Americans have forgotten that their long history of intervention in the Middle East started in Damascus. Now it might end there.

Just as the Central Intelligence Agency came into being in September 1947, two of its officers drove east out of Beirut over the mountains to meet a colleague who had just arrived in Damascus. Archie and Kim Roosevelt were cousins - grandsons of the buccaneering 26th U.S. president no less - and, though only 29 and 31 years old respectively, were already veterans of the world of intelligence. Archie, who had recently completed a posting as the military attaché in Iran, was the new head of the CIA station in Beirut; Kim, who had served in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, was posing as a journalist on a commission for Harper's magazine. The man they were going to meet would eventually become equally well known. His name was Miles Copeland.

Once the two Roosevelts had met up with Copeland, the three men embarked on a tour of Syria. Ostensibly, they wished to see the country's numerous Crusader castles; in reality, they were talent-scouting. In particular, they wanted to identify Syrians in positions of influence who had benefited from an American education and might be willing to help them in a matter that had assumed the greatest strategic significance. The cover and the real purpose of the mission dovetailed rather well: By the fall of 1947, Syria had become as important to the United States as it had been to the Crusaders eight centuries earlier.

Then as now, it was the country's location, rather than its resources, that made it so crucial. Syria had mattered to the Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries because it lay on the route between Europe and Jerusalem. And it mattered to these three Americans in September 1947 because it lay on the likely route of a pipeline that would pump vast quantities of oil from Saudi Arabia to Europe via a terminal on the Mediterranean coast. Such was the importance of this project that the CIA men made two extraordinary moves to secure it. Not only did they sabotage a British plan that seemed to threaten it, but they also interfered, to a degree that was unprecedented, in local politics in the region.

In a report released late Friday, conveniently timed to fall into the news cycle hole, the American Psychological Association was officially implicated as an accessory to Pentagon and CIA torture.

As the New York Times explained:

The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nation's psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.

The report implicates several top officials in the APA guild, including two presidents who served on a CIA advisory panel, and the guild's "ethics director."

In response to the findings, former APA president, Nadine Kaslow, issued a statement full of the most profound hand-wringing that a psychology professional could muster:

The actions, policies and lack of independence from government influence described in the Hoffman report represented a failure to live up to our core values. We profoundly regret and apologize for the behavior and the consequences that ensued.

Yesterday, three top APA officials - its CEO, deputy CEO and communications director - announced they were stepping down and taking an early "retirement."

The whole episode seems shocking, and it is. But if you know your history, it'd actually be more of a shock if the APA was not involved in a project that combined their three favorites: government grants, military-intelligence collaboration, and sadism.

The discovery was made by a group of scientists from a Marseille university, who were studying human remains that matched Caravaggio's description.

Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio, who died in 1610 at the age of 38, succumbed to sepsis caused by the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, researchers from the Marseille-based University Hospital Institute (IHU) revealed this week.

"Thanks to cooperation with Italian anthropologists and microbiologist Giuseppe Cornaglia, the IHU team has retrieved several teeth from Caravaggio's skeleton," the university said in a statement, as cited by AFP.

The researchers examined remains in a cemetery where the mercurial painter had been buried. One of the skeletons matched all the criteria: height, age and time, and also demonstrated high levels of lead, which proved it was Caravaggio who was known to have used lead-based paints.

On the morning of Nov. 19, 1985, a wild-eyed and disheveled homeless woman entered the reception room at the legendary Wall Street firm of Deak-Perera. Carrying a backpack with an aluminum baseball bat sticking out of the top, her face partially hidden by shocks of greasy, gray-streaked hair falling out from under a wool cap, she demanded to speak with the firm's 80-year-old founder and president, Nicholas Deak.

The 44-year-old drifter's name was Lois Lang. She had arrived at Port Authority that morning, the final stop on a month-long cross-country Greyhound journey that began in Seattle. Deak-Perera's receptionist, Frances Lauder, told the woman that Deak was out. Lang became agitated and accused Lauder of lying. Trying to defuse the situation, the receptionist led the unkempt woman down the hallway and showed her Deak's empty office. "I'll be in touch," Lang said, and left for a coffee shop around the corner. From her seat by a window, she kept close watch on 29 Broadway, an art deco skyscraper diagonal from the Bowling Green Bull.

Deak-Perera had been headquartered on the building's 20th and 21st floors since the late 1960s. Nick Deak, known as "the James Bond of money," founded the company in 1947 with the financial backing of the CIA. For more than three decades the company had functioned as an unofficial arm of the intelligence agency and was a key asset in the execution of U.S. Cold War foreign policy. From humble beginnings as a spook front and flower import business, the firm grew to become the largest currency and precious metals firm in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. But on this day in November, the offices were half-empty and employees few. Deak-Perera had been decimated the year before by a federal investigation into its ties to organized crime syndicates from Buenos Aires to Manila. Deak's former CIA associates did nothing to interfere with the public takedown. Deak-Perera declared bankruptcy in December 1984, setting off panicked and sometimes violent runs on its offices in Latin America and Asia.

In a new analysis of thousands of teeth from ancient skeletons buried at a site near Naples, Italy, archaeologists have discovered that people were using their mouths to help with their work -- occupations that likely involved processing hemp into string and fabric.

We all use our teeth as tools -- to open bottles, hold pieces of paper, or even smoke a pipe. When we do this, we open ourselves up to the possibility of cracking our teeth but also create microscopic grooves and injuries to the enamel surface. Since teeth don't remodel like bones do, these tiny insults remain over our entire lives.

To archaeologists, the pattern of tooth use that occurs from actions other than chewing is called AIDM -- activity-induced dental modification -- and can reveal cultural information about a person's life, diet, and occupation. For decades, archaeologists have investigated AIDM and found interesting patterns in Neandertals and other prehistoric human populations that are suggestive of ancient artifact production.

With the release of the new Gary Webb film "Kill The Messenger" and the sudden renewed interest in what goes on in that dark underbelly of the US Empire - drug running, money laundering, death squads, assassinations of lives and of reputations - I'm reminded of the incredible life and death of Nicholas Deak, the CIA's Cold War banker hailed in Time magazine as "the James Bond of the world of money" until the mid-1980s, when his global finance empire was destroyed by Reagan Administration accusations of large-scale Latin American drug money laundering.


The Reagan Commission on Organized Crime spent much of 1984 attacking Deak's global foreign exchange firm, Deak-Perera. By the end of the year, Deak was forced to appear before the commission in a testy public interrogation; his financial empire collapsed within days.

A year later, in 1985, Deak was assassinated in his Wall Street high-rise by a paranoid-schizophrenic bag lady from Seattle, who'd been hired for the job by Latin American mobsters, according to a private internal investigation led by former FBI detectives. The assassin, Lois Lang (pictured above), had previously spent several murky years in the underbelly of Silicon Valley, where she fell under the care of a famous Stanford Research Institute psychiatrist, Frederick Melges - an expert on dosing his subjects with drugs and hypnosis to induce "artificial" dissociative states. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dr. Melges was up to his eyeballs in secret CIA behavior modification programs that were going on at Stanford until they were exposed in Congressional hearings in 1977. [For more on this stranger-than-fiction story, read "James Bond and the Killer Bag Lady" co-authored with Alexander Zaitchik.]

Nicholas Deak's end came fast. Exactly thirty years ago, in 1984, his global financial empire, Deak-Perera, was accused by the Reagan Administration of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars of Colombian drug cartel cash.

A CENTURY and a half ago linguists invented a new map of the world. Their research showed that a single family tree stretches its branches almost unbroken across most of Eurasia: from Iceland to Bangladesh, most people speak languages descended from "Proto-Indo-European". The philologists had a theory to explain why Sanskrit, the ancient forebear of Hindi, has closer cousins in Europe than in south India. They speculated that at some point before the composition of the Vedas, the oldest texts of Hinduism, an Aryan people had migrated into India from the north-west, while their kin pushed westward into Europe.

Long before the Nazis dreamed of an exalted master race, imperialists seized on what some dubbed the "Aryan invasion" theory to paint Britain's rule of India as the extension of a "natural" order. Indians, too, found a use for it. Caste-bound Hindu conservatives declared that the paler-skinned intruders must be ancestors of higher-caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Such talk stirred a backlash in southern India, where generally darker-skinned speakers of Dravidian languages were urged to see themselves as a separate nation.

Hindu nationalists took a different tack. The West, some said, had made up the theory to set Hindus against each other. Christian missionaries and communists were using it to stoke caste hatred and so to recruit followers, they claimed. Worse, the theory challenged an emerging vision of Mother India as a sacred Hindu homeland. If the first speakers of Sanskrit and the creators of the Vedas had themselves been intruders, it was harder to portray later Muslim and Christian invaders as violators of a purity that good Hindus should seek to restore. So it was that some proposed an alternative "Out of India" theory. This held that the original Aryans were in fact Indians, who carried their Indo-European language and superior civilisation to the West.

A sandstone sphinx, believed to date from the last dynasty of ancient Egypt, was uncovered by archaeologists as they drained water from a temple in the southern city of Aswan.

The team were working on reducing the groundwater level in Kom Ombo temple in Aswan when they made the discovery, the antiquities ministry confirmed.

It is said that we learn something new every day. That maxim was certainly underlined this week for me.

On the eve of the annual Hope Over Fear Independence Rally in Glasgow, the 6th I have had the pleasure of co-organising, the Organising Committee announced we intended to provide some pre-Rally entertainment by using our Big Screen to show an edited version of the Hollywood Blockbuster Braveheart.

It would be shown before the official rally started to occupy those who always turn up early and help set the mood for the day. For those who don't know it is a movie which purports to portray the life of a Scottish Freedom Fighter from the 13th Century called William Wallace.

Many in Scotland had hardly heard of him before the film, including me. He wasn't in my history or modern studies lessons. In fact, despite being quite inquisitive at school and associating myself with left-wing views from an early age I hadn't heard about William Wallace very much at all.

The William Wallace I was familiar with was the Glasgow Celtic forward who achieved immortality as a Lisbon Lion playing in the first British team to ever win the European Cup in 1967.

Medieval legends claim that Pope Joan was the first and only female pope. And now, an analysis of ancient silver coins suggests that the ordained woman may have actually lived.

According to legends from the Middle Ages, a pope named John, or Johannes Anglicus, who reigned during the middle of the ninth century, was actually a woman, Pope Joan. For instance, a story from the 13th century written by a Dominican monk from Poland named Martin claimed that Pope Joan became pregnant and gave birth during a church procession.

However, there is much debate over whether a pope named Johannes Anglicus existed, much less whether this pope was a man or woman. The doubt stems in part from the great deal of confusion over the identities of popes during the middle of the ninth century. For example, in the oldest surviving copy of the Liber Pontificalis, the official book of biographies of popes during the early Middle Ages, "Pope Benedict III is missing entirely," study author Michael Habicht, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told Live Science.

Discovering whether Pope Joan existed may not only solve a religious and historical mystery, but also factor in to modern arguments over the role of women in the church. "The debate on female ordination in the church is still ongoing," Habicht said.

Now, Habicht has suggested that symbols on medieval coins show that Pope Johannes Anglicus may have existed, and so, Pope Joan may have been real as well. "The coins really turned the tables in favor of a covered-up but true story," Habicht said.