A ROMAN SHIPWRECK IN THE ANCIENT PORT OF ANTIBES
A team of archaeologists from Inrap have uncovered a Roman shipwreck in southern France, in what was once part of the bustling ancient port of Antibes.
Antibes was known as Antipolis, a Greek colony originally founded by the Phoenicians of Massalia. The date of its origin is uncertain, but situated on the coast of Provence, Antipolis occupied a privileged position on the sea routes linking Marseilles to the Italian coast and contained a natural harbour – Anse Saint-Roch – which protected shipping from prevailing winds. Read full story from pasthorizonspr.com
News:
Possible da Vinci painting found in Scottish farmhouse; could be worth $150 million Fiona McLaren, 59, had kept an old painting in her Scottish farmhouse for decades. She reportedly didn’t think much of the painting, which had been given to her as a gift by her father. But after she finally decided to have the painting appraised, some experts are speculating that it may in fact be a 500-year-old painting by Leonardo da Vinci and potentially worth more than $150 million. Read full story from yahoo.com
Paranormal:
Witch Claims That The Loch Ness Monster Is Actually A Ghost
Kevin Carlyon, a ‘white witch’ and official ‘Protector of Loch Ness and the Loch Ness Creature’ is planning on holding a mass seance at the famous Scottish site in order to make contact with ‘Nessie’ who he believes is a ghost.
Carylon named himself as protector of Nessie after he cast a spell over Loch Ness which would prevent Swedish ‘monster hunter’ Jan Sundberg from capturing the mythical beast when he visited the Loch in 2001 on a Nessie hunt. The pair have since traded insults via email in an ongoing feud which lead to Sundberg threatening to cut Carylon an extra “asshole” and shove his head through it. Carylon responded by outing Sundberg as a convicted child molester. Read full story from themorningstarr.co.uk
Former owner of haunted Oaklands Mansion identifies himself in EVP
Oaklands Mansion in Laurel, MD, dates from 1732 and was once a prosperous plantation on over 1,000 acres. Through the years, it’s sheltered a number of different families. The Staggers family purchased it in the 1920’s and it’s still owned by a descendant today.
This once magnificent mansion, which now sits in the middle of a modern housing development in Price George’s County, has fallen into disrepair. Restoring it to its former glory is a labor of love for the owner, who has boyhood memories of visiting the house. His memories include imported Persian rugs on the gleaming hardwood floors, the elegant flocked velvet wallpaper and crystal chandelier in the dining room, and the large working fireplaces. In its day, Oaklands Mansion must have epitomized the opulent lifestyle of the southern aristocracy. Read full story from Examiner.com
Witchcraft accusations and human rights abuses in Africa
Witch‐hunts have become epidemic throughout Africa. Although witch‐hunts have historically been viewed as gender specific, with a large percentage of victims still identified as elderly and solitary women, recent reports show that victims of witch‐hunts include both women and men of all ages. read full story from paganrightsalliance.org3
Events:
“GhostFest: Paranormal & Horror Convention” – The heads in charge couldn’t have picked a better place than Salem for this weekend’s GhostFest: Paranormal & Horror Convention, which kicks off tonight.
Archeology:
Archaeological research visualizes urban life in ancient cities
A new archaeological research project at the University of Kent, south England, will reconstruct urban life in cities such as Constantinople during a period of history that has long remained hidden from view.
Reconstructions of daily life in ancient Roman cities such as Pompeii are plentiful, thanks to centuries of archaeological research. But that is not the case for the later Roman or ‘late antique’ period (AD 300-650) that saw the long transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages.
This is set to change now – thanks to a three-year project called ‘Visualising the Late Antique City’ – that will see the University’s Dr Luke Lavan, a lecturer in archaeology, leading a team studying artwork, excavated artefacts and the ruins of ancient cities from around the Mediterranean. Although Constantinople is now obscured by modern development within what is now Istanbul, other sites in Turkey, Tunisia, and Italy are expected to reveal much of the urban landscape of the period. Read full story from pashorizons.com
Arts & Entertainment:
4 Reasons Why David Gordon Green’s Suspiria Remake Could Be Great
In between fielding questions about Natalie Portman’s thong bikini in Your Highness, director David Gordon Green confirmed that he hopes to remake Dario Argento’s horror classic Suspiria next. As someone who really likes horror movies, I’m usually somewhere between disheartened and furious each time Hollywood announces a remake of another one of my favorite 70’s films. But a remake of Suspiria actually has real potential. Read full story from movieline.com
‘Ghost Adventures’ crew to probe `Idol` mansion
Washington: The ‘Ghost Adventures’ crew believes there may be demonic activity inside the haunted ‘American Idol’ mansion and they want to investigate the place as soon as possible.
Zak Bagans, the lead investigator of the ‘Ghost Adventures Crew’, insisted the alleged paranormal activity inside the Beverly Hills mansion where the ‘A.I.’ finalists were staying sounds legit and “possibly demonic.” Read full story from zeenews.com
DVD Review: Devil’s Playground
Devil’s Playground is one of the best examples of a schizophrenic horror film I’ve seen lately – and I don’t mean this in a good way. It hovers between horror, action and movie of the week melodrama, switching in tone so fast that you’ll probably give yourself whiplash as you struggle to make it through the full 90 minutes. Read full story from brutalashell.com
Lifestyle & Religion:
How Can A Bunny Lay Eggs?
While the Easter bunny may play second fiddle to Santa Claus in the pantheon of holiday myths, the wiggly-nosed critter actually has deeper historic roots than ol’ St. Nick.
The Easter bunny’s origins predate Christianity, whereas Santa Claus came to popular attention in the 4th century. Like the Easter eggs it is said to circulate, the Easter Bunny is an icon of fertility. The arrival of spring on one hand is a symbol of renewed life for people, but it also is the mating season for rabbits and hares, and it’s the time when birds lay eggs. If you put that together with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, you wind up mixing Easter with the Easter bunny. Read full story from krdo.com
Cambodia: where fear, magic and murder intertwine
BOMNOK, Cambodia — In the midday swelter of early hot season, Pah Eang shivered and walked into a mountainous forest she’d once visited every day. She said she was scared. She hadn’t been to this place, open and silent, in five months. Not since the killings and whispers of magic.
Pulling at her red sweatshirt, Pah dissolved into the Cardamom Mountains that ripple through western Cambodia, and began her search for a place that keeps this 22-year-old awake at night and plagues what’s left of her family. Her path wound deeper until everything was quiet and the only mark of humanity was a bamboo-thatched hut in a clearing so idyllic the savagery of what had occurred there was difficult to imagine.
Last September, Pah’s father and younger brother were killed around 1 a.m. in this hut. The father, Pheng Pah, 46, was stabbed to death while his son, Pah Broh, 15, had his throat slit. When the bodies were discovered the next morning, some villagers in this deeply rural community 25 miles from a paved road rejoiced. They said the father and son were “sorcerers” and had deserved to die. Read full story from globalpost.com
The Episcopal Church:The Way of Balaam
Manchester Cathedral to host tarot card readers and healers at ‘new age’ festival screamed a headline in a British broadsheet. The cathedral will also feature crystal healers and ‘dream interpretation’.
Fortune tellers, meditation experts and traditional healers will fill the pews during the day-long festival in May. The Bishop of Manchester, Rt. Rev Nigel McCulloch, said he wanted to celebrate ‘all forms of spirituality’. Bishop Nigel said the unconventional activities are not incompatible with Christian belief. Read full story from virtueonline.com
BP managers could face manslaughter charges over Gulf oil spill
The US authorities are considering charging BP managers with manslaughter after decisions they made before the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion last year killed 11 workers and caused the biggest offshore spill in US history.
Sources close to the process told Bloomberg that investigators were also examining whether BP’s executives, including former chief executive Tony Hayward, made statements that were at odds with what they knew during congressional hearings last year. Read full story from guardian.co.uk
Paranormal:
County’s Paranormal Society explores haunted hotel
Could Sonoma State be haunted? You should ask our own team of ghost adventurers, the Sonoma County Paranormal Society (SCPS) headed by Lead Investigator, Sonoma State sophomore and Environmental Studies and Planning major Joshua Goudy and friends. The SCPS spend their free time studying locations rumored to be haunted for proof of life after death.
Goudy and his crew will be visiting the Holbrooke Hotel in Grass Valley, Calif. on Tues, April 12., a location famous for multiple instances of paranormal encounters.
The SCPS is made of a core group of five students of both Sonoma State and the Santa Rosa Junior College with a common interest and the desire to share experiences in their studies of paranormal activity. Read full story from sonomastatestar.com
Science:
Lost in Triangulation: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mathematical Slip-Up
Artist, inventor and philosopher Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was without a doubt a genius. Yet, there is some criticism. In his book 1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (William Morrow, 2008) British author and retired submarine commander Gavin Menzies claims that da Vinci swiped most of his ideas from the Chinese. Menzies’s theory was poorly received by the world of science. Besides, isn’t da Vinci’s brilliance beyond question? Definitely, but the Dutch mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs did find an error in one of the Renaissance man‘s drawings. Read full story from scientificamerican.com
‘I’m Not A Witch’ Picked As Top Quote Of Year
Christine O’Donnell’s TV ad declaration “I’m not a witch” during her U.S. Senate campaign topped this year’s best quotes, according to a Yale University librarian.
O’Donnell’s quote is cited by Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School, who released his fifth annual list of the most notable quotations of the year. In the ad, O’Donnell was responding to reports of her revelations that she had dabbled in witchcraft years ago. Read full story from npr.org
Loch Ness monster ‘seen twice’
Simon Dinsdale, a retired police detective from Essex, insists that the two minute film recorded 50 years ago by his father, a famous Nessie-hunter, is genuine.
The footage, shot by Tim Dinsdale in 1960, is one of the best-known images put forward as evidence by those who insist on the existence of the mysterious creature.
Now the insistence of those who believe in Nessie that the film is genuine has been lent new weight after Mr Dinsdale claimed he had seen the monster with his own eyes on two occasions. Read full story from telegraph.co.uk
BP Gulf Spill the #1 Twitter Trend in 2010
There were 25 billion 140-character tweets sent out in 2010, and more of them were concerned with the BP Gulf Spill than any other topic. Twitter has just released its list of the top 10 tweets for 2010, and it’s a pretty interesting blend of pop culture phenomena, world events, and debuting gadgetry. And seeing as how Twitter has grown to be pretty international in its reach and user base, I was a tad surprised to see that the BP spill took the top slot. Here’s how the top trends broke down: Read full story from treehugger.com
Global Warming Mapped
The world is getting warmer. Whether the cause is human activity or natural variability, thermometer readings all around the world have risen steadily since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.8°Celsius (1.4°Fahrenheit) since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15-0.20°C per decade. Read full story from nasa.gov
New Da Vinci mystery discovered in Mona Lisa
Leonardo Da Vinci’s 500-year-old Renaissance masterpiece has long been steeped in mystery with even today, the true identity of the woman with the alluring smile still far from certain.
The painting also featured in the Dan Brown blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, which was turned into a 2006 film starring Tom Hanks, in which his character interprets secret messages hidden in the Mona Lisa and some of Da Vinci’s other paintings, including The Last Supper.
Now members of Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage have revealed that by magnifying high resolution images of the Mona Lisa’s eyes letters and numbers can be seen. Read full story from scotsman.com
Jonathan Horwitz Discusses “Shamanic Inheritance” on December 14 “Why Shamanism Now?” Radio Show
Streaming live on the Co-Creator Radio Network on Tuesday, December 14, at 11 a.m. Pacific time/2 p.m. Eastern time, on her show “Why Shamanism Now?: A Practical Path to Authenticity,” shaman and founder of the Last Mask Center for Shamanic Healing Christina Pratt welcomes Jonathan Horwitz, co-founder with Annette Host of the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies. Horwitz says, “The shaman works by asking for help. We never get anywhere alone. We’re always being helped, although often we do not recognize… The shamanic path is excellent for learning to re-connect with being alive, re-discover the spiritual power we are all born with, and to re-learn what it means to be a part of the whole.” Read full story from pr-canada.net
Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf
Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.
At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said.
The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history. For instance, scientists have debated over when early modern humans exited Africa, with dates as early as 125,000 years ago and as recent as 60,000 years ago (the more recent date is the currently accepted paradigm), according to study researcher Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Read full story from livescience.com
Rooting for swarm intelligence in plants
They’re underfoot and underappreciated. But the roots of a plant may demonstrate the remarkable wisdom of crowds just as swarms of honeybees or humans can.
Three plant scientists now propose that roots growing this way and that in their dark and dangerous soil world may fit a definition for what’s called swarm intelligence. Each tip in a root system acquires information at least partly independently, says plant cell biologist František Baluška of the University of Bonn in Germany. If that information gets processed in interactions with other roots and the whole tangle then solves what might be considered a cognitive problem in a way that a lone root couldn’t, he says, then that would be swarm intelligence. Read full story from sciencenews.org
Now Playing: Geminid Meteor Showers, Year’s Best Sky Show
The annual Geminid shower is about to hit its peak, with anywhere from 60 to 100 meteors zooming across the night sky each hour between midnight tonight and dawn on Tuesday.
The weeklong shower is easily visible to the naked eye and is the best in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Associated Press calls the meteors (or shooting stars) “rocky celestial leftovers.” Earth passes through this stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon, which is considered an extinct comet, every December. Read full story from aolnews.com
The Senior Druid and Pagan Priest presented a 36-page document asking for a Judicial Review on the decision by the Minister of Justice to grant Sheffield University an extension to retain the remains for five years.
King Arthur said: ‘This is not just a Druid or Pagan issue, and we have the support of thousands of people from all walks of life from nations around the world and all the major faiths, who have signed our petition demanding that the remains be re-interred at what should have been their final resting place. Read full story from salsburyjournal.co.uk
Two years ago, a practicing Wiccan who was about to graduate from Southeastern Local Schools asked the district to eliminate the prayer at the graduation ceremony. Prayer went ahead as scheduled, and nothing more was said.
About a month later, it was the city of Greenfield — which had for years begun its city council meetings with a prayer that usually ended with “in Jesus’ name, Amen” — threatened with a lawsuit by The American Civil Liberties Union to stop the prayer. The practice was changed shortly thereafter. Read full story from chillicothegazette.com
