as a time of brutality and survival of the fittest, it isn't necessarily so.

By caring for the weak, the Canaanites were merely obeying a social imperative that seems to have predated humanity. Even the Neanderthals are thought to have significantly helped their disabled brethren. Also Homo erectus, who evolved some 2 million years ago, may have noticed each other's pain, and helped each other out, based on the discovery of an aged, toothless erectus individual found in Dmanisi, Georgia who likely couldn't have survived on its own.

Comment: See also:

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