With the release of the new Gary Webb film "Kill The Messenger" and the sudden renewed interest in what goes on in that dark underbelly of the US Empire - drug running, money laundering, death squads, assassinations of lives and of reputations - I'm reminded of the incredible life and death of Nicholas Deak, the CIA's Cold War banker hailed in Time magazine as "the James Bond of the world of money" until the mid-1980s, when his global finance empire was destroyed by Reagan Administration accusations of large-scale Latin American drug money laundering.


The Reagan Commission on Organized Crime spent much of 1984 attacking Deak's global foreign exchange firm, Deak-Perera. By the end of the year, Deak was forced to appear before the commission in a testy public interrogation; his financial empire collapsed within days.

A year later, in 1985, Deak was assassinated in his Wall Street high-rise by a paranoid-schizophrenic bag lady from Seattle, who'd been hired for the job by Latin American mobsters, according to a private internal investigation led by former FBI detectives. The assassin, Lois Lang (pictured above), had previously spent several murky years in the underbelly of Silicon Valley, where she fell under the care of a famous Stanford Research Institute psychiatrist, Frederick Melges - an expert on dosing his subjects with drugs and hypnosis to induce "artificial" dissociative states. Perhaps not surprisingly, Dr. Melges was up to his eyeballs in secret CIA behavior modification programs that were going on at Stanford until they were exposed in Congressional hearings in 1977. [For more on this stranger-than-fiction story, read "James Bond and the Killer Bag Lady" co-authored with Alexander Zaitchik.]

Nicholas Deak's end came fast. Exactly thirty years ago, in 1984, his global financial empire, Deak-Perera, was accused by the Reagan Administration of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars of Colombian drug cartel cash.

A CENTURY and a half ago linguists invented a new map of the world. Their research showed that a single family tree stretches its branches almost unbroken across most of Eurasia: from Iceland to Bangladesh, most people speak languages descended from "Proto-Indo-European". The philologists had a theory to explain why Sanskrit, the ancient forebear of Hindi, has closer cousins in Europe than in south India. They speculated that at some point before the composition of the Vedas, the oldest texts of Hinduism, an Aryan people had migrated into India from the north-west, while their kin pushed westward into Europe.

Long before the Nazis dreamed of an exalted master race, imperialists seized on what some dubbed the "Aryan invasion" theory to paint Britain's rule of India as the extension of a "natural" order. Indians, too, found a use for it. Caste-bound Hindu conservatives declared that the paler-skinned intruders must be ancestors of higher-caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Such talk stirred a backlash in southern India, where generally darker-skinned speakers of Dravidian languages were urged to see themselves as a separate nation.

Hindu nationalists took a different tack. The West, some said, had made up the theory to set Hindus against each other. Christian missionaries and communists were using it to stoke caste hatred and so to recruit followers, they claimed. Worse, the theory challenged an emerging vision of Mother India as a sacred Hindu homeland. If the first speakers of Sanskrit and the creators of the Vedas had themselves been intruders, it was harder to portray later Muslim and Christian invaders as violators of a purity that good Hindus should seek to restore. So it was that some proposed an alternative "Out of India" theory. This held that the original Aryans were in fact Indians, who carried their Indo-European language and superior civilisation to the West.

A sandstone sphinx, believed to date from the last dynasty of ancient Egypt, was uncovered by archaeologists as they drained water from a temple in the southern city of Aswan.

The team were working on reducing the groundwater level in Kom Ombo temple in Aswan when they made the discovery, the antiquities ministry confirmed.

It is said that we learn something new every day. That maxim was certainly underlined this week for me.

On the eve of the annual Hope Over Fear Independence Rally in Glasgow, the 6th I have had the pleasure of co-organising, the Organising Committee announced we intended to provide some pre-Rally entertainment by using our Big Screen to show an edited version of the Hollywood Blockbuster Braveheart.

It would be shown before the official rally started to occupy those who always turn up early and help set the mood for the day. For those who don't know it is a movie which purports to portray the life of a Scottish Freedom Fighter from the 13th Century called William Wallace.

Many in Scotland had hardly heard of him before the film, including me. He wasn't in my history or modern studies lessons. In fact, despite being quite inquisitive at school and associating myself with left-wing views from an early age I hadn't heard about William Wallace very much at all.

The William Wallace I was familiar with was the Glasgow Celtic forward who achieved immortality as a Lisbon Lion playing in the first British team to ever win the European Cup in 1967.

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.