In Athens and Rome, voting could entail shouting contests, secret stone ballots and an election system with built-in bias for the wealthy.

Citizens of modern democracies have used a variety of methods and technologies to cast their votes on election day, but how did people participate in elections in ancient times? Historians have pieced together some intriguing details from Athens, the first and only direct democracy, and the Roman Republic, a quasi-democracy where the wealthiest classes wielded more influence than the workers.

In both Athens and Rome, participation in the democratic process (The Greek word dēmokratia means "people power") was limited to the dēmos, which were free, male citizens. Women and enslaved people did not have a vote.

Muscat - A team of international archaeologists working under the auspices of the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism has recovered an exceptional collection of silver jewellery from a prehistoric grave of the 3rd millennium BC in Dahwa in North Batinah.

The collection includes parts of necklaces with beads and several rings.

Researchers involved in the study also found a silver ring, likely made in Mesopotamia (Iraq), made of silver from Anatolia (Turkey) for an individual who had links with the Indus Valley Civilisation (Pakistan and western India).

"This shows the complexity of commercial and cultural interactions in Eurasian prehistory, which can definitely be regarded as the prototype for modern global exchanges," said Dr Dennys Frenez, an Italian expert in ancient trade between the Indus Valley and Oman and a collaborator with the ministry.

The international team is led by Prof Kimberly Williams from Temple University, Philadelphia, US, and includes Prof Nasser al Jahwari and Prof Khaled Douglas from Sultan Qaboos University.

In previous articles I discussed the probability that Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator, was not a representative of the public health agencies but, rather, was appointed by the National Security Council. I now have proof that this was, indeed, the case. I have also uncovered documents that show:

• As of March 13th 2020 the National Security Council (NSC) was officially in charge of the U.S. Government's Covid policy.
• Starting on March 18th 2020 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was officially in charge of the U.S. Government's Covid response.

On March 11th 2020, at a Heritage Foundation Talk, Trump's National Security Advisor, Robert O'Brien when discussing what the White House and NSC were doing about the virus, confirmed that the Covid Task Force Coordinator was brought in by the NSC. He said:

We brought into the White House Debi Birx, a fantastic physician and ambassador from the State Department. We appreciate Secretary Pompeo immediately moving her over to the White House at our, well at the President's, request. (min. 21:43-21:56)

November 4 marks Unity Day in Russia, which is a fairly new holiday. It was established in order to replace the old October Revolution Day, which was celebrated in the USSR for over 70 years. Many generations grew up loving this holiday; after communism collapsed, it was no longer possible to keep it as a public holiday.

Its replacement goes back to an event that proved to have as much significance for the country's history. In November 1612, Russia was reborn as a state.

End of a dynasty

The early 17th century is known in the history of Russia as 'the Time of Troubles', or 'Smuta'. After the death of Tsar Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, in 1584, the country found itself sinking slowly into a deep political crisis. The new leader, his son Fyodor I, took little interest in politics, and his court became a place ridden with scheming and plotting by the rival clans of top officials.

Fyodor I ruled for a total of 14 years, and this was a relatively peaceful time, right up to his death in 1598, which created a succession problem since he left no heirs to the throne. Boris Godunov, once Ivan the Terrible's confidante and brother to Fyodor's beloved wife, had managed to consolidate a great deal of power in his hands and had been ruling the tsardom as de facto regent for at least 15 years until then. The only legal contender to the throne would have been Fyodor's brother Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible and his last wife. Dmitry, however, died as a child under mysterious circumstances. Godunov was believed by many to have been involved in his death, since Dmitry was the last heir of the Rurik dynasty.

New evidence suggests he did — and that Lyndon B. Johnson also stole gold from the same base in a separate criminal operation.

On November 17, 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation, President Richard Nixon famously told a group of newspaper editors at Walt Disney World in Florida that he had "never profited from public service. I've earned every cent. I am not a crook."

According to John Clarence, author of The Noss Gold (Soledad Publishing, 2022), days after Nixon made those remarks, over the Thanksgiving holiday, he orchestrated a massive criminal scheme that resulted in the theft of 36.5 tons of gold from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.[1]

On Monday November 26, 1973, a Washington, D.C., lawyer David Austern, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who taught as an adjunct at Georgetown and American University law schools, called George Brazier at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army, to report on the theft of gold from White Sands, which was valued at around $118 million (around $2 billion in 2022).[2]

The Americas were the last continent to be inhabited by humans. An increasing body of archaeological and genomic evidence has hinted to a complex settlement process. This is especially true for South America, where unexpected ancestral signals have raised perplexing scenarios for the early migrations into different regions of the continent.

Many unanswered questions still persist, such as whether the first humans migrated south along the Pacific coast or by some other route. While there is archaeological evidence for a north-to-south migration during the initial peopling of the Americas by ancient Indigenous peoples, where these ancient humans went after they arrived has remained elusive.

Using DNA from two ancient human individuals unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil - Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça - and powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, Florida Atlantic University researchers in collaboration with Emory University have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some unexpected and surprising results.

Not only do researchers provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast - for the first time. The work provides the most complete genetic evidence to date for complex ancient Central and South American migration routes.

Among the key findings, researchers also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals are an extinct population of archaic humans that ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.

Results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (Biological Sciences), suggest that human movements closer to the Atlantic coast eventually linked ancient Uruguay and Panama in a south-to-north migration route - 5,277 kilometers (3,270 miles) apart. This novel migration pattern is estimated to have occurred approximately 1,000 years ago based on the ages of the ancient individuals.

A new paper proposes that Homo sapiens may have been responsible for the extinction of Neanderthals not by violence, but through sex instead.

Making love, not war, might have been responsible for putting the Neanderthals on a path to extinction.

While about 2% of the genome of all living people from outside Africa is derived from Neanderthals, there is very little evidence that this process went the other way.


A new paper, published in the journal PalaeoAnthropology, raises the prospect that interbreeding with our ancestors would have reduced the number of Neanderthals breeding with each other, leading to their eventual extinction.

The discovery was made during excavations of a Viking settlement where the researchers found the remains of 20 houses and structures that date from AD 400, continuing into the Viking Age (AD 800-1050) and the early Middle Ages.

While excavating a wooden floor in one of the buildings, the team discovered a deposited ceramic pot containing a pouch made of linen holding silver coin pendants (used as jewellery), in addition to various items of jewellery such as eight high quality torque-style neck rings, two arm rings, one ring and two pearls. Excavations of the settlement also uncovered objects such as arrows, quern-stones, and ornate amulet rings.

Several of the coin pendants are European in origin, coming from England, Bohemia and Bavaria, in addition to five Arabic coins (dirhams) which suggests a far-reaching trade network.

As we mentioned in a previous article, Boris Yeltsin's period of government in Russia led the country into unprecedented economic chaos and a real danger of fragmentation. The savage privatization of companies and infrastructures gave birth to the emergence of the so-called "oligarchs," former officials and politicians of the communist regime who had accumulated a great deal of power and wealth with these privatizations, wealth that contrasted with the growing misery of the majority of the Russian population.

In September and October 1993, the discontent of a large part of the population against Yeltsin's policies led to the uprising of the Duma (parliament) against the president. The previous elections had given a majority to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a populist and nationalist leader, but the very presidentialist structure of Russian politics meant that in reality the Duma had very little power. In the uprising would converge the patriotic and illiberal forces that would form the basis of the patriotic movement that would be led by Vladimir Putin: Zhirinovsky's nationalists, the Russian communist party (actually national-communist) of Gennady Zyuganov, and tsarist and orthodox religious groups. Despite their ideological differences, these groups had in common their opposition to liberalism and Westernism, and their defense of the integrity and sovereignty of Russia.

The rebel deputies made a strong stand in the Duma building, which was shelled by military units loyal to Yeltsin. The uprising was crushed. But from this point on Yeltsin's political line began to waver. Yeltsin's eight years in power had been a truly dark period in Russian history, with an anti-national government allied to the interests of foreign powers. His policy of change towards a Western-style liberal society was based on Western foreign investment and large loans from international financial institutions. However, none of this materialized in reality — the loans from the International Monetary Fund were in dribs and drabs, immensely smaller than promised and served only to pay the interest on the foreign debt.

In a way, a certain parallel can be drawn between the Russian and Spanish transitions: Governments that respond to foreign interests, dismantling of industry, privatization of companies and danger of fragmentation due to growing nationalism. The only difference is that in Spain there has not been the patriotic reaction that took place in Russia.

Although the uprising in the Duma was crushed by force, it showed the failure of the Yeltsin project. The oligarchs, enriched by savage privatizations, and who supported liberal and pro-Western policies, withdrew their support for the president and promoted an unknown — Vladimir Putin, thinking that he would carry out a policy more in line with their interests. Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, so the year 2000 was the beginning of a new era in Russia.

Thousands of years ago, a child in Peru was sacrificed as part of an ancient ritual, their head severed at the neck and made into a type of trophy. A new analysis of a single hair plucked from the mummy's skull reveals that the child consumed a psychoactive cactus prior to execution, as part of the ceremony.

The child's preserved head was one of 22 human remains associated with the ancient Nazca society examined in a new study; all of these individuals lived during the pre-Hispanic era (3500 B.C. to A.D. 476) and were buried near the southern coast of Peru, where they were excavated during the Nazca Project, a long-running archaeological program that began in 1982. While scientists are uncertain of the child victim's sex and age at death, they reported that the child had ingested San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi), a prickly plant taken for its "strong hallucinogenic properties" and used by indigenous civilizations of the Americas in traditional medicines and during rituals.