The Dead Sea scrolls have given up fresh secrets, with researchers saying they have identified a previously unknown technique used to prepare one of the most remarkable scrolls of the collection.

Scientists say the study poses a puzzle, as the salts used on the writing layer of the Temple scroll are not common to the Dead Sea region.

"This inorganic layer that is really clearly visible on the Temple scroll surprised us and induced us to look more in detail how this scroll was prepared, and it turns out to be quite unique," said Assistant Professor Admir Masic, co-author of the research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

"These salts are not typical for anything we knew about associated with this period and parchment making," he added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had called his US counterpart George W. Bush two days before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, warning about an imminent terrorist plot coming from Afghanistan, a former CIA analyst has revealed.

The urgent warning coming from the Russian leader is mentioned in the book 'The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe,' released earlier this week and written by George Beebee, a senior Bush-era CIA analyst.

Putin had telephoned President Bush two days before the attacks to warn that Russian intelligence has detected signs of an incipient terrorist campaign, 'something long in preparation,' coming out of Afghanistan.

The revelation by the former CIA operative appears to be yet another proof that Washington has been repeatedly warned about the attacks that ultimately happened on September 11, 2001.

While the existence of a warning from Moscow has been public knowledge for years - senior Russian intelligence officials spoke about them shortly after the attacks - Beebee's book suggests that it was not limited to exchange between the intelligence agencies, and that Bush was warned by Putin personally.

Well before Theodore Herzl founded political Zionism and published The Jewish State, Christian Zionists in the United States and England were already seeking to direct and influence the foreign policy of both nations in service to a religious obsession end times prophecy

The largest pro-Israel organization in the United States is not composed of Jews, but of Christian evangelicals, with a total membership of 7 million, more than 2 million more members than the entirety of the American Jewish community.

Members of this organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), met in Washington on Monday, attracting thousands of attendees and featuring speeches from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence, and National Security Advisor John Bolton. CUFI's leader, controversial evangelical preacher John Hagee, has met with President Donald Trump several times and was recently part of an exclusive White House meeting in March on the administration's upcoming "peace plan" for Israel and Palestine.

CUFI is but one of many organizations throughout American history that have promoted the state of Israel and Zionism on the grounds that a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine is a requirement for the fulfillment of end-times prophecy and necessary for Jesus Christ to return to Earth — an event Christians often refer to as "the Second Coming."

While organizations like CUFI and its predecessors have long seen the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the later Israeli victory and conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, there is one prophecy that this sect of evangelical Christians believes is the only thing standing between them and the Second Coming. There are estimated to be more than 20 million of these Christians, often referred to as Christian Zionists, in the United States and they are a key voting bloc and source of political donations for the Republican Party.


As was explored in previous installments of this series, these Christian Zionists, much like religious Zionist extremists in Israel, believe that the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock must be replaced with a Third Jewish Temple in order to usher in the end times.

A massive study of ancient and modern genomes stretching from Europe to Central and South Asia and spanning the last 8000 years paints a complex picture of prehistoric human migrations.

The study, a herculean undertaking published in the journal Science and led by Vagheesh Narasimhan and colleagues at the Harvard Medical School, involved sequencing genomes from more than 500 new ancient individuals - more than any other ancient DNA study to date.

It drew together detailed information gleaned not only from ancient and modern genomes, but also from archaeology and linguistics - a "three-layered cake", as Narasimhan describes it - to understand how ancient groups interacted. Precise radiocarbon ages for 269 ancient remains also were determined.

The narrative that emerges is a complicated one, but it sheds light on an enduring mystery of the Neolithic period: whether languages and innovations such as farming spread from one place to the next.

"These are the most profound cultural transformations to occur in the past 10,000 years," says Narasimhan.

Before farming took off, two genetic gradients existed, one stretching across the north from Europe to Siberia and the other stretching across the south from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) to northern South Asia.

Leprechauns may be considered quintessentially Irish, but research suggests this perception is blarney.

The word "leprechaun" is not a native Irish one, scholars have said.

They have uncovered hundreds of lost words from the Irish language and unlocked the secrets of many others.

Although "leipreachán" has been in the Irish language for a long time, researchers have said it comes from Luperci, a group linked to a Roman festival.

Veggie burgers and imitation meat are downright common these days, but it took a long time for meat analogues to earn respect at the table.

But eventually, it happened. These days, fast food chains like Burger King and Subway sell veggie patties. The veggie dog is common in most baseball parks — both minor and major league — and if you're on one of the coasts, it's not too hard to find a restaurant that's willing to sprinkle a little Gardein onto your nachos in lieu of the ground beef. Research by Mintel in 2012 showed that the meat alternatives industry was worth a whopping $553 million in the U.S. alone.

But this whole business of fake meat becoming really popular didn't come out of nowhere. For that, we have 19th-and-20th-century adherents of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church to thank.

To get a sense of why Putin meddled in our elections one need go no further than the Obama administration's hijinks. Post-Mueller report insanity has gripped the nation. In between Presidential proclamations that the report provides proof of his exoneration, and Democratic declarations that the report contains evidence of crimes deserving of impeachment, lies the reality of U.S.-Russian relations, and the fact that these two nations live in a world where their combined nuclear arsenals can eliminate humanity as we know it.

While President Trump struggles to gain traction for his campaign promise to better relations, his political opponents are stuck in a time warp that has them reliving the 2016 Presidential election and its allegations of Russian interference.

Americans have every right to be concerned about the prospects of Russian interference in elections which serve as the foundation of American democracy. However, in seeking to find a solution to the problems that plague the relationship, it is imperative that the American people understand how we got to where we are today. You can't solve a problem without first accurately defining the problem, and as such any examination of the Genesis of the he-said/she-said aspects of alleged Russian interference in 2016 must take into account the fact that, if anything, the Russians were reacting to a lengthy history of U.S. interference in their internal affairs since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.

One of the key players in this interference was Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor who, while serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, oversaw a policy of engagement with Moscow on behalf of the Obama administration and, when that policy failed, facilitated U.S. interference in the 2012 Russian Presidential election in an effort to keep Vladimir Putin out of office.

The story of Jeffrey Epstein has lost its mystery as more and more commentators allow themselves to express the thought that it is a strong possibility that Epstein was connected to a crime syndicate affiliated with a Zionist political organisation or Israel and/or at least a few compromised intelligence agencies. Whitney Web and others have produced superb studies of possible scenarios, I would instead like to attack the topic from a cultural perspective. Epstein wasn't the first Jewish sex trafficker. This seems like a good time to look back at Zwi Migdal, a Jewish global crime syndicate that operated a century ago and trafficked tens of thousands of Jewish women and under age girls as sex slaves. According to contemporary Jewish writer Giulia Morpurgo the Zwi Migdal had turned Argentina, "into a nightmare of prostitution and exploitation."

During the first three decades of the 20th century Argentina was a rich country. It outgrew Canada and Australia in population, total income, and per capita income. Just before the first world war Argentina was the world's 10th wealthiest state per capita. When Argentina was a rich country, large parts of its economy, culture and politics were controlled by crime syndicates and particularly a Jewish organised crime apparatus named 'Zwi Migdal.'

Fifteen years on, the terrorist attack that killed 334 victims -mostly children- still defines those who got out alive. In a new RT documentary, they return to the school gym where hostages were held, to face their own nightmares.

"This is bone cement. Here's a shunt. This is plastic. Titanium, titanium, titanium. Bone cement. Bone... Shunt, shunt. And another shunt. And more bone cement. Cement," Fatima Dzgoeva says, as she points to dents and bumps on her skull.

"I've had five surgeries on my scalp," she says, almost with pride, though her tone is hard to pinpoint, as Fatima's voice is slurred and missing consonants, a legacy of the brain damage she sustained when one of the terrorists' explosives detonated. She was just ten. After the siege, her head was covered in so many bandages her aunt Lana identified her only by a mole on her body.

Medics wouldn't let Lana identify Fatima's eight-year-old sister because her body was "too charred."

Fatima shows the film crew her rehab exercises - she boasts being almost able to touch her nose with her index finger. Lana then puts on an old video, in which an eerily carefree girl prances around on the first day of school.

Evidence from the Cooper's Ferry archaeological site in Western Idaho shows that people lived in the Columbia River Basin around 16,000 years ago. That's well before a corridor between ice sheets opened up, clearing an inland route south from the Bering land bridge. That suggests that people migrated south along the Pacific coast. Stone tools from the site suggest a possible connection between these first Americans and Northeast Asian hunter-gatherers from the same period.

Route closed due to ice

A piece of charcoal unearthed in the lowest layer of sediment that contains artifacts is between 15,945 and 15,335 years old, according to radiocarbon dating. More charcoal, from the remains of an ancient hearth pit, dated to between 14,075 and 15,195 years old. A few other pieces of bone and charcoal returned radiocarbon dates in the 14,000- to 15,500-year-old range. In higher, more recent layers, archaeologists found bone and charcoal as recent as 8,000 years old, with a range of dates in between.

This makes clear that people had been using the Cooper's Ferry site for a very long time, but it's hard to say whether they stuck around or just kept coming back. "Because we did not excavate the entire site, it is difficult to know if people occupied the site continuously starting at 16,000 years ago," Oregon State University archaeologist Loren Davis told Ars. "I expect that this site was used on a seasonal basis, perhaps as a base camp for hunting, gathering, and fishing activities."

Either way, the local Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) people know the site as the location of an ancient village called Nipéhe. "We worked with archaeologists and student interns from the Nez Perce Tribe who visited to get tours of the excavation and to participate in excavations at the site," said Davis.

Davis and his colleagues used a statistical model to calculate how old the very oldest layers of artifacts at the site should be. "The Bayesian model makes predictions about the age of the lower portion of [the excavated layers] based on the chronological trend of known radiocarbon ages in the upper and middle third," Davis explained. According to the model, the very oldest artifacts at Nipéhe are probably between 16,560 and 15,280 years old.

That's about 2,000 to 1,500 years before the great continent-spanning ice sheets of the Pleistocene began to break up. That break-up opened an ice-free corridor southward from the Bering land bridge between the towering sides of the Cordilleran and Laurentian ice sheets. According to computer simulations, that corridor was closed and buried under several kilometers of ice until at least 14,800 years ago, and possibly even later. And that has some important implications for when, and how, people first set foot in the Americas.