A newly discovered fossil tooth (shown from multiple angles) from Southeast Asia probably belonged to a Denisovan girl who lived between 164,000 and 131,000 years ago, scientists say.

A molar tooth from Southeast Asia probably belonged to a member of a cryptic group of Stone Age hominids called Denisovans, researchers say.

If so, this relatively large tooth joins only a handful of fossils from Denisovans, who are known from ancient DNA pegging them as close Neandertal relatives.

THE NICE IMPERIALISTS
In the middle of the 19th century, the British Empire ran into what what would today be termed a "public relations crisis".

Influential domestic voices were starting to criticise its industrial system and worldwide domination on ethical grounds, not least the art critic John Ruskin.

He wrote that all he had found at the heart of what was supposedly a great civilization was "insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope".[1]

Lack of public support for the empire at home from the wave of "Little Englander" sentiment also risked affecting the way Britain's activities were viewed abroad.

As Carroll Quigley writes, its success was partly due to "its ability to present itself to the world as the defender of the freedoms and rights of small nations and of diverse social and religious groups".[2]

It was therefore decided, by a powerful group based around Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner, along with aristocrats such as Lord Esher, Lord Rothschild and Lord Balfour[3], to rethink the form and appearance of Britain's economic sphere of influence.

Gradually, the Crown's possessions were encouraged to become supposedly independent nations, though very much remaining under Britain's wing, and eventually, after the Second World War, The Empire was rebranded "The Commonwealth", whose current flag features at the top of this page.

In her foreword to a very useful 2019 collection of the Commonwealth's declarations, its current secretary-general, Patricia Scotland, writes[4]:

The 1949 London Declaration marks the opening of a new movement, maintaining the familiar harmony, yet developing it in ways never before attempted - the transformation of an empire into a mutually supporting family of nations and peoples. It was this brief yet visionary declaration which brought into being the Commonwealth we know today"

Today we are very familiar with the two-faced language of power, which is constantly deployed to hide unpalatable truth from the public.

Whether in the form of corporate greenwashing, warmongering "humanitarian interventions" or censorship disguised as "fact-checking", this cynical misuse of words has long since surpassed the satire of George Orwell's mendacious Ministry of Truth.

The phenomenon is global now, but Britain can look back with pride at its leading role in developing this fraudulent double-speak.

The British Empire's self-declared commitment to "the protection and advancement of the native races" [5] did not stop it from opening fire on unarmed Gandhi-supporting Indian independence protesters in Amritsar in 1919, killing 379 people, [6] or from using mass murder, torture and concentration camps to crush the anti-imperialist Mau Mau revolt in Kenya between 1948 and 1955.
The self-righteous defender of worldwide freedom acquiesced in the rise of Hitler's Germany, simultaneously denounced (in public) and tolerated (in private) Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and did all it could to hinder resistance to Franco's far-right coup in Spain in 1936, despite its own public's overwhelming support for the other side.

"Britain's attitude was so devious that it can hardly be untangled,"[7] writes Quigley about this period. "The motives of the government were clearly not the same as the motives of the people, and in no country has secrecy and anonymity been carried so far or been so well preserved as in Britain". [8]

Over the 70-plus years of his existence, The Commonwealth has proudly continued this official practice of manipulative and virtue-signalling language.

A scientific study has uncovered massive, ghostly figures carved into the ceiling of an Alabama cave more than 1,000-years ago.

The figures, three of which were humanoid in shape, are among the biggest ever uncovered in the Northern Americas. Some are more than 6ft long per a study presenting the findings published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity on Tuesday.

Known as glyphs, the unique carvings sculpted in the soft mud on the cave's ceiling could provide clues into the traditions of Native American peoples of this southeastern US, say the study's authors.

Thousands of pits believed to have been used by prehistoric hunters have been unearthed near Stonehenge.

The find, by University of Birmingham and Ghent University researchers, included sites over 10,000 years old.

One of the pits, which was 13ft (4m) wide and 6.5ft (2m) deep, was the largest of its kind in north-west Europe, the archaeologists said.

The discoveries were made using a combination of novel geophysics and "traditional" archaeology, they added.

Of all the mysteries of ancient Rome, silphium is among the most intriguing. Romans loved the herb as much as we love chocolate. They used silphium as perfume, as medicine, as an aphrodisiac and turned it into a condiment, called laser, that they poured on to almost every dish. It was so valuable that Julius Caesar stashed more than half a tonne in his treasury.

Yet it became extinct less than a century later, by the time of Nero, and for nearly 2,000 years people have puzzled over the cause.

Researchers now believe it was the first victim of man-made climate change - and warn that we should heed the lesson of silphium or risk losing plants that are the basis of many modern flavours.


Paul Pollaro and Paul Robertson of the University of New Hampshire say their research, published in Frontiers in Conservation Science, shows that urban growth and accompanying deforestation changed the local microclimate where silphium grew.

The British government ran a secret "black propaganda" campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed.

The effort, run from the mid-1950s through to the late 70s by a unit in London that was part of the Foreign Office, was focused on cold war enemies such as the Soviet Union and China, leftwing liberation groups and leaders that the UK saw as threats to its interests

The campaign also sought to mobilise Muslims against Moscow, promoting greater religious conservatism and radical ideas. To appear authentic, documents encouraged hatred of Israel.

Troops shot in the legs screaming in pain. Others dying from blood loss and shock. With no one around to provide medical assistance. A Russian soldier crucified on an anti-tank barrier, chained to a metal 'hedgehog' and then burned alive...

For many, graphic footage of Russian servicemen tortured and killed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and nationalist battalions, came as a real shock. But this did not surprise those who are familiar with the 'traditions' of Ukraine's 'fighters for national freedom', as they have more than a century of history in this sort of thing.

Europe's First Concentration Camps

The first concentration camps in Europe - Terezin and Thalerhof - were established in Austria-Hungary in the fall of 1914, not to hold prisoners of war, but the empire's own citizens. This is how Vienna, then the 'sick man of Europe', tried to protect its eastern border areas from members of its population which sympathized with neighboring Russia. Fighting between the two countries had broken out just before the beginning of the First World War. Austria-Hungary's last emperor, Charles I, confessed in his edict of May 7, 1917:

"All the arrested Russians are innocent, but they were detained to prevent them becoming guilty."

People from Galicia who did not want to call themselves Ukrainians, as the Austrian authorities insisted, and continued to use the name 'Rusyns', were arrested and incarcerated in two places - in a garrison fortress in Terezin and in a valley near Graz, the capital of Styria. While the prisoners in Terezin were held in the vaults and dungeons of the fortress, with the support of local Czechs, the concentration camp later known as Thalerhof was little more than a bare field fenced in with barbed wire.

Franceschini hails huge 3,000-year-old sculptures as exceptional.
The powerful torsos of two boxers, a large flexible shield that covers the stomach and envelops an arm; then a head, legs and other body parts - just days after the resumption of the latest excavation campaign, the Mont'e Prama Nuragic necropolis at Cabras has yielded the remains of two new monumental statues.

They are two giants that join the army of warriors and boxers that are still shrouded in mystery and have made the Sardinian archaeological site famous all over the world.

Superintendent Monica Stochino told ANSA that the discovery was truly "important" and bodes well for more surprises in the coming weeks.

Culture Minister Dario Franceschini expressed enthusiasm too and recalled that the find has taken place just under a year after the birth of a foundation for the site featuring the culture ministry, the Cabras town council and the Sardinian regional government.

"It's an exceptional discovery and others will follow," he commented.

The field study, which began on April 4, has confirmed that the necropolis stretches southwards and there is a major burial road flanking the tombs.

"It is evidence for us that we are on the right road," stressed Alessandro Usai, the archaeologist who has been the scientific director of the excavation since 2014.

The two new giants have different characteristics to the boxers uncovered at the site in the middle of the 1970s after the accidental discovery of this incredible place, Usai explained.

In late 1949, a series of unmarked flights began launching from central Europe. Gargantuan C-47s, flown by Hungarian or Czech pilots, barreled toward Turkey, and then turned north over the Black Sea, evading radar by flying barely above the ground. As the planes flew over Lviv a string of parachutes opened, a handful of commandos tumbling into the sky over Soviet Ukraine. On the ground, they linked up with Ukrainian resistance fighters trying to beat back Soviet expansionism.

Operation Red Sox, as it was known, was one of the first covert missions of the still new Cold War. The American-trained commandos would feed intelligence back to their handlers using new radio and communications equipment, stoking nascent nationalist movements in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics. The goal was to provide the U.S. unprecedented insight into Moscow's designs in Eastern Europe — and, if possible, to help crack apart the Soviet empire itself. Over half a decade, dozens of operatives took part in these flights, becoming one of the U.S.'s "biggest covert operations" in post-War Europe. Ukraine's bloody insurgency was the operation's centerpiece. And it was in Ukraine that, as one scholar wrote, the CIA saw one of its "most pronounced failures of the Cold War."

A team of marine biologists realized they definitely weren't in Kansas anymore after discovering what appeared to be a yellow brick road on top of an undersea mountain near Hawaii.

"The yellow brick road?" a scientist mused in a YouTube video of the discovery.

Others remarked that the rocks were reminiscent of a very different fictional world: "It's the road to Atlantis," one researcher said.

The yellow rocks, divided from each other at neat 90-degree angles, form a narrow strip and look like they were carved and arranged by human hands. However, the seemingly paved roadway was simply the natural result of ancient volcanic activity thousands of feet below the water's surface, the researchers said in a description below the video.

"At the summit of Nootka Seamount, the team spotted a 'dried lake bed' formation, now IDed as a fractured flow of hyaloclastite rock (a volcanic rock formed in high-energy eruptions where many rock fragments settle to the seabed)," the researchers wrote.

The remarkably brick-like divisions between the rocks are likely the coincidental result of heating and cooling stresses from multiple volcanic eruptions over millions of years, the team added.