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In England, Bar Hill’s ‘Skull Comb’ Is an Iron Age Mystery

FENS AND FARMLAND DOMINATE ENGLAND’S Cambridgeshire. The A14 motorway runs the length of the entire county and, just a few miles northwest of the ancient university town of Cambridge, it passes by the small village of Bar Hill. There, during excavations a few years ago, archaeologist Michael Marshall and his team found something extraordinary: a piece of ancient human skull, carved to resemble—almost, but not quite—a comb.

It’s not unusual to find artifacts in this corner of England, which has been inhabited for millennia. In particular, Cambridgeshire was home to several Iron Age settlements, dating from around 350 BC to the arrival of the Romans about 400 years later. Marshall and his colleagues knew they would turn up some interesting things when they began digging in 2016 ahead of a planned A14 expansion. Two years later, after excavations at about 40 sites, they had collected more than 280,000 artifacts.

Of all the tools and bits of bone unearthed, the skull comb stood out. It’s one of only three ever found, worldwide—the other two were discovered at nearby sites decades ago—and was a career first for Marshall, the prehistoric and Roman finds specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). It was also an item of intrigue: something that could easily fit in the palm of one’s hand, but which clearly carried great value. Someone had carefully carved nearly a dozen teeth along one edge, and then drilled a hole at the top. Was it a tool? An amulet? Something else entirely? Figuring out the comb’s purpose required understanding how it might have fit into Iron Age Britain.

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Officials Investigate After Mysterious Disappearance of 30-Ton Shipment of Explosive Chemicals

More than 30 tons of ammonium nitrate shipped by rail from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to California April 12 never arrived at its destination.

The fertilizer — transported as pellets in a covered hopper car often used to ship coal — fell from the railcar on the way to a rail siding, according to a KQED report. The explosives company that shpped the hazardous material notified federal authorities May 10 about the missing material.

Timothy McVeigh used ammonium nitrate to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building where law enforcement planned the raid on the Waco, Texas, compound housing the Branch Davidians. McVeigh used approximately two tons of ammonium nitrate in the 1995 attack that killed 168 and wounded hundreds more.

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Ukraine Expands Weapons Training For Children As Bakhmut Reportedly Falls

Only two months ago the mainstream media widely circulated a video which they said showcased “shocking footage” of Russian school children training with military weapons in programs designed to prepare them for the military.  The programs were widely criticized as “indoctrination.” 

Of course, Ukraine has also been involved in weapons training for children and these efforts have only increased in recent months as the city of Bakhmut, an epicenter of the fighting for many months, has reportedly fallen to Russia’s Wagner Group.  CNBC has briefly reported on the “Defense of Ukraine” program at the military-patriotic center for schoolchildren in Lviv.  The center was opened this month with plans to open dozens of other training facilities for children across the country in the near future. 

The western city of Lviv has been a primary relocation point for children escaping the war in the east, so it’s not surprising that the Ukrainian government would seek young recruits for the war effort there.

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NYPD reportedly stood by, failed to help Chinatown woman as homeless man stabbed her to death in her own home

In a recently filed lawsuit by the family of 35-year-old Christina Yuna Lee, the Chinatown woman who was killed early in the morning on February 13, 2022 by a homeless man who followed her into her apartment, the victim’s family alleged that two NYPD officers heard her screams “for at least five minutes” and did nothing.

The New York Post reports that two unidentified cops dispatched out of the 5th Precinct responded to Lee’s 911 phone call, which she made while being attacked, and the cops responded within four minutes, “heard Ms. Lee screaming for help” but “failed to gain entry to Ms. Lee’s apartment until Ms. Lee had been stabbed more than 40 times by her attacker and succumbed to her injuries,” according to the lawsuit. 

According to the lawsuit, made against the city and the NYPD, the cops allegedly spoke to the killer “through the closed door of Ms. Lee’s apartment” and “Despite having reason to believe Ms. Lee’s life was in imminent danger, (the officers) failed to gain entry to Ms. Lee’s apartment or otherwise provide her with any potentially life-saving police or medical assistance at that time.”

The lawsuit, filed with the Manhattan Supreme Court, is seeking unspecified damages.

The victim’s aunt, Boksun Lee, said in the court filing that the cops did not enter her niece’s apartment until after she died.

Christina Yuna Lee, a digital producer originally from New Jersey, entered her Chrystie Street apartment around 4:20 am that morning and was allegedly followed by 25-year-old Assamad Nash, a homeless man out on bail for previous alleged violent crimes and who had been convicted of petty larceny and robbery. Nash has been charged with murder for Lee’s killing.

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Do Whites Also Deserve Reparations?

In the United States, calls for reparations are, once again, heating up. A Duke University professor recently called for $14 trillion in reparations for the descendants of American slavery (roughly $350,000 per recipient).

The professor, William Darity, isn’t the only one calling for reparations. The mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has established a task force that will explore compensation for black citizens. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has signaled his support for the idea. Detroit’s Reparations Task Force is currently exploring forms of compensation for the city’s black residents. Similar events are taking place in St. Louis. In early May, California’s reparations task force approved recommendations that could see some black residents receive $1.2 million each as compensation for slavery and racial discrimination.

Reparations are a terrible idea.

Calls for race-based compensation appeal to emotion, not logic. First, how do we define slavery? Contrary to popular belief, African Americans weren’t the only victims of slavery. As Stephan Talty, an author who has researched slavery in great detail, has noted, white people were also the victims of slavery.

In a piece for Salon, a hyper-progressive online magazine, Talty discussed the fact that, contrary to popular belief, white slavery did occur prior to the occurrence of the Civil War. Talty referenced the work of Joel Augustus Rogers, a historian who meticulously documented the many ways in which whites were kidnapped and sold into slavery. These kidnappings occurred from the early 1700s right up until 1861, the year the Civil War started. Some of the victims were orphans or unwanted babies, while others were impoverished immigrants. White slavery occurred in America. This is an inconvenient truth that receives little or no attention, probably because it contradicts the “white privilege” narrative that continues to do the rounds.

Even if we were to agree on a definition of slavery, how are we supposed to verify those that claim to be victims? Then, of course, there’s the matter of financing reparations. Where will the money come from?

For comment on the matter, I reached out to David W. Rasmussen, the director of the Policy Sciences Center at Florida State University. Rasmussen recently published a paper discussing reparations for black citizens, and why such a system of redress for past injustices deserves criticism.

Rasmussen told me that although it’s easy to make the case that black citizens are owed reparations—the right to own slaves is embedded in the Constitution, after all—this doesn’t mean that the case being made has any real substance. The idea of reparations, noted Rasmussen, fails for many reasons.

First off, reparations are expensive, with “reasonable” estimates ranging from about $500 billion to $2.7 trillion. The highest estimate of damages is $7 quadrillion, he said, “a figure that emerges because damages are compounded at an annual interest rate of 6 percent.” For the mathematically challenged, a quadrillion is 1,000 trillion.

Moreover, black reparations would benefit about 12 percent of the population.

In other words, said Rasmussen, “We are asking 88 percent of the population to pay as much as $500 billion (probably over a period of years) to bear the cost.”

All Americans, including those who are currently struggling to put food on the table, would bear this cost (40 million Americans, more than 25 percent of the population, currently live in poverty). Only 30 percent of Americans are in favor of some form of reparations. “Many of these,” according to Rasmussen, “may find a $500 billion price tag a hard sell.” Indeed.

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COVID emergency orders are among `greatest intrusions on civil liberties,′ Justice Gorsuch says

The Supreme Court got rid of a pandemic-related immigration case with a single sentence.

Justice Neil Gorsuch had a lot more to say, leveling harsh criticism of how governments, from small towns to the nation’s capital, responded to the gravest public health threat in a century.

The justice, a 55-year-old conservative who was President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

He pointed to orders closing schools, restricting church services, mandating vaccines and prohibiting evictions. His broadside was aimed at local, state and federal officials — even his colleagues.

“Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale,” Gorsuch wrote in an eight-page statement Thursday that accompanied an expected Supreme Court order formally dismissing a case involving the use of the Title 42 policy to prevent asylum seekers from entering the United States.

The policy was ended last week with the expiration of the public health emergency first declared more than three years ago because of the coronavirus pandemic.

From the start of his Supreme Court tenure in 2017, Gorsuch, a Colorado native who loves to ski and bicycle, has been more willing than most justices to part company with his colleagues, both left and right.

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Boncuklu Tarla: A megalithic site predating Göbekli Tepe

The uncovering of the stunning megalithic architecture of Göbekli Tepe in modern day Türkiye less than three decades ago turned our view of pre-history upside down, with the massive t-shaped pillars of the site pre-dating the pyramids and Stonehenge by some six or seven thousand years. But while it took the spotlight, archaeologists in the area continued finding other, similar sites with impressive architecture and dating back the same mind-boggling stretch in time, some 10,000 years before present.

One of the sites that has become well-known recently is Karahan Tepe (perhaps most notably after it was covered in Graham Hancock’s Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse). But another, lesser known site that lies further to the east may end up being even more important: Boncuklu Tarla. Discovered during construction work on the Ilısu Dam in 2008, it has undergone excavation over the last 11 years and has already turned up many things of note.

Like the other ancient sites of that time in Turkey, Boncuklu Tarla features a walled ‘temple’ with rock pillars – but they appear to predate Göbekli Tepe by a thousand years or so (though the pillars don’t appear to be as impressive), with the earliest layer of the site dating back a staggering 13,000 years. What’s more, the excavation over the past eleven years has worked through multiple layers of the site, with dating of those layers suggesting that it was occupied for around 4,000 years – from around 11,000 BCE to 7,000BCE!

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Israel Uses Its Civilians As Human Shields During Its Attack On Gaza

Israel’s latest assault on the besieged Gaza Strip resulted in the murder of 33 Palestinians, a third of them women and children, in a “targeted assassination” campaign, again, with a majority of those killed being civilians. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, attempted to score a domestic political victory, however, the plot didn’t quite go to plan.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning last week, at around 2:00AM, Israeli fighter jets began bombarding the besieged Gaza Strip. Three prominent leaders of the second most powerful armed group in the territory, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement (PIJ), were killed along with their wives and children in the initial strikes. Although Western corporate media attempted to brush over this fact, it is a violation of international law to break a ceasefire agreement by murdering none-active combatants along with their families. There were no legal proceedings, no plausible threat to the Israeli side, and the regime failed to produce any evidence that killing the individuals they targeted would prevent any future threat — in fact they demonstrated the very opposite.

Tel Aviv notified the United States government about its intentions and Washington did not prevent the attack, making them complicit in the war crimes committed. The Israeli military also used American aircraft in order to carry out its assassination campaign.

In total, 33 Palestinians were killed, roughly a third of them women and children, with over 110 suffering wounds from the Israeli onslaught, 38 of whom were children. On the other side, 1 Israeli was killed by Palestinian retaliatory rocket fire, with a number of others injured. It is expected that Israel is again hiding their combatant deaths, after a gag order was placed on the destruction of military sites during the confrontation. Among the hundreds of sites bombarded by the Israelis was the Beit Lahia Cemetery, an act which was condemned by Gaza’s Ministry of Waqf and Islamic Affairs as “a flagrant violation of the sanctity of the dead”. Ninety-four Gazan families, comprising 535 people, lost their sources of livelihood in Gaza due to the bombings, a further 800 people were displaced, with 940 buildings damaged and 15 residential blocks, containing over 50 apartments, being completely destroyed.

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FBI Whistleblower Report: Bank of America Gave Americans’ Banking Info to FBI Around January 6

A House Judiciary Committee report on FBI whistleblowers found that Bank of America provided the FBI a list of anyone who used their services in the D.C. area regardless of if they participated in the events of the January 6 protests.

The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an interim report on the government’s abuse, misallocation of resources, and retaliation.

Among the Judiciary Committee’s many revelations, FBI whistleblowers Garret O’Boyle, and retired FBI supervisory Intelligence George Hill testified about how Bank of America (BoA) gave the FBI’s Washington Field Office a list of individuals who had made transactions in the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area with a BoA credit or debit card between January 5 and 7, 2021.

Hill also testified that individuals who had previously purchased a firearm with a BoA product were elevated to the top of the list provided to the FBI Washington Field Office, which was reported by Breitbart News’s Ashley Oliver.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), a member of the weaponization subcommittee, emphasized during the subcommittee’s Thursday hearing that Hill testified that there was no geolocation fencing regarding the datamining of Americans’ purchasing of firearms.

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Pentagon Walks Back Claim It Killed Al-Qaeda Leader In Syria

US military officials are walking back claims that a drone strike Central Command (CENTCOM) launched on May 3 in northwest Syria killed a senior al-Qaeda leader after evidence emerged that a civilian was killed.

When the strike was first launched in Syria’s northwest Idlib province, reports immediately emerged that the strike killed a sheep herder with no ties to any militant groups. The Associated Press spoke with family members and neighbors of the victim, Lotfi Hassan Misto, who insisted he was innocent.

According to The Washington Post, Misto was a 56-year-old father of 10, and the paper spoke with terrorism experts who said it was unlikely he was affiliated with al-Qaeda. 

The operation was overseen by U.S. Central Command, which claimed hours after the strike, without citing evidence or naming a suspect, that the Predator drone strike had targeted a “senior Al Qaeda leader.” But now there is doubt inside the Pentagon about who was killed, two U.S. defense officials told The Washington Post.

“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” an unnamed military official told the Post. Another official claimed the person they killed was al-Qaeda but offered no evidence.

“Though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda,” the official said.

CENTCOM’s initial press release on the strike did not name the person they killed. Since then, the command has refused to share any details of the operation or say why they could have targeted the wrong person.

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