The global expanse of US military bases is well-known; but it's actual territorial empire is largely hidden. The true map of America is not taught in our schools. Abby Martin interviews history Professor Daniel Immerwahr about his new book, 'How To Hide An Empire,' where he documents the story of our "Greater United States."


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Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire who now sits in jail on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors, has continued to draw media scrutiny in the weeks after his arrest on July 6. Part of the reason for this continued media interest is related to Epstein's alleged relationship to the intelligence services and new information about the true extent of the sexual blackmail operation Epstein is believed to have run for decades.

As MintPress reported last week, Epstein was able to run this sordid operation for so long precisely because his was only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive operation that began in the 1950s and perhaps even earlier.

Starting first with mob-linked liquor baron Lewis Rosenstiel and later with Roy Cohn, Rosenstiel's protege and future mentor to Donald Trump, Epstein's is just one of the many sexual blackmail operations involving children that are all tied to the same network, which includes elements of organized crime, powerful Washington politicians, lobbyists and "fixers," and clear links to intelligence as well as the FBI.

Someone plowing the field in Newton Grove had hit a large stone while working earlier and moved it over to the edge of the field, said Mary Beth Fitts, assistant archaeologist at the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology.

But when the property owner stopped to look at it, he discovered it wasn't just any stone. When he turned it over, he found a face carved into the front of it and called the Office of State Archaeology, Fitts said.

But experts are unsure what exactly it is.

"It's a very unusual artifact," Fitts said. "We haven't seen anything like that before."

The office posted a 3D model of the sculpture on Facebook on Monday in hopes of "crowd sourcing" to find out more about it.

"We're hoping maybe someone has seen something like it," Fitts said.

Life, as they say, goes on. Until one day it doesn't. For ancient societies, without the means to predict natural disasters, destruction could often come suddenly and completely by surprise. Below are four of the most devastating natural events in recorded human history, and the societies that they wiped off the map.

The Storegga Slides

Until about 8,000 years ago, the British Isles were a peninsula, joined to mainland Europe by a strip of chalk downs, swamps, lakes and wooded hills. Today, we call this submerged world Doggerland.

Today, fishermen routinely bring up carved bone and antler tools from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived here. But by the end of the 7^th millennium BC, a warming world caused sea levels to rise. The people of Doggerland must have watched with dread as their villages were swallowed up one by one. But one event would turn the slow advance of the sea into an apocalyptic terror.

The edge of the Norwegian continental shelf is an underwater cliff that runs for six hundred miles along the Atlantic Basin. And one autumn day around 6225-6170 BCE, this cliff collapsed. An estimated 770 cubic miles, or over 50 Mount Everests, of rock broke off and slid into the deep ocean. The rubble flow reached a speed of 90 mph underwater.

Despite his "sweetheart" deal and having seemingly evaded justice, billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested earlier this month on federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Epstein's arrest has again brought increased media attention to many of his famous friends, the current president among them.

Many questions have since been asked about how much Epstein's famous friends knew of his activities and exactly what Epstein was up to. The latter arguably received the most attention after it was reported that Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein's "sweetheart" deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump's Labor Secretary following Epstein's arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for "intelligence."

Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues — whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway — with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.

Claims of Epstein's links and his involvement in a sophisticated, well-funded sexual blackmail operation have, surprisingly, spurred few media outlets to examine the history of intelligence agencies both in the U.S. and abroad conducting similar sexual blackmail operations, many of which also involved underage prostitutes.

In the U.S. alone, the CIA operated numerous sexual blackmail operations throughout the country, employing prostitutes to target foreign diplomats in what the Washington Post once nicknamed the CIA's "love traps." If one goes even farther back into the U.S. historical record it becomes apparent that these tactics and their use against powerful political and influential figures significantly predate the CIA and even its precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In fact, they were pioneered years earlier by none other than the American Mafia.

When most members of the general public think of the Stone Age, they probably envision an adult male hominin wielding a stone tool. That picture is laughably incomplete. It assumes that only adult males made and used stone tools, and that stones were the only materials in these ancient people's everyday tool kits.

Both assumptions are at best questionable; at worst, they are simply wrong.

First, let's tackle the stereotype about raw materials. Recent discoveries in Kenya suggest that the earliest stone tools may be as much as 3.3 million years old. Other recent discoveries in China suggest that bone tools — used, for example, to re-sharpen stone axes — may be as much as 115,000 years old. A logical inference from these studies might be that our human ancestors crafted stone tools for nearly 3 million years before making and using tools created from perishable materials such as bone.

But can it possibly be true that our primate ancestors exclusively created stone tools for more than 3 million years, 30 times longer than they made tools out of materials that break down, like bone, wood, and fiber? It's possible, but it defies logic to think that was the case. A better explanation lies in the fact that perishable materials don't preserve well over time, whereas stone tools remain well-preserved for eons.

That difference in preservation rates has long affected our scientific understandings of the prehistoric past — and not for the better.

In the 1830s, Danish archaeologist and curator Christian Jürgensen Thomsen defined the "three age system." In that interpretive framework, Thomsen divided human history (as he understood it) according to the types of tools he found in archaeological sites in northern Europe. Thomsen didn't have any absolute dating techniques available to guide his analysis (like radiocarbon or tree-ring dating); instead, he used the law of superposition — a fancy way of saying that the oldest material found in an archaeological site is, barring any disturbance, buried deepest. Think of the garbage can in your office: At the end of the week, debris from Monday will be at the bottom, debris from Wednesday in the middle, and debris from Friday at the top.

A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush's South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey's, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about. After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinnett published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.

Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear.

Excavations carried out by LMU archaeologists in Ur, an important trading center in Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE, provide fascinating new insights into the lives of its inhabitants.
Ur is one of the world's oldest cities. What was life like for its inhabitants some 4000 years ago? A team led by Adelheid Otto, Director of the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology at LMU, is carrying out excavations at Ur, which promise to provide some answers to this question. The team has now returned from Southern Iraq, having completed their second season due to the kind permission by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. This year's dig, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Munich University Association, lasted for 9 weeks. Its target was a residential building that was located on the edge of the city, and has been dated to the period around 1835 BCE. The excavation forms part of a larger project led by Professor Elisabeth Stone of Stony Brook University in New York State.

The LMU group began work on the site 2 years ago, and has now uncovered the whole house, together with a vaulted tomb in which the remains of 24 individuals were discovered. To accomplish this task, the team, which included Bachelor's and Master's students as well as doctoral candidates worked 6 days a week on the site. "They did a fantastic job," says Adelheid Otto. "We began work every morning at 5 and worked until 10 or 11 o'clock at night."

More than two decades after researchers discovered the 3,800-year-old remains of "Jomon woman" in Hokkaido, Japan, they've finally deciphered her genetic secrets.

And it turns out, from that perspective, she looks very different from modern-day inhabitants of Japan. The woman, who was elderly when she died, had a high tolerance for alcohol, unlike some modern Japanese people, a genetic analysis revealed. She also had moderately dark skin and eyes and an elevated chance of developing freckles.

Surprisingly, the ancient woman shared a gene variant with people who live in the Arctic, one that helps people digest high-fat foods. This variant is found in more than 70% of the Arctic population, but it's absent elsewhere, said study first author Hideaki Kanzawa, a curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo.

A Pictish man with a rugged face who was brutally murdered 1,400 years ago may have been royalty, new research finds.

After his murder, the approximately 30-year-old man's remains sat undisturbed in a cave on the Black Isle of the Scottish Highlands for more than a millennia. Archaeologists found the man's skeleton in a strange position; rocks pinned down his arms and legs, his skull was fractured, and his legs were crossed. Forensic artists published a virtual reconstruction of his face in 2017, catapulting him into internet fame.

Now, a new analysis indicates that this fellow, known as Rosemarkie Man, was likely a prominent person in his community, perhaps a member of royalty or a chieftain, according to news sources.

The Picts were a group of tribes that lived in what is now Scotland during the Iron Age and Medieval times. They routinely fought against the Romans, who dubbed these tribes "Picts," likely from the Latin word "picti," which means "painted ones," as the Picts had distinctive tattoos and war paint.