Still today, 48 years on, there are relatively few people who know the whole truth about how Israel set the stage for war in June 1967 to grab more Arab land. The single most decisive event that made war inevitable happened on Thursday 1 June, four days before Israel launched its attacks. What was it?

On that day in Israel there was a coup organized and executed by the IDF's top generals and other security chiefs without a shot being fired. They required Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to form a unity government and bring into it as minister of defence Israel's one-eyed war lord, General Moshe Dayan. Up this point Eshkol had been both prime minister and minister of defence; and for two years Dayan had been in the political wilderness, devoting his time to archaeology. Effectively Eshkol was stripped of his command of Israel's war machine.

The problem with Eshkol for Israel's military and other security establishments was that he didn't want Israel to go to war because he knew the assertions of its hawks that the Arabs were about to attack were propaganda nonsense (more on this in a moment). He also understood and accepted the advice given to his foreign minister Abba Eban by French President Charles de Gaulle. In a conversation with Eban in Paris de Gaulle said Israel should not go to war because, if it did, it would create Palestinian nationalism which would never go away. (In my opinion that was the best advice anybody ever gave Israel).

With TPP and its deranged Atlantic cousin, TTIP, both proceeding — and Citizens United still buttering up our elections for corporate feasts — watchdogs and whistleblowers have never been more important to our democracy.

However, while a hero like Edward Snowden can reveal to us the surveillance state and dragnet data collection enabled by the Patriot Act, one person alone can't stop its successor, the USA FREEDOM Act, from privatizing mass data collection and outsourcing the job to the government's Big Data partners.

Corporate rule over this country is more disturbing than ever, but it's important to never gloss over the crimes of the past. Corporations can and do get away with murder — and have been doing so for a while. Their dubious "personhood" status — which bestows upon them seemingly limitless powers of 'citizenship' — has in many cases immunized them from the same laws and regulations real humans face. As a result, their crimes are swept under the rug as though they were merely teenage transgressions.

But watchful eyes and minds can collect and archive these crimes with the same ubiquity as the surveillance cameras on our street corners. Without further ado, here are 10 corporations that got away with murder:

Explosive information potentially implicating intelligence operatives from Britain, the US and the former apartheid government in the killing of former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld is under intense scrutiny by a high-level panel established by the UN.

It is probing the circumstances under which Hammarskjöld and other UN officials died.

Among the documents being assessed for veracity and clues to possible perpetrators is information obtained by investigators of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It includes correspondence between intelligence operatives.

The former Swedish diplomat and UN boss and several other UN officials died in September 1961 after the aircraft in which they were travelling crashed near Ndola, Zambia.

It is understood that Hammarskjöld had upset several powerful mining and political interests after investigating reported insurgency against the newly independent state of Congo.

Rambo! In my Reagan-era youth, the name was synonymous with the Vietnam War -- at least the Vietnam War reimagined, the celluloid fantasy version of it in which a tanned, glistening, muscle-bound commando busted the handcuffs of defeat and redeemed America's honor in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Untold millions including the Gipper himself, an inveterate Vietnam revisionist, were enraptured.

Many years later, studying war crimes in Vietnam, I would come across a real Rambo -- or maybe you'd call him an anti-Rambo. To the best of my knowledge, this Rambo didn't fire a machine gun one-handed or use explosive-tipped arrows. But his work was a powder keg with a short fuse and his conscience a bright flame. While conducting research for a Pentagon-funded project on refugees, A. Terry Rambo turned up evidence that South Korean troops, functionally serving as America's mercenaries in Vietnam, had massacred a large number of civilians. That Rambo "presented the findings" to, he said, "a whole slew of colonels -- 10 or 12" of them. He thought the American brass would take action. Instead, a U.S. officer instructed him to leave that information out of his report. "I told [the officer] as a civilian I didn't feel myself bound by [U.S. military] orders and that I was going to submit a report on it." Rambo eventually went public with the story.

He was far from alone.

The criminality, the madness of the Vietnam War seemed to compel many to act in similar ways even when it put them at great peril, threatened to upend their lives, sink their careers, and leave them at odds with their families. Many took to the streets; many who knew secrets spilled them; and the phenomenon spread. It became a golden age of whistleblowing: veterans exposing U.S. atrocities, civilians exposing FBI dirty tricks and domestic surveillance, government officials exposing White House crimes and NSA spying. Truth-telling seemed to be in the air. And, of course, a former Pentagon analyst and employee of the military-funded RAND Corporation, Daniel Ellsberg, rocked the world with his exposure of the U.S. military's secret history of the Vietnam War -- known as the Pentagon Papers -- laying bare decades of lies foisted upon Congress and the American people. Today, in another great age of whistleblowers, only Ellsberg's name remains.

The real Rambo, Ron Ridenhour, Jamie Henry, Perry Fellwock, Peter Buxtun, and so many others are known only to a tiny minority. In 1970, A. Terry Rambo told the New York Times that he had heard about a RAND study that also found evidence of South Korean atrocities. A RAND spokesman said they had turned up "rumors about Korean troop behavior... but since they did not involve RAND research, we can only regard them as hearsay." Decades later -- no thanks to RAND -- it's well-documented that South Korean forces slaughtered large numbers of Vietnamese civilians. It might never have been so if the real Rambo hadn't had the courage to come forward.

Without whistleblowers, citizens are at the mercy of massaged truths and fine-crafted fictions spun by officials who prefer shadows to sunlight. If you can imagine a world in which the Pentagon Papers were never leaked, in which the burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office by President Nixon's "Plumbers" was never uncovered, in which decades of blood-soaked lies were kept secret from the American people, then you can imagine a world in which the late Anthony Russo, another former RAND analyst and whistleblower in danger of evaporating into history's mists, never had a crisis of conscience.

Today, Russo has been reduced to a footnote and his shining accomplishment assumed to be, as he put it, as a "Xerox aide" to Ellsberg, a man who did little more than help physically copy documents. As Barbara Myers writes in her inaugural (and epic) TomDispatch piece, Russo was far more instrumental in the leaking of the Pentagon Papers than most know -- and that may have been only his second most important act of whistleblowing. With news of a final Rambo film starring Stallone on the horizon, the time seems ripe to remember the real Rambos and Russos who took great risks to tell hard truths, exposing misery, malfeasance, and murder that the powerful would rather have kept hidden. Nick Turse

Vessels discovered in a Scythian grave mound contained traces of opium and marijuana, confirming the claim of an ancient historian.

They ruled the vast grasslands of Eurasia for a thousand years, striking fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians. But they left no cities or settlements behind, only massive grave mounds, called kurgans, dotting the steppes from Mongolia to the Black Sea.

Now one of those kurgans, located in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, has yielded an intriguing discovery: golden artifacts that are shedding light on the shadowy world of the Scythians, fierce nomads whose exploits—and drug-fueled rituals—were chronicled by the Greek historian Herodotus.

"It's a once-in-a-century discovery," says Anton Gass, an archaeologist at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin. "These are among the finest objects we know from the region."

The find—kept secret until now to protect it from looters—first came to light in the summer of 2013, when Stavropol-based archaeologist Andrei Belinski began excavating the kurgan, called Sengileevskoe-2, to clear the way for a power-line project.

At first Belinski wasn't optimistic about finding much inside, as there were telltale signs that the kurgan had been plundered in the past. But a few weeks into the excavation, his team came across a thick layer of clay. Digging underneath, they discovered a rectangular chamber lined with broad, flat stones. Inside was something the looters somehow had missed: golden treasures placed there 2,400 years ago.

The chamber contained two bucket-shaped gold vessels, each placed upside down. Inside were three gold cups, a heavy gold finger ring, two neck rings, and a gold bracelet. In all, the well-preserved gold artifacts weighed nearly seven pounds (3.2 kilos).

"It was definitely a surprise for us," Belinski says. "We weren't expecting to find anything like this." (Read about another excavation of a Scythian kurgan and its gold.)

Belinski asked criminologists in nearby Stavropol to analyze a black residue inside the vessels. The results came back positive for opium and cannabis, confirming a practice first reported by Herodotus. The Greek historian claimed that the Scythians used a plant to produce smoke "that no Grecian vapour-bath can surpass ... transported by the vapor, [they] shout aloud."

Because the sticky residue was found on the inside of the vessels, Belinski and Gass think they were used to brew and drink a strong opium concoction, while cannabis was burning nearby. "That both drugs were being used simultaneously is beyond doubt," Gass says.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

Most adult Americans today are unaware of what caused the War of 1812, who started it, what the outcome was, or even who the belligerents were. If I recall correctly, my grade school / high school History Class covered The War Of 1812 - aka America's Second War Of Independence, or America's Forgotten War - for a total of maybe one week. And what a worthless week it was. Like most history teachers I've ever had, they turned an exciting story into a dry bundle of boring crap ... focusing on memorizing dates and random events without getting to the real story behind the story; i.e. why did it happen, how does the war affect us today, and what can we learn from it? This is a crying shame because the war had a tremendous impact on American political development, territorial expansion, and national identity.

A 19^th century French historian said, "History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit." The word 'history' comes from the Greek, and literally means "knowledge acquired by investigation". So, let us investigate the War Of 1812, and the spirit of humanity which caused it ... and changed America forever.

In late May 1945 Josef Stalin ordered Marshall Georgy Zhukov to leave Germany and come to Moscow. He was concerned over the actions of British allies. Stalin said the Soviet forces disarmed Germans and sent them to prisoners' camps while British did not. Instead they cooperated with Germans troops and let them maintain combat capability.

Stalin believed that there were plans to use them later. He emphasized that it was an outright violation of the inter-governmental agreements that said the forces surrendered were to be immediately disbanded. The Soviet intelligence got the text of secret telegram sent by Winston Churchill to Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, the commander of British forces. It instructed to collect the weapons and keep them in readiness to give back to Germans in case the Soviet offensive continued.

According to the instructions received from Stalin, Zhukov harshly condemned these activities speaking at the Allied Control Council (the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and France). He said the world history knew few examples of such treachery and refusal to observe the commitments on the part of nations that had an allied status. Montgomery denied the accusation. A few years later he admitted that he received such an instruction and carried it out. He had to comply with the order as a soldier.

A fierce battle was raging in the vicinity of Berlin. At his time Winston Churchill said that the Soviet Russia became a deadly threat to the free world. The British Prime Minister wanted a new front created in the east to stop the Soviet offensive as soon as possible. Churchill was overwhelmed by the feeling that with Nazi Germany defeated a new threat emerged posed by the Soviet Union.

That's why London wanted Berlin to be taken by Anglo-American forces. Churchill also wanted Americans to liberate Czechoslovakia and Prague with Austria controlled by all allies on equal terms.

Jaw and teeth fossils found in Ethiopia's Afar region in 2011 represent a previously unknown member of humankind's family tree that lived 3.3 to 3.5 million years ago alongside the famous human ancestor Lucy, scientists say.

The fossils shed new light on a key period in the human lineage's evolution before the emergence of our genus, Homo, and provide the first evidence that two early human ancestor species lived at the same time and place prior to 3 million years ago.

The new species, Australopithecus deyiremeda, combined ape-like and human-like traits as did Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, but was sufficiently different to warrant recognition as a separate species, scientists said announcing the discovery on Wednesday.

Lucy's skeleton was unearthed in 1974 from the Hadar site, near Woranso-Mille, where the new fossil was found.

Wounds discovered on a 430,000-year-old human skull discovered in Spain could indicate that the individual was one of the first-ever murder victims, according to a new study published in the May 27 edition of the open-access journal PLOS One.

In the study, Dr. Nohemi Sala from Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos, Spain, and her colleagues explain that the skull was discovered at Sima de los Huesos, a site located deep within a series of underground caves located in northern Spain.

The skull, known as Cranium 17, was found with the skeletal remains of at least 28 individuals dating back to the Middle Pleistocene period. The specimen is comprised of 52 cranial fragments recovered during a series of excavations at the site over the past two decades, and contains a pair of penetrating lesions on the frontal bone, just above the left eye, Dr. Sala's team said.

Around 20,000 residents in Cologne in Germany were evacuated after a 200-kilogram bomb from World War II was discovered during preparations for construction work.

Deactivation of the device, found near Muelheim Bridge over the Rhine River, is scheduled to take place on Wednesday afternoon, the DPA news agency reported.

The bomb, believed to be a US design, is 1.76 meters long and 60 centimeters in diameter.

It is buried 5 meters underground, which is going to complicate the task of the bomb disposal squad.

"As is common with these heavy bombs, this one is very deep down. Such a big bomb can't simply be taken out. We need to dig a deep and wide hole first," Dieter Daeneck, who is leading the operation, told FAZ.

Earlier, 20,000 people had to leave their homes, including over a 1,000 residents of a nursing home, which required dozens of ambulances to arrive on the scene.