Two mummified lions, dating back about 2,600 years, have been discovered in a tomb full of cat statues and cat mummies in Saqqara, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced today (Nov. 23) at a press conference.

"This is the first time [that a] complete mummy of a lion or lion cub" has been found in Egypt, said Mostafa Waziri, the general secretary of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, who led the team that made the discovery.

Analysis is ongoing, but it appears the lions are fairly small — about 3 feet (just under 1 meter) in length, — Waziri said, suggesting that they were not fully grown when they died. Three other mummies that belong to large cats (the exact species is unclear) were found near the two lions. These three other mummies could belong to leopards, cheetahs or other forms of big cat. About 20 mummies of smaller cats were also found near the lion cubs.

About 100 statues and statuettes were found near the burials, many of which depict cats. The cat statues are made of stone, wood or metal (such as bronze), and "most of them [are] well painted, well decorated and some were inlaid with gold," Waziri said.

Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were stocky hunters adapted to Europe's cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo rhodesiensis in central Africa.

Several short, small-brained species survived alongside them: Homo naledi in South Africa, Homo luzonensis in the Philippines, Homo floresiensis ("hobbits") in Indonesia, and the mysterious Red Deer Cave People in China. Given how quickly we're discovering new species, more are likely waiting to be found.

By 10,000 years ago, they were all gone. The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there's no obvious environmental catastrophe - volcanic eruptions, climate change, asteroid impact - driving it. Instead, the extinctions' timing suggests they were caused by the spread of a new species, evolving 260,000-350,000 years ago in Southern Africa: Homo sapiens.

We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex's name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family's patrons — the Saudi royal family — and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.

The story starts in the late 1950s, when Yamasaki, a second-generation Japanese-American, won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form. The Saudis admired it so much that they put a picture of it on one of their banknotes.
For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois.

Spurred by the recent U.S. attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, Lucy Komisar offers a never-told story about the international corruption of state oil company PdVSA many years ago, under a pro-business administration in Caracas.

Part of the ongoing U.S. demonization of the Nicolas Maduro government of Venezuela is to accuse it of corruption. In 2017, for example, U.S. prosecutors charged five former Venezuelan officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) with soliciting bribes in exchange for helping vendors win favorable treatment from state oil company PdVSA from 2011 to 2015. (Hugo Chávez was president 2006 to 2013, and Maduro became president in 2013.)

However, there's another example of PdVSA bribery that the U.S. never felt compelled to pursue. It is the alleged and never investigated Halliburton bribery of Venezuelan oil company officials in the late 1990s when Halliburton was run by Dick Cheney, who would leave it to become vice-president under George W. Bush.

Exposing that story shines a light on the political motivation of Washington's current attacks on Venezuela.

The story involves Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root allegedly participating in a payoff to PdVSA with its French partner Technip in order to get oil facility construction contracts in Venezuela in 1997 and 1998.

This was revealed to a French investigating magistrate by the Technip official who managed the bribe affair and who told me the story.

In the state of Western Australia sits the famous Wolfe Creek crater, the aftermath of a 14,000-tonne meteorite crashing into Earth thousands of years ago. A new study now claims the impact happened far more recently than we suspected, prompting a rethink on how often giant space rocks actually strike our planet.

A team of researchers from universities in Australia and the US took a close look at several features of the crater's underlying rock to get a precise measurement on the age of Wolfe Creek's most famous landmark.

Previous estimates have stated the crater could be 300,000 years old, but the new result places it much closer to our time, perhaps as little as 120,000 years ago. And knowing this is not just a geological curiosity, either.

As far as neat-looking craters go, they don't tend to be much bigger. With little rain to wear away the walls of the impact site, Wolfe Creek crater has been remarkably well preserved throughout the ages. But the site also stands out for the fact it is the second largest crater on Earth to still have fragments of the offending space rock.

There's no doubt the shrapnel of far bigger blasts exist out there somewhere, but with ocean and ice covering so much of our planet's surface, and wind and rain eating away at the geology, evidence is hard to come by.

Witness to Lee Harvey Oswald's Murder Gives Exclusive Interview to WhoWhatWhy
The detective who was handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, when Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, provided several revelations in an exclusive interview he granted WhoWhatWhy. The conversation took place two months before his death on August 29 of this year.

This Friday is the 56th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's death, allegedly at the hands of Oswald; Sunday is the anniversary of Ruby's slaying of Oswald in the Dallas Police Department garage.

One striking contention offered by retired Dallas Police Department (DPD) Detective James Leavelle, almost in passing, was that he took notes while interviewing Oswald.

This contrasts with the official position that no police department notes or recordings exist.

We have arrived at the 56th anniversary of the murder of America's 35th President John F. Kennedy and too few have come to terms with the tragic forces that both murdered this great leader on November 22, 1963, and attempted to destroy the positive vision of mankind towards which Kennedy dedicated his life.

Now 56 years later, 500 CIA documents remain illegally classified in spite of President Trump's commitment to make everything public according to the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 which itself was made possible through the incredible work of Oliver Stone in 1992.

In spite of that lack of full de-classification, enough evidence has been uncovered over the years, largely spearheaded by the pioneering work of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in Stone's production) who led in the only jury trial investigating the true killers in 1966. Garrison's work didn't stop at the trial which uncovered mountains of inconsistencies in the "official narrative" of a lone gunman promoted by the very CIA which Kennedy openly threatened to "splinter into a thousand pieces and scatter into the wind" after firing Allan Dulles.

Garrison's investigation continued until his death in 1992 and his discoveries led directly to a Montreal-based international assassination bureau set up by MI6 during WWII named Permindex and steered by Louis Mortimer Bloomfield- a character whose life is kept a mystery as letters and personal writings remain classified in Canada's National Archives, in spite of their legal mandate to be made public 20 years after his 1984 death.

In this presentation, Canadian Patriot Press founder Matthew Ehret introduces the historical forces shaping the world when JFK become President in 1961, what this young man's vision was for a post-colonial world of win-win cooperation, how he fought to shut down the Federal Reserve, break up the CIA, and end the Vietnam war. Ehret also takes on the cover up of JFK's murder and how an Anglo-American intelligence operation coordinated through Montreal carried out the murder, how New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison fought to reveal the truth throughout the last 3 decades of his life and how the current alliance of Russia and China are offering humanity a 2nd chance to pick up the torch where it was dropped by JFK in 1963.

The full truth of this operation which mis-shaped the course of world history will surprise you.

Aged approximately 45,000 years, this might be the world's oldest animal statuette.

The sensational discovery was made three months ago in the Altai Mountains by the team of archeologists from Novosibirsk Institute of Archeology and Ethnography.

The precious small - 42mm long, 8mm thick and 11mm high - figurine of a cave lion (Panthera spelaea, lat) was made by an Upper Palaeolithic artist between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago.

It was found inside the 11th layer of the southern gallery of the Denisova Cave.

Researchers at Helsinki and Turku universities mapping ancient Finno-Ugric ancestry say modern-day Finns carry genes from diverse populations living in the region of Finland during the Iron Age.

They said they were able to reconstruct 103 complete mitochondrial genomes from archaeological bone samples, allowing them to trace maternal lineage. The samples were collected from burial sites across Finland and the Republic of Karelia, Russia.

Scientists found that genes associated with ancient farmer populations were more common in the east, whereas lineages inherited from hunter-gatherers were more prevalent in the west.

AN ANCIENT temple has been discovered by archaeologists in Peru who think it may have been used by pagans for 'rituals of water worship'.

The temple is surrounded by 21 tombs that date back to between 1,500 BC to 292 AD.

The megalithic temple itself is thought to be around 3,000 years old.

It was discovered by a Peruvian team of archaeologists who think it may have been used by a 'water cult' for fertility rituals.