Germany's most notorious postwar neo-Nazi party was led by an intelligence agent working for the British, according to both published and unpublished German sources.

The alleged agent - the late Adolf von Thadden - came closer than anyone to giving the far-right real influence over postwar German politics.

Under his leadership, the National Democratic party (NPD) made a string of impressive showings in regional elections in the late 60s, and there were widespread fears that it would gain representation in the federal parliament.

Yet, according to a report earlier this year in the Cologne daily, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the man dubbed "the New Führer" was working for British intelligence throughout the four years he led the NPD, from 1967 to 1971.

One of the darkest and most enthralling British espionage stories of the 20th century turns 50 this month, still resonant with sinister meaning. It was on 1 July 1963 that the British government finally admitted what it had known for some time: that Harold Adrian Russell Philby - "Kim" to friends and family - was not merely living in the Soviet Union as a defector and a Russian spy, but was actually the fabled "third man". Later this archetype of treachery would become known, in the words of his biographer, as "the spy who betrayed a generation".

Philby was perhaps the most lethal double agent in the annals of British espionage. As a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring and a secret servant of the Soviet intelligence services, Philby was responsible for the betrayal of countless national secrets as well as the brutal elimination of many British agents.

At the same time he was a member of the British establishment, with a distinguished literary father and friendships with prominent English literati, such as Graham Greene, as well as with high-flying US spooks such as James Angleton, later to become head of the CIA. If ever there was a member of the club - two, as it turned out - it was Kim Philby, OBE.

Deep in the mountains of northern Idaho, miles from the nearest town, lies evidence of a little-known portion of a shameful chapter of American history.

There are no buildings, signs or markers to indicate what happened at the site 70 years ago, but researchers sifting through the dirt have found broken porcelain, old medicine bottles and lost artwork identifying the location of the first internment camp where the U.S. government used people of Japanese ancestry as a workforce during World War II.

Today, a team of researchers from the University of Idaho wants to make sure the Kooskia Internment Camp isn't forgotten to history.

"We want people to know what happened, and make sure we don't repeat the past," said anthropology professor Stacey Camp, who is leading the research.

It's an important mission, said Charlene Mano-Shen of the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle.

Mano-Shen said her grandfather was forced into a camp near Missoula, Mont., during WWII, and some of the nation's responses to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 evoked memories of the Japanese internments. Muslims, she said Thursday, "have been put on FBI lists and detained in the same way my grandfather was."

A US writer has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA spiked a French village's food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD

Journalist H P Albarelli Jr came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of a biochemist who fell from a 13th floor window two years after a mystery illness that caused an entire French village to go temporarily mad 50 years ago.

Hundreds of residents in picturesque Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations on August 16, 1951.

"Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest." -- George Hunter White, U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics

For well over half a century, the CIA (and its predecessor, OSS) has been violating the Geneva Conventions and the United States Constitution, subjecting the guilty and innocent alike to "cruel and unusual" treatment. H.P. Albarelli's A Terrible Mistake -- The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Cold War Experiments, a fascinating and important new work of unprecedented depth (10 years in the making and involving numerous first hand interviews), pulls back the curtain on the Agency's diabolical mind control experiments and extensive efforts to assemble and analyze every known substance that could kill a person relatively easily, quickly and surreptitiously.

A Terrible Mistake is the true story of how the CIA drugged one of its own scientists and, when "the little bird" flew through a closed window on the 13th floor of the Statler Hotel in Manhattan, proceeded to publicly insist, for decades to come, that Dr. Frank Olson was mentally unstable and had committed suicide. Albarelli takes us with him as he investigates the question: did Frank Olson jump, or was he pitched?

This compelling tale not only reveals the wherefore and how of Frank Olson's murder, but looks behind the scenes at CIA and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, deliciously acquainting us with some of the Agency's darkest characters, including: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the notorious MKULTRA program, whose mind control techniques included extensive use of LSD; the evil psychiatrist Dr. Harold Abramson; various Corsican mafia kingpins; and the ultimate spy, Pierre Lafitte. Lafitte was not only glamorously descended from the famous pirate captain, Jean Lafitte, he was also a CIA assassin, who just happened to be working as a bellman at the Statler Hotel the night Frank Olson crashed through a closed window and dropped to his death.

Some ancient monumental structures were built to manipulate sound for sensory and mind effects, suggests recent research.

The results of recent research suggests that ancient, or prehistoric, builders of the monumental structures found in such diverse places as Ireland, Malta, southern Turkey and Peru all have a peculiarly common characteristic -- they may have been specially designed to conduct and manipulate sound to produce certain sensory effects.

Beginning in 2008, a recent and ongoing study of the massive 6,000-year-old stone structure complex known as the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum on the island of Malta, for example, is producing some revelatory results. Like its related prehistoric temple structures on Malta, this structure features central corridors and curved chambers. But this structure is unique in that it is subterranean, created through the removal of an estimated 2,000 tons of stone carved out with stone hammers and antler picks. Low voices within its walls create eerie, reverberating echoes, and a sound made or words spoken in certain places can be clearly heard throughout all of its three levels. Now, scientists are suggesting that certain sound vibration frequencies created when sound is emitted within its walls are actually altering human brain functions of those within earshot.

"Regional brain activity in a number of healthy volunteers was monitored by EEG through exposure to different sound vibration frequencies," reports Malta temple expert Linda Eneix of the Old Temples Study Foundation, "The findings indicated that at 110 Hz the patterns of activity over the prefrontal cortex abruptly shifted, resulting in a relative deactivation of the language center and a temporary shifting from left to right-sided dominance related to emotional processing and creativity. This shifting did not occur at 90 Hz or 130 Hz......In addition to stimulating their more creative sides, it appears that an atmosphere of resonant sound in the frequency of 110 or 111 Hz would have been "switching on" an area of the brain that bio-behavioral scientists believe relates to mood, empathy and social behavior. Deliberately or not, the people who spent time in such an environment under conditions that may have included a low male voice -- in ritual chanting or even simple communication -- were exposing themselves to vibrations that may have actually impacted their thinking." [1]

Watch as the two secret service men assigned to protect president Kennedy's motorcade are ordered to stand down just minutes before entering Dealey Plaza. They are obviously not happy about being given these orders...

According to a new report in the Journal of Archaeological Science, an ancient humanoid species referred to as the "hobbit" closely resembled humans and not apes as some experts previously thought.

Archeologists first excavated remains of this three-foot-tall human-like primate from an Indonesian cave in 2003. Known to researchers by its scientific name Homo floresiensis, the species is believed to have been a contemporary of Homo sapiens and to have gone extinct around 12,000 years ago.

While some scientists have said that the hobbit species was more ape-like, others contend that it had more human features like Homo erectus. Based on a facial reconstruction, the new study supports the latter theory.

"Our facial approximation is primarily based on verified, peer reviewed research regarding the relationship between the skull and its soft tissues," the researchers wrote.

The study noted that chimps do not have human cheeks. Therefore, previous reconstructions of the hobbit's face were most likely inaccurate. Other theories are misguidedly based on the assumption that earlier human species had the features of ape-man hybrids, the study asserted.

Wyatt Earp is one of America's most famous vigilantes who delivered justice the American way - except it's all a lie. Biographer Andrew Isenberg on how Earp built this myth and its dangerous echoes through American history.

Eighty-five years ago in Los Angeles, the Western lawman Wyatt Earp, who participated in an infamous gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881, met with an aspiring screenwriter, Stuart Lake, and began to dictate his memoirs. Four years later, Lake sold the screen rights to Earp's story to Fox, and the first of what would be dozens of Earp films went into production.

By now, most Americans have learned what they know of Wyatt Earp from the screen. Older viewers may have first learned of Earp in 1957 from Gunfight at the OK Corral, which starred Burt Lancaster, or, between 1955 and 1961, from the ABC television program The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O'Brian. Younger Americans know Earp from 1993's Tombstone, with Kurt Russell as Earp, or 1994's Wyatt Earp, starring Kevin Costner. Harrison Ford is reportedly planning to play Earp in a film adaptation of the 2007 novel Black Hats.

Over the decades, film and television has told a consistent narrative about Earp. According to the screen, he reluctantly pinned on a badge and was drawn into the Tombstone gunfight because of his sense of duty, his unshakable commitment to law and order, and his loyalty to his brothers, also lawmen. After the gunfight resulted in the deaths of three cowboys, the dead men's allies exacted their revenge on the Earps by shooting two of Wyatt's brothers in the back, killing one and crippling the other. Despairing of bringing the men responsible to justice in the frontier courts, Earp, wearing a deputy U.S. marshal's badge, hunted down and killed some of the men he deemed responsible.

Some screen treatments admit some flaws in Earp's character, yet all of the films condone Earp's vigilante killings. Justice, in this view, is found not in fickle courtrooms, but in the character of stalwarts such as Earp, who possess an innate sense of law and order. It is a view that suggests, to paraphrase Mao, that justice grows out of the barrel of a gun.

"Year of meteors! Brooding year!" - Walt Whitman

July 20^th is a red letter date in space history. Apollo 11, the first crewed landing on the Moon, took place on this day in 1969. Viking 1 also made the first successful landing on Mars, seven years later to the day in 1976.

A remarkable astronomical event also occurred over the northeastern United States 153 years ago today on the night of July 20^th, known as the Great Meteor Procession of 1860. And with it came a mystery of poetry, art and astronomy that was only recently solved in 2010.

A meteor procession occurs when an incoming meteor breaks up upon reentry into our atmosphere at an oblique angle. The result can be a spectacular display, leaving a brilliant glowing train in its wake. Unlike early morning meteors that are more frequent and run into the Earth head-on as it plows along in its orbit, evening meteors are rarer and have to approach the Earth from behind. In contrast, these often leave slow and stately trains as they move across the evening sky, struggling to keep up with the Earth.