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In 1619, a hurricane sank the English merchant ship Warwick in Bermuda's Castle Harbor. The struggling settlers of Jamestown, Virginia, were desperately awaiting the shipload of fresh supplies, and keenly felt the loss. Almost 400 years later, artifacts from the wreck are helping archaeologist Grace Tsai uncover if unrefrigerated food and drink remained edible and nutritious during long sea voyages. Since 2012, Tsai, a doctoral candidate in nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University, has been studying archaeological records of provisions from three different shipwrecks from the 16th and 17th centuries and analyzing shipboard diets based on modern nutritional guidelines. Now,...

The FBI came out empty handed at the remote Pennsylvania site where Civil War-era gold treasure is rumored to be buried, officials said Monday. Dozens of FBI agents, Pennsylvania state officials and members of a treasure-hunting group dug in a rural site where local lore has it that a Civil War-era gold shipment bound for a U.S. Mint in Philadelphia was either lost or hidden around the time of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. President Abraham Lincoln reportedly ordered the shipment to pay Union Army soldiers, according to a local treasure-hunting group called Finders Keepers.The FBI said it conducted...

A lost Viking settlement known as "Hóp," which has been mentioned in sagas passed down over hundreds of years, is said to have supported wild grapes, abundant salmon and inhabitants who made canoes out of animal hides. Now, a prominent archaeologist says the settlement likely resides in northeastern New Brunswick. If Hóp is found it would be the second Viking settlement to be discovered in North America. The other is at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. ...using the description of the settlement from sagas of Viking voyages, along with archaeological work carried out at L'Anse aux...

A famed archaeologist well-known for discovering the sprawling 9,000-year-old settlement in Turkey called Çatalhöyük seems to have faked several of his ancient findings and may have run a "forger's workshop" of sorts, one researcher says. James Mellaart, who died in 2012, created some of the "ancient" murals at Çatalhöyük that he supposedly discovered; he also forged documents recording inscriptions that were found at Beyköy, a village in Turkey, said geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger, president of the Luwian Studies Foundation. Zangger examined Mellaart's apartment in London between Feb. 24 and 27, finding "prototypes," as Zangger calls them, of murals and inscriptions that...

It was said on May 8, 1945, that some of the victors wandered around in a daze. They were puzzled by a strange silence. The guns were no longer firing the permanent barrage, their constant companion, during those last months since they had crossed the Rhine. Some could not quite believe it was all over. They had longed for an end to the war in Europe for years. “Then suddenly it was upon them all and the impact of the fact was a thing that failed to register–like the death of a loved one,” the historian of the U.S. 3rd...

Vladimir Putin won in a landslide on Sunday, one day after China's parliament unanimously re-appointed Xi to a second term. Xi has drawn comparison with Putin as the Chinese leader has consolidated power and gained a path to indefinite rule after the rubber-stamp National People's Congress lifted presidential term limits last week. "Currently, the China-Russia comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership is at the best level in history, which sets an example for building a new type of international relations," Xi said in a congratulatory message to Putin, according to the official Xinhua news agency. "China is willing to work with Russia...

With clients that included princes, artists and a future King of England, these are the women who ruled Paris from their bed. Fascinating pictures reveal the prostitutes who featured in 'The Pretty Women of Paris' - the nineteenth century directory for the French capital's best courtesans and brothels. Published in 1883 and limited to 169 copies, the notorious guide listed the names of the city's most famous scarlet women - along with their addresses, qualities and faults.

‘ARE WE ROME?” asked the author Cullen Murphy a decade ago, in a provocatively titled book that compared the 21st-century United States with the final days of the Roman Empire. Lately there’s been no shortage of Cassandras who emphatically answer yes. “The speed with which we’re recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome is impressive,” opined the conservative commentator Bill Kristol, in a tweet this past July, taking issue with President Trump’s treatment of the press. “What took Rome centuries we’re achieving in months.” And the Cornell historian Barry Strauss bemoaned the parallels between alleged American failings and those of...

As a 155-year-old legend goes, a Union Army wagon train left Wheeling, W.Va., before the Battle of Gettysburg, carrying two tons of gold, but never completed its 400-mile mission. The gold was supposed to be used to pay Union soldiers. But it first had to make it to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, according to the Associated Press. It never did. The wagon train traveled northeast and was last spotted in St. Marys, Pa. Searchers found the wagons and the bodies of dead soldiers — and the gold was gone. But maybe not forever. On Friday, dozens of FBI agents,...

A Bay State lawmaker is calling on her colleagues to change the sign to an entrance for the Massachusetts State House named after Joseph Hooker, a Union general in the Civil War, saying his surname is tied up with a slang term for prostitutes and is demeaning to women. “Female staffers don’t use that entrance because the sign is offensive to them,” State Rep. Michelle DuBois, Brockton Democrat, told CBS Boston in a recently aired interview.

YouTube Kids, the supposedly child-friendly version of YouTube that’s been shown to often play host to troves of slop content and disturbing videos, apparently was showing videos from British conspiracy theorist David Icke, a guy who believes reptilian aliens secretly control the world and are responsible for the Holocaust. According to a Saturday report in Business Insider, searching for the term “UFO” on YouTube kids turned up a video purporting “to show a UFO shooting at a chemtrail.” The suggested followups for that video featured a number of Icke’s clips, including a nearly five-hour lecture on how aliens built the...

These harrowing pictures of a teenage girl awaiting her torture and death at the hands of Nazi torture specialists lay bare the tragic human toll of the Holocaust. The gaunt face of 14-year-old prisoner Czesława Kwoka stares back through time in a haunting Auschwitz mugshot restored this year by Brazilian artist Marina Amaral. Taken just minutes after she was beaten to within an inch of her life, the images give a human face to one of the concentration camp’s 1.1 million victims.

When former President Barack Obama said he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House. In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his...

Sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s Peter Jones discovered a collection of century-old letters in his parents' attic in Bethesda, Maryland. The letters had been sent by his great-great-great grandfather, Byran Hunt, to his son, Jones' great-great grandfather, John Hunt,[a] who had emigrated from Kilkelly, County Mayo, to the United States in 1855 and worked on the railroad. As Byran was illiterate, the letters were dictated to the local schoolmaster, Pat McNamara (d. 1902), who often wrote letters on behalf of his neighbors who were unable to read and write. Covering the years 1858 to 1893, the Hunt letters...

Last month Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos State Corporation, began work on a contingency plan that would reshape its future in space exploration. The country could shift its human spaceflight cooperation from the U.S. to China, sources within Roscosmos told Popular Mechanics. One possible scenario includes Roscosmos exiting the International Space Station program early. If adopted, the new strategy would mark a historic moment for the Russian space program, which has cooperated with the U.S. for nearly three decades. In 1993, not long after the breakup of the USSR.

An inspiration and idol to countless girls, Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian woman to fly in space. Born on 17 March 1962, in Karnal, Haryana. She acquired her Bachelor of Engineering degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh in 1982. After completing her graduation in Engineering, she moved from India to the US in 1982 and made her first space trip aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997. During her first space mission, she also spoke to the then Prime Minister of India Inderjit K Gujral from the orbit. Chawla's second space trip in 2003 ended...

Not since the Windsor Castle fire has there been a makeover of one of our national treasures on such a scale. Indeed, the restoration of Chatsworth House has cost only a few million pounds less than the £37 million lavished on the castle. However, the facelift of Chatsworth, in Derbyshire — where Keira Knightley’s heart as Miss Bennet first fluttered over the brooding Mr Darcy in the big-screen version of Pride And Prejudice — was prompted not by adversity but because its owner, the Duke of Devonshire, had no wifi. That became the trigger for the biggest, costliest and longest...

Has $55million worth of lost gold from the Civil War era been found in central Pennsylvania? That's what locals seem to believe after FBI agents, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and treasure hunters Dennis and Kem Parada were seen digging around a remote area in Benezette Township, called Dents Run. Dennis and his son Kem, the owners of the treasure hunting organization Finders Keepers, have claimed for years that 52 gold bars were buried under a fire pit at Dents Run more than 150 years ago during the Battle of Gettysburg.

SIERRA VISTA — The Mountain View Officers’ Club on Fort Huachuca was a bustling banquet hall and social center for African-American soldiers more than 70 years ago. Today, it sits vacant, and faced threats of demolition for years. However, the historic building could receive a facelift in coming months. After gaining the Army’s approval to restore the building to its original facade in December, national preservation groups are one step closer to getting the project off the ground. Arizona State Parks & Trails received a $500,000 grant earlier this week to help restore the old building. Funding for the grant...

U.S. foreign policy toward adversaries such as Russia, North Korea and Syria may turn more aggressive if CIA Director Mike Pompeo becomes secretary of state. Pompeo has lambasted Moscow's aggression toward the West and other countries: January 2018: "I continue to be concerned not only about the Russians but about others' efforts as well. We have many foes who want to undermine Western democracy. So there's this Washington-based focus on Russian interference. I want to make sure we broaden the conversation." North Korea October 2017: Pompeo said Pyongyang was would soon be able to threaten a U.S. city with nuclear...