The discovery of a Temple-era pomegranate, in particular, was always going to provoke excitement. The pomegranate is a deeply resonant fruit in Judaism that, according to the Bible, was used as a decorative motif in Solomon's temple. There is a Rabbinic reference to its seeds, which in legend always number 613 - one for each of the commandments of the Bible. One Israel museum press officer explains the effect of seeing such relics: "It is very exciting, very emotional, very Jewish feelings," she says.

Few people in Vermont remember Dr. Robert W. Hyde, but one of his former patients can’t forget him. The doctor was involved in one of the nation’s darkest chapters in medical science: In the 1950s, Hyde conducted drug and psychological experiments at a Boston hospital through funding that apparently originated with the CIA. Later, he became director of research at the Vermont State Hospital.

The patient, Karen Wetmore, is convinced that Hyde and other researchers subjected her and possibly other patients to experiments paid for by the CIA at the Waterbury facility.

Did you know that Thanksgiving was originally in the summer?

This FBI-document of 1947 recommends that "one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago" should not be called to testify for the Committee on Unamerican Activities, for he is working for Congressman Richard M. Nixon. According to the Warren Commission, Ruby had no connections with Oswald, Organized Crime or the Government. No wonder the header reads "This is sensitive".

The failure of Soviet communism was only the latest demonstration that freedom and property rights, not sharing, are essential to prosperity. The earliest European settlers in America had a dramatic demonstration of that lesson, but few people today know it.

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

Why? When people can get the same return with a small amount of effort as with a large amount, most people will make little effort.

When President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, along with Governor John Connolly of Texas, on November 22, 1963, the news spread out on the nation and world like a shock wave. It was a national experience like never before. Other presidents had been assassinated, but that was in the days before the media could spread news at a lightning pace. It was only about an hour after the initial flash from Dallas that the followup report of Kennedy's death sent out another shockwave.

The task of the historian is to investigate, confront, challenge and, if necessary, correct society's collective memory. In this process, the state ought to have no role whatever, none at all. Certainly not in the UK, which delights in presenting itself as a bastion of academic freedom.

A visually stunning two-hour special edition of "Nova" examines decades of archaeological studies that contradict much of what is in the Bible. The entire Exodus story is debunked, as is the idea that the Israelites were monotheistic following the contract made between God and Abraham. It turns out idol worship was common through the reign of King David and right up to the Babylonian exile.

The deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it.

Press reports say Barack Obama may retain George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates as a gesture to war-time continuity, bipartisanship and respect for the Washington insider community, which has embraced Gates as something of a new Wise Man.

However, if Obama does keep Gates on, the new President will be employing someone who embodies many of the worst elements of U.S. national security policy over the past three decades, including responsibility for what Obama himself has fingered as a chief concern, “politicized intelligence.”

What brought Reagan, who served as President of SAG, (1947-52), and again in 1959, to do such a terrible thing? I think he was mostly a hollow type of man, vain, insecure and highly self- righteous. The record shows that to protect his rear end, he had become "a commie hunter;" he also carried a gun. The exact number of colleagues on whom Reagan ratted, will probably never be known. Once tagged as a Red "sympathizer," no matter how scanty the evidence, an individual was subjected to being "blacklisted" and barred from working in the Hollywood Industry.

I am going to be brief because it's a long story, but I have all the documents to prove any statement that I make — they said: "Look here. You can yet win this war. You don't have to give up. You don't have to accept the negotiated peace offered to you now by Germany. You can win this war if the United States will come in as your ally." The United States was not in the war at that time. We were fresh; we were young; we were rich; we were powerful.

A leading expert on Auschwitz on Sunday denigrated the importance of the finding of plans for the construction of the extermination camp, which was reported this weekend in the German tabloid Bild. He said the documents have been known to scholars for many years and that they were not plans to build the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but rather earlier plans for the building of a forced labor camp.

No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.

Dr. Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.

Bugliosi’s whole approach to the Kennedy assassination is virtually the same as that of the Commission he wishes to defend. If facts and research don’t bolster the lone gunman then debunk it or ignore it all together. The Warren Commission decided via a secret meeting in January of 1964, that for various political reasons (see my piece, The Investigation That Never Was) they would basically run with Lee H. Oswald as the sole assassin and no other conspirators. Bugliosi takes the same path, though his is not as political.

Japan's defence minister said today he will sack the air force chief of staff for saying that Japan was ensnared into World War Two by the United States and was not an aggressor in the conflict in Asia.

In a conflict that has produced more than its share of suffering and tragedy, the name of Kafr Qassem lives on in infamy more than half a century after Israeli police gunned down 47 Palestinian civilians, including women and children, in the village.

This week Kafr Qassem's inhabitants, joined by a handful of Israeli Jewish sympathizers, commemorated the anniversary of the deaths 52 years ago by marching to the cemetery where the victims were laid to rest.

In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modelled on the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives.

In the European Arrest Warrant issued in October 2004, he is accused of approving of or playing down the murder of the Jews by the Nazis.

But District Judge Daphne Wickham ruled the warrant invalid today at the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court in London, saying it contained inadequate detail about the offences.

It neither states the name of the website nor where the propaganda is said to have been published from - only referring to the 'world-wide internet'.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

In the video, Hunt discusses LBJ, who saw Kennedy as an “obstacle” to the presidency, and how Johnson consorted with top CIA officials Cord Meyer and William K. Harvey to carry out the assassination plot. Hunt had direct knowledge of the plot because he was part of it in his role as a “bench warmer,” as he described himself.

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called "the Truth Bill" and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men.

This interpretation of Jewish history was developed as talented, imaginative historians built on surviving fragments of Jewish and Christian religious memory to construct a continuous genealogy for the Jewish people. Judaism’s abundant historiography encompasses many different approaches.

Who are the Chagos islanders?Between 1967 and 1971 an estimated 2,000 Chagossians were driven from the archipelago in the Indian Ocean after Britain made a secret deal to lease the main island, Diego Garcia, to the US as an airbase.

The controversy that has plagued the assassination of John F. Kennedy has its genesis in the Warren Commission. The very name of this body lives in infamy as the first official government investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Formed rapidly after the death of the president, it operated for nine months before its conclusions were presented to the press and public in a 912-page book and twenty-six volumes of evidence and witness testimony. The mainstream press, then as now, largely accepted the Warren Commission’s conclusion.

"I heard him say on, I believe it was Meet the Press, that his ancestors owned no slaves. Well, I certainly have carried the name McCain from the beginning of my life, and I've known the ties to John McCain, and have tried to get him to communicate with me about that, but he has been unwilling at least to date."

"The McCain campaign told me, when I talked to them about this, that he hasn't been to any of the family reunions simply because of scheduling conflicts," said Blackmon. "There's not a decision not to do that."

Republican Sen. John McCain served on the advisory board to the U.S. chapter of an international group linked to ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America in the 1980s.

The U.S. Council for World Freedom also aided rebels trying to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua. That landed the group in the middle of the Iran-Contra affair and in legal trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, which revoked the charitable organization's tax exemption.

Critics of Roosevelt's New Deal often liken it to fascism. Roosevelt's numerous defenders dismiss this charge as reactionary propaganda; but as Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes clear, it is perfectly true. Moreover, it was recognized to be true during the 1930s, by the New Deal's supporters as well as its opponents.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The Republican US presidential candidate John McCain was not tortured during his captivity in North Vietnam, the chief prison guard of the jail in which he was held has claimed.

In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Nguyen Tien Tran acknowledged that conditions in the prison were "tough, though not inhuman". But, he added: "We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded."

The rationalization of the colonist/settler is that of a rapist. They blame the victim for "wanting it" or "needing it" and for themselves it was a good thing they did it. You can't have occupation without genocide. Occupation is genocide. Depleted Uranium (uranium dug up by coherced labor on Indian reservations) dropped on the Middle East is genocide. Globalization is genocide. " -Ry Dawson

Father Las Casas wrote:

If we're going to make the crimes of the radical left in the 1960s and 1970s a campaign issue - a time period much of which Barack Obama spent in elementary school - then how about the crimes of the radical right?

And make no mistake: Henry Kissinger has done things that, morally speaking, make Ayers' actions, deplorable as some of them surely were, look like the equivalent of jaywalking.

Long before Columbus, the Western Hemisphere was known to the ancient Egyptians, other Africans and Greeks, as well as the Celts and Vikings - and probably many others. The “achievement” of Columbus was that he saw a way to exploit what he found. Sadly, this attitude continues.

Written in 1917, this article could easily be about today.

Far from being the "death camps" as you have heard so often, places like Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald were not in the business of extermination. They were work camps, critical to the German war effort. But did you know that the Jewish workers were compensated for their labor with scrip printed specifically for their use in stores, canteens and even brothels? The prisoner monetary system was conceived in ghettos such as Lodz, carried to camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau and still existed in the displaced persons camps that were established by the Allies after World War II.

Once upon a time, the US government
closed the doors to every bank in the
nation.

The year was 1933 and it was called
a "bank holiday."

If you needed cash for something, you
were out of luck.

By 1933, over $140 billion in depositors'
money had gone up in smoke because of
banking failures and there was a run on
banks throughout the country that threatened
to bring the whole system down.

In terms familiar to the common man, this might quite properly be called the use of bribes and graft by individuals and powers foreign, i.e. external, to the Congress of the United States to subvert the constitutional process and suborn our political system and the interests of WE THE PEOPLE.

After appearing in numerous official publications until 1876, this Article "disappeared" from our Constitution, to be replaced by another made nearly 50 years later. You may well ask how such a thing could have happened. So did we.