While some are likely to politicize the find, which adds further color to the history of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel, the dig's director noted that his aims are academic rather than ideological.

Following 150 years of exploration, archaeologists have uncovered a significant moat in the City of David within the Jerusalem Walls National Park, the Israel Antiquities Authority and Tel Aviv University announced on Sunday. This massive trench, measuring at least 9 meters deep and 30 meters wide, likely separated the upper city, home to the temple and palace, from the lower city.

The discovery was made during excavations of the Givati Parking Lot. The moat apparently formed a barrier between the City of David and the Temple Mount and Ophel areas, and its perpendicular cliffs made it impassable. Archaeologists were initially unsure as to its purpose, but continued excavations revealed that it served as the northern fortification line of the lower city, separating the residential areas in the south from the acropolis in the north.

For as long as there have been "rulers," there have been political assassinations. It isn't hard to see why that's the case. After all, as long as people believe in The Most Dangerous Superstition — namely, that some have the right to rule over others — then there will be those willing to kill for that power.

So, apropos of nothing at all, let's look at some of the famous political assassinations (and attempted assassinations) in history, what they accomplished, and how they were perpetrated.

JULIUS CAESAR (SUCCESSFUL)

The assassination of Julius Caesar is the most famous political assassination in history and it isn't hard to see why. The story of his downfall is replete with intrigue, betrayal, ambition, power, and empire. That story has introduced phrases to the vernacular that we still recognize today — "Et tu, Brute?" and "Beware the ides of March" — and has provided fodder for historians, artists and writers for thousands of years.

Yes, from Shakespeare to Star Wars, the tale of the fall of the Roman Republic still captivates us to the present day. You know: Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Caesar wearing red boots, Caesar becoming dictator-for-life, Caesar playing a game of yoinky-yeety with a diadem after the annual running-through-the-streets-naked-striking-everyone-you-meet-with-shaggy-thongs festival. That whole story.

The action culminated on the fateful ides of March in 44 B.C., when Caesar was set upon by dozens of conspirators as he was preparing to convene a Senate meeting. Many historians have described the scene, but perhaps none so memorably as Suetonius:

As he took his seat, the conspirators gathered about him as if to pay their respects, and straightway Tillius Cimber, who had assumed the lead, came nearer as though to ask something; and when Caesar with a gesture put him off to another time, Cimber caught his toga by both shoulders; then as Caesar cried, "Why, this is violence!" one of the Cascas stabbed him from one side just below the throat.​ Caesar caught Casca's arm and ran it through with his stylus,​ but as he tried to leap to his feet, he was stopped by another wound. When he saw that he was beset on every side by drawn daggers, he muffled his head in his robe, and at the same time drew down its lap to his feet with his left hand, in order to fall more decently, with the lower part of his body also covered. And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, "You too, my child?"​ All the conspirators made off, and he lay there lifeless for some time, and finally three common slaves put him on a litter and carried him home, with one arm hanging down. And of so many wounds none turned out to be mortal, in the opinion of the physician Antistius, except the second one in the breast.

When you drill down on the details of Caesar's assassination and its aftermath, it's interesting to note that it follows the exact opposite of the narrative that is pushed by authorities in the wake of every political assassination these days.

There was no "lone nut" assassin to blame the incident on.

The government did not engage in a sloppy cover-up of the crime.

There was no gaslighting of the citizenry about what had taken place.

Indeed, rather than cover up their conspiracy, the gaggle of Senators who conspired to murder Caesar openly proclaimed it. After the killing, Brutus and his fellow conspirators marched through the streets, brandishing their blood-stained daggers and announcing, "People of Rome, we are once again free!"

The joyous celebration did not last long, however. The Roman Republic immediately descended into a bloody, years-long civil war followed by a bloody, years-long power struggle. In the end, Gaius Octavius — Caesar's adopted son and appointed successor — emerged victorious, bearing a new name and a new title: Augustus Caesar, founder of the Roman Empire.

There's a lesson in there somewhere. I wonder if we'll ever learn it.

In 2016, a man in Oakland, California, disrupted web development around the world by deleting 11 lines of code.

The story of how 28-year-old Azer Koçulu briefly broke the internet shows how writing software for the web has become dependent on a patchwork of code that itself relies on the benevolence of fellow programmers. When that system breaks down, as it did then, the consequences can be vast and unpredictable.

"I think I have the right of deleting all my stuff," Koçulu wrote on March 20, 2016 in an email that was later made public.

And then he did it.

Archaeological evidence suggests strategic and adaptable community.
A team of researchers led by Jane McMahon from the Discipline of Archaeology find new evidence that shifts the perception of how people lived in north-western Saudi Arabia during the Neolithic period.

To date, little has been known about people living in north-western Saudi Arabia during the Neolithic - the period traditionally defined by the shift to humans controlling food production and settling into communities with agriculture and domesticated animals.

The piecemeal evidence available hinted traditional ideas - of small struggling groups constantly on the move across the barren lands - needed to be revisited.

Now, an Australian-led team has released new research on monumental buildings we call 'standing stone circles'. The findings are helping to rewrite what we know about the people who lived on this land between 6,500 and 8,000 years ago.

Our evidence reveals what they ate, what tools they used and even the jewellery they wore. It leads us to think these people weren't struggling so much after all, but rather had found complex and strategic ways to thrive on the land for millennia.

Archaeologists in Campeche, Mexico, have found an underground structure beneath a Maya ball court, as well as offerings on top of a Maya pyramid at another site.
Archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a mysterious subterranean structure with painted walls hidden beneath a Maya ball court.

The team found the building while excavating the ball court, the playing space for the ritual ball game played by the Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples.

"We located parts of an earlier building that had painted walls, but only further excavations may reveal the shape of that underlying building and what its function was," said Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia and director of the excavation.

The finding is "evidently a very important structure, because ball courts are normally found only at major Maya sites, which were centers of the regional political organization," Šprajc told Live Science in an email. The structure could date to the Early Classic period (A.D. 200 to 600) and is covered with a layer of painted stucco, according to a translated statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Previously, Šprajc and his colleagues surveyed a large area of the Maya Lowlands in the Mexican state of Campeche with lidar, a technique that shoots millions of laser pulses from an aircraft. These pulses then bounce off the ground and return to the machine in the aircraft, allowing researchers to map the landscape's topography.

Archeologists have unearthed more clues about a Native American tribe of up to 50,000 people that mysteriously vanished without a trace.

The Cahokia people once thrived in what is now Illinois, only to abandon their six-square-mile city more than 600 years ago.

While the leading theory has been that the ancient city had become unlivable after massive crop failure that followed an epic drought, a new study has discovered evidence pointing toward another explanation.

Carbon-dating analysis of deep-cut layers of soil and agricultural remnants, the researcher said, now show that farming practices remained consistent in Cahokia even amid those punishing drought years.

Cahokia's indigenous residents, they now believe, might have more gradually left their city for better opportunities elsewhere or to connect with distant loved ones.

One person's DNA became the centerpiece of a genetic sequence used by biologists the world over. Did he agree to that?

They numbered 20 in all — 10 men and 10 women who came to a sprawling medical campus in downtown Buffalo, New York, to volunteer for what a news report had billed as "the world's biggest science project."

It was the spring of 1997, and the Human Genome Project, an ambitious attempt to read and map a human genetic code in its entirety, was building momentum. The project's scientists had refined techniques to read out the chemical sequences — the series of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs — that encode the building blocks of life. Now, the researchers just needed suitable human DNA to work with. More exactly, they needed DNA from ordinary people willing to have their genetic information published for the world to see. The volunteers who showed up at Buffalo's Roswell Park Cancer Institute had come to answer the call.

Early humans experienced a rapid population collapse across large parts of Europe five thousand years ago, the cause of which has been heavily debated. A new study published in the journal Nature suggests an early form of the plague may have played an important role.

The early Neolithic period was marked by substantial population growth, as the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture allowed for larger and more permanent settlements. Around 3000 B.C., however, Neolithic humans in many parts of Northern Europe are believed to have experienced a dramatic population decline, known as the Neolithic Decline. Several potential causes have been theorized, including the plague, but previous research has disagreed on whether early plague outbreaks could cause widespread epidemics.

Archaeologists have discovered the only brewery from the Roman era found to date on the peninsula, famous for its winemaking tradition, in the region of Macerata. The find, which also includes kilns for pottery production and metal forges, was revealed during the 30th excavation campaign conducted by the Università di Macerata at the sites of Urbs Salvia and Villamagna.

In Villamagna, archaeologists found a Roman villa with impressive monumental structures and the mentioned brewery. This unusual discovery could be linked to the ancient Gallic roots of the region, as the Celtic tribes, before their arrival in Italy, were known for their beer consumption.

In the 4th century BC, the Senones Gauls, a Celtic tribe originally from present-day France, occupied various areas of the Marche region, including the province of Macerata, and it is likely that the owners of the villa maintained this ancestral tradition influenced by Celtic culture.

Every time you hear a "climate change" scare story, that person was PAID. He is a Rockefeller stooge. He may not know it; but his profession has been entirely corrupted.

In the climate change arena, the Rockefellers call the shots. The whole thing was their idea, they took a silly but interesting theory and amped it up with hundreds and hundreds of million of dollars. They founded institutions and linked the survival of those institutions to promoting climate change and population reduction. They adopted one likely politician after another.

The Rockefellers have created 990 Climate Change activist organizations. They give them directions, financing, and launch them on the world. The Green Movement was started, financed, organized, and militarized by the Rockefellers. By the late 40's the family was all in, on the same page. In the 50's they began to stand up countless institutions, committees, university departments, university institutes, foundations, and policy shops gathered around this one idea, as below: