God, I miss JFK.

I've been watching the Kennedy shows this week and I notice one significant Kennedy effort that never gets mentioned. He was the president to demand that Israel not develop nuclear weapons.

This is how the Jerusalem Post described Kennedy's actions which are inconceivable given the power of the lobby today.

Let me begin by stating that thousands of years before the 'official' Thanksgiving Day was proclaimed by Governor Winthrop of the Massachussetts Bay Colony in 1637, North American Indigenous people across the continent had celebrated seasons of Thanksgiving.

"Thanksgiving" is a very ancient concept to American Indian nations. The big problem with the American Thanksgiving holiday is its false association with American Indian people. The infamous 'Indians and pilgrims' myth. It is good to celebrate Thanksgiving, to be thankful for your blessings. It is not good to distort history, to falsely portray the origin of this holiday and lie about the truth of its actual inception. Here are some accurate historical facts about the true origin of this American holiday that may interest you:

"Thanksgiving" did not begin as a great loving relationship between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag, Pequot and Narragansett people. In fact, in October of 1621 when the "pilgrim" survivors of their first winter in Turtle Island sat down to share the first unofficial "Thanksgiving" meal, the Indians who were there were not even invited!

There was no turkey, squash, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie. A few days before this alleged feast took place, a company of 'pilgrims' led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local Indian leader, and an 11 foot high wall was erected around the entire Plymouth settlement for the very purpose of keeping Indians out! Officially, the holiday we know as "Thanksgiving" actually came into existence in the year 1637. Governor Winthrop of the Massachussetts Bay Colony proclaimed this first official day of Thanksgiving and feasting to celebrate the return of the colony's men who had arrived safely from what is now Mystic, Connecticut. They had gone there to participate in the massacre of over 700 Pequot men, women and children, and Mr. Winthrop decided to dedicate an official day of thanksgiving complete with a feast to 'give thanks' for their great 'victory.'

The white-washed version of the Thanksgiving holiday you were told in school isn't anywhere close to the true, blood-spattered story of disease, slavery and genocide.

A new study has revealed how indigenous Australians coped with the last Ice Age, roughly 20,000 years ago.

Researchers say that when the climate cooled dramatically, Aboriginal groups sought refuge in well-watered areas, such as along rivers, and populations were condensed into small habitable areas.

Professor Sean Ulm, lead author of the research at James Cook University in Townsville, says the vast majority of Australia was simply uninhabitable at this time. "Forests disappeared, animals went extinct; major areas of Australia would have been deprived of surface water."

The 24,000-year-old remains of a young boy from the Siberian village of Mal'ta have added a new root to the family tree of indigenous Americans. While some of the New World's native ancestry clearly traces back to east Asia, the Mal'ta boy's genome - the oldest known of any modern human - shows that up to one-third of that ancestry can be traced back to Europe.

The results show that people related to western Eurasians had spread further east than anyone had suspected, and lived in Siberia during the coldest parts of the last Ice Age.

"At some point in the past, a branch of east Asians and a branch of western Eurasians met each other and had sex a lot," says palaeogeneticist Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen, who led the sequencing of the boy's genome. This mixing, he says, created Native Americans - in the sense of the populations of both North and South America that predated - as we know them. His team's results are published today in Nature¹.

In 2009, Willerslev's team travelled to Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg, where it had arranged to collect a DNA sample from one of the Mal'ta boy's arm bones. "We hoped that he could tell us something about the early peopling of the Americas, but it was a complete long shot," he says.

Archaeologists say they've uncovered some stunning finds while digging at a construction site in Israel, including stone axes, a "cultic" temple and traces of a 10,000-year-old house. The discoveries provide a "broad picture" of human development over thousands of years, from the time when people first started settling in homes to the early days of urban planning, officials with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said.
The excavation took place at Eshtaol, located about 15 miles (25 kilometers) west of Jerusalem, in preparation of the widening of an Israeli road. The oldest discovery at the site was a building from the eighth millennium B.C., during the Neolithic period. [See Photos of the Excavations at Eshtaol]

"This is the first time that such an ancient structure has been discovered in the Judean Shephelah," archaeologists with the IAA said, referring to the plains west of Jerusalem.

The birthplace of the Buddha has been found in Nepal, revealing that the origins of Buddhism date to the sixth century B.C., according to archaeologists. What's more, evidence of tree roots at the birth site reinforce the mythology of Buddha's birth under a tree.

The excavations took place within the already sacred Maya Devi Temple at Lumbini, Nepal, a UNESCO World Heritage site long thought to have been the Buddha's birthplace.

The archaeological team dug under a series of brick temples at the site and unearthed a previously unknown sixth-century B.C. timber structure. It is described in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity.

The timber structure contains an open space in the center that links to the nativity story of the Buddha himself.

"By placing the life of the Gautama Buddha firmly into the sixth century B.C. we can understand the exact character of the social and economic context in which he taught - it was a time of dramatic change with the introduction of coinage, the concept of the state, urbanization, the growth of merchants and the middle classes," Robin Coningham, co-leader of the project, told Discovery News.

"The discovery of evidence of tree roots in the center of the earliest shrines at Lumbini - the presence of a tree shrine - add a real physical perspective to the Buddhist traditions of his life story, which associated Lumbini with the Buddha's birth under a tree," added Coningham, who is an archaeologist at Durham University.

• The Red Lady of Paviland is actually the skeleton of a man and got its name as it was dyed in red ochre, giving its bones the unusual colour

• It is the oldest ceremonial burial of a human discovered in Western Europe

• Byron Davies, the Assembly Member for South Wales, has asked Oxford University to return the remains of the man who was buried in Gower

A Welsh politician has picked a fight with Oxford University by asking for the return of one of Wales' oldest treasures.

The university is currently the custodian of a 33,000-year-old skeleton that received the oldest ceremonial burial in Western Europe.

But Byron Davies, the Assembly Member for South Wales, has asked the university to return the remains of the person known as the Red Lady of Paviland, who was buried in Gower, Wales.
The skeleton, which is actually that of a man, got its name as it was dyed in red ochre, giving its bones the unusual colour.

It was discovered in a limestone cave in Gower in 1823 by a geology professor at the university, which is why the skeleton has been under lock and key in Oxford ever since.

It is still the oldest ceremonial burial of a human discovered in Western Europe.

Oxford University said the skeleton is one of the iconic relics of the British Palaeolithic, and a cast of the skeleton is on permanent display, along with related artefacts, at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Earlier this month Salon's David Talbot wrote the best summation pointing to why unanswered questions, government secrecy and media cover-up over the JFK assassination matter even more than a 'black hole' pursuit of the actual identity of the shooter.

For over 20 years I have studied the assassination and have come to believe that the American electorate's persistent majority belief in more than one shooter and in a conspiracy is rooted as much in a gnawing sense that the President of the United States is not the supreme authority in the land (no matter how many insist on calling POTUS 'the must powerful man in the world,') as anything else. It is this sense that unseen persons and powers operate above and outside of elected authority which undergirds the passionate insistence that more than one shooter is responsible for what happened on November 22, 1963. That such 'outlaw' elite authorities are apolitical and never abusive of their unbridled power is nonsense, the electorate is sure.

A British academic believes she has identified the precise spot of the elusive Hanging Gardens of Babylon - in one of the most dangerous places on earth

It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for which the location has for centuries remained elusive.

Now, though, an academic from Oxford University believes she has solved one of the world's last great archaeological mysteries by identifying the precise spot on which the Hanging Gardens of Babylon once stood.

Dr Stephanie Dalley focused her search hundreds of miles north of the site of the ancient city of Babylon, now near Hillah, in central Iraq, to support her theory that the lush, elevated marvel was in fact built near the city of Ninevah, in the north of the country.

From piecing together clues from ancient texts, the academic has uncovered evidence that the gardens were in fact produced not by the Babylonians and their king Nebuchadnezzar, as has traditionally been assumed, but rather by their neighbours and foes, the Assyrians under their monarch, Sennacherib, around 2,700 years ago.