Swedish archaeologists have unearthed a dozen burial sites near the southern city of Aswan that date back almost 3500 years to the New Kingdom era of ancient Egypt, the Antiquities Ministry said on Wednesday.

Human and animal remains were found in the cemeteries, which were discovered in the Gabal al-Silsila or Chain of Mountains area 65 km (40.3 miles) north of Aswan and would have been used during the reigns of pharaohs Thutmose III and Amenhotep II.

It is hoped the burial sites will help historians better understand ancient Egyptian healthcare and give a boost to Egypt's struggling tourism industry, which has been beset by political upheaval and militant attacks since the unseating of autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
Some of the cemeteries were for animals and contain one or two chambers with either stone or clay coffins, or ones made of cartonnage, Mahmoud Afify, the ministry's head of Ancient Egyptian Antiquities, said in a statement. Totems and scorpions were also found.

About 24,000 years ago, when much of North America was buried under the ice of the Last Glacial Maximum, a few hunters took shelter in a small cave above the Bluefish River in what is now northwestern Yukon. The hunters had killed a Yukon horse and were butchering it using super-sharp stone shards called microblades. As they sliced out the horse's meaty tongue, the microblades left distinctive cuts in its jaw bone. Millennia later, archaeologist and doctoral candidate Lauriane Bourgeon spotted those marks through her microscope at the University of Montreal and added the fragment of ancient jaw bone to her small selection of samples for radiocarbon dating.

The bones came from excavations led by archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars between 1977 and 1987 and have been in storage at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. At the time, Cinq-Mars and his team concluded that the Bluefish Caves showed evidence of occasional human use as much as 30,000 years ago. That is so much older than anything else found in the Americas that Cinq-Mars's conclusions were widely disputed, and the three small caves were largely left out of discussions about the peopling of the Americas.

Read more at Hakai Magazine

Outrage is shaking Washington as members of Congress compete to demonize Russia for its alleged interference in America's recent presidential election. "Any foreign intervention in our elections is entirely unacceptable," Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has asserted. Russian actions, according to other legislators, are "attacks on our very fundamentals of democracy" that "should alarm every American" because they "cut to the heart of our free society." This burst of righteous indignation would be easier to swallow if the United States had not itself made a chronic habit of interfering in foreign elections.

Over a period of more than a century, American leaders have used a variety of tools to influence voters in other countries. We have chosen candidates, advised them, financed their parties, designed their campaigns, bribed media outlets to support them, and intimidated or smeared their rivals.

One of our first operations to shape the outcome of a foreign election came in Cuba. After the United States helped Cuban rebels overthrow Spanish rule in 1898, we organized a presidential election, recruited a pro-American candidate, and forbade others to run against him. Two years later, after the United States annexed Hawaii, we established an electoral system that denied suffrage to most native Hawaiians, assuring that only pro-American candidates would be elected to public office.

During the Cold War, influencing foreign elections was a top priority for the CIA. One of its first major operations was aimed at assuring that a party we favored won the 1948 election in Italy. This was a multipronged effort that included projects like encouraging Italian-Americans to write letters to their relatives warning that American aid to Italy would end if the wrong party won. Encouraged by its success in Italy, the CIA quickly moved to other countries.

Builders in Cambridge were in for a surprise when they discovered highly significant Anglo-Saxon remains on a new housing development. A range of treasures, including vases, jewellery and pots from early English nobles were found, which date as far back as 501 AD.

The findings give an insight into how people lived in the Ango-Saxon period, including their trade activities and behaviours. The site lies on the western edge of the Middle Saxon settlement around the Cherry Hinton area of Cambridge.
Findings include precious jewellery such as fine brooches, multi-coloured glass and amber beads, rings and hairpins dating back to the sixth century AD, as well as remnants of an original village-style settlement. Complete pottery vessels were also found on the land, earmarked for 60 homes, including a stunning rare glass claw beaker.

These elaborate drinking vessels are normally found further south in Kent, northern France, the Netherlands and Germany, where they were produced.

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Senior officials of a Republican presidential campaign committed outright treason against the United States when they secretly met with envoys of a foreign government to lay the groundwork for the defeat of the Democratic presidential candidate. We are not referring to the unsubstantiated charges about the 2016 presidential campaign leveled against Donald Trump campaign and the Russian government.

In 1980, vice presidential candidate George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan's campaign manager William Casey met with Iranian government officials and worked out a covert plan for Iran to keep 52 Americans hostage in Tehran until after the November 4, 1980, election. In return, the Reagan team promised to secretly ship U.S. weapons and spare parts to Iran on a Central Intelligence Agency-contracted U.S. merchant vessel before the election as a down payment to Iran with more weapons following after Reagan was sworn into office on January 20, 1981. The "weapons-for-hostages" plan worked for the Reagan team. President Jimmy Carter was defeated and the 52 hostages in Iran were freed the very moment Ronald Reagan raised his right hand to be sworn in as president.

Thousands of years ago, people living on the high mountains of the Tibetan plateau waded into a steamy hot spring, leaving behind footprints in the soft mud. These footprints, which were discovered in 1998, have proved invaluable to modern-day researchers, who recently dated them to between 7,400 and 12,600 years ago.

Based on earlier analyses of other human sites, it was thought that the plateau's earliest permanent human residents had settled there no earlier than 5,200 years ago, the researchers said. But these newfound dates make the ancient Tibetan site of Chusang the oldest permanent base of people on the Tibetan plateau, they said.

Older known human camps do exist in the region, dating to between 9,000 and 15,000 years ago, but they were likely short-term, seasonal sites, the researchers said.

"Chusang is special because you have these human footprints in this carbonate mud," said study co-lead researcher Michael Meyer, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. "[The footprints] are hardened, so they were able to stay there for thousands or tens of thousands of years."

In February 1990, thanks to a 15-year-old boy named Bruno Kowalsczewski, footsteps echoed through the chambers of Bruniquel Cave for the first time in tens of thousands of years.

The cave sits in France's scenic Aveyron Valley, but its entrance had long been sealed by an ancient rockslide. Kowalsczewski's father had detected faint wisps of air emerging from the scree, and the boy spent three years clearing away the rubble. He eventually dug out a tight, thirty-meter-long passage that the thinnest members of the local caving club could squeeze through. They found themselves in a large, roomy corridor. There were animal bones and signs of bear activity, but nothing recent. The floor was pockmarked with pools of water. The walls were punctuated by stalactites (the ones that hang down) and stalagmites (the ones that stick up).

Some 336 meters into the cave, the caver stumbled across something extraordinary—a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones.

These weren't natural formations, and they weren't the work of bears. They were built by people.

Fidel is dead, but he is immortal. Few people have known the glory of entering into the realm of legend and history during their lifetime. Fidel is one of these people. He belonged to a generation of legendary fighters - Nelson Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres, Turcios Lima, Ahmed Ben Barka - who, in pursuit of an ideal of justice, threw themselves into political action in the 1950s, with the aim and the hope of changing an unequal, discriminatory world, marked by the onset of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and United States.

During that period, people across half of the world, in Vietnam, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, were rising up. At that time, a large part of humanity was still under infamous colonial rule. Almost all of Africa and a good part of Asia were dominated, subjugated, by the old empires of the West. Meanwhile, Latin American nations, which had theoretically achieved independence over a century and a half before, continued to be exploited by privileged minorities, subjected to social and ethnic discrimination, and often marked by harsh dictatorships, backed by Washington.

The recent discovery of the grave of an ancient soldier is challenging accepted wisdom among archaeologists.

They had been digging for days, shaded from the Greek sun by a square of green tarpaulin slung between olive trees. The archaeologists used picks to break the cream-colored clay, baked as hard as rock, until what began as a cluster of stones just visible in the dirt became four walls in a neat rectangle, sinking down into the earth. Little more than the occasional animal bone, however, came from the soil itself. On the morning of May 28, 2015, the sun gave way to an unseasonable drizzle. The pair digging that day, Flint Dibble and Alison Fields, waited for the rain to clear, then stepped down into their meter-deep hole and got to work. Dibble looked at Fields. "It's got to be soon," he said.

The season had not started well. The archaeologists were part of a group of close to three dozen researchers digging near the ancient Palace of Nestor, on a hilltop near Pylos on the southwest coast of Greece. The palace was built in the Bronze Age by the Mycenaeans—the heroes described in Homer's epic poems—and was first excavated in the 1930s. The dig's leaders, Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, husband-and-wife archaeologists from the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio, had hoped to excavate in a currant field just downslope from the palace, but Greek bureaucracy and a lawyers' strike kept them from obtaining the necessary permits. So they settled, disappointed, on a neighboring olive grove. They cleared the land of weeds and snakes and selected a few spots to investigate, including three stones that appeared to form a corner. As the trench around the stones sank deeper, the researchers allowed themselves to grow eager: The shaft's dimensions, two meters by one meter, suggested a grave, and Mycenaean burials are famous for their breathtakingly rich contents, able to reveal volumes about the culture that produced them. Still, there was no proof that this structure was even ancient, the archaeologists reminded themselves, and it might simply be a small cellar or shed.

As the US main stream media continues to push the "fake news" narrative about Russian hacker/Putin/Wikileaks connection, aimed at subverting the US election, or American democracy, or crushing Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, or helping Donald Trump's Presidential campaign...f**k it, I have lost track as to what the entire US establishment is claiming Russia did or sought to do with these mystery hacks.

Anyway, here is an appropriate reminder as to who is throwing giant stones inside of a giant glass house.

Courtesy of Zerohedge, and an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to US involvement in overthrowing foreign governments. Here are just the examples since World War II (* indicates successful ouster of a government).