(Oct. 20) -- In a striking admission sure to stoke the imaginations of conspiracy theorists everywhere, a former Secret Service agent reveals how he came "chillingly close" to shooting President Lyndon B. Johnson right outside his home just hours after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

So reads "The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence," a new book co-authored by the former agent himself, Gerald "Jerry" Blaine, and writer Lisa McCubbin. In it, the authors vividly recall Nov. 22, 1963, the fateful night of Kennedy's assassination, when Blaine was assigned to watch newly appointed President Johnson's house in Washington, D.C., in case of another attack....

Jon Runyan, a former pro football player and now the Republican nominee against freshman Rep. John Adler (D-NJ), has added his voice to the recent constitutional jurisprudence of GOP candidates -- listing the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford Supreme Court decision as a recent case that he disagreed with....

Adler then asked the question again, pointing out that he asked for decisions in the previous 10-15 years. Runyan was reportedly unable to give an answer....

Captain Ahab had Moby Dick. Bob Neyland's white whale is the Bonhomme Richard.

For decades, thrillseekers, archaeologists and professional treasure hunters have searched for the wreckage of the Bonhomme Richard, a Continental Navy ship from the Revolutionary War that sank on Sept. 25, 1779, off the coast of Yorkshire, England, in the choppy waters of the North Sea.

But the ship is legally the property of the U.S. Navy, which is responsible for preserving whatever may be left of it. A big part of that job falls to Neyland, chief archaeologist for the Navy's Underwater Archaeology Branch, based at the Washington Navy Yard. The tiny unit is responsible for identifying and preserving sunken and historically important Navy vessels from colonial-era warships to World War II fighter planes....

Egypt's top archaeologist has shown off the newly discovered tomb of a pharaonic priest, a find he says could point the way to a new necropolis to be excavated near the famed Giza pyramids.

Standing inside the 4,300-year-old structure on Tuesday, Zahi Hawass said hieroglyphics on the tomb's walls indicate it belonged to Rudj-ka, a priest inspector in the mortuary cult of the pharaoh Khafre, who built the second largest of Giza's pyramids.

The tomb - about the size of a train car - was adorned with paintings, some of them still vivid.

Images on one wall depict a man standing on a boat, spearing fish....

The Google R&D Center in Israel has partnered with the Israel Antiquities Authority in an effort to make Dead Sea scrolls available online for free.

The amazing project aims at creating the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, which will include hi-resolution and multi spectra images of the entire collection — 900 manuscripts that have some 30,000 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.

The imaging technology will be supplied by MegaVision, a U.S. based company, while Google will be in charge with uploading the images to the Internet and performing meaningful searches across a broad range of data in a number of languages and formats.

All these will result in “unprecedented scholarly and popular access to the Scrolls and related research” as each scroll will have meta-data including transcriptions, translations and bibliography.

Not sure about you folks, but that sounds nothing short of cool. Just imagine browsing through all these scrolls from the comfort of your home....

With rising anti-Muslim sentiment across the country, an untold story is raising greater awareness about the Muslim faith and the teachings of the Quran. That awareness comes from an unlikely source: a small Jewish congregation in Creve Coeur.

Temple Emanuel is premiering a groundbreaking exhibit of photos that reveals Albanian Muslims who saved 2,000 Jews during World War II.

It's a story you've likely never heard. It is a story told through the faces of Albanian Muslims who risked their own lives to live by a code of faith and honor called Besa.

Dr. Ghazala Hayat is a neurologist at St. Louis University and serves as spokesperson for the Islamic Foundation of Greater Saint Louis.

Hayat said while Besa is an Albanian word, it is part of Islamic culture and teachings. According to Dr. Hayat, Besa is an ancient code which requires people to endanger their own lives if necessary to save the life of anyone seeking asylum. To this day, Besa is the highest moral law of the region, superseding religious differences, blood feuds, and even tribal traditions.

The exhibit is opening eyes throughout the world.

"You don't have to share the same faith. You have to respect each other's faith," Hayat said.

Pictures of the Albanian Muslims in the exhibit tell a lifetime of stories. As a young mother, one woman did not have enough breast milk to feed her son. A Jewish woman she hid nursed him instead. She was asked if she minded that a Jewish mother had fed her baby.

"Jews are God's people like us," the woman said.

Another man who also hid Jewish families said, "I did nothing special. All Jews are our brothers."

And the head of the Bektashi sect, with more than seven million followers, tells the story of Albania's prime minister, who gave a secret order during the Nazi occupation....

Archaeologists in the Swiss city of Zurich have unearthed a 5,000-year-old door that may be one of the oldest ever found in Europe.

The ancient poplar wood door is "solid and elegant" with well-preserved hinges and a "remarkable" design for holding the boards together, chief archaeologist Niels Bleicher said Wednesday.

Using tree rings to determine its age, Bleicher believes the door could have been made in the year 3,063 B.C. -- around the time that construction on Britain's world famous Stonehenge monument began.

"The door is very remarkable because of the way the planks were held together," Bleicher told The Associated Press.

Harsh climatic conditions at the time meant people had to build solid houses that would keep out much of the cold wind that blew across Lake Zurich, and the door would have helped, he said. "It's a clever design that even looks good."...

HYDE PARK — In honor of the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the Works Progress Administration and the Rural Electrification Administration, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum and the Roosevelt Institute on Sunday will present "1935 and the Enduring New Deal: The Works Progress Administration and the Rural Electrification Administration."...

This program will examine the historical impact of the WPA and REA's infrastructure programs, current efforts to document and preserve New Deal projects, and the lessons that can be learned from these programs. Poughkeepsie Journal Executive Editor Stuart Shinske will moderate the discussion....

Pakistan's powerful intelligence services were heavily involved in preparations for the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008, according to classified Indian government documents obtained by the Guardian.

A 109-page report into the interrogation of key suspect David Headley, a Pakistani-American militant arrested last year and detained in the US, makes detailed claims of ISI support for the bombings.

Under questioning, Headley described dozens of meetings between officers of the main Pakistani military intelligence service, the ISI, and senior militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group responsible for the Mumbai attacks....

A Neanderthal infant was discovered alongside two adults, potentially representing a prehistoric family.

Neanderthal youngsters that made it to the "terrible two's" were large, sturdy and toothy, suggests a newly discovered Neanderthal infant. The child almost survived to such an age, but instead died when it was just one and a half years old.

The remains of this infant -- a lower jaw and teeth unearthed in a Belgian cave -- are the youngest Neanderthal ever found in northwest Europe, according to a study that will appear in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Since the remains of two adults were also previously discovered in the cave, the fossil collection may represent a Neanderthal family....

A North End privy sealed for more than a century has yielded thousands of artifacts that are giving archeologists an unprecedented look at how the world’s oldest profession was practiced by improper Bostonians of the 19th century.

From toothbrushes to jewelry to cosmetics, and parts of 19 syringes used for hygiene, the treasure trove plucked from a now-buried site near Haymarket is evidence of a thriving, racy economy that the city’s prim Victorian image never acknowledges.

But the 3,000 items found during a 1993 archeological survey linked to the Big Dig, behind long-vanished rowhouses on Endicott Street, show the trappings of a busy brothel aimed at middle-class customers.

The findings, the most of their kind ever discovered in Boston, have not been previously publicized outside academic and archeological circles. Limits in funding and staff have consigned most of them to private storage and occasional analysis by students and researchers.

That work has been a colorful revelation, Beaudry and other archeologists said. Research into housing records has shown that the property at 27 and 29 Endicott St. probably was used as a brothel for much of the time between 1852 and 1883.

In a city where 5,000 prostitutes are estimated to have worked in the last half of the 19th century, the property had plenty of company. Beaudry estimated that the North End, Boston’s red-light district of the time, contained 30 to 40 brothels within its tight, congested confines....

Leading Bulgarian archaeologist Nikolay Ovcharov has presented the latest finds of his team from the Ancient Thrace and Rome fortress of Perperikon in the Rhodope Mountain.

One of the finds is a miniature model of a stone grinder dated back to 7000 years ago. Ovcharov believes the model might have been an actual children's toy.

Another unique find is a figure of a Thracian warrior from the 3rd-2nd century BC. The Thracian warrior used to hold a spear. The figure is modeled after the Greek god Apollo, who in the Roman Age "replaced" the cult for the "Thracian Horseman", a local deity, among the Thracians.

Ovcharov also showed a surgical instrument from Roman times which was used for plucking parasites out of human bodies. He explained the instrument is the same as the one portrayed on every pharmacy with a serpent wrapped around it or held by the Ancient Greece god of medicine Asclepius.

According to the professor, the most interesting find at Perperikon from the Middle Ages period is the 13th century image of a mummer, or "kuker" in Bulgarian. The human-line image features a man with a bear head and a bear skin, which according to Ovcharov, proves that today's kukeri games around Bulgaria – in which humans dress as scary animal creatures to chase away evil ghosts – were inherited from the ancient Dionysus games among the Thracians....

The pre-Columbian Indian societies that once lived in the Amazon rainforests may have been much larger and more advanced than researchers previously realized. Together with Brazilian colleagues, archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg have found the remains of approximately 90 settlements in an area South of the city of Santarém, in the Brazilian part of the Amazon.

"The most surprising thing is that many of these settlements are a long way from rivers, and are located in rainforest areas that extremely sparsely populated today," says Per Stenborg from the Department of Historical Studies, who led the Swedish part of the archaeological investigations in the area over the summer.

Traditionally archaeologists have thought that these inland areas were sparsely populated also before the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries. One reason for this assumption is that the soils found in the inland generally is quite infertile; another reason is that access to water is poor during dry periods as these areas are situated at long distances from the major watercourses. It has therefore been something of a mystery that the earliest historical account; from Spaniard Francisco de Orellana's journey along the River Amazon in 1541-42, depicted the Amazon as a densely populated region with what the Spanish described as "towns", situated not only along the river itself, but also in the inland.

NEW DISCOVERIES COULD CHANGE PREVIOUS IDEAS

The current archaeological project in the Santarém area could well change our ideas about the pre-Columbian Amazon. The archaeologists have come across areas of very fertile soil scattered around the otherwise infertile land. These soils, known as "Terra Preta do Indio", or "Amazonian Dark Earth", are not natural, but have been created by humans (that is, they are "anthrosols").

"Just as importantly, we found round depressions in the landscape, some as big as a hundred metres in diameter, by several of the larger settlements," says Stenborg. "These could be the remains of water reservoirs, built to secure water supply during dry periods."...

During World War II, Allied forces readily admitted that German tanks were superior to their own. The big question for Allied forces, then, was how many tanks Germany was producing. Here's how they reverse-engineered serial numbers to find out.

To solve the problem of determining production numbers, the Allied forces initially tried conventional intelligence gathering: spying, intercepting and decoding transmissions and interrogating captured enemies.

Via this method, the Allies deduced that from June 1940 to September 1942, the German military industrial complex churned out around 1,400 tanks each month. That number just didn't seem right. To put that number in context, Axis forces used "only" 1,200 tanks during the Battle of Stalingrad, an eight month battle with a total of almost two million casualties. So that number of 1,400 was likely way too high.

Obviously skeptical of the above result, the Allies looked for other methods of estimation. And then they found a critical clue: serial numbers.

Allied intelligence noticed each captured German tank contained a serial number unique to the tank. With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine that the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production....

In 1838, the United States government forcibly removed more than 16,000 Cherokee Indian people from their homelands in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia, and sent them to Indian Territory—a place we now call Oklahoma. Both the route they followed and the experience itself are known as the Trail of Tears, and they are commemorated by The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.

The Trail covers thousands of miles of land and water routes in parts of nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee) and "was designated to preserve the story, the routes, and support the associated sites that commemorate the Cherokees' forced migration." Much of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail is on waterways. People were moved onto boats and traveled along the Mississippi River, and then disembarked and walked.

The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail isn't a single, contiguous route managed by a one agency, but a cooperative effort by number of federal, state and local agencies, organizations, tribes, and private individuals to administer sites that are either along the original route or which have exhibits or other information about the migration....

Sixty-five years have passed since the end of the Second World War, but even today it would seem that many Germans still cling to the prejudice and racism which the Nazi party identified with.

A new poll conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation for Political Education, a foundation with close ties to the German Social Democratic party, has found that one in 10 Germans wants "a new Fuehrer to lead the country with an iron fist", and that every third German thinks all foreign immigrants should be expelled from Germany if unemployment becomes a problem. The poll consisted of 2,500 people of different ages. The results were announced on Wednesday....

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered the tomb of a priest who conducted prayer rituals before statues of a dead pharaoh more than 4,000 years ago, the antiquities council said on Monday.

The tomb, which belonged to the priest Rwd-ka and dated back to the Fifth Dynasty of 2,514 to 2,374 BC, was found near the pyramids of Giza, antiquities chief Zahi Hawass told AFP.

One of the priest's roles was to lead a series or rituals and prayers before statues of a departed pharaoh who was venerated as a God....

WINDHOEK (AFP) – Church bells ring out on the dot of noon in the heart of Namibia's sleepy capital Windhoek, still precise 100 years after the church was built as an emblem of Imperial Germany's colonial reach.

"It is like being at home. It is wonderful to hear these beautiful bells here in Namibia, nearly 10,000 kilometres (6,000 miles) away from Germany," said tourist Annelise Schmieder from Stuttgart.

"I am thrilled that I could see the 'Christuskirche'," said Schmieder, standing on the steps of the sandstone Church of Christ and glancing up at the 42-metre (138-foot) high tower on a hill overlooking the city.

The Lutheran church was consecrated on October 16, 1910 after a tumultuous period of construction that mirrored the upheaval of Imperial Germany's conquest of a land then known as South West Africa....

Archaeologists are to dig out a portal tomb in Northern Ireland for the first time in 50 years.

The collapse of Tirnony Dolmen near Maghera has produced a rare opportunity to discover what lies beneath — and exactly how old it is.

Normally portal tombs, which are among the oldest built structures still standing in Northern Ireland, are off limits to excavators and must be preserved.

But after the massive capstone of this portal tomb fell to the ground earlier this year, archaeologists will be able to uncover the secrets it has held for millennia before repairs are carried out.

An iconographic analysis conducted regarding different Maya murals created in Prehispanic times, between 600 and 1000 of the Common Era, have allowed the hypothetical reconstruction of the way the milita was integrated in this culture; scenes studied refer to aspects like the command and armaments systems, as well as communications and tactics used at the height of this ancient civilization.

Until now, Bonampak frescoes, in Chiapas, and San Bartolo, in El Peten, Guatemala, were the most researched expressions to understand siege and defense tactics of Maya cities. Nevertheless, in 4 archaeological zones of northern Yucatan Peninsula there are mural paintings that bring in new information on the matter.

Eduardo Tejeda Monroy, archaeologist of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), presented a descriptive study of the images that integrate murals at Chichen Itza, Chacmultun and Mulchic, in Yucatan and Ichmac, in Campeche, during his recent participation in the 6th Permanent Conferences of Archaeology in 2010 at the Templo Mayor Museum....

Head of the Archaeology Department Nicolas Kabbad said one of the two presses is dedicated for olive pressing and the second for pressing grapes, adding that both presses are made up of rock basins engraved on rock designed for pressing and refinement, gathering the juice in a circular basin 1.5 m in diameter, with a hole for olive and grapes juice to pass.

He added the recent discovery is to be added to a series of archaeological discoveries at the site. The mission has already unearthed 17 olive presses since the outset of its work twenty years ago, adding that efforts are underway to unearth more presses which are an indication of the region's richness in cultivating olives, grapes and many fruitful trees.

The Syrian-German-Italian mission wrapped up excavations on Monday at Tal Qatana in Mesherfe in Homs which started late June....