On this 75th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union the Russians will once again remind the world that the Red Army saved European civilisation as well as Russia from the Nazis

Seventy-five years ago Adolf Hitler launched the biggest and most destructive military campaign in history when three million German and allied troops invaded the Soviet Union along a 1,000-mile front.

Operation Barbarossa - the codename for the German invasion of Russia - was no ordinary military campaign: it was an ideological and racist war, a war of destruction and extermination that aimed to kill Jews, enslave the Slavic peoples and destroy communism. The result was a war in which 25 million Soviet citizens died, including a million Jews, executed by the SS in 1941-1942 - an action which became the template for the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry. European Russia was devastated by the German invasion as 70,000 towns and villages were destroyed along with 98,000 collective farms, tens of thousands of factories and thousands of miles of roads and railways. During the war the USSR lost 15% of its population and 30% of its national wealth.

The attack on Russia was the climax of Hitler's bid to establish Germany as the dominant world power. That bid had begun with the invasion of Poland in September 1939, followed by the German conquest of France in June 1940. By 1941 the German war machine had conquered most of Europe as country after country was invaded or forced to join Hitler's Axis alliance.

Archaeologists have unearthed a greenish-colored bronze wing in England that dates to the Roman period, an archaeology company reports.

The 5.5-inch-long (14 centimeters) wing is small enough to fit in a person's hand, the archaeologists said. It's meticulously covered with detailed plumage, and was likely part of a Roman bronze sculpture of a god or goddess, they said.

Archaeologists from Cotswold Archaeology discovered the wing while they were investigating a site before a construction project, called the Greyfriars Development, in Gloucester, a county in southwest England. At first glance, the wing was covered with a thick layer of soil and corrosion, the archaeologists said.

The corrosion is no surprise, as bronze (a metal made out of copper and tin) often corrodes into a lime-green color when it's exposed to pollutants and humidity over time, according to the U.S. General Services Administration.

The archaeologists cleaned and X-rayed the specimen, which revealed the wing's finely cast detail. The wing looks similar to those seen on eagle statuettes and other eagle imagery from the Roman world, they said in a statement.

Johnny Gruelle created the Quintessential Raggedy Ann doll in 1915 (US patent D47789). Gruelle was a successful American writer, cartoonist, storyteller and illustrator who worked for a popular magazine at the time called Physical Culture.
Many are unaware that Gruelle's famous Raggedy Ann storybooks and illustrations were based in large part on Marcella's childhood adventures.

Marcella's Vaccine Tragedy

Not long after the creation of the much beloved Raggedy Ann, Gruelle's only child and 13 year old daughter Marcella died a painful death after receiving a routine small pox vaccination at school, which was given without parental consent.

A Greek archaeologist believes he has found a fragment of the lost throne of the rulers of Mycenae, famous from ancient myth and the story of the Trojan War.

Christofilis Maggidis, who heads excavations at the site in southern Greece, said Tuesday that the chunk of worked limestone was found two years ago, in a streambed under the imposing citadel.

He told a press conference in Athens that the royal throne was among sections of the hilltop palace that collapsed during an earthquake around 1200BC.

Greek Culture Ministry officials have distanced themselves from the identification, citing a separate study that ruled the chunk to be part of a stone basin.

But Maggidis said the find was unmistakably made for sitting on, and would have been no use for holding liquids as it is made of porous stone.

"The love of possessions is a disease with them [Americans]. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away. If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough." - Sitting Bull

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Open the door and see the armed Gestapo at your doorstep demanding you turn over the rights of your children and toddlers. They no longer belong to you as mandated by federal law.

The Bat Creek stone was discovered in a small mound near Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The archaeologists who dug it up in 1889 discovered a small stone tablet engraved with several mysterious alphabetic characters.

The stone was discovered by a team led by entomologist Cyrus Thomas from the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey. Eight years earlier, Congress assigned the Institute to complete archaeological excavations. The main goal was to explore the prehistoric mounds. After just a few years of work, archaeologists had collected over 40,000 artifacts and wrote a seven-hundred-page report of their findings, which was presented in 1894.

Thomas wondered if the tablet with the inscription was created in a pre-Columbian language. He was fascinated with the tablet and its secrets, however he didn't have enough knowledge or tools to examine the discovery properly. Now, his reports from the excavations are not considered a serious archaeological resource. Nonetheless, one of his discoveries, known as the Bat Creek stone, helped Thomas leave his mark.

Researchers find what appear to be predecessors of tiny humans whose bones were first unearthed on Indonesian island in 2004

More than a decade ago, researchers in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores unearthed the bones of an ancient race of tiny humans. Now, in sandstone laid down by a stream 700,000 years ago, they have found what appear to be the creatures' ancestors.

The new fossils are not extensive. A partial lower jaw and six teeth, belonging to at least one adult and two children, are all researchers have. But the importance of the remains outweighs their number. They suggest that dwarf humans roamed the island - hunting pygmy elephants and fending off komodo dragons - for more than half a million years.

The first bones belonging to the miniature humans were dug from the floor of the Liang Bua cave on Flores in 2004. The 50,000-year-old fossils pointed to a now-extinct group of humans that stood only a metre tall. Named Homo floresiensis, but swiftly nicknamed the "hobbits", they made simple stone tools and had desperately small brains, one third the size of ours.

Unprecedented new details of medieval cities hidden under jungle in Cambodia near Angkor Wat have been revealed using lasers, archaeologists said Sunday, shedding new light on the civilisation behind the world's largest religious complex.

While the research has been going on for several years, the new findings uncover the sheer scale of the Khmer Empire's urban sprawl and temple complexes to be significantly bigger than was previously thought.

The research, drawing on airborne laser scanning technology known as lidar, will be unveiled in full at the Royal Geographic Society in London on Monday by Australian archaeologist Damian Evans.

"We always imagined that their great cities surrounded the monuments in antiquity," Evans told AFP.

"But now we can see them with incredible precision and detail, in some places for the very first time, but in most places where we already had a vague idea that cities must be there," he added.

Angkor Wat, a UNESCO World Heritage site seen as among the most important in southeast Asia, is considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

It was constructed from the early to mid 1100s by King Suryavarman II at the height of the Khmer Empire's political and military power and was among the largest pre-industrial cities in the world.

But scholars had long believed there was far more to the empire than just the Angkor complex.

In 1967 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published his poem "A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies," only to be accused of "collaboration with the Zionist enemy" for his sympathetic depiction of an Israeli soldier's remorse of conscience. Forty years later that soldier has identified himself as the historian Shlomo Sand. He has translated his remorse into a book that has become a bestseller in Israel and France, where the award of the Prix Aujourd'hui has made the author something of a TV star.

Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century "[t]he national project was ... a fully conscious one ... It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation" (45).

Sand traces how Zionist ideology drove the project of Jewish nationalism by turning Judaism "into something hermetic, like the German Volk ..." (255). He argues that history and biology were enlisted "to bind together the frangible secular Jewish identity." Together, these engendered an "ethnonationalist historiography" which was typified by the mid-19th century German Jewish historian Heinricht Graetz and his friend Moses Hess, who "needed a good deal of racial theory to dream up the Jewish people" (256).

History has seen a number of secretive agreements which had major impact on the global economy, from hiding investments to taking gold reserves. Some of the stories are real, and some are rather legends.

Here are some examples of how global financial decisions have been made behind closed doors.

IMF Helping Ukraine

Recently, Ukrainian politician and former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko accused President Petro Poroshenko of reaching a secretive deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to the agreement, Kiev would abandon a moratorium on the sale of land and increase electricity and gas tariffs, Timoshenko said. Ukraine would also abandon preferential pensions for school teachers and healthcare workers, she added.

"This document is secret. The government and the president signed a secret agreement behind the back of the Ukrainian people," Timoshenko said.

However, soon afterwards the Finance Ministry rebuffed the allegations, saying that the final text of an agreement with the IMF is not yet ready. According to the ministry, the final document will be published within a month.

Meanwhile, Kiev has been part of an IMF program of financial aid. The plan has resulted in a twofold increase in tariffs on gas, hot water and heating.

The program presumes $17.5 billion of aid to Kiev. In March 2015, the first tranche of $5 billion was unveiled. Kiev received the second tranche of $1.7 billion in August 2013. However, the third tranche of financial aid was delayed due to political turmoil in Ukraine. But after Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk resigned the IMF reaffirmed its readiness to work with Kiev.