The philosopher's greatest work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, only makes sense in the light of mysticism

If you bring together two enigmas, do you get a bigger enigma, or do they cancel each other out, like multiplied negative numbers, to produce clarity? The latter, I hope, as I take on Wittgenstein and mysticism.

I've been puzzling over these topics since my philosophy salon met to discuss "The Mysticism of the Tractatus," written in 1966 by B.F. McGuinness. The salon consists of eight or so people, most with graduate degrees in philosophy, who gather in the salon-runner's living room to jaw over a paper. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom Bertrand Russell described as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived," published only one book during his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. First issued in German in 1921, Tractatus is a cryptic meditation on what is knowable and unknowable.

An enigmatic sculpture of a king's head dating back nearly 3,000 years has left researchers guessing at whose face it depicts.

The 5cm (two-inch) sculpture is an exceedingly rare example of figurative art from the region during the ninth century BC - a period associated with biblical kings. It is exquisitely preserved but for a bit of missing beard, and nothing quite like it has been found before.

While scholars are certain the stern-bearded figure wearing a golden crown represents royalty, they are less sure which king it symbolises, or which kingdom he may have ruled.

Underwater explorers have discovered fragments of Britain's richest shipwreck due to recent storms shifting sand and allowing them to reveal cannons and anchors at Loe Bar, near Cornwall.

The merchant ship, called the President and owned by the East India Company, sank in 1684 with a cargo of precious diamonds and pearls worth $10.7 million (8 million pounds) today. Divers from Historic England David Gibbins and Mark Milburn explained that until recently weather conditions hadn't permitted them to get in the water, as the "entry and exit are treacherous even with the smallest waves."

"The site was first reported by divers twenty years ago and was designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973. Mark and I are licensed by Historic England to monitor the wreck, but for many years it has been covered by sand," Daily Mail cited them as saying.

Cranial surgery without modern anesthesia and antibiotics may sound like a death sentence. But trepanation-the act of drilling, cutting, or scraping a hole in the skull for medical reasons-was practiced for thousands of years from ancient Greece to pre-Columbian Peru. Not every patient survived. But many did, including more than 100 subjects of the Inca Empire. A new study of their skulls and hundreds of others from pre-Columbian Peru suggests the success rates of premodern surgeons there was shockingly high: up to 80% during the Inca era, compared with just 50% during the American Civil War some 400 years later.

Trepanation likely started as a treatment for head wounds, says David Kushner, a neurologist at the University of Miami in Florida. After a traumatic injury, such surgery would have cleaned up skull fractures and relieved pressure on the brain, which commonly swells and accumulates fluid after a blow to the head. But not all trepanned skulls show signs of head injuries, so it's possible the surgery was also used to treat conditions that left no skeletal trace, such as chronic headaches or mental illnesses. Trepanned skulls have been found all over the world, but Peru, with its dry climate and excellent preservation conditions, boasts hundreds of them.

For the new study, Kushner teamed up with John Verano, a bioarchaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, to systematically study trepanation's success rate across different cultures and time periods. The team examined 59 skulls from Peru's southern coast dated to between 400 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E, 421 from Peru's central highlands dated from 1000 C.E. to 1400 C.E., and 160 from the highlands around Cusco, capital of the Inca Empire, from the early 1400s C.E. to the mid-1500s C.E. If the bone around the surgical hole showed no signs of healing, the researchers knew the patient died either during or very shortly after the surgery. Smooth bone around the opening showed that the patient had survived for months or years after the procedure.

I'm very pleased to announce that our selection of HTML Books now contains works by renowned World War II historian David Irving, including his magisterial Hitler's War, named by famed military historian Sir John Keegan as one of the most crucial volumes for properly understanding that conflict.

With many millions of his books in print, including a string of best-sellers translated into numerous languages, it's quite possible that the eighty-year-old Irving today ranks as the most internationally-successful British historian of the last one hundred years. Although I myself have merely read a couple of his shorter works, I found these absolutely outstanding, with Irving regularly deploying his remarkable command of the primary source documentary evidence to totally demolish my naive History 101 understanding of major historical events. It would hardly surprise me if the huge corpus of his writings eventually constitutes a central pillar upon which future historians seek to comprehend the catastrophically bloody middle years of our hugely destructive twentieth century even after most of our other chroniclers of that era are long forgotten.

Carefully reading a thousand-page reconstruction of the German side of the Second World War is obviously a daunting undertaking, and his remaining thirty-odd books would probably add at least another 10,000 pages to that Herculean task. But fortunately, Irving is also a riveting speaker, and several of his extended lectures of recent decades are conveniently available on YouTube, as given below. These effectively present many of his most remarkable revelations concerning the wartime policies of both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, as well as sometimes recounting the challenging personal situation he himself faced. Watching these lectures may consume several hours, but that is still a trivial investment compared to the many weeks it would take to digest the underlying books themselves.

A Right Derived From Might

To better understand the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, it is important to understand the original 1947 UN action on Israel-Palestine.

The common representation of Israel's birth is that the UN created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the US governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.

In reality, while the UN General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.

Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.

Third, the US administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations, and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.

It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 per cent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 per cent non-Jewish. And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds.

Let us look at the specifics.

Fresh evidence presented in an exclusive Al Jazeera investigation into the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 Americans proves the incident was not a mistake. Since 1967 the 'official story' has been that Israel simply misidentified the American ship as Egyptian for several hours. Israel apologized to the United States and for several decades we've been led to believe that this could be the only explanation for why Israeli jets and torpedo boats would launch rockets, missiles and torpedoes at an American target for more than two hours.

A new documentary called The Day Israel Attacked America airing on Al Jazeera was produced and directed by award winning British film maker Richard Belfield. Thanks to the audio evidence obtained by Belfield, it is finally possible to prove the survivors of the attack on the USS Liberty were right all along. The survivors have always been extremely confident that Israel's intentions were to sink that ship and kill everyone on board so Egypt could be blamed for the tragedy. Why? To convince President Lyndon Johnson (and the American public) that we needed to declare war on Egypt. This is the definition of a 'false flag'. (can you say 9/11?)

The story of history is the story of the roads not taken, and never more so than when it comes to the life and legacy of US President John F Kennedy.

Cuban Missile Crisis

The 55th anniversary of Kennedy's 'Peace Speech', delivered in the form a commencement address to students and faculty at the American University in Washington on June 10, 1963, is a time to lament the loss of a leader who, by the time of his assassination, was on a journey towards ending the Cold War in conjunction with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Both men had emerged from the Thirteen Days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 chastened by the knowledge of how close the world had come to nuclear war. Moreover, they emerged determined to ensure that the world would never come close to anything like it again, having faced down hardliners within their respective governments and militaries who were itching for conflict.

In his book on the period, 'To Move The World', Jeffrey D Sachs describes how "The world had never before peered into the abyss as it did in those days. And the two leaders who steered the world away from it, Kennedy and Khrushchev, were now joined by this near-death experience, each feeling a responsibility that only the other could understand."

Roanoke Island in North Carolina - In 1587, more than 100 men, women, and children settled on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina. War with Spain prevented speedy resupply of the colony - the first English settlement in the New World, backed by Elizabethan courtier Sir Walter Raleigh. When a rescue mission arrived 3 years later, the town was abandoned and the colonists had vanished.

What is commonly called the Lost Colony has captured the imagination of generations of professional and amateur sleuths, but the colonists' fate is not the only mystery. Despite more than a century of digging, no trace has been found of the colonists' town - only the remains of a small workshop and an earthen fort that may have been built later, according to a study to be published this year. Now, after a long hiatus, archaeologists plan to resume digging this fall. "I firmly believe that our program of re-excavation will provide answers to the vexing questions that past fieldwork has left us," says archaeologist Eric Klingelhofer, vice president for research at the nonprofit First Colony Foundation in Durham, North Carolina.

The first colonists arrived in 1585, when a voyage from England landed more than 100 men here, among them a science team including Joachim Gans, a metallurgist from Prague and the first known practicing Jew in the Americas. According to eyewitness accounts, the colonists built a substantial town on the island's north end. Gans built a small lab where he worked with scientist Thomas Harriot. After the English assassinated a local Native American leader, however, they faced hostility. After less than a year, they abandoned Roanoke and returned to England.

With the world's press spending a great deal of its energy on the rather fractious relationship between the United States and North Korea, a look back in time gives us some fascinating insight regarding the geopolitical stresses that rule the region, particularly the stresses that occurred during the Korean War.

Thanks to the International Action Center and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), a Non-Governmental Organization which was founded in 1946 and acts as a consultative group to UNESCO, we have an interesting document that outlines some of America's actions on the Korean Peninsula during the early 1950s.

In March 1952, the IADL issued a Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea during the Korean War. Here is a screen capture showing the title page: