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Kurt Sonnenfeld (right) at Ground Zero

As a contract employee for FEMA's Colorado regional branch, 35 year old Kurt Sonnenfeld was dispatched to videotape and photograph the rescue and recovery effort at ground zero in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. There was no restriction on what Sonnenfeld could film and no documents were signed by him that passed ownership of the footage to FEMA. According to the TVtechnology website, Sonnenfeld was FEMA's Denver-based Region 8 Public Affairs Officer and he worked the site as one of only four FEMA photographers along with FEMA's Denver-based Region 8 Deputy Public Affairs officer Jim Chestnutt.

Iranian archeologists have unearthed an ancient cylinder seal dating to at least 3,500 years ago in Iran's northern Mazandaran Province.

Archeological excavations at the Kelar Mound in the north of Iran have resulted in the discovery of a cylinder seal which dates back to the Neolithic Era; it is decorated with a drawing of a goat.

"The priceless object is believed to have been used in business and trading. It was probably used as a document and an index to determine the destination for trade," Mehdi Mousavi, head of the archeological team at Kelar Mound, said.

The damp mud falls away easily from the long thighbone jutting out of the dirt wall of the trench at the gentle prod of the shovel's tip. Beyond the mass grave filled with the skeletal remains of some 2,000 people, presumed to be Germans who died in the closing months of World War II, stands the red-brick fortress of the Teutonic Knights that was once one of Germany's greatest landmarks until it was forced to cede the territory to Poland after the war.

Until then, Malbork was the German town of Marienburg, and the authorities believe the dead men, women and children buried together here were inhabitants of the city, along with refugees from places farther east, such as Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, fleeing the devastating Soviet counterattack that would eventually capture Berlin. Several dozen of the skulls have bullet holes, which prompted speculation of a massacre when the first bodies were found last October, whereas now the talk centers on cold, hunger and most of all typhus, which was rampant at the time.

Europe has more than its share of mass graves, a reflection of the extraordinary scale of violence of the previous century. But throughout the Continent the public is far more used to Germans as perpetrators rather than victims, and perhaps nowhere is that more true than in Germany itself.

"For it is the day of the Lord's vengeance and the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion."

~ Isaiah 34:8.

"An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent."

~ Edmund Burke, 1789

In his own time Douglas Lancelot Reed (1895 - 1976) was widely-read. Nowadays he is either pretty much forgotten, or the mere mention of his name evokes outrage among those Establishment experts who have heard of him. The reason for this outrage isn't hard to find: he drew attention to what he saw as a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, and wrote about its history at length in his book The Controversy of Zion. This was completed in 1956 - but not submitted for publication until 1978, two years after his death.

In the obituary for him which appeared in The Times, Douglas Reed was described as a "virulent anti-Semite". A careful reading of The Controversy of Zion, however, shows this to be questionable - even though Reed himself may on occasion have described himself as a writer of anti-Semitic material. In saying that, Reed seems rather to have been referring to his ardent anti-Pharisaism, anti-Talmudism and anti-Zionism. He doesn't however seem to have been an anti-Semite, in the sense of being a hater of Jews, as there are many, many instances where he shows considerable sympathy for ordinary rank-and-file Jews.

The Israeli government repeatedly denies that its treatment of the Palestinians is anything like the treatment suffered by Jews under the Nazi regime. But the Nazis too denied that they were engaging in genocide and war crimes.

Rather than attempting to argue in writing the point that the stewards of the state of Israel appear to be the ideological descendants of the Nazis, the following photo essay of juxtaposed images of Palestinian life today in the occupied territories and Jewish life 68 years ago in Germany and Poland say much more than words ever could:

Much has already been written about the eight-day-long running massacre of Palestinians that is taking place in Gaza. Indeed, what more can be said when it is clear that the Israeli government is intent on blithely ignoring all petitions, both the ambivalent and the unequivocal, to stop the indiscriminate murder.

At least 450 dead so far (other reports put the figure closer to 500), many of them civilians, women, children, old and young, the rest policemen or Hamas officials. At least 2000 injured, many too seriously to survive or be treated in Gaza's severely blockaded hospitals. In short, in the last eight days the state of Israel has murdered approximately 500 innocent Palestinians and seriously injured 2000, and the representatives of the world's leading democracies sit virtually silent. Make no mistake and do not be fooled by the mainstream media reporting, every single Palestinian that has died or been injured as a result of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is innocent. When a people that have been dispossessed of their land, livelihoods and homes, occupied, periodically murdered and regularly starved take action to resist and defend themselves, they are guilty of nothing but standing up for their human rights and their rights under international law.

Polish archeologists believe silk-draped skeletons found in a cathedral crypt are the 600-year-old remains of three grand masters of the Teutonic Knights.

An archeologist says DNA testing was done on the skeleton remains of the three in the city of Kwidzyn -- the Teutonic fortress of Marienwerder in the Middle Ages.

He says the tests indicate the remains are those of Werner von Orseln, the knights' leader from 1324 to 1330; Ludolf Koenig, who ruled from 1342 to 1345, and Heinrich von Plauen, who reigned from 1410 to 1413.

Bogumil Wisniewski, the archeologist who spearheaded the search, tells The Associated Press that researchers are 95 to 96 per cent sure it is them.

He says the skeletons, found in wooden coffins, were draped in silks -- some painted with gold -- a fabric reserved only to those highest in power in the Middle Ages.

SOTT Editors Simon Davies and Joe Quinn appeared on UK-based TV show On The Edge on Thursday 9th October 2008.

Watch the 1 hour show (streaming video) below:

A few years ago, when my book The Secret History of the World was published, I rashly promised that volume 2 would soon be completed and ready for publication. After all, I pretty much knew what I wanted to zoom in on - the topic of Moses and the creation of Judaism - and I already had a good hypothesis and had tons of supplementary support material. I even had a title: The Horns of Moses (triple entendre!) It should be a piece of cake, I thought. And so, I sat down to write.

I had a pretty good flow going, Moses was coming to life on the computer screen, and then... well, then I started to have doubts. I knew that I knew a lot about Moses from the theological point of view and from the point of view of a lot of alternative research. I even knew a lot of what the scholars knew - the people who spend their lives studying and analyzing the Biblical texts. But I still felt uneasy. So, I went searching for more source materials and discovered that there was a whole lot more I needed to read before I could complete this project. That's pretty much what I have been doing for the past year or two: reading stuff that nobody except specialists ever reads, and collecting piles of data.

What has been shocking to discover is exactly how much IS known among the scholars that is not known by the general public. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since I have discovered this to be true in other fields, but when the subject is the foundation of religion - stuff people believe in and stake their lives on and use to determine their actions in life - well, it's pretty bad.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges.

In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

But Jewish leaders and some historians have reacted furiously to the book, and questioned Solzhenitsyn's motives in writing it, accusing him of factual inaccuracies and of fanning the flames of anti-semitism in Russia.

Solzhenitsyn argues that some Jewish satire of the revolutionary period "consciously or unconsciously descends on the Russians" as being behind the genocide. But he states that all the nation's ethnic groups must share the blame, and that people shy away from speaking the truth about the Jewish experience.