Secret HistoryS


Dollars

UK MOD facilitated bribes to Saudi prince in arms deal - Guardian

FILE PHOTO: Prince Bandar in the 1980s.
© Diana Walker / Getty ImagesFILE PHOTO: Prince Bandar in the 1980s.
Two people accused of corruption have been acquitted after showing a British court they acted with London's blessing

Senior British Defense officials knowingly continued highly "anachronistic" payments to the son of a former Saudi defense minister while withholding key evidence from a probe into the deal, UK court documents have revealed. The practice reportedly continued even after it caused a major scandal under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The emails and memos that shed light on the arrangement, many of which are marked confidential and sensitive, were revealed as part of a bribery case that concluded in London last week. The payments related to the so-called al-Yamamah arms deal from the 1980s, which was the largest weapons export sale in modern British history. The recipient of the funds was Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, the son of Saudi Arabia's defense minister at the time, who played a key role in negotiating the contracts.

Comment:
1) From the article: "The payments related to the so-called al-Yamamah arms deal from the 1980s". In some cases it takes time for hypocrisy to become clearly visible, at least if the UK government pretends to be against corruption.

2) The al-Yamamah arms deal was substantial. The Wiki has:
"Al Yamamah (Arabic: اليمامة, lit. 'The Dove') is the name of a series of record arms sales by the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia, paid for by the delivery of up to 600,000 barrels (95,000 m3) of crude oil per day to the British government.[1] The prime contractor has been BAE Systems and its predecessor British Aerospace. The first sales occurred in September 1985 and the most recent contract for 72 Eurofighter Typhoon multirole fighters was signed in August 2006.

Mike Turner, then CEO of BAE Systems, said in August 2005 that BAE and its predecessor had earned £43 billion in twenty years from the contracts and that it could earn £40 billion more.[2] It is Britain's largest ever export agreement, and employs at least 5,000 people in Saudi Arabia.[3]

In 2010, BAE Systems pleaded guilty in a United States court to charges of false accounting and making misleading statements in connection with the sales.[4] An investigation by the British Serious Fraud Office into the deal was discontinued after political pressure from the Saudi and British governments.[5][6]"
3) In the article it might appear as if Jeffrey Cook and John Mason are the two most interesting, but what about Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud? From the time the money began flowing from the UK to Saudi Arabia, he was Saudi ambassador to the US.The Wiki has:
Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud (Arabic: بندر بن سلطان بن عبد العزيز آل سعود; born 2 March 1949) is a retired Saudi Arabian diplomat, military officer, and government official who served as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. He is a member of the House of Saud. From 2005 to 2015 he served as secretary general of the National Security Council, and was director general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014. From 2014 to 2015 he was King Abdullah's special envoy.
4) Below are other articles that mention Bandar bin sultan Al Saud


Books

17th century plague pit may be largest mass burial site ever seen in Europe

plague pit
© In Terra VeritasAn unearthed section of one of the pits.
Archaeologists digging in the German city of Nuremberg ahead of the construction of a new retirement home have uncovered what may be the largest mass burial of plague victims ever uncovered in Europe.

Excavations are ongoing, but the centuries-old remains of more than 500 individuals have been unearthed so far, and the team believes there could have been as many as 1,500 people interred therein.

Precise dating is also yet to be performed, but tentative estimates suggest the eight plague pits were created around the first half of the 17th century. Some of the bones appear tinted green because for some time the site was used to dispose of waste from a nearby copper mill, Spiegel reports.

Comment: See also: The following articles provide fascinating and insightful reading that may be particularly pertinent for our own time:


Info

3,300-year-old tablet from mysterious Hittite Empire describes catastrophic invasion of four cities

Researchers think a sacred language inscribed in cuneiform on the tablet suggest the Hittite king visited or lived where the tablet was found in Turkey.
ancient tablet
© Kimiyoshi Matsumura, Japanese Institute of Anatolian ArchaeologyThe ancient tablet is inscribed with cuneiform text in both the Hittite and Hurrian languages. The Hittite inscription describes the outbreak of war, and the Hurrian inscription is a prayer for victory.
A 3,300-year-old clay tablet from central Turkey describes a catastrophic foreign invasion of the Hittite Empire, a mysterious Bronze Age state. The invasion took place during a Hittite civil war, apparently in an effort to aid one of the warring factions, according to a translation of the tablet's cuneiform text.

The palm-size tablet was found in May 2023 by Kimiyoshi Matsumura, an archaeologist at the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology, amid the Hittite ruins at Büklükale, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of the Turkish capital Ankara.

Archaeologists think Büklükale was a major Hittite city. The new discovery suggests it was also a royal residence, perhaps on a par with the royal residence in the Hittite capital Hattuša (also spelled Hattusha), about 70 miles (112 km) to the northeast.

According to a translation by Mark Weeden, an associate professor of ancient Middle Eastern languages at University College London, the first six lines of cuneiform text on the tablet say, in the Hittite language, that "four cities, including the capital, Hattusa, are in disaster," while the remaining 64 lines are a prayer in the Hurrian language asking for victory.

The Hittites used the Hurrian language for religious ceremonies, Matsumura told Live Science, and it appears that the tablet is a record of a sacred ritual performed by the Hittite king.

"The find of the Hurrian tablet means that the religious ritual at Büklükale was performed by the Hittite king," he said in an email. "It indicates that, at the least, the Hittite king came to Büklükale ... and performed the ritual."

Info

Archaeologists unearthed the earliest known evidence of body perforation in skeletons dating back 11,000 years in Türkiye

Use of Ornaments
© Ergül Kodaş, Emma L Baysal et al. / AntiquityIllustration of the hypothetical use of labrets and ear ornaments found at Boncuklu Tarla.
Archaeologists have unearthed the earliest known evidence of body perforation in skeletons dating back 11,000 years at the Boncuklu Tarla excavation site in southeastern Türkiye.

Furthermore, analysis reveals that only adults had body piercings, indicating that the prehistoric custom might have been a ritual associated with coming-of-age ritual.

The findings, which date back to around 11,000 BC, shed new light on early sedentary communities' body modification practices and call into question existing narratives about their origins in South-west Asia.

A team from Ankara University unearthed more than 100 ornaments buried in the graves of 11 thousand-year-old individuals during excavations carried out in Boncuklu Tarla between 2012 and 2017.

The ornaments were discovered in situ next to the ears and chins of the skeletal remains, and are mostly made from limestone, obsidian, chlorite, copper, or river pebbles. The variety of the ornaments suggests that they were designed for use in both ear and lower lip piercings known as labrets.

Bad Guys

On the leash of the US State Department and MI6: how western military-intelligence structures finance and arm the Russian opposition to foment chaos and terror in the country

Foundation to Battle Injustice
Human rights activists of the Foundation to Battle Injustice have collected facts and evidence that shed light on the involvement of Western state and intelligence services in the financing and radicalization of the Russian opposition. The Foundation's investigation revealed the methods and means used by foreign structures to spread disinformation, sow fear and anxiety among Russian citizens, and recruit Russian-speaking citizens at home and abroad. Relying on the exclusive opinions and assessments of experts and sources, the Foundation to Battle Injustice assessed the risks associated with the activities of aggressive nationalist cells planning subversive activities in Russia.

Comment:
1) The source also has the article available in Russian, French, and German
The Foundation to Battle Injustice is led by Mira Terada, which can be spelled as Meera Terada and appears in this SOTT article: Assassination Kill List: VIDEO: 13-year-old on Ukrainian gov't kill list speaks out.

2) Below are links to some of the themes brought up in the article:
Russophobia
In the comments to this article, Britain most hostile state to Russia - former defense minister, there are links to several articles that discuss the origin and expression of Russophobia. Related might be Wall Street and the Russian Revolution - with Richard B. Spence which takes one back to before 1920!

CIA and Russia
In title: 94 articles (Does not mean that they are all about CIA activity in Russia itself, this also goes for the following and later links CIA and Ukraine.)
In summary: 319 articles CIA and Ukraine
In title: 47 articles
In summary: 319 articles MI6 and Russia
In title: 12 articles
In summary: 139 articles In the latest episode of NewsReal with Joe & Niall, western dealings in Russia were briefly discussed in this episode: End of Empire: Angry Biden, Divider-in-Chief & Macron's Grande Armée to 'Defeat' Russia?


MI6 and Ukraine
In title, two articles:
In summary: 21 articles Mikhail Khodorkovsky
In title: 5 articlesIn summary: 39 articlesIn text 155 articles Alexey Navalny
For more on Navalny see this article: For Putin foe Alexey Navalny, Ukraine has long been a volatile issue updated with links to many other articles, including some after he passed away in February 2024.

Leonid Volkov Bill Browder Alexander Parvus (Wiki) in the expression:
"Lyonya is such a modern-day Alexander Parvus. Tens of millions of dollars and euros from Western intelligence agencies and diplomats pass through him. "
The activities of Parvus and other are discussed in this article: On why Putin criticized the Bolshevik counter revolution: Trotsky, Parvus and the War on Civilization


Drought

Mystery of enormous Saharan 'star dune' finally solved — and it wasn't what scientists were expecting

Star dune
The 'star dune' is located in Morocco's Erg Chebbi dune field.
A towering, star-shaped dune in the Sahara desert formed in less than a thousand years, new research finds.

The study, published March 4 in the journal Scientific Reports, is one of relatively few to look at these so-called star dunes, which are the tallest dunes on Earth. Named for their multiple-armed shapes, star dunes form in places where the winds change direction throughout the year, according to the National Park Service.

Although star dunes are found all over the world, there is only one confirmed star dune in the rock record, from about 250 million years ago in Scotland, Charles Bristow, a professor emeritus of sedimentology at University College London, told Live Science. That may be because researchers don't know what to look for to identify an ancient star dune, he said.

These dunes are difficult to study because they're usually in remote locations, and slogging up a few hundred feet of shifting sand is not easy.

Comment: See also:


Better Earth

Giant DNA study reveals origins of India's people going back 50,000 years

India people women
© (Marco Bottigelli/Getty Images)
The most populous country in the world, India, has long been left out of genetic studies, leaving a massive gap in our understanding of human origins and appreciation of the genetic diversity of our species.

A new study diving 50,000 years into the past by analyzing thousands of genomes has sought to change that, revealing several surprising threads in the rich tapestry of modern India's ancestry.

University of California Berkley population geneticist Elise Kerdoncuff and colleagues sequenced the DNA of 2,762 people from India, including individuals from most geographic regions, in both rural and urban areas, and speakers of all major languages, and tribal and caste groups, to capture the extraordinary diversity of the country.

Star of David

Why the State of Israel is a tool of Western colonial domination in the Middle East

flags
© redressonline/KJN
Zionism can be considered as fascism adapted to the conditions of the Middle East and the aspirations for domination of Anglo-American imperialism over that region, Eduardo Vasco writes.
The central thesis of this article is that the State of Israel is a pure imperialist invention to facilitate the domination of Western Asia by the great powers, a domination that can only be exercised through fascist methods. We seek to prove this thesis by analyzing the history of the Zionist movement from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, using as sources the works of some of the greatest scholars on the subject worldwide, many of them Jews.
The common origins of German Nazism, Italian fascism and Israeli Zionism

The 19th century was the most important in the history of humanity. It was there where the greatest political, economic and social transformations of modernity took place, which opened the way for an unlimited development of human capabilities following the industrial revolution.

It was when the different peoples of the world, particularly those of Europe, which was the center of these transformations, tried for the first time, on an international level, to free themselves from the chains that bound them to backwardness and oppression. Nationalist movements were born in several nations suffocated by colonial empires.

To justify their action, the ideologues of nationalism often resorted to the invention of myths in order to present the purpose of building a nation as a natural historical result of the development of a people's struggle. The myths had as their fundamental characteristic a religious, racial and territorial basis.

Comment: Author provides a cohesive and comprehensive historical context to the creation and diabolical trajectory of 'Israel' and its complicit partners. Excellent read.


Better Earth

1.4 million year old stone tools in Ukraine may be oldest evidence of 'human' presence in Europe

ukraine stone tool
© Roman Garba via APThis photo provided by researcher Roman Garba shows a heavily weathered flake artifact at the Korolevo I archaeological site in western Ukraine in August 2023. Stone tools found in the area are the earliest evidence of early human presence in Europe, dating back to 1.4 million years ago, according to research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, March 6, 2024.
Ancient stone tools found in western Ukraine may be the oldest known evidence of early human presence in Europe, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The chipped stones, deliberately fashioned from volcanic rock, were excavated from a quarry in Korolevo in the 1970s. Archaeologists used new methods to date the layers of sedimentary rock surrounding the tools to more than 1 million years old.

"This is the earliest evidence of any type of human in Europe that is dated," said Mads Faurschou Knudsen, a geophysicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of the new study.

Comment: This is particularly notable because this and other finds push back human habitation in these regions much further back than previously thought, further discrediting the much touted Out of Africa theory:


Info

Archaeologists discover 8600-year-old bread at Çatalhöyük - May be the oldest bread in the world

Archaeologists have discovered about 8,600-year-old bread at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in central Turkey.
Ancient Bread
© AA
Çatalhöyük is noteworthy because it is one of the first human proto-cities to have been built. Full of densely packed mud brick houses covered in paintings and symbolic decorations, its population hovered around 8,000. That made it one of the biggest settlements of its era, somewhere between an outsized village and a tiny city. People, mud-brick homes through ceiling doors, and they navigated sidewalks that wound around the city's rooftops.

Archaeologists have discovered an oven structure in the area called "Mekan 66". Around the largely destroyed oven, wheat, barley, pea seeds, and a handful find that could be food were found.

Analyses conducted at Necmettin Erbakan University Science and Technology Research and Application Center (BITAM) determined that the spongy residue was fermented bread from 6600 B.C.

Head of the Excavation Committee and Anadolu University Faculty Member Associate Professor Ali Umut Türkcan told the AA correspondent that when "archaeology" is mentioned, structures, monuments, and finds come to mind.