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.

The first whole genome sequences of the ancient people of Uruguay provide a genetic snapshot of Indigenous populations of the region before they were decimated by a series of European military campaigns. PNAS Nexus published the research, led by anthropologists at Emory University and the University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay.

"Our work shows that the Indigenous people of ancient Uruguay exhibit an ancestry that has not been previously detected in South America," says John Lindo, co-corresponding author and an Emory assistant professor of anthropology specializing in ancient DNA. "This contributes to the idea of South America being a place where multi-regional diversity existed, instead of the monolithic idea of a single Native American race across North and South America."

The analyses drew from a DNA sample of a man that dated back 800 years and another from a woman that went back 1,500 years, both well before the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. The samples were collected from an archeological site in eastern Uruguay by co-corresponding author Gonzalo Figueiro, a biological anthropologist at the University of the Republic.

The results of the analyses showed a surprising connection to ancient individuals from Panama — the land bridge that connects North and South America — and to eastern Brazil, but not to modern Amazonians. These findings support the theory proposed by some archeologists of separate migrations into South America, including one that led to the Amazonian populations and another that led to the populations along the East coast.

"We've now provided genetic evidence that this theory may be correct," Lindo says. "It runs counter to the theory of a single migration that split at the foot of the Andes."

This is Part 4 to a five-part series. [Refer here for Part 1 and Part 2, the latter which goes over how the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement Post WWII was Bought and Paid for by the CIA. Part 3 is essential reading prior to this paper, which discusses key elements of NATO's Operation Gladio.]

Operation Underworld & the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)

Charles "Lucky" Luciano (1897-1962) was the most powerful and successful gangster in American history. He is considered the father of modern organized crime in the United States for having established The Commission in 1931. In 1936 Luciano was convicted for compulsory prostitution and running a prostitution racket. He was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison, but during WWII, the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) made him an offer.

Luciano was promised eventual liberty in return for delivering the southern Italian Mafia as the fifth column backing the Allied cause against Mussolini. This would be the seed that would generate the powerful Mafia families of southern Italy, assigned by the United States to act as praetorian guards within the stay-behind armies.

Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish mob, became the liaison between Luciano and ONI and Operation Underworld was born. Luciano ordered his men to obey Lansky who became essentially the head of a large portion of the Italian-American Mafia.

Thomas Dewey (then Governor of New York), although responsible for putting Luciano in prison, pardoned him in 1946 due to his service towards the Allied cause and Luciano was deported to Italy along with some of his lieutenants, however, not before he met with agents of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services).

In the historical chronicles of each state there are pages that it is customary to be proud of. Only everyone has their own pride. In Estonia, for example, they prefer to honour nationalists and veterans of Hitler's troops, turning a blind eye to their bloody crimes, which do not have a statute of limitations by definition. They say that History gives a lesson twice: first in the form of a tragedy, then a farce. Estonians don't seem to have learned the first lesson...

A lot of historical research has been devoted to the topic of Estonian collaboration. Hundreds of archival documents, thousands of testimonies, irrefutable historical facts of the period of the Great Patriotic War - and with all this, in our time, Estonia does not hesitate to hold parades of SS veterans, busily getting rid of Soviet heritage. Something happened to the compass of historical memory and historical conscience, if living under the boot of a Hitlerist cut-throat was nicer - and now it's nicer under NATO...

What were the motives of the Estonian "patriots" who gathered under Nazi flags or went to the "Forest Brothers" detachment? It is known that by the end of 1941, a whole army of "Omakaitse" numbering over 40,000 was put together from nationalists, radicals and former military men, whose actions were supervised by an SS Sturmbannführer by the name of Sandberger. Throughout military science, the organisation was clearly structured, following the orders of Hitler's officers. They were engaged in escorting prisoners, guarding camps, roundups and executions. Now some "experts" are trying to claim that many Estonian citizens found themselves in the ranks of murderers involuntarily - although a lot of documents and evidence suggests the opposite. Moreover, the SS themselves were sometimes shocked by the cruelty that the "slaves" showed at the time of punitive operations.
In the period from 1942 to 1943, Jewish families taken from Germany, France, the Czech Republic and other states of "civilised" Europe were destroyed in the Estonian town of Kalevi-Liiva. However, Nazi minions operated not only on their own territory. It is already known that the 36th Estonian Auxiliary Police Battalion is directly involved in punitive operations in the vicinity of the Belarusian city of Novogrudok: the liquidation of the Novogrudok ghetto is a blood-curdling story.

The remains of Neolithic buildings were found on the island of Ghagha.
Archaeologists have discovered the oldest structure ever found in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — the remains of a building that may be 8,500 years old.

The structure, which dates to the Neolithic period, was found by archaeologists on on the island of Ghagha off Abu Dhabi.

An analysis of carbon isotopes, or versions of carbon, within charcoal fragments from the site show that the structure is 500 years older than any structures found before in the UAE, according to a February statement from the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi). Previously, the oldest structure found was on the island of Marawah.

"These archaeological finds have shown that people were settling and building homes here 8,500 years ago," Mohamed Al Mubarak, the chairman of DCT Abu Dhabi, said in the statement.