In the shadow of O'Hare International Airport, the winding, looping streets and small-town character of unincorporated Norwood Park Township look much the way they did in December 1978.

But gone are the lines of gawking bystanders, desperate families of missing young men and carloads of curiosity-seekers who choked the streets in the days before that long-ago Christmas, trying to catch a glimpse of the murder house.

John Wayne Gacy's confession to the rape and murder of more than 30 people didn't just awaken America to a nightmare hidden in its own backyard. The discovery 40 years ago of the dank, muddy mass grave underneath Gacy's yellow brick ranch house at 8213 W. Summerdale Ave. forever shattered the image of the safe suburban community.

A police search for missing Maine West sophomore Robert Piest led investigators to 36-year-old Gacy, a "stocky, bull necked contractor," described by neighbors and business associates as a pillar of the community: a likable, boastful divorced businessman and Democratic precinct captain who hosted themed neighborhood parties and entertained children as a clown named Pogo.

"(The public) would feel much more comfortable if Gacy was this type of creepy, sequestered ghoul that was unkempt and heinous," Detective Sgt. Jason Moran of the Cook County sheriff's office, who is a point man on the Gacy case, said recently. "But instead, he dressed as a clown and bounced kids on his knee. He would knock at your door and say vote for my candidate."

Gacy's nice-guy persona masked something far more sinister. Once they were safely restrained - usually in a pair of handcuffs as he demonstrated a "trick" he learned as a clown - Gacy's easy smile melted away, revealing a cold, growling predator who sexually assaulted his victims before strangling many of them with a knotted rope. He buried 29 of his 33 victims in trenches underneath and around his home and dumped four others from bridges once his property could hold no more bodies.

A 2,800-year-old incantation, written in Aramaic, describes the capture of a creature called the "devourer" said to be able to produce "fire."

Discovered in August 2017 within a small building, possibly a shrine, at the site of Zincirli (called "Sam'al" in ancient times), in Turkey, the incantation is inscribed on a stone cosmetic container. Written by a man who practiced magic who is called "Rahim son of Shadadan," the incantation "describes the seizure of a threatening creature [called] the 'devourer,'" wrote Madadh Richey and Dennis Pardee in the abstract of a presentation they gave recently at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting. That event took place in Denver between Nov 17 and 21.

The blood of the devourer was used to treat someone who appears to have been suffering from the "fire" of the devourer, said Richey, a doctoral student in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. It's not clear whether the blood was given to the afflicted person in a potion that could be swallowed or whether it was smeared onto their body, Richey told Live Science.

Construction of Machu Picchu was interrupted around 1450 by a powerful earthquake, leaving damage still evident today and prompting the Inca to perfect the seismic-resistant megalithic architecture that is now so famous throughout Cusco, according to a major new scientific study revealed by Peru's state-run news agency Andina.

The Cusco-Pata Research Project determined that a temblor of at least magnitude 6.5 struck during the reign of the 9th Inca Pachacutec while he was building his now iconic summer estate atop the saddle-ridge between two craggy mountain peaks.

The multidisciplinary research project began in 2016, led by the Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute (Ingemmet), with the participation of experts from the United Kingdom, France and Spain.

"What we can see is that there was already construction underway with one type of architecture under Pachacutec," said the project coordinator Carlos Benavente. "Then, we believe in the middle of that construction of Machu Picchu, there was a major earthquake."

A major aspect of the CIA's detention and interrogation operations has been purposefully hidden from view, primarily due to secrecy guidelines that make it illegal for anyone "read into" the program to reveal even its very existence.

Recent declassified documents make clear that there was not one, but two CIA torture programs. These programs used different interrogation techniques, responded to different bureaucracies within the CIA, and had very different levels of oversight.

This article reveals for the first time a crucial untold aspect of the story behind the construction and development of the CIA's torture programs, such as we can understand them today (December 2018).

I will try to retell the history of the CIA's interrogation and detention programs with this new understanding of how they originated, were constructed, and how they operated. This revisionist history is open source document-based, and it's worth noting that there is much disinformation and obscure history to clarify.

At the close of this article, we will look at some possible reasons for the separation of the two programs, and the meaning of all this for current investigators and concerned citizens.

Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building and marketing the first computerized word processor, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 93.

Marc Berezin, a nephew, confirmed her death, at the Mary Manning Walsh Home. He said she had learned that she had lymphoma several months ago but had chosen to forgo treatment.

In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Ms. Berezin (pronounced BEAR-a-zen) not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corporation, a tech start-up on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.

One of the charges that nationalist Ukrainians often lodge against their Russian neighbors is that the Russian government has never acknowledged or formally apologized to Ukraine for the "Holodomor" that took place in Ukraine in 1932-1933. This was a man-made famine that killed an estimated seven to 10 million Ukrainians, though higher estimates claim 12.5 million and lower ones now claim 3.3 million.

No matter what the total was, it amounts to a lot of people that starved to death. The charge that modern-day Russia ought to apologize for this event is usually met with silence, which further enrages those Ukrainians that believe that this issue must be resolved by the Russian acknowledgement of responsibility for it. Indeed, the prime charge of these Ukrainians is that the Russians committed a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This is a claim Russia denies.

To the outside observer who does not know this history of Russia and Ukraine's relationship, and who does not know or understand the characteristics of the Soviet Union, this charge seems as simple and laid out as that of the Native Americans or the blacks demanding some sort of recompense or restitution for the damages inflicted on these societies through conquest and / or slavery. But we discovered someone who had family connections involved in the Holodomor, and who offers her own perspective, which is instructive in why perhaps the Russian Federation does not say anything about this situation.

When Dutch colonists became the first Europeans to discover Gunung (Mount) Padang in the early 20th century, they must have been awestruck by the sheer scale of their ancient stone surroundings.

Here, scattered across a vast hilltop in the West Java province of Indonesia, lay the remnants of a massive complex of rocky structures and monuments - an archaeological wonder since described as the largest megalithic site in all of Southeastern Asia.

But those early settlers couldn't have guessed the greatest wonder of all might lay hidden, buried deep in the ground below their feet.

The stunning tomb displays clues to the life of a royal official, with more discoveries likely.

During Egypt's pyramid age, a well-connected man named Wahtye died and was laid to rest in the vast royal cemetery that now occupies the desert west of modern Cairo. His colorfully decorated tomb, apparently intact, has recently come to light some 16 feet (five meters) beneath the sand at the archaeological site known as Saqqara.


This burial is "one of a kind in the last decades," said Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, at a press conference that announced the discovery earlier today. "The color is almost intact even though the tomb is almost 4,400 years old."

When offered support from then-President Yeltsin for a bid to lead Russia, Vladimir Putin said 'No,' much to the surprise of his boss. The anecdote was told by the Russian president to school students choosing their path in life.

Putin recalled how he was offered a big career boost that eventually made him president of Russia during a forum on career opportunities for teenagers about to graduate from school. When asked how he chose the profession of the president, he assured them he did not.

The story came with a moral. Putin said that, although he had plenty of experience as an official and "a big boy" by that stage, he didn't feel ready to fill Yeltsin's shoes. He said he hopes young people in the audience will be better prepared for making key decisions in their lives than he had been.

"The first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, summoned me and said: 'I want to submit your candidacy to the parliament, so that you become Prime Minister, and later I suggest you run for President. Do you agree?' And I told him: 'No'. He was very surprised and asked in his peculiar manner: 'Why is that?' And I told him: 'I am not ready'"

The marble stele, held in the British Museum's collections for 150 years, also includes the first known use of the term "no man's land"

A recently interpreted 4,500-year-old marble pillar from ancient Mesopotamia shows that even at the dawn of civilization, people were bickering about their borders.

As James Pickford at The Financial Times reports, the pillar sat in British Museum for 150 years until Irving Finkel, a curator in the Middle East department, deciphered the Sumerian cuneiform writing on the cylinder this year. As it turns out, the object, now on view in an exhibit called "No Man's Land," was erected to establish a border between the warring city states of Lagash and Umma, located in present-day southern Iraq.