For every finger to receive a ring, another finger must pull a trigger."

We all know the story.

The man gets down on one knee, grabs hold of the girl's hand and she covers her mouth as she is overtaken by emotions. The man pulls out a tiny box and opens it up to show off the sparkling diamond engagement ring before asking the question, "Will You Marry Me?"

The classic love story which peaks when the man asks for the woman's hand in marriage. They are officially engaged once he props a diamond ring on her finger.

However, there is another side to this story that never gets covered in the media. It is the dark side of the diamond, where if the public knew about the horrors and atrocities that take place to produce this mineral - perhaps we would re-think the way we celebrate "love."

It is a contentious issue in many modern cities as they struggle to accommodate new arrivals, but it seems even Ancient Rome was a magnet for foreigners seeking their fortune.

A new study has suggested Rome was attracting immigrants from the furthest reaches of its empire and beyond 2,000 years ago.

Analysis of skeletons found buried in two ancient cemeteries of the city dating from the first to the third centuries AD showed eight of them were from as far away as North Africa and the Alps.

The migrants, who were mostly children and men, were buried in simple graves and appear to have been poor, suggesting they could have come to the city hoping to find success.

However, it is also possible they were slaves who had been brought to the city by their Imperial masters.

From brutal torture devices to bizarre medical treatments, these terrifying contraptions reveal a darker side to innovation.
They show how inventors throughout history have put their skills and intellects to use in horrifying ways, creating contraptions that have caused unimaginable suffering.

The feature, first published in How It Works magazine, highlights some heinous inventions used in torture, war and medicine.
In the past, a punishment much worse than a long prison sentence awaited criminals.

From boiling people alive to sawing them in half, execution methods were often developed to be as cruel as possible and these gruesome events were usually carried out in public to deter others from following in the footsteps of the accused.

Even if people weren't sentenced to death, there were plenty of ghastly implements that could be used to torture them. Typically used to extract a confession or information about accomplices, torture was popular in medieval times, with the screams of victims echoing from castle dungeons across Europe.

War has also inspired a wide selection of horrific innovations. While guns and bombs were designed to kill instantly, chemical weapons could draw out death for several agonising days - thankfully, this form of warfare is now prohibited.

We are also lucky that some medical devices from history are no longer used. Despite being designed with good intentions, many medieval procedures were truly stomach-churning, making a trip to the doctor quite the ordeal.

Cruel Methods Of Execution

One of the most brutal methods of execution ever created took the form of a hollow bull statue.Invented in ancient Greece by Perillus, a bronze worker in Athens, it was given as a gift to a cruel tyrant named Phalaris of Agrigentum.As well as roasting criminals alive, the device also doubled as a musical instrument, converting the victim's desperate cries into what Perillus described as 'the tenderest, most pathetic, most melodious of bellowings'.

The Phoenix Program in Vietnam in many ways provides a blue print for our own times. Assassinations and torture are the essence of the war on terror. As are death squads and false flag terror attacks. As are mass surveillance of the populace.

Thanks to the work of Douglas Valentine in his classic book "The Phoenix Program" we have an extremely detailed account of the Phoenix Program exposing a classic example of the brutality of the CIA's counter insurgency wars. By studying the Phoenix program one can gain a great deal of insight into the wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

How the book came to be written is an interesting story in it's own right. Doug Valentine had written a novel about his fathers experiences in a prisoner of war camp during World War 2 called "Hotel Tacloban."

He decided his next book would be on Vietnam and he decided to focus on the CIA role since little had been written on the topic. He approached former CIA Director William Colby for help. He sent him a copy of his book and the former CIA director decided that Valentine was a man who understood the harsh realities of war and agreed to meet with him. Valentine cut his hair, bought a suit and tie met with Colby and managed to gain his confidence. Colby believed Valentine would write a sympathetic account. After all the CIA is used to working with journalists who censor the truth in exchange for inside information. Colby arranged for him to meet hundreds of former agents.

"There was no battle and no resistance (and no Egyptians). The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs [including] women and children. The children were killed by smashing of their skulls with sticks. Is it possible to shout about Deir Yassin and be silent about something much worse?" For the first time ever, a letter quoting one of the Israeli soldiers who were part of the Al-Dawayima massacre in October 1948 is published in full.

On Friday, February 5th 2016, Haaretz published an article in Hebrew by Israeli historian Yair Auron, which covers one of the biggest massacres of 1948. The massacre is of Al Dawayima, west of Al-Khalil (which is often referred to as Hebron). In a 2004 interview with Haaretz, Israeli historian Benny Morris refers to this as a massacre of "hundreds".

After the massacre, a letter was sent to the editor of the leftist affiliated newspaper Al-Hamishmar, but never published. As Auron notes, there are still many archives of the time which are classified. Auron also states that there was an investigation that was never concluded and "died out" as a massive amnesty was provided to military personnel in February 1949.

The Zodiac Killer murdered at least seven people and possibly up to 20 in northern California between December 1968 and October 1969 and it has remained one of the world's greatest unsolved crimes.

The case has spawned dozens of books and a film, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo. The Zodiac nickname was derived from a series of cryptic and taunting letters which were posted to the media from the San Francisco Bay area. They included ciphers and only one of the four has been decoded.

But now a former detective, Kimberly McGath, has identified the Zodiac as Dennis Rader. Rader, now 70, is better known as the BTK Killer. He derived his grisly nickname from the fact that he Bound, Tortured and Killed his ten victims in Wichita, Kansas between 1974 and 1991. Rader was in the US Air Force from 1966 and 1970 before settling down with a wife in Kansas.

The BTK Killer sent numerous letters to the media but suddenly stopped. He then vanished until 2004 when he suddenly started sending letters again. The following year Rader was arrested after he sent police a floppy disk, which was traced back to him. Faced with a mountain of forensic evidence Rader confessed to being the BTK Killer and is now serving life imprisonment with no parole. But he has never been questioned about the Zodiac killings.

Ms McGath has been studying links between the two killers for two years, especially the letters they both wrote, and she told Daily Star Online : "There are just so many similarities between Zodiac and BTK."

She said the authorities ruled out a link because of a "general alibi" assuming Rader was serving in the US air force in Japan at the time of Zodiac's crimes. But she said he could easily have travelled back to California to carry out the killings and she points out in her book how close many of the killings were to air force bases.

Europe went through a major population upheaval about 14,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, according to DNA from the bones of hunter-gatherers.

Ancient DNA studies published in the last five years have transformed what we know about the early peopling of Europe. The picture they paint is one in which successive waves of immigration wash over the continent, bringing in new people, new genes and new technologies.

These studies helped confirm that Europe's early hunter-gatherers - who arrived about 40,000 years ago - were largely replaced by farmers arriving from the Middle East about 8000 years ago. These farmers then saw an influx of pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe about 4500 years ago, meaning modern Europe was shaped by three major population turnover events.

Waves of immigration

The latest study suggests things were even more complicated. About 14,500 years ago, when Europe was emerging from the last ice age, the hunter-gatherers who had endured the chilly conditions were largely replaced by a different population of hunter-gatherers.

Societies around the world portray distinct characteristics which define their culture. From the clothes worn; the language spoken and the customs and traditions that are passed from generation to generation, each of these can provide insights into a cultural group. There are, however, a number of universal customs that are practiced on each continent around the globe. They include circumcision, death and burial rituals and cranial deformation. These traditions originated in our remote past. Their purpose and meaning seemingly lost to the sands of time.

It was once believed that head modifications developed in Egypt, and then spread around the world. Researchers have concluded that this phenomenon was not isolated to one geographic area and then disseminated out into the surrounding areas. Instead, this bizarre hallmark of ancient societies sprang up around the world in different cultural groups independently. Many have come to believe it to be an inherent step in the evolution of a group's culture.

On January 21st the Wall Street Journal's editors allowed on its editorial pages an opinion piece with one of the most glaring distortions of post-Soviet Russian history and politics ever produced by contemporary American 'rusology.' David Satter issued forth yet another of his caricatures of analysis in an exegesis from which he hoped readers would take away: 'eternally totalitarian, imperialistic, and murderous Russia.' The only murder here, however, was Satter's murder of truth and the historical record. In addition to an uniformed analysis of the complicated and unresolved Litvinenko case as well as Russian politics under President Vladimir Putin, he issued forth both a full-fledged perversion of politics under Russia's first post-Soviet president Boris N. Yeltsin and a complete inversion of the history of October 1993.

Satter wrote:

"The first unexamined episode was the massacre at the Ostankino television tower in 1993, in the wake of Boris Yeltsin's illegal order abolishing the Russian parliament. Thousands of unarmed pro-parliament protesters near the tower were fired on with automatic weapons, leaving 46 dead and 124 wounded. Yeltsin then persuaded the army to attack the parliament building and, in the wake of military victory, introduced a super-presidency with near-dictatorial powers.

With no check on executive power, Yeltsin launched the first Chechen war in 1994 and facilitated the widespread corruption that drove Russia into poverty and hardship" (David Satter, "The Russian State of Murder under Putin," Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2016).

Let's take the four elements in Satter's compound distortion one at a time.

A unique ancient funerary boat has been unearthed near the Abusir pyramids, Egypt's Antiquities Minister said in a statement.

The vessel dates to about 2550 B.C. and was discovered by archaeologists excavating a large mastaba, or ancient tomb, in a cemetery of the Old Kingdom officials in Abusir, south of the Giza plateau.

The 59-foot-long boat was found in the area south of the mud-brick tomb by a team of the Czech Institute of Archaeology at Charles University in Prague, led by excavation director Miroslav Bárta.

Covered with the wind-blown sand, the 4,500-year-old remains of the wooden vessel were lying on a bed of stone with ropes and wooden components still in their original position.

The wooden planks, joined with wooden pegs, were found intact. The desert sand preserved the plant fibers that covered the planking seams, while some of the ropes that bound the boat together were also found in their original position with all their details intact.