A tourist looking back over his holiday photos accidentally discovered a remarkably intact ancient amphora, estimated to date from the Byzantine period, floating in the sea off a beach on Greece's largest island, Crete.

The man noticed the suspicious object on Thursday afternoon while looking back at pictures he took of the calm sea at the popular Arina beach in Heraklion. Initially, the man feared the bobbing item was something sinister like a floating head, reports local media Neakriti.

He contacted the sea sports facility at the beach, showed them the image and directed them to the spot where he took his holiday snap, and they soon discovered that the strange object was an ancient amphora.

Almost 600 pages of transcripts from meetings and phone calls between US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin paint a picture of a time when the West liked Russia because Moscow did what it was told.

"You have guided your country through a historic time and you are leaving a legacy that will leave Russians better off for years to come," Clinton told Yeltsin in a phone call on December 31, 1999, the day the Russian leader announced his surprise resignation.

"I know that the democratic changes you led made it possible for Russia to be integrated into the international community," Clinton continued, adding that historians will call Yeltsin "the father of Russian democracy" who worked to "make the world a safer place."

His support for pro-Israel, anti-Russian American foreign policy was zealous, verging on fanatical. This explains part of that puzzle.

This is a reprint of an article from August 2008 by the excellent Michael Collins Piper. Vladimir Putin once famously speculated that he thought McCain suffered from mental instability caused by his long detention in Vietnamese prisons, when trying to explain why McCain was so fanatically pro-Israel and hostile towards Russia. Perhaps Putin's vaunted intelligence resources hadn't filled him in on McCain's family ties.

If you still doubt that the big media is determined to keep under wraps the organized crime origins of the $200 million fortune of John McCain and his wife Cindy, take note of how the prestigious Washington Post touched on the issue in its July 22 edition. Rather, instead, note how the Post covered up the matter.
The Post reported: Cindy Lou Hensley grew up as an only child, and a privileged one, in a large rancher in an upper-class section of Phoenix. Her dad, Jim Hensley, founded what became a large Anheuser-Busch distributorship, and her mom, Marguerite, was a proper belle who emphasized impeccable manners.

The Post also added, almost discretely, that Mrs. McCain's wealth "may" exceed $100 million (although most sources estimate it is worth $200 million or more) and - for the record - that "she was the apple of her father's eye."

Rizvan Chitigov, who was killed in the district center Shali in Chechnya on Wednesday and was the third most influential warlord after Shamil Basayev and Doku Umarov, had graduated from an elite U.S. subversion and reconnaissance school and had served on a contract basis in a U.S. Marine battalion, Kommersant reports.

Marine dog tags indicating his name, and date and place of birth, were discovered on his body.

In the early 1990s, Chitigov went to America using the assistance of an international Muslim fund, which had a mission in Chechnya. Returning to Shali in 1994, he told his compatriots that he could have forged a career in the U.S. Navy (and was subsequently called "the American" after that), but a warlord, Khattab, persuaded him to return to his native republic.

Jim Harrison's novella Legends of the Fall, made famous by the 1994 film starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, recounts the tragedies that ensue when the three sons of an aristocratic Montana rancher ride north in 1914 to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Given that an estimated 17 percent of Montana's young men volunteered or were conscripted to fight in the bloody trenches of France and Belgium during World War I, Harrison drew from the real history of a young state that was largely enthusiastic about that war.

Such ardor can, however, have a darker side. In 1918, Montana passed the nation's harshest sedition law, which criminalized criticism of the war effort and served as a model for the federal government's own Sedition Act enacted a few months later. Although the war was nearly over when it was passed, 200 Montanans, many of them German immigrants beset by a nationwide anti-German hysteria, were charged and 79 were convicted for being vocal in their opposition to the war.

For more than half a century, Israel has maintained a cover of silence and opacity regarding its nuclear program and arsenal, backed up by the threat of severe punishment and persecution for any Israeli (see Mordechai Vanunu) who dares publicly breach the cover. In return for this silence, plus a pledge of restraint on certain nuclear development activities, the United States has reportedly agreed in writing not to pressure Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or get rid of its nuclear arsenal. (See this recent New Yorker article by Adam Entous.) US policy on Israel also includes its own public silence concerning Israeli nuclear weapons. But this policy should change as a result of a new scientific study of an event that took place nearly 40 years ago, during the Carter Administration. That study makes it virtually certain that the event was an illegal nuclear test. This strengthens previous analyses concluding that Israel likely carried out a nuclear test in violation of US law and the Limited Test Ban Treaty. The response to this new study will determine whether the United States and the international community of nations are serious about nuclear arms control.

On September 22, 1979, a US Vela satellite, designed to detect clandestine nuclear tests, recorded a "flash" off the coast of South Africa that every nuclear scientist monitoring the satellite's detectors at the time believed fit the classic description of a nuclear explosion. President Jimmy Carter's book based on his White House diaries notes that he was immediately informed of the "flash" by his national security team; with the information came speculation that the event was an Israeli nuclear test at sea, with South African participation.

Instinctively you might think that if we - humanity that is - could not read or write, then we would have difficulty remembering how to do things. You are right, of course, particularly when it comes to complicated tasks such as building Large Hadron Colliders or even organising a sports tournament, but perhaps we should not uncritically rush to such a judgement.

Research is showing increasingly clearly that pre-literate societies, in which no-one read or wrote, were capable of accumulating vast bodies of knowledge and passing these on in intelligible form for thousands of years.

When the Klamath people of Oregon, US, were first encountered by Europeans, they recorded stories about the terminal eruption of the massive volcano - later named Mt Mazama by geologists - that once towered over the landscape where iconic Crater Lake now lies.

The stories described the sounds and the nature of this spectacular eruption, leaving us in no doubt that the Klamath must have witnessed it. Until comparatively recently, the community passed on such knowledge only orally. Mt Mazama is now known to have disappeared from the Oregon landscape about 7600 years ago, leaving us to wonder how such stories could endure so extraordinarily long.

This is not an isolated example. From all around the coast of Australia - a land area about the same size as the conterminous United States - we find 22 groups of indigenous stories recalling a time when the ocean surface was much lower, shorelines were further out to sea (sometimes by hundreds of kilometres), and places that are today offshore islands were joined to the mainland.

Most of these stories can only be memories of the time, after the end of the last Ice Age, when the sea level across the entire planet was rising as a result of land-ice melt. Around Australia, this process ended about 7000 years ago, meaning that the stories must have endured at least this long, transmitted orally across some 300 to 400 generations to reach us today in a form that allows little uncertainty about what they recall.

Teenage girl 'Denny', the latest breathtaking discovery from the Denisova cave in Siberia has understandably made headlines around the world this week.

Earlier finds from here have shown how the cave - in mountainous Altai region - was shared in prehistoric times by three groupings, early Homo sapiens, the more advanced (at the time) but extinct Denisovans and the Neanderthals, also long gone.

A tiny fragment of bone now proves that girl of around 13 was the result of an unexpected match between a Denisovan man and a woman from the more primitive Neanderthals, scientists reported in Nature journal.

Here we look inside the remarkable cave which - as this scientific breakthrough was announced - remains a hive of activity with archaeological researchers painstakingly scouring the dirt floor for yet more jaw-dropping discoveries.

Our video and pictures take you into the limestone cave that is a remarkable shrine to the evolution of modern man.

An international team, including researchers at Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has found the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in eastern Africa. The Lothagam North Pillar Site was built 5,000 years ago by early pastoralists living around Lake Turkana, Kenya. This group is believed to have had an egalitarian society, without a stratified social hierarchy. Thus, their construction of such a large public project contradicts longstanding narratives about early complex societies, which suggest that a stratified social structure is necessary to enable the construction of large public buildings or monuments. The study, led by Elisabeth Hildebrand, of Stony Brook University, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Lothagam North Pillar Site was a communal cemetery constructed and used over a period of several centuries between about 5,000 and 4,300 years ago. Early herders built a platform approximately 30 meters in diameter and excavated a large cavity in the center to bury their dead. After the cavity was filled and capped with stones, the builders placed large, megalith pillars, some sourced from as much as a kilometer away, on top. Stone circles and cairns were added nearby. An estimated minimum of 580 individuals were densely buried within the central platform cavity of the site. Men, women and children of different ages, from infants to the elderly, were all buried in the same area, without any particular burials being singled out with special treatment. Additionally, essentially all individuals were buried with personal ornaments and the distribution of ornaments was approximately equal throughout the cemetery. These factors indicate a relatively egalitarian society without strong social stratification.

An enormous ancient Chinese pyramid has been discovered in an 4,300-year-old lost city, which regularly hosted human sacrifices and was once one of the largest settlements in the world.

The astonishing find was documented in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, in which researchers revealed that the newly excavated step pyramid is at least 230-ft high and covers a staggering 24 acres at its base.

The article, written by a team of professors at universities in China and California, says the city, now named "Shimao," flourished for five centuries across a 988-acre region surrounding the pyramid, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

The pyramid is decorated with eye symbols and part-human, part-animal figures which, the researchers say, could have given the pyramid religious power in the eyes of the Shimao citizens of the day. Both the city and pyramid were surrounded by a series of sophisticated defensive stone walls, ramparts and gates, which the team says indicates highly restricted access to the complex. Decapitated human heads were also discovered, suggesting human sacrifice was a popular tradition at the time.