Archaeologists have discovered a stunning memento of wartime romance, carved more than 100 years ago by a captive Russian soldier in Poland.

Etched into a canteen found at the site of the World War I prisoner-of-war camp in Czersk is a detailed scene of a man and woman caught in a loving embrace.

It comes in stark contrast to the gruesome first-hand accounts of life at the POW camp, where hunger, forced labor, and infectious disease were widespread.

Experts say so-called trench art like this often captured life's sentimental moments even in the midst of hardship, reflecting the 'personal stories, feelings, and fears' of soldiers during war.

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered what's thought to be the largest granite sarcophagus ever found in Alexandria, measuring nearly nine feet long.

The massive stone casket was buried more than 16 feet beneath the surface alongside a huge alabaster head - likely belonging to the man who owned the tomb.

Experts say the ancient coffin has remained untouched since its burial thousands of years ago during the Ptolemaic period.

According to the archaeologists who led the dig, the black granite sarcophagus stands at 185 centimeters tall (6 feet), 265cm long (8.6 ft), and 165 cm wide (5.4 ft). It's said to be the largest ever found in Alexandria

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump wasn't shy when it came to the issue of debt. As he told Norah O'Donnell of CBS This Morning at the time, "I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me. I've made a fortune by using debt and if things don't work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that's a smart thing, not a stupid thing." So how perfect that he would become the president of debt, presiding (like his two predecessors) over what TomDispatch regular Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, calls America's "credit-card wars." Those conflicts, already almost 17 years in the making and still spreading, may, when the costs finally come due, lend a hand in the bankrupting of America and leave those who don't fit comfortably into the 1% bracket in a ditch somewhere in Trump country.

Five years ago this month, former CIA employee and government contractor Edward Snowden was charged with espionage after fleeing to Hong Kong with a cache of classified documents from the National Security Agency. At the time, he was either hailed as a hero or denounced as a traitor. Regardless of how you view him, history could very well end up connecting the dots between Snowden's actions and the ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Many intelligence officers say that Snowden is a traitor since the information he carried with him to Hong Kong -- subsequently leaked to selected journalists and then published -- could have inadvertently provided foreign intelligence services with pieces of information that would compromise the intelligence operations of Western nations, particularly those of the "Five Eyes": the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. All of these agencies share data with the NSA.

But how did ancient artists create prehistoric masterpieces on sheer cliffs today only accessible by sophisticated modern climbing equipment?

When the Soviet authorities dammed the giant Yenisei River to generate hydroelectricity, they made an artificial reservoir some 388 kilometres long (roughly the distance from New York to Washington DC), never wider than 15km, and with a maximum 105-metre depth.

In doing so, ancient petroglyphs were submerged forever.

Or so scientists believed.

Now, due to markedly varying water levels in Krasnoyarsk Reservoir (or Sea), some of the submerged rock art is reappearing from the deep, while other finds are being made - thanks to observations by boat from the water - high on cliff sides.

Ever since the revelation that the radical author George Orwell had provided names of possible communists to British intelligence, liberal revisionists have claimed he was a crypto-racist and a British spy. Any honest examination of the available documents shows that not only is this untrue, Orwell was the subject of surveillance and investigation by British intelligence for over a decade.

The Independent recently ran an article asking if Orwell was 'secretly a reactionary snitch'. It recounts how in 1996 the declassification of a Foreign Office file chronicling a meeting between Orwell and an agent of the FCO in 1949 shocked many readers and admirers of Orwell's writings.

The escalating trade war between the US and China has dominated headlines, dragged markets down and aroused fears of a full-scale global trade war as several countries respond to new US tariffs with tit-for-tat measures.

While US President Donald Trump claimed recently on Twitter that trade wars are "good" and "easy to win" - history paints a very different picture. Here's a look at six past trade wars and the havoc they caused to the global economy.

The priest quickly sliced into the captive's torso and removed his still-beating heart. That sacrifice, one among thousands performed in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan, would feed the gods and ensure the continued existence of the world.

Death, however, was just the start of the victim's role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries.

Priests carried the body to another ritual space, where they laid it face-up. Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today's surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body. Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull. Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way. The skulls were bound for Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor-a pyramid with two temples on top. One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.

In August 1940, a Russian expatriate worked in his well-sheltered garden in Mexico City. He surrounded himself with chickens, rabbits, and peaceful trees. But the man was no vacationing grandpa - he was one of the most famous political exiles in the world, and his home in Coyoacan was surrounded by armed guards and fortress-like walls.

Leon Trotsky had been a political liability in Russia for years before his hasty expulsion. Though he had helped lead the Communist Party to power in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Trotsky quickly became persona non grata to Joseph Stalin. Trotsky's opposition to Stalin's bloated bureaucracy and his publicly-stated belief that Stalinism wasn't taking Communism far enough toward permanent world revolution cost him everything.

When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, it was thought that Trotsky, who had endured a long marriage of political convenience with Lenin, might come to power. But Stalin helped drum up and took advantage of anti-Trotsky sentiment to seize Soviet control instead. Stalin acted swiftly against the former hero, and he swept Trotsky out of his political positions, the Communist Party, and eventually the USSR itself.

As Trotsky looked for a new state to call home, Stalin scrubbed him from photographs and published texts, but Trotsky was more concerned about preserving his actual life. Though he managed to find political asylum in Mexico, he survived multiple assassination attempts over the years and a raid on his compound.

However, on August 20, 1940, Trotsky's luck ran out. A man who called himself Jacques Mornard had become friends with Trotsky and his armed guards. They exchanged sympathetic political views and chatted about trivial matters, but Mornard was actually Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent.

Archaeologist Tom Buijtendorp, who is promoting a new book on Julius Caesar, headed a project to recreate Caesar's bust using a 3D scan of one existing portrait, a marble bust held by the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. Archaeologist and anthropologist Maja d'Hollosy used the scan of the marble bust (and other portraits, allegedly) to create a truly horrendous clay and silicon 'reproduction'. The bust was unveiled at an event by Buijtendorp at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands, on Friday.

RT reports:

A new 3D reconstruction of Julius Caesar's head gives unprecedented insight into what the famous Roman general looked like all those years ago - including the bizarre proportions of his cranium.
...
The result is a remarkably lifelike depiction of Caesar, down to the unusual skull shape said to have been the result of his difficult birth.

"So he has a crazy bulge on his head," Buijtendorp said of his skull, HLN reports. "A doctor said that such a thing occurs in a heavy delivery. You do not invent that as an artist."

You can see the monstrosity that resulted above. The only problem is: Caesar didn't look like that.