...In this recession-racked town, the lack of food is a serious problem. It's a theme that comes up again and again in conversations in Detroit. There isn't a single major chain supermarket in the city, forcing residents to buy food from corner stores. Often less healthy and more expensive food.

As the area's economy worsens --unemployment was over 16% in July -- food stamp applications and pantry visits have surged.

Detroiters have responded to this crisis. Huge amounts of vacant land has led to a resurgence in urban farming. Volunteers at local food pantries have also increased.

But the food crunch is intensifying, and spreading to people not used to dealing with hunger. As middle class workers lose their jobs, the same folks that used to donate to soup kitchens and pantries have become their fastest growing set of recipients.

Beatles fans will cross Abbey Road this morning 40 years to the minute
after the band created one of the most iconic album covers of all
time.

The Beatles walked across a zebra crossing on the road in St John's
Wood, north London, at 11.35am on August 8 1969, for an image caught
on the cover of their classic album Abbey Road.

An 8,000-year-old human skeleton was found during excavations in one of the oldest residential areas in southern Turkey, a media report said.

The skeleton was discovered inside a Neolithic-age tomb unearthed in Yumuktepe Hoyuk of the southern Mersin province by archeologists from the Italian Lecce University and Turkish Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.

Archaeologists of Debrecen's Deri Museum have discovered 4,000-year-old remains of a settlement during earth works connected to a local sewage treatment project, leader of the excavations Krisztian Szilagyi told MTI on Tuesday.

A team of 35-40 archaeologists are working in an area of two hectares, and have now identified the traces of three phases of the settlement: one in the early Bronze Age between 2700-2500 BC, the Sarmatian period around the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD as well as the youngest phase in the 8th and 9th centuries, Szilagyi said.

The settlement is believed to have been the largest of its kind in eastern Hungary, the archaeologist added.

Excavations led by a University of Toronto archaeologist at the site of a recently discovered temple in southeastern Turkey have uncovered a cache of cuneiform tablets dating back to the Iron Age period between 1200 and 600 BCE. Found in the temple's cella, or 'holy of holies', the tablets are part of a possible archive. The cella also contained gold, bronze and iron implements, libation vessels and ornately decorated ritual objects.

"The assemblage appears to represent a Neo-Assyrian renovation of an older Neo-Hittite temple complex, providing a rare glimpse into the religious dimension of Assyrian imperial ideology," said Timothy Harrison, professor of near eastern archeology in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and director of U of T's Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP). "The tablets, and the information they contain, may possibly highlight the imperial ambitions of one of the great powers of the ancient world, and its lasting influence on the political culture of the Middle East."

Partially uncovered in 2008 at Tell Tayinat, capital of the Neo-Hittite Kingdom of Palastin, the structure of the building where the tablets were found preserves the classic plan of a Neo-Hittite temple. It formed part of a sacred precinct that once included monumental stelae carved in Luwian (an extinct Anatolian language once spoken in Turkey) hieroglyphic script, but which were found by the expedition smashed into tiny shard-like fragments.

"Tayinat was destroyed by the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III in 738 BCE, and then transformed into an Assyrian provincial capital, equipped with its own governor and imperial administration," said Harrison. "Scholars have long speculated that the reference to Calneh in Isaiah's oracle against Assyria alludes to Tiglath-pileser's devastation of Kunulua - i.e., Tayinat. The destruction of the Luwian monuments and conversion of the sacred precinct into an Assyrian religious complex may represent the physical manifestation of this historic event."

The temple was later burned in an intense fire and found filled with heavily charred brick and wood which, ironically, contributed to the preservation of the finds recovered from its inner chambers. "While those responsible for this later destruction are not yet known, the remarkable discoveries preserved in the Tayinat temple clearly record a pivotal moment in its history," said Harrison. "They promise a richly textured view of the cultural and ethnic contest that has long characterized the turbulent history of this region."...

Unhappy lovers in Cyprus have been taking so much stone from the tomb of Saint Agapitikos to use in love potions that soon there won't be any left.

Dust from the grave in the courtyard of the church in the village of Arodes in Paphos district has been used for centuries by the lovelorn, who are supposed to slip it into the drink of their objet d'amour.

But, in recent years, so many have been filching shards of stone that a quarter of the tomb has disappeared.

Although past research has suggested Tyrannosaurus rex was related to chickens, now findings hint this giant predator might have acted chicken too.

Instead of picking on dinosaurs its own size, researchers now suggest T. rex was a baby killer that liked to swallow defenseless prey whole.

Seven years ago, more than 50% of the power distributed by North Delhi Power Ltd. wasn't paid for by customers. Today, the company has cut that to 15%, signaling that one of India's biggest infrastructure problems can be solved, if tackled aggressively.

Power theft by rich and poor customers as well as businesses has plagued India for decades, hindering foreign and domestic investment that could spark the increase in generating capacity the nation desperately needs.

The experience of North Delhi Power, a joint venture between the Delhi government and Mumbai-based Tata Power Co. Ltd., shows that a broad and sustained effort can make a difference.

A key challenge for power companies is reducing theft by India's poor. Many have come to view free electricity as a right, something that politicians have done little to counter in a bid to win votes.

Two significant colonial American sites along the upper Hudson River are expected to change hands in an effort to preserve the historic properties, while the state still plans to buy a third 18th-century site that's considered the birthplace of the U.S. Army Rangers.

All three properties are in or adjacent to Fort Edward, a history-rich Washington County village 40 miles north of Albany. The fort the English built here was Britain's largest military outpost in North America during the French and Indian War (1754-1763), with more than 15,000 troops.

A national archaeology preservation group has an agreement to purchase the former site of the Royal Blockhouse, a British army outpost built in 1758 across the Hudson River from the fort, and an archaeologist who has led excavations here since the early 1990s is buying a riverside parcel where a merchant's home and store were located the mid-1700s.

The state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation is eyeing an undeveloped section of Rogers Island from the downstate businessman who also owns the blockhouse property. The island is of particular interest to military historians because it was the base of operations for Rogers' Rangers, the American frontiersmen who served as scouts for the regular British army.

Over the decades, the three sites have been looted by treasure hunters, archaeology experts said.

The search for a new Ohio statue for the U.S. Capitol is taking a panel of state lawmakers to the birthplace of inventor Thomas Edison.

The committee is looking for a historic figure to replace William Allen, one of two Ohioans representing the state in the National Statuary Hall at the Capitol building in Washington. Allen was a 19th century congressman and Ohio governor who portrayed blacks as savages and supported the rights of Southern slave owners.

On Oct. 27, 1993, a 32-year-old Chicago lawyer, Barack Obama, was interviewed by an aspiring filmmaker who wanted to make a documentary about African-American role models. That movie never got made, but the 12-minute interview is just now surfacing in a video, "Becoming Barack: Evolution of a Leader."

Video of Obama before his Illinois State Senate days is rare, but those dozen minutes weren't enough to carry a stand-alone film. Los Angeles-based executive producer Stuart A. Goldman added newly shot interviews with people from Obama's days in Chicago as a community organizer and lawyer, an interview with his half sister shot during Obama's 2006 visit to Kenya and other material to create the DVD. It will be released on Aug. 11.

Since Irwin Stovroff was profiled a week ago on FOXNews.com, the decorated WWII veteran has received thousands of positive letters for his non-profit organization, Vets Helping Heroes, which provides service and therapy dogs to wounded veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

As of December 31, 2008, over 45,000 troops have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan since the start of operations there. Many of them return with life-altering wounds, lost limbs, spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, or suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

Stovroff says his guide and service dogs help the injured soldiers, not just in a functional way, but therapeutically. "They need a guide (but) they need the help and love of a dog as well," he told FOX News.

Life in the White House, however, came at a cost. Johnson and the first children before and after her will always have to "pay a big price in terms of personal time," she said. More than 45 years after she moved into the White House, she still receives requests for interviews about the time she spent there.

But the public's interest in first daughters is nothing new. Fanny Hayes, for example, who was about the same age as Malia when she moved into the White House in 1877, was followed by the media until the day she died. "She was an American celebrity," said presidential historian Doug Wead.

While the interest in first daughters has stayed steady, the pressure on the children has intensified, said Wead, author of "All the Presidents' Children: Triumph and Tragedy in the Lives of America's First Families."

When Chelsea Clinton was just 13 years old, for example, she was ridiculed in a 1993 "Saturday Night Live" sketch that declared her "not a babe." Actor Mike Myers later apologized, and the skit was cut from replays of the show.

Amy Carter, who was 9 when she moved into the White House, was also mocked for her appearance and for her poor manners, after she pulled out a book during a state dinner. Her parents enrolled her in public school, illuminating the already bright spotlight on her. An infamous photograph of her first day at school shows the young girl with her head hanging low, carrying a Snoopy book bag and surrounded by a swarm of paparazzi.

But other presidential children have taken on power roles in their fathers' administrations. Anna Roosevelt, for example, was a "super aide" to Franklin D. Roosevelt during his last year in office, Wead said, describing her as a combination of a personal secretary and chief of staff, not to mention popular in the public eye.

Ever since the first Europeans came to North America, only to discover the puzzling fact that other people were already living here, the question of how to understand the Native American past has been both difficult and politically charged. For many years, American Indian life was viewed through a scrim of interconnected bigotry and romance, which simultaneously served to idealize the pre-contact societies of the Americas and to justify their destruction. Pre-Columbian life might be understood as savage and brutal darkness or an eco-conscious Eden where man lived in perfect harmony with nature. But it seemed to exist outside history, as if the native people of this continent were for some reason exempt from greed, cruelty, warfare and other near-universal characteristics of human society.

As archaeologist Timothy Pauketat's cautious but mesmerizing new book, "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi," makes clear, Cahokia -- the greatest Native American city north of Mexico -- definitely belongs to human history. (It is not "historical," in the strict sense, because the Cahokians left no written records.) At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland. Featuring a man-made central plaza covering 50 acres and the third-largest pyramid in the New World (the 100-foot-tall "Monks Mound"), Cahokia was home to at least 20,000 people. If that doesn't sound impressive from a 21st-century perspective, consider that the next city on United States territory to attain that size would be Philadelphia, some 600 years later. [Full article, with links, is 2200 words.]

Sonia Sotomayor won confirmation Thursday as the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, a history-making Senate vote that capped a summer-long debate heavy with ethnic politics and hints of high court fights to come. The third woman in court history, she'll be sworn in Saturday as the 111th justice and the first nominated by a Democrat in 15 years.

Britain's notorious "Great Train Robber" was released from his prison sentence Thursday as the nearly 80-year-old lay close to death in a hospital bed.

Britain's Justice Secretary Jack Straw said he decided to release Ronnie Biggs on compassionate grounds, after he fell seriously ill this week in his cell at Norwich Prison, 118 miles northeast of London.

The prison officers watching him at the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital will remain overnight, and leave tomorrow, once the paperwork for his release is complete, Straw said. Biggs turns 80 on Saturday.

Biggs was part of a gang that robbed a Glasgow-to-London mail train in August 1963, in what was called the "heist of the century." The robbery netted 2.6 million pounds — worth more than $50 million today.

Most of the gang was soon rounded up. Biggs was sentenced to 30 years in jail but escaped from prison in 1965 by climbing over a wall. He fled to Brazil, where he made a living from his notoriety, regaling journalists and tourists with stories of his exploits and even recording with punk band The Sex Pistols.

In 2001, he voluntarily returned to Britain, surrendered to police and was sent back to jail. He was locked up in Belmarsh high-security prison in London on his return before being moved to a specialist medical unit at Norwich prison...

Quiet sobs echo through the atrium of the Al-Rifai Mosque in Cairo, where rows of seated mourners are surrounded by wreathes of white flowers. Women dab their heavily made-up eyes, while men stare solemnly ahead.

As the streets of Tehran demand freedom, a different group of Iranians gathered in Cairo last week to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the death of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian monarch deposed by the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Shah was granted refuge in Egypt by President Anwar Sadat and died in Cairo soon after.

Approximately 65 members of the Iranian diaspora, dressed in various shades of designer-label black, have been coming to Cairo from all over the world, some for as many as 29 consecutive years, to pay their respects. They visit Sadat's tomb, the final resting place of the Shah in the Al-Rifai Mosque, and then hold a reception in his memory, led by Empress Farah Pahlavi, the late shah's third wife.

Seeing former president Bill Clinton in North Korea today on a mission to win the release of two journalists and perhaps raise other issues of concern in U.S.-North Korean relations immediately brings to mind a question:

Has any former president taken on such a job, presumably with the blessing of the current administration?

I called presidential historian Stephen Hess at the Brookings Institution to talk about the historical precedent. Hess basically said nothing quite like this has happened before.

We began with a conversation about the unique position Clinton is in as a former president and the husband of the secretary of State, and the big difference between his current mission -- which would seem to be in line with the Obama administration's wishes -- and the very independent type of diplomacy that former president Jimmy Carter has practiced over the years.

Then we discussed whether it's reasonable to believe that Clinton went to North Korea on a completely "private mission," as the White House has said. "Absolutely impossible," Hess says with a laugh...

The top U.S. uniformed military officer Wednesday offered a bleak assessment of the war in Afghanistan, saying that years of neglect before the Obama administration had starved the U.S.-led effort of funds and diplomatic heft - a condition he called "a culture of poverty."

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told editors and reporters at The Washington Times that nearly eight years after the war began, the U.S. military is still digging its way "out of a hole" and has not reached "year zero" in the campaign to turn back Taliban advances and gain the trust of the Afghan people.

The Obama administration's Sudan envoy is facing growing resistance to a suggestion he made recently to civilians displaced from Darfur that they should start planning to go back to their villages. Darfurian civilians and U.N. relief agencies say it is still too dangerous to return to the region where a six-year-long conflict has led to the deaths of more than 300,000 people.

In the latest sign of tension, Sheik al-Tahir, a leader at Kalma, one of Darfur's largest camps for displaced people, said Tuesday that homeless civilians would protest retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration's strategy for resolving the conflict and his assertion in June that genocide in Darfur has ended. Tahir and other camp leaders have accused Gration of taking the side of the Sudanese government, which has been seeking to dismantle the camps.

The latest round of violence in Darfur began in February 2003, when two rebel movements took up arms against the Islamic government in Khartoum. In response, the government, backed by local Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed, launched a bloody counterinsurgency operation that the Bush and Obama administrations have termed genocidal.

The Russian and United States militaries both played down the significance of two Russian attack submarines patrolling in international waters off the East Coast of the U.S., although the Pentagon confirmed Wednesday that it had been years since Russian subs had extended their reach into the region.

"It is the first time … in roughly a decade that we’ve seen this kind of behavior," Defense Department Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters.

The New York Times reported that a pair of nuclear-powered submarines – an Akula-class attack boat and a newer Akula-II variant – had been patrolling off the eastern seaboard in recent days.

Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement the submarines were being monitored during transit.

Morrell made it clear the Defense Department was not worried by the incident.

A new study published by the Peres Center for Peace argues that economic peace, though a helpful tool, cannot replace a political solution with the Palestinians.

The study was released last week at a special conference on the topic at Tel Aviv University, following a meeting between Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom and Palestinian National Economy Minister Bassim Khoury...

...Ashkenazi, who prior to joining the Peres center was the head of the IDF's West Bank and Gaza Strip Civil Administration Economic Branch, challenged the assumption that merely pumping money into the Palestinian economy would increase willingness for peace.

He recalled that back in 1999, the term "the cost of loss" was thrown around liberally.

"The reasoning was that by developing the Palestinian economy, increasing wages, starting businesses and improving their quality of life, the Palestinians would have something to lose and the cost of walking away from negotiations would be very high, so that on the day when the people want to rise up, the business leaders and the politicians would step up to calm things down," explained Ashkenazi.

What followed was a period of rapid economic expansion that saw a multitude of joint projects, increased tourism, skyrocketing GDP, five consecutive years of nine percent growth and improved bilateral relationships.

"And then came the surprise that caught both us and the Palestinians off-guard. Someone, most likely Arafat, lit a spark... the spark lit a flame, which in the midst of [an] unprecedented economic flourishing, set the Palestinian economy back 50 years, pushing the economy down by 40%. The 'cost of loss' proved an ineffective deterrent."...

A village in Kerala’s Periyar delta may be the site of a port that has remained untraced for centuries although ancient Indian and Greek texts had described it as an Indian Ocean trade hub, researchers have said.

Archaeological excavations at Pattanam, about 25km north of Kochi, have yielded an abundance of artefacts — a 2,000-year-old brick-layered wharf, a wooden canoe and hundreds of fragments of Roman and West Asian pottery, including wine jars.

The findings of three years of excavations suggest that the Pattanam site may have been part of Muziris, a port city mentioned in an ancient Tamil text, Akanunuru, as well as in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a navigational guide from ancient Greece describing ports along the Red Sea and in India. Historians have dated both texts to the first century AD.