Folklore researcher Wang Zhiyuan has collected 26 civilian marriage certificates ranging from the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) to the early stage of the People's Republic of China (PRC).

"These civilian marriage certificates are not antiques or historical records. Few people take an interest in collecting them. But to some degree, they bear witness to historical changes in China," said Wang, president of the Luoyang Museum of Folk Customs in Luoyang City, central China's Henan Province.

Wang entertains a special affection for these certificates and has spent four years collecting them from various second-hand book markets and antique markets.

By now, he has a varied collection, including certificates for marriages, divorces, remarriages, and ghost marriages. A ghost marriage is a marriage in which one or both parties are deceased.

These certificates also give a glimpse into the lives of women in ancient China, when they were expected to practice the 'three obediences and four virtues'. A woman was supposed to obey her father before she got married, obey her husband while married and obey her son in widowhood. The four virtues included fidelity, physical charm, propriety in speech and efficiency in needle work.

"In feudal China, a marriage was arranged by parents between two families of equal social rank. The bride and bridegroom were supposed to match each other in their birthdates. A lot of rituals were also observed about a wedding. However, all that was still not enough to guarantee a happy marriage," said Wang.

The team of researchers scouring the South Pacific for the wreckage of the plane flown by American aviator Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937 say they may be nearing success after seeing an unexplained shadow on sonar images which were taken off the island of Nikumaroro in the Republic of Kirbati last year.

Experts with The International Group for Historic Airport Recovery, TIGHAR, revealed that painstaking analysis of sonar images captured in July 2012 revealed an anomaly on the slopes of a reef at a depth of about 600 feet that could turn out to be a section of the Lockheed Electra aircraft the American aviator and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were flying.

The team has described the discovery as "exciting" but "frustrating", as nothing is sure yet. "Maybe the anomaly is a coral feature that just happens to give a sonar return unlike any other coral feature on the entire reef slope," the group said. "Maybe it's a sunken fishing boat that isn't mentioned in any of the historical literature."

Is it home to a mine for spaceship fuel? Could it be a portal to another dimension, ready to be activated? Is it a place of hidden paranormal powers? Was it a safe spot to be when the 2012 Mayan prophecy predicted the end of the world? Is it an ancient indigenous homage to the summer and winter solstice?

Officially Serpent Mound is the largest surviving prehistoric effigy mound in the world, but in this stranger-­than-fiction story, there are ardent supporters for all of the claims listed above, and many more.

According to the Ohio Historical Society, the organization that manages the site in rural in southern Ohio, the mound is over 1,300 feet long, and clearly resembles an uncoiling serpent. Their website says the original purpose of the mound is unknown but was probably built by people from the Fort Ancient culture who lived in the area from 1000 to 1500 A.D. Bradley Lepper, archaeologist for the society, reports that the head of Serpent Mound appears to align with the rising sun during the summer solstice, and since the nearby Newark Earthworks have detailed astronomical alignments built into them, it is reasonable to assume that Serpent Mound does as well. Generations of researchers agree with that theory, but the intent of those who built the serpent remains a mystery. Lepper posits that Serpent Mound may have been a shrine to a spiritual power.

Chilpancingo - Inside a cave in the municipality of Cocula, north of Chilpancingo, Guerrero, specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found a Mezcala type figurine and fragments of braziers that date back to the year 700 AD; in this same context, they found Olmec and pre Olmec ceramic which dates back to 1000 and 1200 BC, as well as osseous remains, which means this emptiness had different uses and was a place of funerary cult.

Archaeologist Miguel Perez Negrete, from the INAH center in Guerrero, detailed that the Mezcala figurine is complete, and its finding is relevant because of the few discoveries that have been made of these kinds of pieces, only twelve have been found in the region during this decade.

These sculptures are schematic and small, made with stone. The Mezcala culture is one of the civilizations that has been developing along the Balsas River, even toward the limits of the state of Guerrero, which has been identified primarily because of its architectonic style and anthropomorphic figurines.

"The one found in recent days, is a human representation in limestone, 8 centimeters [3.14 inches] tall, and like others that have been found, the gender of the figurine cannot be distinguished. Something noticeable is that it doesn't have slanted eyes, but round, like dots. Along the figurine they also found White Grainy ceramic which is very sandy. This type of material was used in the Epiclassic period (700 AD)", explained the archaeologist.

If you thought being found buried under a parking lot was about as unroyal as it could get for King Richard III, think again. In a paper published today inAntiquity, researchers describe his body as being buried in haste, crammed into a too-small grave that was roughly dug (at the time, a proper grave would have had straight walls, not sloping ones). Further indications that the dead king was treated with little respect: He was found in a somewhat folded position with no death shroud, and his hands may have been bound, reports Smithsonian. (The BBC tempers the finding by noting the University of Leicester researchers did acknowledge the treatment could have been the result of harried gravediggers.)

Researchers believe that bullets, musket balls, cavalry uniform buttons and Native American artifacts found in Owens Lake point to the massacre of 35 Paiute Indians by settlers and soldiers in 1863.
Lone Pine, California - Oral histories of Native Americans and U.S. Cavalry records offer insights into a horrific massacre here in 1863: Thirty-five Paiute Indians were chased into Owens Lake by settlers and soldiers to drown or be gunned down.

But the records are silent on one important point. Exactly where did the massacre occur on the moonlit night of March 19, 1863?

An archaeological find in what is today a vast alkali playa has revealed a cache of bullets, musket balls, cavalry uniform buttons and Native American artifacts that Paiute tribal members and researchers believe are evidence of the grim chapter in Owens Valley history.

The site has been lost to history for more than 100 years, a time in which Los Angeles drained most of Owens Lake to slake the growing city's thirst. Strong winds and torrential rain in 2009 may have uncovered the artifacts, which were found by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power archaeologists surveying the area in preparation for dust mitigation projects.

Dust wasn't a problem in the mid-19th century at Owens Lake, 200 miles north of Los Angeles. Native Paiutes hunted along the lake and diverted the flow of local streams to irrigate fields of wild hyacinth and yellow nutgrass.

But disputes arose as settlers poured into the valley and began ranching on the tribe's pasturelands. U.S. troops were sent to protect the settlers and the land and water they had effectively stolen from the Paiutes.

Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors -- a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that -- that the Bible actually contains lies?

Most people wouldn't put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.

Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books "pseudepigrapha."

You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It's the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means "writing that is inscribed with a lie."

Thousands of pages of documentation describe atrocities carried out in both Eastern and Western EuropeNazi war criminals escaped prosecution because crucial evidence in Britain's National Archives and in government archives in the United States was ignored for decades.

The thousands of pages of documentation describe atrocities carried out in both Eastern and Western Europe - but have only been examined by German government war crimes investigators over the past four years, after most of the suspects and witnesses had died. At no stage had British or US intelligence told the Germans of the existence of the material.

Much of the original material was gathered when British and US intelligence services bugged a small number of prisoner of war camps near London and Washington DC during World War Two. For years the documents were kept under wraps by the intelligence services because the prisoner-of-war camp bugging program would have been regarded as illegal under international law - and, more importantly, because, during most of the Cold War, the US and Britain did not want to alert the Soviets to the fact that they had developed this intelligence gathering technique.

"All the relevant material was of course known to the British and American intelligence services during and after the war - and was in the public domain after its declassification in the US in the 1970s and the UK in 1996. However, prior to 2009, no use was ever made of the material to track down war criminals. If the direct evidence and the indirect leads contained in the material, had been used earlier by official war crime investigators, there is no doubt that a number of war criminals would have been arrested and brought to trial," said London School of Economics historian, Professor Sönke Neitzel, co-author of Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying - a recently published book on the World War Two allied prisoner-of-war camp bugging operation.

"It is regrettable that the intelligence services in the UK and the US did not make use of the documentation and did not pass it on to the German war crime investigation authorities in the latter part of the 20th century, before many of the suspects had died," he said.

Six mass graves features the remains of dozens of Palestinians killed during the Israeli-Arab war of 1948, when the Jewish state was founded have been uncovered in the Jaffa district of Tel Aviv.

An official at the Muslim cemetery there told AFP that the grisly find happened on Wednesday when ground subsided as builders carried out renovation work.

In 1948 Jaffa was a Palestinian town but there was an exodus of most of its Arab population when it fell to the fledgling Israeli army and right-wing Jewish militias.


Researcher and historian Mahmoud Obeid, a Jaffa resident, told As-Safri newspaper: 'We discovered six mass graves, two of which we dug up. Our estimate is that they contain around 200 bodies, with an unknown additional number in the other graves.

'The remains belong to people of different ages, including women, children and the elderly, some of which bear signs of violence.'

In 1942 a British forest guard in Roopkund, India, made an alarming discovery. More than three miles above sea level, he stumbled across a frozen lake surrounded by hundreds of human skeletons. That summer, the melting ice revealed even more remains, floating in the water and lying haphazardly around the lake's edges.

Since this was the height of World War II, there were fears that the skeletons might belong to Japanese soldiers who had died of exposure while sneaking through India. The British government, terrified of a Japanese land invasion, sent a team of investigators to determine whether this was true. Upon examination they realized these bones weren't Japanese soldiers at all, but of a much much older vintage. But what killed them? Many theories were put forth, including an epidemic, landslide, and ritual suicide. For six decades, no one was able to shed light on the mystery of "Skeleton Lake."

In 2004 a scientific expedition offered the first plausible explanation of the mysterious deaths. The answer was stranger than anyone had guessed.