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.

The internet was created in the early 1990s and since then billions of website pages and blogs have been created. Sputnik spoke to Dame Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science, about the early days of the web and also about the importance of archiving pages before they are consigned to the online dustbin.

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at CERN in Switzerland in Christmas 1990 but for the next 10 years, before Google was launched, people struggled to find what they were looking for on the "internet".

"I first met Tim in December 1990 in Paris when he was just beginning to get the web ready to make available. They key thing about the web was that standards were open and ubiquitous and free, it was not proprietary," Dame Wendy Hall, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, told Sputnik.

Sir Winston Churchill was the towering figure of the Second World War. He was the one who did most to shape our idea of what actually took place in those terrible years of conflict.

He is one of the main reasons why we like to think it was a 'Good War'.

The passion and parables of his war are nowadays better known than those of the Bible. Instead of the triumphal ride into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the betrayal at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, we have a modern substitute: Winston the outcast prophet in the wilderness, living on cigars and champagne rather than locusts and wild honey, but slighted, exiled and prophetic all the same.

As a child, I studied many patriotic accounts of the war, my favourite being a cartoon strip produced by the boys' weekly The Eagle, called The Happy Warrior. This cast Churchill as a sort of superhero who was somehow always right amid an unending succession of disasters that mysteriously ended in a final triumph. It would be many years before I understood how wrong this treasured picture was, and I still find it painful to acknowledge.

In September 1959, Nikita Khrushchev became the first Soviet leader to visit America. It was a remarkable event and a seminal moment in the Cold War.

Born in 1894 the son of poor peasants in Russia, Khrushchev's life charts what is arguably the most dramatic period in Russian history, straddling the First World War, the 1917 February and October revolutions, the 1918-1922 civil war that ensued thereafter, the upheavals of the 1920s, followed by the five year plans and purges of the 1930s.

It also takes in the Second World War and the post-Stalin period, a period in which Khrushchev was personally and politically central with his infamous 1956 'secret speech' to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in Moscow.

The 50,000-year-old mummified remains of two ice-age animals, a caribou calf and a wolf pup, have been unveiled in the Canadian territory of Yukon with their fur, skin and muscle tissue still intact.

The specimens, among the oldest mummified mammal soft tissue in the world, were unearthed southeast of Dawson City, Yukon, by permafrost gold miners.

"They're spectacular, they're world-class, and we're definitely really excited about them," said Yukon government paleontologist Grant Zazula.

Stanford researchers have found the oldest archaeological evidence of beer brewing, a discovery that supports the hypothesis that in some regions, beer may have been an underlying motivation to cultivate cereals.

Stanford University archaeologists are turning the history of beer on its head.

A research team led by Li Liu, a professor of Chinese archaeology at Stanford, has found evidence of the earliest brewmasters to date, a finding that might stir an old debate: What came first, beer or bread?

In a cave in what is now Israel, the team found beer-brewing innovations that they believe predate the early appearance of cultivated cereals in the Near East by several millennia. Their findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, support a hypothesis proposed by archaeologists more than 60 years ago: Beer may have been a motivating factor for the original domestication of cereals in some areas.

'Oldest record of man-made alcohol'

Evidence suggests that thousands of years ago, the Natufian people, a group of hunter-gatherers in the eastern Mediterranean, were quite the beer connoisseurs.

Researchers believe the pattern on the fragment of rock is 73,000 years old, but are perplexed as to what it might represent

The earliest known drawing in history - a red, cross-hatched pattern - has been found in a cave in South Africa. Photograph: Craig Foster/University of Bergen/Nature

It lacks the grace of Da Vinci and has none of the warmth of Rubens, but the criss-crossed pattern on the chunk of rock is remarkable all the same. According to researchers who unearthed the piece, it is the earliest known drawing in the world.

Archaeologists found the marked stone fragment as they sifted through spear points and other material excavated at Blombos cave in South Africa. It has taken seven years of tests to conclude that a human made the lines with an ochre crayon 73,000 years ago.

The Attica prison revolt took place over four fateful days in September 1971, when inmates took over the the facility. Even now, some 47 years on, it still resonates.

Some 1,300 inmates were involved in the takeover of the Attica Correctional Facility in New York State from September 9 to September 13, 1971. They were driven to do so by the brutal conditions of their incarceration, leaving them no choice but to rise up and reassert their dignity and humanity in defiance.

Prison's social & racial dynamics

Here I beg your indulgence with a brief digression of sociological import. Because in order to fully grasp the enormity of an event such as Attica - defined by the refusal of those deemed outlaws to submit to their prescribed status in a society where one class and race asserts the right to dominate and rule over another - we are obliged to grasp a truth that dare not speak its name. It is one most powerfully encapsulated in the words of US Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Norman Mailer, who wrote:

"There is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best - that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising, and the most undefeated of the poor."

Little did we know at the time, 9/11 was not a normal day of blue sky aviation. On the contrary, it was one of the busiest days in the history of American aviation, a dense forest of live fly exercises, drills, simulations, fake radar injects and utter confusion. And that was before the attacks even began. This is the story of 9/11 that you didn't watch unfold on your TV that fateful day in 2001. This is the story of the 9/11 War Games.

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The past is not dead; it is people who are sleeping. The current night and daymares that we are having arise out of murders lodged deep in our past that have continued into the present. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on "a vast tapestry of lies" that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad.

But, as Pinter said, "I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory."

No one is more emblematic of this noble effort than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world.

In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been "more malign that benign, more demonic than divine." He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis. In his previous book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin cataloged the evil actions that flowed from the inside job/false flag attacks of September 11^th, while in this one - a prequel - he offers a lesson in American history going back centuries, and he shows that one would be correct in calling the United States a "false flag empire."