A small lump of iron found in ancient ruins in Turkey may upend commonly held beliefs about the history of ironmaking, as the relic appears to have come from somewhere else.

The question is, where?

A Japanese research team uncovered the oldest ironmaking-related relic of its class at an excavation site in the Anatolia region, the central area of the Hittite Empire (1,400 B.C.-1,200 B.C.).

The empire was a major power along with the New Kingdom of Egypt in the ancient Orient.

The relic is a weight-shaped lump with a diameter of about 3 centimeters and contains a high amount of oxidized iron.

The Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology (JIAA) of the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan (MECCJ) discovered it in September 2017 in a geological layer dating between 2,500 B.C. and 2,250 B.C.

The institute has been engaged in research into the Kaman Kalehoyuk ruins in Turkey since 1986.

The ruins are in the central area of the Hittite Empire that prospered in the ancient Orient by using iron and light tanks as weapons.

The empire is said to have acquired military advantages by adopting ironmaking invented by indigenous people. In those days, ironmaking was considered the most advanced technology.

After the empire collapsed, the ironmaking technology spread to surrounding regions, and the proliferation became a turning point toward the Iron Age.

According to JIAA director Sachihiro Omura, the unearthed relic is believed to be the oldest of its kind in the history of ironmaking.

A Soviet rocket manufactured in the 1960s, courage, optimism, and a patriotic upsurge managed to take down an 'invisible' $42.6 mln American bomber packed with modern technology that NATO was using to 'carry freedom' to the people of Yugoslavia. This is the story of an unexpected "miracle" that occurred in the early days of the bombing of Serbia.

The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, 'the Invisible', the pride of the US Air Force and a technological wonder, was shot down just three days after the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began - on 27 March 1999, near the village of Buđanovci; the aircraft became the only confirmed loss of a NATO stealth plane.

Zoltán Dani, a colonel in the Yugoslavian Air Defence Forces, was the commander of the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade during the NATO war of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Members of his team have become Serbian national heroes.

Opinions among archaeologists are divided over an 11-year investigation of an Australian site containing what could be an ancient midden, or shell heap.

If it is, in fact, the result of human activity, dating evidence pushes back the likely arrival of people into the island continent to 120,000 years ago - almost double the current confirmed estimate.

The Moyjil-Point Ritchie site the southern coast near the mouth of the Hopkins River has intrigued scientists since the early 1980s because of its scattered deposits of sea snail shells. Questions of Moyjil's archaeological significance have swirled around the site ever since.

The new research - published in a series of papers in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria - pins down the antiquity of the shell deposits, using three different methods.

But analysis of the shells and the rocks they are associated with doesn't definitively point to whether the collection of shells is an ancient human midden or the work of sea birds.

Theories differ - even among those who have worked at the site.

"I'm now 99% convinced that people were there," says geologist Jim Bowler from the University of Melbourne, who has studied the Moyjil site since the 1980s. But, he concedes, "it lacks confirmatory evidence".

In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.

While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda — not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor have U.S. leaders considered launching "humanitarian bombings" against the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese and were continuing such slaughter through the summer of 1999, or the Guatemalans for the Guatemalan military's systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In such cases, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators — who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.

Why then did U.S. leaders wage an unrestrainedly murderous assault upon Yugoslavia?

A newly declassified US intelligence memo has been unearthed this week and featured in a bombshell Wall Street Journal report. It proves that the year prior to the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq the White House was expressly warned in great detail of all that could and would go wrong in the regime change war's aftermath, including the Sunni-Shia sectarian chaos and proxy war with Iran that would define Iraq and the whole region for years following. And crucially, it reveals that seven months before the US invasion of Iraq, American intelligence officials understood that Osama bin Laden was likely "alive and well and hiding in northwest Pakistan" -important given that a key Bush admin claim to sell the war was that Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were "in league" against the United States.

The July 2002 memo was authored by William Burns, then serving as Assistant Secretary of State for near eastern affairs, and though clearly dismissed by the Bush neocons making the case for war, proved prescient on many levels. "Following are some very quick and informal thoughts on how events before, during and after an effort to overthrow the regime in Baghdad could unravel if we're not careful, intersecting to create a 'perfect storm' for American interests," Burns wrote in the memo, classified 'Secret' and sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

From the summit of Mount Nebo in Jordan, Moses could see Canaan. The patriarch could even see Jerusalem perched on a hilltop on a good day, according to tradition.

Moses would never make the trip to the Promised Land, the Bible tells us, but he was buried on that very mountain ridge. Thousands of years later, apparently sometime between 350 and 380 C.E., early Christians built a church and monastery on the mount where the patriarch was supposed to have gazed westward. And pilgrims began to arrive.

The question is who exactly those pilgrims visiting between the third and eighth centuries were. Where did they come from? What were they like?

Two decades ago, NATO started its 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. RT America's Alex Mihailovich revisits the Balkans to recall how the intervention happened and see the harm the people in the Balkans still suffer from.

The 1999 NATO operation was the culmination of Yugoslavia's decade of bloody dissolution, which split the entire region along ethnic and religious lines. Mihailovich was there when the cruise missiles started hitting Novi Sad and other major cities. Touted as a surgical humanitarian intervention to stop the violence in Kosovo, in reality, Operation Allied Force killed more civilians than troops and devastated civilian infrastructure of the nation.

It had plenty of unintended consequences too, from hitting a civilian train, a marketplace and the Chinese Embassy, to polluting the land with depleted uranium. The toxic substance is used for armor-piercing munitions and is believed to be the cause of a spike of cancer cases today.

In late 2018, aerospace and defence giant Northrop Grumman passed a development review of its B-21 program, a secretive flying-wing strategic bomber design meant to succeed the B-2 Spirit. However, as it turns out, the company has also been tinkering with some unique designs developed in the 1940s by a certain central European country.

In September 2008, in preparation for a 2009 National Geographic documentary called Hitler's Stealth Fighter, a team of engineers from Northrop Grumman dusted off the last surviving airframe from a Horten Ho 229 V3 prototype Nazi bomber design at a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum storage facility in Maryland to engage in testing of the aircraft's stealth properties.

Building a mockup of the aircraft using "modern techniques," including stereo-lithography, engineers were able to simulate its performance against period British Chain Home radar network components, designed to help ward off Luftwaffe attacks.

In April 1986, nearly a quarter century before the devastating 2011 NATO-led air campaign which left the North African country in ruins, the US military launched airstrikes against Libya in an attempt to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi over a nightclub bombing in West Berlin which was allegedly perpetrated by Libyan intelligence.

The UK's Ministry of Defence drew up plans to defend the British overseas territory of Gibraltar against a potential Libyan attack amid fears that London's support for the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi may have prompted a Libyan retaliation, a recently declassified top secret report has shown.

"Following US military action against Libya there is an increased risk of Libyan attack on UK targets," the report, cited by The Times, indicated. "The relative proximity of Gibraltar and the fact that its naval installation and airfield have in the past provided support for US units makes it a potential target for such an attack," the report added.

Judging Libya's Soviet-supplied Tupolev Tu-22 bombers to have sufficient range to strike Gibraltar with five 1,000 kg bombs dropped from an altitude of up to 35,000 feet, the report cited guidelines approved by the cabinet allowing for enemy aircraft demonstrating "hostile intent" to be attacked.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, excavations carried out by a French archaeological mission have revealed an ancient city on the site of Kunara. Towards the end of the 3rd millennium BC, this city stood in the heart of an unknown kingdom: that of the mountain people, who had until then remained in the shadow of their powerful Mesopotamian neighbours.

"The first excavations were perplexing!" This was not ArScAn [1] researcher Aline Tenu's first archaeological mission in the Middle East, yet the discovery that she made with her colleague in Iraqi Kurdistan continue to yield many surprises. "You could call it a small revolution," confirms their colleague Philippe Clancier, an epigraphist at ArScan.

What exactly did they find? Over the course of six excavation campaigns, conducted between 2012 and 2018, the archaeologists unearthed the traces of an unexpected ancient city at the site of Kunara. It is located on the outskirts of the Zagros Mountains, on two small hills overlooking the right bank of a branch of the Tanjaro River, approximately 5 km southwest of the city of Soulaymaniyah (modern-day cultural capital of Iraqi Kurdistan). "This area near the Iran-Iraq border was not very well explored until now," Tenu points out. The ban on venturing into Kurdistan under Saddam Hussein's regime as well as successive wars-the most recent against ISIS-did not make things any easier. "The situation is much more favourable now," enthuses the archaeologist, emphasizing the warm support offered by local authorities.