The recently discovered Chinon Parchment of the Vatican Library in 2001 has brought a level of redemption to the Knights Templar. It does not discount their "heretical" activities, which were entirely gnostic in nature and reveal Johannite and Sufi influences on the Knights. But it does absolve them of these "crimes."

The History of the Parchment

When Pope Clement V summoned many of the accused Knights Templar to his residence in Poitiers, France to determine the truth of the heretical allegations against them, some of the highest ranking knights, including Grandmaster Jacques de Molay, were diverted to Chinon, where they were met by three cardinals.

Their subsequent meeting in Chinon—including confessions by the Knights and an ensuing absolution of their crimes by the Church—comprise the text of the Chinon Parchment.

The Chinon Parchment is explicit in revealing that De Molay and the high ranking Templar official questioned by the cardinals confessed to the heretical charges against them, including sodomy, denouncing Jesus, illicit kissing, trampling and spitting on the cross, and worshipping an idolized head.

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Official history says that the Spanish colonizers in America were focused on the territory from Mexico to the end of South America. For centuries, there was the question of why the Spaniards didn't decide to try to conquer further north. Artifacts from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries bring a new light to this topic.

It is known that the Spanish claimed territories in what is today part of the United States of America. In the 16th century, they had explored the southern area of the country. For example, in Florida, the St Augustine fort was established by the Spanish in 1565. The impact of the Spanish way of understanding Roman Catholicism is evident in this region. The Spanish also influenced the economy in this area and attacked local Native Americans.

There are three known conquerors who explored the southern parts of the USA: Juan Ponce de Leon, Hernando De Soto and Francisco Vazquez de Coronado. It seems unbelievable that the Spanish, known as great conquerors and wanderlusts, stopped exploring the continent due to the British domination. Or perhaps they did?

Two (or more) Spanish Galleons

The greatest mystery comes in the form of two wrecks of Spanish galleons discovered on the Oregon Coast, near the mouth of the Columbia River. There are no official Spanish reports about lost expeditions or ships in this area. It is believed that there is also another galleon lost in this region, but it has not been located. There is speculation about several other lost ships in the area and even closer to Alaska, although none of them have been discovered.

The first ship was lost in 1694, and the second one in 1735. The Spanish galleons sailed on North for the first time in 1542. Some documents show that with time they traveled to Cortes Island, which has a name that reflects the Spanish presence. They also went to British Columbia and at the beginning of the new century - to Alaska.

The Himalayan Towers are a series of stone towers located mostly in Tibet. Carbon dating shows they were built approximately 500 to 1,100 years ago. Since they are generally located in prosperous villages, it is believed that their primary function was as a demonstration of a family's prestige within the community. For strength, many of the towers use a star pattern of walls as opposed to a strictly rectangular method. Heights can exceed 60m.

The Wadi Sura cave in the Libyan Desert features a number of stencil paintings dating back to between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, including over a dozen tiny human-like hand prints. Since its discovery, the hands were thought to belong to human babies, but an anthropologist now says they're not human at all.

Sorry folks, it's not aliens. It turns out, the iconic stencils were made using the forefeet of reptiles. Such is the conclusion of a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, led by Emmanuelle Honore from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in the UK.

Some of Europe's earliest inhabitants mysteriously vanished toward the end of the last ice age and were largely replaced by others, a new genetic analysis finds.

The finds come from an analysis of dozens of ancient fossil remains collected across Europe.

The genetic turnover was likely the result of a rapidly changing climate, which the earlier inhabitants of Europe couldn't adapt to quickly enough, said the study's co-author, Cosimo Posth, an archaeogenetics doctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The temperature change around that time was "enormous compared to the climactic changes that are happening in our century," Posth told Live Science. "You have to imagine that also the environment changed pretty drastically."

A twisted family tree

Europe has a long and tangled genetic legacy. Genetic studies have revealed that the first modern humans who poured out of Africa, somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago, soon got busy mating with local Neanderthals. At the beginning of the agricultural revolution, between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, farmers from the Middle East swept across Europe, gradually replacing the native hunter-gatherers. Around 5,000 years ago, nomadic horsemen called the Yamnaya emerged from the steppes of Ukraine and intermingled with the native population. In addition, another lost group of ancient Europeans mysteriously vanished about 4,500 years ago, a 2013 study in the journal Nature Communications found.

But relatively little was known about human occupation of Europe between the first out-of-Africa event and the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago. During some of that time, the vast Weichselian Ice Sheet covered much of northern Europe, while glaciers in the Pyrenees and the Alps blocked east-west passage across the continent.

Odd how the truth comes out. Thanks to triangulation, the regime opposition power struggle, and possibly one between 'towers of the Kremlin', the other side of the story regarding Zbigniew Brzezinski's and other Washingtonians' Chechen 'freedom fighters' accidentally emerges from the liberal opposition in Moscow.

Translated excerpt (original Russian text is at the bottom of this page) from Ilya Yashin's much-touted report on the threat to Russia's national security posed by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov:

This period (the 1990s - Gordon Hahn) in the country is associated with a sharp increase in crime. In addition, the new Chechen authorities began to pursue a policy of displacement of people from other ethnic groups, which is accompanied by killings, looting, and ethnic cleansing. Journalist Paul Klebnikov called these events a genocide of ethnic Russians, which was carried out in Chechnya before the combat operations that began in 1994. 'It was a bloody war against the civilian ethnic Russian population of Chechnya - so-called forced chechenization,' he wrote. Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000 described the events as 'a large-scale genocide against the Russian population.' These events were due to both a weakening of the central government and an appeal by the population to restore justice after Stalin's deportation of the Chechen people. The republic's new authorities very successfully speculated on these sentiments.'

In July 1999, the Ministry of Nationalities of the Russian Federation reported that from 1991 to 1999 more than 21 thousand ethnic Russians were killed (not counting those killed in war) and more than 100 thousand apartments and houses belonging to members of non-Chechen ethnic groups were seized in Chechnya. More than 46 thousand were turned into de facto slaves, with their property and passports confiscated with the connivance of the republican and federal authorities (putin-itogi.ru, p. 5).

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

Tsodilo (also referred to as the Tsodilo Hills) is a site in Botswana that contains one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world. It has been claimed that in an area of just 10 square km (6.21 square miles), more than 4000 or 4500 individual paintings (scattered over 400 rock art sites) have been found. As a result, Tsodilo has been referred to as the 'Louvre of the Desert'.

The archaeological record of Tsodilo provides a chronological account of human activities and changes in the environment over at least 100,000 years, though not continuously. Thus, the rock paintings at this site span from the Stone Age all the way until the 19th century AD. It has, however, been pointed out that these paintings have not always been dated accurately.

The "Family" of Tsodilo

Tsodilo is situated in the Okavango Sub-District, Ngamiland District, northwestern Botswana, and is close to the country's border with Namibia. This site lies in the Kalahari Desert, and is made up of huge quartzite rock formations. To the east of Tsodilo are ancient sand dunes, whilst to its west is a dry fossil lake bed. The Tsodilo range is made up of four main outcrops, and is revered as a sacred site in the landscape by the indigenous peoples who live in the area.

The CIA reportedly came up with some outlandish plots to kill former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but this could just be the craziest yet. The US National Security Archive published information that Washington tried to give Castro a diving suit contaminated with tuberculosis.

The National Security Archive alleges that the US government contacted lawyer James Donovan to conduct secret negotiations with Castro. Given Donavan's connections to the Cuban leader, the CIA believed they could use this to their advantage to try and assassinate Castro.

"At some point during Donovan's negotiations with Castro" several officials in the covert operations division "devised a plan to have Donovan be the unwitting purveyor of a diving suit and breathing apparatus, respectively contaminated with Madura foot fungus and tuberculosis bacteria, as a gift for Castro," a passage from the National Security Archive reveals.

Aboriginal Australians have been genetically isolated from the rest of humanity for 50,000 years with no direct evidence that they had ever intermarried with South-East Asians about 4,000 years ago, as some scholars have suggested, a DNA study has revealed.

A detailed analysis of the male Y chromosome from 13 Aboriginal men found no traces of DNA from other ethnic groups, such as people from the Indian sub-continent who were thought to have migrated to Australia about 2000BC.

Geneticists have calculated from mutations present in the Aboriginal Y chromosome that the first inhabitants of Australia had separated from other members of Homo sapiens living elsewhere in the world about 50,000 years ago - probably long before our species had arrived to live in Europe.

The findings of the study, however, fail to explain the arrival of the dingo wild dog in Australia, which is not a native species and was almost certainly brought by humans to the continent from other parts of south-east Asia.