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It is a riddle that has confounded scholars for over a century. And now it carries a handsome cash prize: $1 million for anyone who can decipher the script of the ancient Indus Valley civilization. Relatively little is known about the creators of the script, who built a sprawling urban system about 5,000 years ago across what is modern-day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Excavations at more than 2,000 sites have unearthed a wealth of artifacts. But until the civilization’s script can be read, its language, culture and religion, as well as the history of its rise and fall, will remain...

The Indus Valley Script usually features an animal accompanied by a short series of signs. Image credit: Ismoon, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Awriting system developed by one of the world’s earliest urban societies has given linguists nothing but grief since it was first discovered on an unintelligible stone seal in the ancient city of Harappa, in what is now Pakistan, 150 years ago. Hoping to finally crack the code, authorities have now announced a $1 million prize to anyone who manages to decipher the so-called Indus Valley Script (IVS). Also known as the Harappan Script, the IVS was invented...

Former President Donald Trump has flipped the script on Vice President Kamala Harris, taking her attacks on “Project 2025” and slapping the label on her own policies. Harris has repeatedly warned voters about “Trump’s Project 2025,” even though Trump disavowed the document, as numerous fact-checkers have confirmed. Tired of Harris’s repeated defiance of the truth, the Trump campaign has decided to use the term “Project 2025” to describe the policies that she would enact if she took office next year. In posts on social media, Trump listed the policies in “Kamala’s Project 2025”: Abolishing ICE Opening the border Defunding the...

The Korean alphabet, hangul, is “the most scientific writing system.” One often hears that in South Korea, a society that has taken to heart Asia scholar Edwin O. Reischauer’s description of hangul as “perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any country.” But whatever their scientific credentials, all the other writing systems in use (and indeed out of use) have fascinating qualities of their own, a range of which are explained in the UsefulCharts video above on the writing systems of the world — not just the alphabets of the world, mind you, but also the...

A wooden tablet discovered on Easter Island may pre-date European colonization of the region, researchers revealed in early February. Less than 30 wooden tablets containing an undeciphered script called “Rongorongo” were found on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), four of which were removed in 1869 by Catholic Missionaries, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Those wooden tablets were analyzed using radiocarbon dating, and one of them was found to pre-date European settlement on the island, the study said. Easter Island was “discovered” by Europeans in the 1720s, and absolutely decimated in the years following, the...

Joe Biden on Tuesday held a joint presser with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after the two met in the Oval Office. Joe Biden announced another $200 million in additional military aid for Ukraine during Zelensky’s visit.

Caught handing out canned questions for audience members to ask the candidate and feeding the answers to him over a teleprompter, Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo defended these strategies calling them “a new innovation in how every candidate will campaign in the future. Trump is just jealous because he didn’t think of this first. Now watch and see him copy us.” Ducklo explained that “handing out pre-screened questions and feeding the answers to the candidate via teleprompter is so perfect that we’re surprised no one else had done it before we did. Allowing audience members or the press to ask whatever...

"I was told to go off this paper but I can't. You need the truth."

by Sam Rostock We know that the Biden events are all staged and we now have more evidence. Today in Kenosha, Wisconsin at a Biden event a woman admitted on camera that she was given a piece of paper telling her what to say. “My name in Porsche Bennett,” the woman said. “I’m just going to be honest, Mr. Biden, I was told to go off this paper, but I can’t. You need the truth and I’m part of the truth.” She then criticized those who came to Kenosha to riot vs. actual protesters, clearly not what the Biden...

Syracuse TV anchor Michael Benny has broken his silence on the controversy surrounding a script he read on CNY Central for station owner Sinclair Broadcast Group. Benny and Allison Bybee appear in a video compilation showing TV anchors at Sinclair-owned stations across the country in a promo echoing President Donald Trump's constant attacks on "fake news" media. Critics say it reflects the company's right-wing agenda without disclosing a political bias.... For days, CNY Central declined to comment, but Benny finally spoke out in a lengthy Facebook post on Wednesday night. "Recently, my boss came to me with a script for...

Louisiana's public school classrooms will be required to teach cursive writing to students starting with the new school year. That mandate, approved by lawmakers in 2016 but delayed a year so schools could prepare, is among more than two dozen new laws that take effect Saturday (July 1).

One hears a great deal these days about the universal nature of story. It's a gratifying conceit that deep down we all share the same fundamental narrative. But what about the more factional, political nature of story? I don't mean the depiction of torture in Zero Dark Thirty or corporate cunning in Promised Land. I mean the intrinsically political nature of how character is portrayed and plot structured. Stories stage conflict. And the strongest conflict always dictates inseparable, irreconcilable opposites. If Henry Adams was right, that politics in practice is always "the systematic organization of hatreds," then what better place...

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — A writer desperate to get a movie script read suffered the ultimate rejection Thursday when police blew up a briefcase he said contained the screenplay after an agent refused to read it, police said. The bizarre story was set in Beverly Hills, where a man visited the office of a literary agent and left behind a briefcase that he said contained a computer, police Sgt. Brad Cornelius said. The man left instructions for it to be delivered to someone at the business, who told another person in the office, "This guy's been kind of pestering me...

Critics have called Margalit Fox's new book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, a paleographic detective procedural. It follows the story of the laborious quest to crack a mysterious script, unearthed in Crete in 1900, known by the sterile-sounding name Linear B. Fox, an obituary writer for The New York Times, is good at bringing the departed to life. In The Riddle of the Labyrinth, she tells the story of Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, who worked alone over decades and discovered the essential grammar of Linear B, only to die in 1950 before she could complete her...

Whenever you remake a revered Hollywood film, there’s bound to be controversy, but going right to the original material is certainly an interesting approach. Warner Bros is in early talks with Robert Zemeckis to direct a live-action remake of the The Wizard of Oz and plans to use the original script from the 1939 classic. Warner Bros owns the screenplay because Ted Turner bought it along with the MGM library before Warner Bros bought Turner’s empire. This latest Oz twist comes as Disney is trying very hard to mount The Great And Powerful Oz. Sam Raimi is developing that film...

America’s welfare state has grown into an unwieldy hodgepodge of programs that provide various forms of assistance to tens of millions of Americans. It costs taxpayers nearly a trillion dollars annually and experts predict that, absent reform, it will keep growing in the years ahead. The welfare state acquired its girth by following a familiar script — over and over again. The latest performance came at a recent hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee, which is pondering yet another proposed expansion of government: the “Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act,” an $8 billion add-on to the nation’s school-lunch...

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – John McClane's string of bad luck may not yet be over. "Hitman" screenwriter Skip Woods is in negotiations with 20th Century Fox to take a crack at a new "Die Hard" script. The New York cop known for consistently being in the wrong place at the right time has already survived four run-ins with terrorists, traitors and psychotic loose cannons of one stripe or another. In his last outing, "Live Free or Die Hard," written by Mark Bomback and directed by Len Wiseman in 2007, McClane battled Web terrorists to $378 million in worldwide grosses...

Heroic Hollywood: Thinking Inside the Box by Russ Dvonch In this post, I want to give some advice to beginning screenwriters who are having difficulty finishing — or even starting — their first screenplay. I’ve been mulling over what to say for several weeks now, trying to come up with some inspirational words of advice to motivate you into achieving your goal. After much thought and deep-dish contemplation, I’ve boiled my advice down to this: If you want to write for Hollywood, think like a hack writer and stick to the Hollywood Formula. How’s that for inspiring rhetoric? Now, most...

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are...

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