You see a girl walking down the street. You can say, "There goes a beautiful girl" or "There goes a whore." What the hell's the difference? They've both got legs.

~ Jon E.M. Jacoby, executive vice president of Stephens Inc., explaining the Arkansas system of politics and finance as it reached perfection during the Clinton years

Part 1

In Arkansas, the latest backstairs of the national political system, you hear a lot of things. Concerning Whitewater, for example, you are constantly-- and probably correctly--reminded that the dustup involves nothing but a typical loony tunes savings & loans deal from the 1980s, despite the august personages involved and their perplexing insistence on behaving like refugees from a Raymond Chandler novel. In Arkansas memories are long, political rascality is king of regional sports and rumor and truth tend to commingle until otherwise reasonable people are driven slightly bonkers trying to sort out one from the other. In Little Rock the whole Whitewater affair is regarded as something of a hoot--the Yankee carpetbagger press, with the reality of Arkansas staring it in the face, has gone and missed the real story again. But if Whitewater was nothing but a minor peccadillo that the press has glommed onto because it thinks it understands it--and compared with the private financial shenanigans of Arizona Governor Fife Symington, Whitewater resembles a misdeed along the lines of crossing the street against the light--why, then, has the Clinton administration so frantically placed its back to the door, as though a peek beyond would reveal grandpa tied to a chair, surrounded by his looted bank books? In Arkansas the answer to this question eerily resembles the epitaph on the tombstone of Sir Christopher Wren: if you would see Clinton's monument, look around.

Hints of an unidentified, extinct human species have been found in the DNA of modern Melanesians - those living in a region of the South Pacific, northeast of Australia. According to new genetic modelling, the species is unlikely to be Neanderthal or Denisovan - two ancient species that are represented in the fossil record - but could represent a third, unknown human relative that has so far eluded archaeologists.

"We're missing a population, or we're misunderstanding something about the relationships," Ryan Bohlender, a statistical geneticist from the University of Texas, told Tina Hesman Saey at Science News. Bohlender and his team have been investigating the percentages of extinct hominid DNA that modern humans still carry today, and say they've found discrepancies in previous analyses that suggest our mingling with Neanderthals and Denisovans isn't the whole story.

It's thought that between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, our early ancestors migrated out of Africa, and first made contact with other hominid species living on the Eurasian landmass. This contact left a mark on our species that can still be found today, with Europeans and Asians carrying distinct genetic variants of Neanderthal DNA in their own genomes. And that's not all they've given us.

On October 25th, 2002 the last great hero of the common people in the US Senate was very likely murdered by agents of the shadow US crime cabal government otherwise known as the Bush-Cheney regime. His wife and daughter and two pilots also died in the air crash. Paul Wellstone's story deserves to be retold and Americans need to be reminded that criminals in and out of our government still need to be punished for their unindicted crimes. This article was written as both a tribute to an outstanding American patriot and a reexamination of his probable assassination by criminals still on the loose.

Minnesota Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone was a man of integrity who was among the few politicians openly and adamantly opposing the Iraq invasion as well as the creation of the US version of Gestapo-land Security. As a fearless populist leader he'd been a constant thorn in the side ever since then President George H. W. Bush responding to the junior senator's uncomfortable questions at a reception asked, "Who is this chickenshit?" Years later as the only senator up for reelection who voted against the Iraq War when Democrats held just a one seat edge over the Republicans in the Senate (with one independent caucusing with Democrats), his thorny side made him the #1 GOP target. With the Karl Rove led Republican Party just one seat away from gaining Republican control over the US Senate, Wellstone's death gave his Republican challenger Norm Coleman the 49-49 split and, as the President of the Senate, Cheney's tie breaking vote would deliver the GOP 50-49 advantage needed to steamroll yet more tax cuts through for the rich, unending bankers' wars and a never seen before boom for the military-security industrial complex. Again, motive and means tilt heavily towards assassination. The facts make it more than probable.

A month prior to the November 2002 election Vice President Cheney had arranged a meeting with Wellstone, threatening him with grave consequences should he vote against the preplanned Iraq invasion. A few days later speaking to a group of war veterans, Wellstone publicly recalled Cheney's threatening words:

If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.

What myths have most of us been taught about Native Americans? In a new book, All the Real Indians Died Off And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker show how generations of people in the United States have been misinformed about Indigenous Americans as part of a colonial agenda of erasure.

The following is the Truthout interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker.

Mark Karlin: I was profoundly enlightened when I interviewed you about your last book The Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Your new book, written with Dina Gilio-Whitaker debunks 21 myths about Native Americans. Before we get to the book, I want to start and ask you a truly global question, how is the Indigenous rights movement becoming increasingly transnational?

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: The international Indigenous movement is becoming increasingly visible, but it has been developing since the early 1920s, when the Haudenosaunee (six Nations of the Iroquois federation) sent a representative, Cayuga leader Deskaheh, to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1923 to address the League of Nations. From the 1930s onwards, Muskogee Creek, Cherokee and Hopi representatives built ties with Indigenous Peoples in Central Mexico, where their peoples had originated.

Nasīr al-Dīn Tūsī was a Persian polymath and prolific writer: An architect, astronomer, biologist, chemist, mathematician, philosopher, physician, physicist, scientist, theologian and Marja Taqleed. He was of the Ismaili, and subsequently Twelver Shī'ah, Islamic belief. The Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332 - 1406) considered Tusi to be the greatest of the later Persian scholars.

Tusi has about 150 works, of which 25 are in Persian and the remaining are in Arabic, and there is one treatise in Persian, Arabic and Turkish.

During his stay in Nishapur, Tusi established a reputation as an exceptional scholar. Tusi's prose writings represent one of the largest collections by a single Islamic author. Writing in both Arabic and Persian, Nasir al-Din Tusi dealt with both religious ("Islamic") topics and non-religious or secular subjects ("the ancient sciences"). His works include the definitive Arabic versions of the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Autolycus, and Theodosius of Bithynia.

A team of archaeologists from the University of West Florida has uncovered a third shipwreck from a sunken 16th century fleet of Spanish ships in Pensacola Bay.

It was located near the first two discoveries which are believed to be a part of the Tristan de Luna y Arellano expedition, a Spanish explorer who attempted to colonize Florida in 1559.

A mysterious stone found in a ditch on Bornholm by archaeology students during the summer has proven to be a 5,000 years old map.

According to the magazine Skalk, the stone was discovered during archaeological excavation work at the Neolithic shrine Vasagård.

The stone has been studied by researchers at the National Museum of Denmark.

Unlike previous and similar findings, archaeologist and senior researcher at the National Museum, Flemming Kaul, is reasonably certain that the stone does not show the sun and the sun's rays, but displays the topographic details of a piece of nature on the island as it appeared between the years 2700 and 2900 BC.

Ritual stones

Kaul called the stone "without parallel". In recent years, excavations at Vasagård have turned up several stones inscribed with rectangular patterns filled with different rows of lines and shading.

"Some of the lines may be reproductions of ears of corn or plants with leaves," said Kaul.

"These are not accidental scratches," said Kaul. "We see the stones as types of maps showing different kinds of fields."

The recent find was not complete. It is made up of two pieces and one piece is still missing. Archaeologists believe the stones were used in Stone Age rituals.

A secret Nazi-era tactical base has been discovered by Russian researchers on the island of Alexandra Land in the Arctic Circle, located 620 miles from the North Pole.

The site, code-named "Schatzgraber" or "Treasure Hunter" was built by Nazis in 1942 - a year after Hitler invaded Russia - and was primarily used as a tactical weather station that was crucial in planning the strategic movements of Nazi troops, warships and submarines.

"Before it was only known from written sources, but now we also have real proof," said Evgeny Ermolov, a senior researcher at the Russian Arctic National Park, in a statement. The written source Ermolov referenced is the book "Wettertrupp Haudegen," published in 1954, and written in German.

In 1760, Scottish poet James Macpherson published a volume of poems he claimed to have translated from the Gaelic works of a third-century Scottish bard named Ossian. The poems were an enormous hit and a major inspiration to the nascent Romantic period in literature and art.

They may also have been fakes — or, at least, far less authentic than Macpherson claimed. Early critics, including English poet Samuel Johnson, pointed out the poems' similarities to Irish mythology and that Macpherson never produced any ancient documents indicating the origin of the works.

Now, a new analysis of the relationships among the characters in the "Ossian" poems suggests they share more in common with their Irish cousins than their author would have liked to admit. The social structure of the world of "Ossian" is more similar to that seen in Irish mythology and less similar to that seen in the Homeric epics that Macpherson touted as being similar to the Scottish work.

Archaeologists say they've found evidence of a battlefield from the Roman emperor Titus' siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

Recent excavations revealed a section of the so-called "Third Wall" of Jerusalem that Titus' army breached on its way to conquering the city, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

Outside the wall, the archaeologists found that the ground was littered with large ballista stones (stones used as projectiles with a type of crossbow) and sling stones, suggesting that this area had been under heavy fire from Roman siege engines.

These archaeological remains were unearthed last winter at the site where the campus of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design is to be built, in an area of the city that is known today as the Russian Compound, IAA officials said.