As the annual AIPAC conference wraps up in Washington on Tuesday, historian Walter Hixson looked back on the Israel Lobby's origins in this speech last Friday to the "Israel Lobby & American Policy Conference" at the National Press Club.

This conference speaks truth to power. We gather here because we support truth and justice in Palestine. We also insist on a free and open discussion of the Israel lobby and its impact on American democracy and world politics.

All of you already know that the Israel lobby is extremely powerful - for the record, it constitutes easily the most powerful diaspora lobby representing the interests of a foreign nation in all of American history - but you may not know how deeply rooted it is. In fact, the extensive lobbying efforts of Zionists and their Jewish and Christian sympathizers in the United States predate the creation of Israel and flourished throughout the first generation of the Palestine conflict.

As good a date as any to fix the origins of the Israel lobby in the United States is the 1942 Biltmore Conference held in the heartland of American Zionism, New York City. Zionists quickly discovered that they could mobilize Jewish organizations as well as groups such as the American Christian Palestine Committee, to pressure Congress to back the cause. The nascent lobby efficiently lined up the two main political parties in support of creation of a Jewish commonwealth, admission of masses of refugees, and crucial US financial assistance to accommodate them. Military assistance would come later.

The elusive Denisovans, the extinct cousins of Neanderthals, are known from only the scraps of bone they left in Siberia's Denisova Cave in Russia and the genetic legacy they bequeathed to living people across Asia. A new study of that legacy in people from New Guinea now suggests that, far from being a single group, these mysterious humans were so diverse that their populations were as distantly related to each other as they were to Neanderthals.

In another startling suggestion, the study implies one of those groups may have survived and encountered modern humans as recently as 15,000 to 30,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years later than researchers had thought. "A late surviving lineage [of Denisovans] could have interbred with Homo sapiens" in Southeast Asia, paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, not a member of the team, said in a Skype interview during a session at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists here. The new study was presented Thursday at the meeting.

Hundreds of years ago, the west coast of South America was ruled by the Incas - a mysterious empire considered to be the most elaborate society to exist in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. This is not their story.

For long before the Incas held dominion over the sweeping lands stretching from Colombia to Chile, an even more mysterious and ancient society inhabited this elevated Andean region.

This older empire was called the Tiwanaku state, whom we know even less about. At their peak, they may have only numbered 10,000 to 20,000 people.

What scarce details we do know about the Tiwanaku state come from archaeological finds, uncovering a trail of clues about the Tiwanaku people and their long-gone culture. Now, scientists have just announced the discovery of a big new piece of the puzzle.

Thermopolia used by poorer residents with few cooking facilities, archaeologists say

A well-preserved frescoed "fast food" counter is among the latest discoveries unearthed by archaeologists in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

The 150 or so thermopolia, or snack bars, dotted across the city were mostly used by the poorer residents, who rarely had cooking facilities in their home, to grab a snack or drink. Typical menus included coarse bread with salty fish, baked cheese, lentils and spicy wine.

A new study suggests that a group of Neanderthals in southeast France resorted to cannibalism to survive lean times. If that says anything about Neanderthals, it's that they weren't so different from us-for better and for worse.

The bones in the cave

Something awful happened in Moula-Guercy cave in southeastern France around 120,000 years ago. Archaeologists excavating the site in the early 1990s found the bones of six Neanderthals near the eastern wall of the cave, disarticulated and mingled with bones from deer and other wildlife. That mixing of bones, as though the dead Neanderthals had been discarded with the remains of their food, is strange enough; there's plenty of evidence that Neanderthals typically buried their dead. But at Moula-Guercy, at least six Neanderthals-two adults, two teenagers, and two children-received very different treatment. Their bones and those of the deer show nearly-identical marks of cutting, scraping, and cracking, the kind of damage usually associated with butchering.

Washington has again shown that all is fair in war and business, calling for the extradition of a Chilean ex-arms dealer who sold cluster bombs to Iraq in the '80s, despite claims the CIA supported and approved the deals.

Before being inducted into Bush's 'Axis of Evil', Iraq's war with neighboring Iran made it a useful proxy to help Washington crush the nascent revolutionary government in Tehran. To accomplish the task, Baghdad needed bombs, and wealthy businessman Carlos Cardoen happened to have supplies in stock.

According to former National Security official Howard Teicher, part of the reason Cardoen found himself in the right place at the right time to seal the lucrative deal was that the CIA had stepped in to help manufacture and facilitate the sale of cluster bombs to the Iraqi government.

On September 10, 1968 Rafi Eitan and three other Israeli nationals arrived in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small city north of Pittsburgh that was home to a company called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. NUMEC packaged and stored enriched uranium, which it supplied to nuclear power plants in northeastern United States.

Rafael Eitan, who died Saturday at age 92, was an already legendary intelligence operative by the time he came to America in 1968. In 1960, he led the Mossad operation in 1960 to capture Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi functionary who presided over the liquidation of the European Jews. Eichmann's trial and subsequent execution was a milestone in world understanding of the Holocaust. As his obituaries noted, Eitan would go on a storied career that including running Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy whose arrest in 1985 cause a serious rift between the U.S. and Israeli governments.

The New York Times obituary mentioned of one of Eitan's most audacious and consequential operations:

"He was also suspected of being involved in the late-1960s disappearance of at least 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium from a nuclear fuel plant in the Pittsburgh area; many believed that the uranium was diverted to Israel to help its atomic bomb program."

After an online complaint from pro-Israeli watchdog group CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, the Times deleted the offending facts and appended a correction that was, unfortunately, more misleading than the original. The Times correction stated, "though Mr. Eitan visited the plant around the time of the disappearance, it was never shown conclusively that he had had an important role in it."

'The new discovery will change, for the first time, the plan of the temple more than 160 years since its discovery,' said the secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Excavation work carried out in Ramses II's temple in Abydos, Sohag, has uncovered a new temple palace belonging to the 19th Dynasty king.

The discovery was made by the New York University mission, directed by Sameh Iskander.

"It is a very important discovery which will change, for the first time, the plan of the temple more than 160 years since its discovery," said Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

He describes the new discovery as "an important contribution to our understanding of the development of the temple palaces during the Ramesside period."

The location and layout of the palace exhibits a noteworthy parallel to the temple palace of Ramses II's father Seti I in Abydos some 300 metres to the south.

During the work of the mission around the temple to recover the architectural elements south of the temple, Iskander told Ahram Online, the mission accidentally stumbled upon a stone walkway at the south-western door of a temple.

This walkway led to an entrance of a palace building that contains the cartouches of Ramses II.

Northern Ethiopia was once home to a vast, ancient lake. Saber-toothed cats prowled around it, giant crocodiles swam within. The streams and rivers that fed it-over 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene-left behind trails of sediment that have now hardened into sandstone.

Deposited within these layers are fossils: some of early hominins, along with the bones of hippos, antelope, and elephants. Anthropologist Jessica Thompson encountered two of these specimens, from an area named Dikika, in 2010.

At the time, she was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Given no explanation as to their history, she analyzed the bones and found signs of butchery. Percussion marks suggested someone may have accessed the marrow; cut marks hinted that flesh was stripped from bone. To her surprise, the specimens were 3.4 million years old, putting the butcher's behaviors back 800,000 years earlier than conventional estimates would suggest. That fact got Thompson, now an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Yale University, thinking there might be more traces of tool use from those early times.

In a wide-ranging review published in February's issue of Current Anthropology, Thompson joins a team of researchers to weave together several strands of recent evidence and propose a new theory about the transition to large animal consumption by our ancestors. The prevailing view, supported by a confluence of fossil evidence from sites in Ethiopia, is that the emergence of flaked tool use and meat consumption led to the cerebral expansion that kickstarted human evolution more than 2 million years ago. Thompson and her colleagues disagree: Rather than using sharpened stones to hunt and scrape meat from animals, they suggest, earlier hominins may have first bashed bones to harvest fatty nutrients from marrow and brains.

Exactly 233 years ago this week, two of America's founding fathers documented their first exposure to Islamic jihad in a letter to Congress; like many Americans today, they too were shocked at what they learned.

Context: in 1785, Muslim pirates from North Africa, or "Barbary," had captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- then ambassadors to France and England respectively -- met with Tripoli's ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of the Barbary States' hitherto inexplicable animosity to American vessels in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:

We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary's] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise

One need not conjecture what the American ambassadors -- who years earlier had asserted that all men were "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" -- thought of their Muslim counterpart's answer. Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting.