On Easter Monday, 13 ^th April 1360, a freak hail storm broke over English troops as they were preparing for battle with the French during the Hundred Years' War. So brutal was the storm that over 1,000 men and 6,000 horses lost their lives that night. Convinced it was a sign from God, King Edward rushed to pursue peace with the French, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years' War.

Inheritance Dispute Results in 116 Years of War

The Hundred Years' War was a series of military conflicts between France and England which began in 1337 due to an inheritance dispute over the French throne, and only truly ended in 1453. The 116 years of the war saw the rise and fall of several kings and nobles.

During the course of the war, King Edward III of England was actively attempting to conquer France. In October 1359, he led an invading force of 10,000 men across the English Channel to France. The French avoided direct conflicts and remained sheltered behind protective walls, while Edward's army sacked and burned the countryside.

Andy Warhol was and still is arguably the most recognisable face of modern art. His pieces sell for hundreds of millions, and to find one of his works at a garage sale or flea market would set you up for a very comfortable retirement. With his thick retro glasses and lustrous platinum wigs the man was the epitome of the avant-garde. The central function of his work and the work of his contemporaries was to jumble together high and low culture, to claim them as equal to each other, and to challenge our notion of what really was "worthwhile art." Building on the work of the early conceptual artists from the turn of the last century, he tore asunder the old ideas of traditional aesthetic value, stating through his pieces that there can only be interpretation and that all works are of equivalent value.

However, when he died in February 1987 the world got a real look at Andy Warhol and what he really considered to be "worthwhile art." Behind the doors of his neo-classical townhouse the rooms were not furnished by piles of Brillo boxes or indeed stacks of soup cans but objects of a rather different style. Classical busts sat on mahogany tables, portraits lined the walls, and on many surfaces sat fine antiques. Warhol had chosen to adorn his house with pieces that had stood the test of time, pieces that followed the old rules on aesthetic value, but most importantly pieces that would have been shunned in the art world he had created and dominated.

"Secret" documents from the Reagan administration show how the U.S. embedded "political action," i.e., the manipulation of foreign governments, in ostensibly well-meaning organizations.

"Secret" documents, recently declassified by the Reagan presidential library, reveal senior White House officials reengaging a former CIA "proprietary," The Asia Foundation, in "political action," an intelligence term of art for influencing the actions of foreign governments.

The documents from 1982 came at a turning-point moment when the Reagan administration was revamping how the U.S. government endeavored to manipulate the internal affairs of governments around the world in the wake of scandals in the 1960s and 1970s involving the Central Intelligence Agency's global covert operations.

Instead of continuing to rely heavily on the CIA, President Reagan and his national security team began offloading many of those "political action" responsibilities to "non-governmental organizations" (NGOs) that operated in a more overt fashion and received funding from other U.S. government agencies.

But secrecy was still required for the involvement of these NGOs in the U.S. government's strategies to bend the political will of targeted countries. If the "political action" of these NGOs were known, many countries would object to their presence; thus, the "secret" classification of the 1982 White House memos that I recently obtained via a "mandatory declassification review" from the archivists at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California.

A recent article titled Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh May Be the 1st Known 'Giant,' published in Live Science on August 4th, revealed that 3rd Dynasty Pharaoh Sa-Nakht, excavated from Wadi Maghareh (located in the Sinai Peninsula region), was a so-called "Giant" - the first known giant ruler of ancient Egypt. He was 5 inches taller than the robust Ramses II, and 8 inches taller than average man for that time. Although he was only 6ft 1.5in tall, this caused a media sensation, but please note that I am the same height as this 'giant'!

Throughout Egypt's past there have been numerous examples of much taller giants reported, excavated, depicted in art, and mummified examples that have been hidden from the public. We have uncovered accounts ranging from between seven feet (2.13 meters) and sixteen feet (4.88 meters) tall. Painstaking research of archaeological records, archaic texts, newspapers, and analysis of depictions of hieroglyphs and Egyptian art has started to shed some light on this phenomenon.

Jezebel - even to this day her name is synonymous with wickedness and promiscuity. She was the most depraved of women, a murderess, an adulteress and worst of all an idolatress. She was so hated by some of the ancient followers of Yahweh that they went out of their way after her death to paint her as all things evil, even going so far as changing her actual title from the Virgin of Baal to the Whore of Baal. But what was it really that caused such a reaction from the followers of Yahweh? How could a mere woman challenge such men of God?

The City of Samaria

The story really begins after the death of King Solomon when the Israelites split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The first king of the north was Omri and he established his capitol in a place called Samaria. Omri built his palace complex on a hill he purchased from a man named Shemer, for which he paid two talents of silver. The ancient city of Samaria today is split between Israeli and Palestinian control and, unfortunately, it is in a precarious state threatened by vandals, robbers, and neglect.

The best-known excavations of the site date from 1908 to 1910 and then again in the 1930's. The Palestinian Department of Antiquities, formed in 1997, is working on protecting and excavating the site with about a dozen digs being conducted, so conditions are improving. This ancient site is one of the most documented by fact in the Bible, as well as the burial place of John the Baptist, Joseph, and ten kings of Israel. Is it the location of this city that has caused its virtual abandonment by archaeologists until recently or is it something more? It seems to have been ground zero for the war between the worshippers of the old goddesses and gods, and the followers of Yahweh, for whom there was no room for other gods, and no amount of violence and treachery was too extreme to achieve their ends. What truths may be buried in the city of Samaria?

For the first time in 50 years, the ruins of Chichén Itzá are being investigated by archaeologists. The team from the Great Maya Aquifer Project aim to discover if "local legends of an elaborate underworld are true."

Built more than 1,000 years ago, the ancient Mayan pyramid in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula will be explored using a modified ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to locate passageways and rooms in El Castillo, also known as the Temple of Kukulcan.

"Something on this scale has never been attempted, but we're confident that it will help us understand this site in a way that wasn't possible before," Great Maya Aquifer Project Director Guillermo de Anda, told National Geographic. "With this data, I believe we will conclusively find out if the local legends of an elaborate underworld are true."

There's no doubt the beautiful, raven-haired young actress would have attracted attention as she arrived at the swanky Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles one cold day in January 1947.

But poignantly Elizabeth Short only realised true fame through her horrifying murder - which went on to become one of the most notorious unsolved cases in US history.

On the morning of January 15th that same year and one week after she was last seen alive at the Biltmore, the 22-year-old's naked and mutilated body was discovered abandoned on a grassy verge in a lonely corner of LA.

She had been cut in two neatly at the waist - and drained of blood with frightening precision.

The case was quickly dubbed The Black Dahlia, a play on the title of film noir classic The Blue Dahlia starring Veronica Lake which had been released the previous year - and reference to Short's jet-black hair, dark lacy clothes and mystery surrounding her short life.

If you have long suspected the mainstream is being less than honest [or simply delusional] when they describe Comets as "dirty snowballs" or [more recently] "icy dirtballs" then you might be interested to discover Close Cometary Encounters are associated with sudden spikes in the level of Thorium 232.

Cometary nuclei are composed of an amalgamation of rock, dust, water ice, and frozen gases such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, and ammonia.

As such, they are popularly described as "dirty snowballs" after Fred Whipple's model.

However, some comets may have a higher dust content, leading them to be called "icy dirtballs".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet

Dangerous Close Cometary Encounters occur when:

a) Comets collide with the Earth.
b) Comets pass directly between the Earth and the Sun.

In the second case the alignment exposes the Earth to a potential Cometary Double-Tap whereby:

1) The "gas tail" of the Comet is delivered directly into the Earth's upper atmosphere.
2) The "dust tail" of the Comet side-swipes the Earth with a debris train.

New Delhi: The zero, crown jewel of India's rich heritage in mathematics, just grew older by at least 500 years.

A new carbon dating study commissioned on an ancient birch bark manuscript has found that the indispensable digit dates to as early as the 3rd or 4th century - approximately five centuries older than scholars previously believed.

The research was performed on the Bakhshali Manuscript, a mathematical document written on birch bark which was found close to ancient Taxila now near Peshawar in 1881. It has been housed in the University of Oxford since 1902.

The findings mean that the manuscript predates a 9th century inscription of zero on the wall of a temple in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, which was previously considered to be the oldest recorded example of a zero used as a placeholder in India, a report by Oxford's Bodleian Libraries said.

Four friends were slowly making their way across the high altitude rocky terrain while hunting reindeer in Oppland, Norway. One noticed a rusty object sticking out of the rocks. Curiosity took over and he sped up to reach the spot, where he soon found himself in front of an impressive-looking sword. After releasing the sword from its rocky hold, the friends decided that it didn't look like anything modern, so they headed back down the mountain with their treasure to consult a local archaeologist.That archaeologist, and also another in Dagbladet, confirmed that the sword wasn't made recently. In fact, archaeologist Espen Finstad told Dagbladet news that the sword was a Viking Age relic created in the 900s AD.


Finstad is also the chief editor of Secrets of the Ice, a group of glacier archaeologists working in the same region where the Viking Age sword was found. Realizing the importance to return quickly to the site, the Secrets of the Ice team spoke with the Museum of Cultural History and the National Park authorities.