A new article is examining the theory that Greenland’s medieval Norse settlements were ruined by the collapse of the trade in walrus tusks, after ivory from elephants became more easily accessible for artisans in Europe.

As China, Iran, and Australia initiate draconian efforts to shut down the internet as an alternative news source, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom is mulling a similar attempt to block dissenting voices. The so-called Digital Economy Bill, essentially ignored by the media, would allow the Secretary of State to “a technical obligation on internet service providers” at the whim of the government.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today stands accused of taking part in the kidnapping and illegal extradition of a permanent resident of Ecuador, in violation of both international law and Ecuadorian law.

His crimes? Selling herbal medicine and daring to tell the truth about those medicines on his website.

What provoked the recount was a pile of fossilised bones and teeth uncovered 15 years ago by local man Jean Rouvier in a basalt quarry at Lezignan la Cebe, in the Herault valley, Languedoc.

The surprise came when argon dating showed the site went back 1.57 million years — substantially older than many other prehistoric sites — according to a paper published in the specialist journal, Comptes Rendus Palevol.

Without a man named Thucydides, the chances are slim that we’d know anything about the Peloponnesian War. A new book about the man attempts to correct what we know.

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made.

In a 1924 booklet published by the Arm & Hammer Soda Company, the company starts off saying, “The proven value of Arm & Hammer Bicarbonate of Soda as a therapeutic agent is further evinced by the following evidence of a prominent physician named Dr. Volney S. Cheney, in a letter to the Church & Dwight Company:

“In 1918 and 1919 while fighting the ‘Flu’ with the U. S. Public Health Service it was brought to my attention that rarely any one who had been thoroughly alkalinized with bicarbonate of soda contracted the disease, and those who did contract it, if alkalinized early, would invariably have mild attacks.”

Hollywood actor and director Mel Gibson’s next directing project will be an as-yet untitled film about Vikings, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, “Variety” reported on Monday.

“This will be an awe-inspiring story, created with some of the industry?s finest cinematic talent and I am just over the moon to be making this film with Mel, Leo and Bill,” said the film’s producer Graham King in a statement.

A crofter has uncovered what is believed to be a Viking anchor while digging a drain on the Isle of Skye.

Graeme Mackenzie, 47, made the find after hiring an excavator to open the drain on rough pastureland 50yds (48m) from his home near Sleat.

Rain had partly washed away the bottom of the drain and exposed a corroded 4in (10cm) iron spike.

Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports.

The authors say their findings provide rare evidence of cannibalism in Europe’s early Neolithic period.

Up to 500 human remains unearthed near the village of Herxheim may have been cannibalised.

Armed officers leap from their vehicles, guns drawn and sunglasses glaring. “Come out with your hands up!” they shout.

You slowly open the driver’s door of your car and inch out of your seat with both hands raised in surrender, cowering behind the open door. “What did I do, officer? What’s my crime?”

Their answer comes back loud and intimidating: “SELLING RAW MILK!”

A couple of years back, the Reverend Stephen Boissoin committed the crime of writing a letter to a local newspaper objecting to various aspects of “the homosexual agenda”. The Alberta “Human Rights” Tribunal convicted him of this crime and imposed a lifetime speech ban preventing him, in essence, from saying anything about homosexuality in public or private ever again anywhere for the rest of his life.

The Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta has now struck down this outrageous decision. Mr Justice Wilson’s ruling could not be plainer. He rejects all the Tribunal’s punishments as “illegal”, not least the speech ban.

Police forces across the country have been warned to stop using anti-terror laws to question and search innocent photographers after The Independent forced senior officers to admit that the controversial legislation is being widely misused.

Chief Constable Andy Trotter, chairman of Acpo’s media advisory group, took the decision to send the warning after growing criticism of the police’s treatment of photographers.

Writing in today’s Independent, he says: “Everyone… has a right to take photographs and film in public places. Taking photographs… is not normally cause for suspicion and there are no powers prohibiting the taking of photographs, film or digital images in a public place.”

There were 36 million prescriptions issued for antidepressant drugs in the United Kingdom in 2008, nearly one for every adult in the population, according to numbers obtained by the Liberal Democrat party.

President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials.

The enormous skull of an ancient cow-like beast that stood higher than a man has been uncovered in a quarry.

Excavator driver John Rutherford was on a routine shift at a riverside pit in Northumberland when he unearthed the incredible bones with his digger.

They belonged to a species of wild cattle called an auroch, that had roamed Britain more than 7,500 years ago.

Aurochs stood 6ft at the shoulder and became extinct in the UK around 4,000 years ago.

The Auroch’s skull was preserved in a pocket of peat for thousand of years before it was dug up at a quarrry

Professor Ad Putter of Bristol University’s Department of English has been awarded £357,430 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a project that will investigate the verse forms of Middle English romances.

The romances were originally intended for a listening audience and, although they are still widely read today, modern readers no longer inhabit their sound worlds. This research project aims to rediscover these lost worlds through studying the aural qualities – rhyme and rhythm – of the poetry.

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Paul and Lisa Hessey believe in the long-term benefits of healthy eating and rejected advice to feed their two-year-old son high-calorie snack food such as chocolate, crisps and cakes.

To their horror, social workers put Zak into foster care ‘to assess his needs’ and allegedly threatened the couple with the loss of their parental rights if they fought the decision in court.

Transcendental Meditation (TM) first became well-known in the U.S. during the 1960s when the Beatles showed interest in studying the stress-reducing technique. But meditation hasn’t gone the way of love beads and flower power since then. In fact, various techniques, including TM, have received serious scientific scrutiny and researchers have documented many health benefits of meditation.

Now a $3.8 million study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has reached a first-ever finding: patients with coronary heart disease who practiced TM had a nearly 50 percent lower rate of heart attack, stroke, and death compared to a matched group that didn’t meditate.