About a century before the fall of the Byzantine Empire - the eastern portion of the vast Roman Empire - signs of its impending doom were written in garbage.

Archaeologists recently investigated accumulated refuse in trash mounds at a Byzantine settlement called Elusa in Israel's Negev Desert. They found that the age of the trash introduced an intriguing new timeline for the Byzantine decline, scientists reported in a new study. [The Holy Land: 7 Amazing Archaeological Finds]

The researchers discovered that trash disposal - once a well-organized and reliable service in outpost cities like Elusa - ceased around the middle of the sixth century, about 100 years prior to the empire's collapse. At that time, a climate event known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age was taking hold in the Northern Hemisphere, and an epidemic known as the Justinian plague raged through the Roman Empire, eventually killing over 100 million people.

Native American shamans living in South America 1,000 years ago had quite the pharmacopoeia in their toolkits. A shaman's bag found in Bolivia contained a special pouch with traces of multiple psychotropic plants inside, as well as a pretty impressive assembly of paraphernalia.

In addition to the pouch, stitched together from three fox snouts, the leather bag contained two wooden tablets for grinding psychotropic plants into snuff, two bone spatulas, a woven headband, and a tube with two human hair braids attached, for smoking hallucinogenic plants.

"We already knew that psychotropics were important in the spiritual and religious activities of the societies of the south-central Andes, but we did not know that these people were using so many different compounds and possibly combining them together," said anthropologist Jose Capriles of Penn State.

"This is the largest number of psychoactive substances ever found in a single archaeological assemblage from South America."

Throughout history, humans around the world have used plant-based substances to alter perception, often in religious or ritual contexts. Discerning what these plants were, and how they were used, can tell us a lot about what ancient humans knew about plants, and which plants were culturally important.

The biblical King Balak may have been a historical figure, according to a new reading of the Mesha Stele, an inscribed stone dating from the second half of the 9th century BCE.

A name in Line 31 of the stele, previously thought to read 'House of David', could instead read 'Balak', a king of Moab mentioned in the biblical story of Balaam (Numbers 22-24), say archaeologist Prof. Israel Finkelstein and historians and biblical scholars Prof. Nadav Na'aman and Prof. Thomas Römer, in an article published in Tel Aviv: The Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.

The Mesha Stele was found in the 19th century in the ruins of the biblical town of Dibon in Moab (present day Jordan), and is now in the Louvre. The stone's inscription tells the story of the territorial expansion and construction endeavours of King Mesha of Moab, who is mentioned in the Bible. The stele was cracked in the 19th century and parts of it are missing, but portions of the missing parts are preserved in a reverse copy of the inscription, known as a 'squeeze', made before the stele cracked.

The authors studied new high-resolution photographs of the squeeze, and of the stele itself. These new images made it clear that there are three consonants in the name of the monarch mentioned in Line 31, and that the first is the Hebrew letter beth (a 'b' sound).

Dissent

Dissidents include individuals who have been victimized and those who have a developed sense of empathy for others' oppression and trauma.

Acts of dissent range from the minuscule to the enormous and assume countless forms. One can sign a petition, kneel during a national anthem, block a highway, sit in the front of a bus, participate in a strike, march or sit-in, lead an armed revolt, or as in the case of Moshe Menuhin - perhaps Zionism's first dissident - write a book.

Moshe Menuhin (1893-1983) was born in the city of Gomel (as Moshe Mnuchin), Belarus to a notable orthodox Jewish family. As a young boy of eleven he moved to Palestine where he studied at a Yeshiva in Jerusalem and subsequently was a student in the inaugural class of the first Zionist high school in Tel Aviv - Gymnasia Herzliya. Several of his classmates would become leaders of the Zionist Yeshuv (settlement) and of the new state of Israel, such as Moshe Shertok (aka Moshe Sharett, Israel's second Prime Minister) and Eliyahu Golomb (leader of the Zionist militia- Haganah). Menuhin moved to the United States in 1913 to pursue higher education at New York University. He was the father of legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin and a committed anti-Zionist throughout his entire life, authoring several books on the topic.

A 4,500-year-old cemetery has been discovered southeast of the famous Giza Pyramids, the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced this morning (May 4).

Several tombs and burials were discovered in the cemetery, with one of the oldest tombs holding the remains of two individuals - one named "Behnui-Ka" and another named "Nwi." Their sarcophagi were found intact and their remains are likely inside; however, no information on them has been released. Analysis of the tomb's artifacts and hieroglyphic inscriptions revealed that the two men lived almost 4,500 years ago, during what historians often call the Fifth Dynasty, a time after the Giza Pyramids had been built.

According to those inscriptions, Behnui-Ka was a priest and judge who held a number of titles, including a lengthy one that calls him "the purifier of kings: Khafre, Userkaf and Niuserre." Khafre was a pharaoh who ordered the construction of one of the Giza Pyramids, while Userkaf and Niuserre were pharaohs who ruled Egypt during the Fifth Dynasty.

Part one: The Rise of the Round Table Movement and the Sad Case of Canada (1864-1945).

"Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits... One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world."

-Henry C. Carey (Lincoln's advisor), Harmony of Interests, 1856

A large team of researchers from across the U.K. has found evidence of Paget's disease of the bone in multiple medieval skeletons uncovered in northwest Britain. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes their study of the skeletons and what they found.

Paget's disease of the bone (as opposed to other body parts) is a condition in which one or more bones produce new bone cells faster than normal-the result is deformation, pain and other symptoms, depending on where it occurs. The most common sites are femur, pelvis, lumbar vertebra and the skull. The cause of the disease is unknown, though it is suspected to have both inherited and environmental roots. It cannot be cured, but it can be treated. In this new effort, the researchers studied skeletons excavated at a Norton Priory site in Cheshire-a medieval abbey dating back to between the 12th and 16th centuries.

The flash of bright light surprised everyone who saw it. Hundreds of Portlanders reported spotting "a vast burst of smoke and spurting flame."

The explosion that followed was even more startling. The shock wave reverberated across the sky for miles, shattering windows and cracking walls.

A recreational mountain climber might have had the best view.

"I was standing still for a moment, looking toward Portland," recalled Thurston Skei, who was working his way up Mount Adams just before 8 a.m. on July 2, 1939. "I saw a trail of smoke coming down through the sky. There was a bright flash at the head of the smoke column as if a huge rocket had exploded."

A few people called police to ask if Martians had attacked. (This was nine months after Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast had confused and worried listeners.) Many more residents thought there had been an earthquake. (The Oregonian reported that the University of Washington's seismograph had remained quiet.)

The US and its far-right allies in Brazil and Colombia are currently leading a coup attempt against Venezuela's elected government. It's the issue that's filling media outlets around the world at the moment. But what doesn't appear in the news is the backing of a country some 10,000km away: Israel.

Israel's links with Latin America are perhaps more extensive than one might expect. And the attempted coup in Venezuela is a reminder of longstanding Israeli ties with the Latin American far right.

Israel backs the Venezuelan coup attempt

Israel has a longhistory of supporting far-right groups and regimes in Latin America. This seems to be reoccurring today in Venezuela.

Almost two years have passed since the "deep state" became a part of the American lexicon. It was in early February 2017, just weeks after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, that news reports first mentioned the term's increased use within the president's inner circle. Over the following months the president and supporters of his administration publicly embellished upon the deep state's meaning and significance, making it into a catchphrase for perceived internal adversaries within Washington. News analysis of the phenomenon has done much to shed light on how the worldview of right-wing activists such as Steve Bannon and Alex Jones helped introduce administration allies to the concept of the "deep state." Though the term has been cause for much circumspection within political media, it is now clear that the notion of the deep state has assumed some importance for the American public. According to a Monmouth poll from the spring of 2018, a total of 37 percent of respondents had heard of a thing called the deep state. When asked if they believed there was "a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy," almost three-quarters of respondents agreed such a "deep state" existed.

The concept of the deep state has been a subject of interest for me for some time now. As a historian of the Republic of Turkey, I was first exposed to the term almost 20 years ago as a graduate student. When I began to first visit Turkey in the early 2000s, anyone who spoke of the deep state did not do so facetiously or critically. Serious people not only accepted the existence of a Turkish deep state, but they tended to believe it comprised an important element that defined Turkey's past. For more than a decade much of my research has been dedicated to understanding many of the individuals, institutions and events associated with the Turkish deep state. Among the works that inspired me to look more closely at Turkey's deep state phenomenon were books and articles written by a Canadian diplomat-turned-professor named Peter Dale Scott. His 1993 book published by University of California Press, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, caught my attention as one of the few academic studies to frame American history in a light similar to Turkish discussions of the deep state. In 2007, I had a chance to interview Scott on a (thankfully) short-lived podcast I had published while a professor at Long Island University. Our discussion occurred within weeks of the publication his newest work, The Road to 9/11, in which he used the term the "deep state" for the first time. It was as a result of this book, and the exposure he received thereafter from Alex Jones and others, that many Americans first entertained the notion that a deep state lorded over the United States.