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One day in a spring, an elderly man walked alone on a stone road lined by young willows in Xuzhou in East China's Jiangsu Province. At the end of the road was a museum that few people have heard of. A Chinese theology professor says the first Christmas is depicted in the stone relief from the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220). In the picture above a woman and a man are sitting around what looks like a manger, with allegedly "the three wise men" approaching from the left side, holding gifts, "the shepherd" following them, and "the assassins" queued...

European-crafted glass beads found at three different indigenous sites in northern Alaska date back to the pre-colonial period of North America, in what is an intriguing archaeological discovery. Somehow, these blueberry-sized beads made their way from what is now Venice, Italy, to the Brooks Range mountains of Alaska at some point during the mid-to-late 15th century, according to new research published in American Antiquity. The authors of the paper, archaeologists Michael Kunz from the University of Alaska Museum of the North and Robin Mills from the Bureau of Land Management, suspect the beads were trade goods that, after passing through...

@RepThomasMassie speaks out on the cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on Ross Ulbricht by the criminal justice system. Join Rep. Massie and more than 370,000 people demanding clemency from @realDonaldTrum at http://freeross.org. Watch this Video...

In his final weeks in office before Joe Biden’s inauguration, President Donald Trump is weighing granting clemency to Ross Ulbricht, the founder and former administrator of the world’s most famous darknet drug market, Silk Road, The Daily Beast has learned. According to three people familiar with the matter, the White House counsel’s office has had documents related to Ulbricht’s case under review, and Trump was recently made aware of the situation and the pleas of the Silk Road founder’s allies. Two of these sources say the president has at times privately expressed some sympathy for Ulbricht’s situation and has been...

Earlier this week, the bitcoin community was shocked when a digital wallet containing roughly $1 billion in bitcoin...was emptied by an unknown individual. The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that it had seized the wallet’s contents as part of a civil forfeiture case targeting the Silk Road. The government said it retrieved the roughly 70,000 bitcoins with the help of an unnamed hacker, whose identity is known to the government but who is simply referred to as “Individual X” in court documents. “Individual X” allegedly hacked the Silk Road’s payments system some time in 2012 or 2013. The government...

The coronavirus infection spreading across the United States prison system is throwing Ross Ulbricht’s confinement into sharp relief. Found guilty of seven charges including money laundering, conspiracy to traffic narcotics and computer hacking, the controversial founder of the Silk Road is currently serving a double life sentence plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole. As the pandemic worsens conditions for the nation’s large prison population, Ross spends 22 hours a day behind bars in Tucson, Ariz., where he’s currently being held. Outside visits are stopped so Ross’s mother, Lyn, and other loved ones, who work tirelessly for his release,...

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Policy. E-commerce, including transactions involving smaller express-carrier or international mail packages, is being exploited by traffickers to introduce contraband into the United States, and by foreign exporters and United States importers to avoid applicable customs duties, taxes, and fees. It is the policy of the United States Government to protect consumers, intellectual property rights holders, businesses, and workers from counterfeit goods, narcotics (including synthetic opioids such as fentanyl), and other contraband now...

A hacker known as “The Jester” claims to have revealed the identity of a LulzSec member who may be the group’s leader. Thirty-year-old Xavier Kaotico, also known as Xavier de Leon or “sabu,” has been outed as the hacker prankster group’s leader, though his role and involvement with LulzSec has not been confirmed. The man allegedly lives or has recently lived in New York City, and is an independant IT consultant specializing in Python programming, Linux development, network security and exploit development. LulzSec, a small group of hackers that has become the focus of the international technology media over...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- In the U.S. government's biggest crackdown to date on a hacktivist group calling itself "Anonymous," four leaders and one other activist were arrested Tuesday and charged with a computer hacking conspiracy. The U.S. Department of Justice also revealed Tuesday that it had snared the prime leader of an Anonymous offshoot group called LulzSec, which conducted a high-profile, two-month hacking rampage last summer against corporate and government targets. -snip- What particularly set the movement on edge was the conviction and apparent turning of the LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, known by his hacker alias Sabu.

The Libertarians are up in arms this week after the Justice Department served subpoenas to Nick Gillespie’s Reason Magazine over comments left on their web site by anonymous readers. The commentariat buzz in question erupted over an article dealing with the life sentence imposed on Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. This has prompted some outraged cries from observers such as Bloomberg contributor (and former Reason editor) Virginia Postrel, who described the move as stomping on free speech. Powerline’s Steven Hayward (coincidentally also a former contributor to Reason) wonders aloud whether the Justice Department attorneys are just stupid or possibly...

It’s unquestionable that the United States prides itself on the freedoms which establish its foundations, but it is also undeniable that our very own judicial system is just as guilty of violating these freedoms. reason magazine On June 2nd, Reason magazine was issued a subpoena by a U.S. district court, demanding “any and all information” on six of the magazines’ readers. When the organization didn’t comply, the government authorized a gag order, prohibiting Reason from discussing or acknowledging the order and the subpoena. “Given the seriousness of the potential legal sanctions, I was exceedingly anxious that a Reason staff member...

Less than a year after raising $1.5 million for his Bitcoin exchange start-up BitInstant, CEO Charlie Shrem has been charged with money laundering. A news release from U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan said that Shrem knowingly facilitated illegal purchases on the now-shuttered underground drug marketplace Silk Road. Silk Road was a Web site that allowed users to buy everything from heroin to fake IDs. To help preserve users´ anonymity, the site required all transactions to be conducted in bitcoins. According to the government, a man named Robert Faiella worked with Shrem to sell bitcoins to Silk Road users. The two men

Prominent bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem has been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on charges of funneling cash to the illicit online marketplace Silk Road.

This is a summary from many sources, the first of which is the full text of Robert Mueller III's Inditement of July 13, 2018. (I won't quote that Inditement here, but you should take the time to read it, so as to get an understanding of the transcript below.) Most important is HOW those 12 Russian Agents were identified, and how that evidence was obtained. Also in question is, "Does the United States actually have the ability to track all of this evidence; or is it just built upon fiction and is unprovable ?" And IF the evidence is...

Former govt. agent admits spying on Attkisson, implicates his colleagues. Former U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein is accused of leading the group. Govt. hackers allegedly reported to FBI official who now heads CrowdStrike Former FBI Unit Chief confirms he initiated forensic report proving govt. intrusion and reported to Attkisson A former U.S. government agent has admitted participating in the illegal government surveillance on then-CBS New investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson. The insider has identified former U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein as the person responsible for the project. As a result of the new admission, Attkisson and her family are filing suit against Rosenstein...

Millet was brought into Europe from China more than 7,000 years ago, archaeologists from the University of Cambridge in the UK stated in a thesis published by US journal "Science" on May 8. The report, entitled "Origins of Agriculture in East Asia," was coauthored by Martin Jones, a professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge and his Chinese student Liu Xinyi. The study said that charred millet seeds found in the Neolithic farming remains in Northeast China indicated that locals had planted millet as early as 8,000 years ago. Millet was gradually introduced to Europe during the next millennium....

The dog and pig bones, as well as bones of other animals analyzed in the study, come from an archaeological site in a region of northwest China considered to be a possible early center of East Asian agriculture. Chemical traces within the dog bones suggest a diet high in millet, a grain that wild dogs are unlikely to eat in large quantities, but that was a staple of early agricultural societies in northwest China. "If the dogs were consuming that much millet, their human masters were likely doing the same," says Seth Newsome, a coauthor on the study and a...

China Exclusive: Chinese archaeologists discover world earliest millets (Xinhua) Updated: 2005-09-02 16:14 Chinese archaeologists have recently found the world earliest millets, dated back to about 8,000 years ago, on the grassland in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. A large number of carbonized millets have been discovered by Chinese archaeologists at the Xinglonggou relics site in Chifeng City. The discovery has changed the traditional opinion that millet, the staple food in ancient north China, originated in the Yellow River valley, Zhao Zhijun, a researcher with the Archaeology Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Xinhua on Friday. Carbon-14...

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China's two-prong attempt to construct a new Silk Road. The first prong is the overland Silk Road Economic Belt. The other is the Maritime Silk Road. Both are being undertaken simultaneously and are said to one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever attempted by man. Here is a map showing the grand scope of the project. The BRI is intended to be a vast network of railways, seaports, gas and oil pipelines, and highways built by Chinese companies and labor. China also wants construct up to fifty special economic zones along its...

Apples originally evolved in the wild to entice ancient megafauna to disperse their seeds; more recently, humans began spreading the trees along the Silk Road with other familiar crops; dispersing the apple trees led to their domestication. Recent archaeological finds of ancient preserved apple seeds across Europe and West Asia combined with historical, paleontological, and recently published genetic data are presenting a fascinating new narrative for one of our most familiar fruits. In this study, Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History traces the history of the apple from its wild origins, noting that...