I made the mistake of listening to NPR last week to find out what Conventional Wisdom had to say about Trump firing Comey, on the assumption that their standardized Mister-Rogers-on-Nyquil voice tones would rein in the hysteria pitch a little. And on the surface, it did—the NPR host and guests weren't directly shrieking "the world is ending! We're all gonna die SHEEPLE!" the way they were on CNN. But in a sense they were screaming "fire!", if you know how to distinguish the very minute pitch level differences in the standard NPR Nyquil voice.

The host of the daytime NPR program asked his guests how serious, and how "unprecedented" Trump's decision to fire his FBI chief was. The guests answers were strange: they spoke about "rule of law" and "violating the Constitution" but then switched to Trump "violating norms"—and back again, interchanging "norms" and "laws" as if they're synonyms. One of the guests admitted that Trump firing Comey was 100% legal, but that didn't seem to matter in this talk about Trump having abandoned rule-of-law for a Putinist dictatorship. These guys wouldn't pass a high school civics class, but there they were, garbling it all up. What mattered was the proper sense of panic and outrage—I'm not sure anyone really cared about the actual legality of the thing, or the legal, political or "normative" history of the FBI.

Perhaps no atrocity has been more extensively covered than the Holocaust carried out by the Third Reich in Germany. Yet few Americans are aware that there was a holocaust committed by the Second Reich 40 years prior.

While Adolf Hitler is a household name, synonymous with evil, his predecessor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, is far less recognizable — although many of his crimes were just as bad, if not worse, than Hitler's.

Wilhelm II was crowned in 1888 and launched a "New Course" in German foreign relations. His policies ultimately resulted in Germany's involvement and eventual defeat in World War I. Despite his notable involvement in World War I, little else is taught about Wilhelm's reign, in American schools.

More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of 'a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment'. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that 'we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.' American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population: 'A regional war between India and Pakistan, for instance, has the potential to dramatically damage Europe, the US and other regions through global ozone loss and climate change.' How is it possible that we have come to this?

How does a puffed-up, vainglorious narcissist, whose every other word may well be a lie (that applies to both of them, Trump and Kim Jong-un), come not only to hold the peace of the world in his hands but perhaps the future of the planet? We have arrived at this point because of an inveterate unwillingness on the part of Americans to look history in the face and a laser-like focus on that same history by the leaders of North Korea.

The Romans were renowned as great engineers and this is evident in the many structures that they left behind. One particular type of construction that the Romans were famous for is their roads. It was these roads, which the Romans called viae, that enabled them to build and maintain their empire. How did they create this infrastructure that has withstood the passing of time better than most its modern counterparts?

Roads of All Kinds

It has been calculated that the network of Roman roads covered a distance of over 400,000 km (248,548.47 miles), with more than 120,000 km (74,564.54 miles) of this being of the type known as 'public roads'. Spreading across the Romans' vast empire from Great Britain in the north to Morocco in the south, and from Portugal in the west to Iraq in the East, they allowed people and goods to travel quickly from one part of the empire to another.

The Romans classified their roads into several types. The most important of these were the viae publicae (public roads), followed by the viae militares (military roads), then the actus (local roads), and finally the privatae (private roads). The first of these were the widest, and reached up to 12 meters (39.37 ft.) in width. Military roads were maintained by the army, and private roads were built by individual landowners.

Constructing Roads to Last

There was no 'one-size-fits-all' Roman technique for building roads. Their construction varied depending on the terrain and the local building materials that were available. For example, different solutions were required to build roads over marshy areas and steep ground. Nevertheless, there are certain standard rules that were followed.

Roman roads consisted of three layers - a foundation layer on the bottom, a middle layer, and a surface layer on the top. The foundation layer often consisted of stones or earth. Other materials used to form this layer included: rough gravel, crushed bricks, clay material, and even piles of wood when roads were being built over swampy areas. The following layer would be composed of softer materials such as sand or fine gravel. This layer may have been formed by several successive layers. Finally, the surface was made using gravel, which was occasionally mixed with lime. For more prominent areas, such as those close to cities, roads were made more impressive by having the surface layer built using blocks of stone (which depended on the local material available, and may have consisted of volcanic tuff, limestone, basalt, etc.) or cobbles. The center of the road sloped to the sides to allow water to drain off the surface into drainage ditches. These ditches also served to define the road in areas where enemies could use the surrounding terrain for ambushes.

To read the rest of this article, go here.

A Freedom of Information (FOI) request has revealed that British officials turned a blind eye to the massacre of thousands of dissidents in Zimbabwe in order to protect the UK's economic and political interests.

Thousands of documents obtained under a Freedom of Information request by Dr. Hazel Cameron, a lecturer in international relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, has uncovered that British officials in London and Zimbabwe were aware of the atrocities in the 1980s.

In an interview with the Guardian, Dr. Cameron said that the British could have stopped some of the things that were taking place in Zimbabwe; instead they decided to further their own interests.

Chaco Canyon is a land of extremes. Summer heat scorches the desert canyon, which is sandwiched between sandstone cliffs nearly two kilometers above sea level in New Mexico's northwestern corner. Bitter cold sweeps in for winter. Temperatures can swing as many as 28 degrees Celsius during the course of a day. Through it all, Chaco Canyon maintains a desolate beauty and a craggy pride as home to one of ancient America's most enigmatic civilizations.

Scientists have struggled to understand Chaco society since its first excavations in the late 1800s. Who first settled Chaco Canyon around 1,200 years ago is still a mystery. Many researchers suspect that it took a few hundred years for a fledgling city-state run by an elite social class to emerge. Political and cultural ties between the ancient society and Chaco-style communities outside the canyon also perplex. Then there's the puzzle of how people survived from about 800 to around 1300 on the rough, parched terrain.

A new generation of Chaco studies and discoveries is under way, partly thanks to a young researcher's skeleton reassembly project. This jigsaw job required a lot of travel, but not to Chaco Canyon.

That's because bones of people excavated at Chaco in the 1890s and 1920s were packed away in boxes and drawers at museums in New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Kerriann Marden visited all of these places to retrieve far-flung body parts from one site in particular — Pueblo Bonito, the oldest and largest of a dozen huge stone great houses in Chaco Canyon. The structure was built, along with a range of smaller structures, between about 800 and 1130.

Pueblo Bonito was massive, rising at least five stories with around 650 rooms. It has yielded more human bones and artifacts than any other Chaco site. Research has focused on this great house presumably reserved for Chaco's elite families; the lives of workaday folk have been largely unexplored, even in the latest studies.

During Chaco society's heyday, other civilizations peaked elsewhere in the Americas, including the Maya in Central America. Just as present-day Maya groups trace their ancestry back to that ancient civilization, today's Pueblo tribes, such as the Hopi and Zuni, consider Chaco people to have been their forebears. Navajo Nation also claims an ancestral tie to Chaco society.

Excavations at a five-million-year-old Tennessee sinkhole have yielded hundreds of snake bones, including the remains of an unusual new fossil species: Schubert's Winged Serpent

Poring over hundreds of snake fossils excavated from an ancient eastern Tennessee sinkhole, paleontologists Steven Jasinski and David Moscato noticed bones that were unlike any other. They included vertebrae with broad wing-shaped projections coming out of the sides.

"When we first saw them, we knew they were unusual, but the feeling wasn't so much, 'Eureka!' as it was, 'What the heck is this?'" said Moscato, who is the programming coordinator at the Center for Science Teaching and Learning at East Tennessee State University. "Before we could be sure this was something new, we had to look at just about every similar species of snake we could think of, alive or extinct."

The extensive investigation determined that the bones belonged to a new five-million-year-old fossil species, which the researchers named Zilantophis schuberti, or "Schubert's Winged Serpent." Their work was published in the Journal of Herpetology.

 The historian William Hogeland talks about the first war the United States ever fought and the "problematic and thorny and painful" questions his new book raises. ...

[Hogeland's] new book, which comes out this week, is Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In elegant, authoritative prose packed with lively characters and hard-won detail, Hogeland tells the strangely unknown story of the conquest of the American Midwest in a nameless, barely successful war in the early 1790s against a confederation of indigenous peoples who had lived there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Autumn of the Black Snake is a narrative history, often a gripping and even thrilling one. Hogeland recently told me that he hoped the book would offer readers "an emotional, imaginative experience of the past." But it also raises what he called "problematic and thorny and painful" questions about the origins and the nature of the United States. Hogeland's adept management of both that narrative and those questions makes this his finest and most disturbing book to date. ... —Richard Kreitner'

[The following Q&A offers insight to the founding of America at the expense of the native population.]

Sixty-nine years ago, the state of Israel was born following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by Israeli forces.

What: The Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe)
When: 15 May 1948
Where: Palestine

What Happened?

On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the executive head of the World Zionist Organisation, declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Israelis mark the event as their "Independence Day". Ever since, 15 May has been remembered internationally as Nakba Day.

Nakba Day commemorates the forced displacement of more than half the Palestinian population; 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes and into refugee camps. The catastrophe later became the longest running refugee crises in the modern era.

The outbreak of extreme weather today in 1697 saw a young man 'keeping sheep' unfortunately lose his life after his eye was ripped from its socket by the killer ice - as hailstones bigger than fists fell from the heavens and smashed houses, glass and even oak trees.

The murderous ice piled up to 5ft high in Hitchin after the fatal storm began at 9am, wreaking its deadly havoc until 2pm.

And according to the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation, in its 2016 book Extreme Weather, there has been no more serious hailstorm in Britain in the last 350 years.

Sir Hans Sloane, the then-secretary of the Royal Society, received word of the storm from Hitchin apothecary Robert Taylor, who told of 'a sharp storm of hailstones, seven and eight inches about'.