he Romans were some of the most sophisticated builders of the ancient world. Over the centuries, they adopted an increasingly advanced set of materials and technologies to create their famous structures

In new research published in EPJ Plus, Francesca Rosi and colleagues at the Italian National Research Council improved on these techniques through scientific analysis of the materials used to build the Roman Forum's Atrium Vestae. They found that successive phases of modification to the building saw improvements including higher quality raw materials, higher brick firing temperatures, and better ratios between carbonate and silicate building materials.

. Since the Atrium Vestae was modified in five distinctive building phases spanning several centuries, the study highlighted technological improvements throughout the Roman age in unprecedented levels of detail.

At least seven more Iraqi protesters were killed Saturday in clashes with security forces in Baghdad and the southern town of Nasiriyah, as thousands took part in nationwide anti-government protests, officials said.

“I want change. I want to remove those corrupt people who sleep in the Green Zone and who fired tear gas and rubber bullets at us,” said protester Fares Mukhaled, 19, who sat barefoot on the ground at the square, where some had erected tents.

The protests against the Shiite-dominated government have been largely concentrated in Shiite areas. Some have also criticized Iran’s influence over the country. “Iraq is free. Iran out, out!” some protesters chanted in Tahrir Square.

The Syrian Kurds, however, were both disciplined and pragmatic. But they could not be harnessed as a purely Kurdish force, plowing into Sunni Arab areas held by ISIS. So a fig leaf was created -- a new name for the Syrian Kurdish fighting units, normally called the Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG.

Reflecting how little the Trump administration cared for the details as it rushed to clean up its self-inflicted mess, Vice President Mike Pence mistakenly referred to the SDF as the "Syrian Defence Forces" several times as he announced a ceasefire that further betrayed them. And, earlier, President Donald Trump blurted out the poorly-kept secret that the PKK were in their ranksAmerica's imperfect pact with the Kurds was always going to fall apart one day. But nobody could have imagined the SDF's 10,000-plus dead sons and daughters would have been betrayed by overwhelming ignorance, fealty to Turkish and Russian interests, and the toxic aversion to details that the Trump administration displayed.

Moscow is unlikely to be too fussed. Their key goal is becoming the new power in the region, and this settlement, almost directly replacing US forces with their own police and political clout, does that.

Why do children dress in costume and knock on strangers' doors to ask for treats on Halloween? The practice can be traced to the ancient Celts, early Roman Catholics and 17th-century British politics.

During some Celtic celebrations of Samhain, villagers disguised themselves in costumes made of animal skins to drive away phantom visitors; banquet tables were prepared and food was left out to placate unwelcome spirits. 

In later centuries, people began dressing as ghosts, demons and other malevolent creatures, performing antics in exchange for food and drink.

Food insecurity in North Korea “is at an alarming level,” with nearly half the population — 11 million people — undernourished, the U.N. independent investigator on human rights in the country said Tuesday

140,000 children are estimated to be suffering from “undernutrition,” including 30,000 who “face an increased risk of death.” Quintana said the government, which has primary responsibility for ensuring access to food, “is violating its human rights obligations due to its failing economic and agricultural policies.”

“The country’s economic resources are being diverted away from the essential needs of the people,” he said. “Pervasive discrimination in the public distribution system means that ordinary citizens, especially farmers and people in rural areas, have not been receiving any rations.”

The sudden decision to pull about 1,000 American troops out of northern Syria, and leave Kurdish allies in the lurch after they did so much to fight off the Islamic State, has already had terrible consequences. The Kurds have been forced to make a deal with the murderous regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, hoping it will protect them against being massacred by incoming Turkish troops who regard them as mortal enemies.

This world order — call it Pax Americana or American imperialism, as you like — has been fraying since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War had given United States–led alliances a purpose. The “war on terror” was never a convincing substitute. And the disastrous attempt by George W. Bush to reorder the Middle East by invading Iraq, ostensibly to liberate benighted Arabs, made the idealistic justification for Pax Americana look like a cynical sham.

By the end of the last century, even as Communism, at least in Europe, had ceased to be an existential threat, the dependence of democratic allies on the United States began to cause greater strains. Mr. Trump is not the first president to voice his resentment about Europeans and East Asians taking American security too much for granted and not paying their fair share; Barack Obama said so, too. Only, Mr. Trump’s resentments are expressed with more vulgarity and less knowledge.

I am sitting on a chair outside a restaurant in Salem. Perhaps 10 feet from me is a woman who is standing in the middle of the sidewalk peeing in her pants. I see the urine turn the cloth of her jeans dark, then drip out from her trousers to the ground. The woman is perhaps 60 years old, but you know how it goes—hard lives make for hard faces, so perhaps she’s younger. What is certain is that there is a deficit here: a person not only without a home, but now without a dry pair shoes or pants.

None of them look at the woman. There are a few grimaces as they catch her scent, which even from where I sit is quite strong.

I wonder about the growing chasm between rich and poor, the choices people face between hunger and medicine, the growing parade of the ragged and downtrodden pushing carts filled with cardboard and rags.

mong those in favour of Brexit, there is a widely held belief that a favourable trade deal can easily be negotiated with the United States. But this flies in the face of the evidence: throughout history, the US has proved to be a ruthless negotiator where its economic interests are involved.

This sleight of hand by Roosevelt was a way around Congress and the Debt Default Act of 1934 which disallowed any loans to countries who were in default on their obligations, which included the UK. Further Acts of Congress during the 1930s prevented the sale of armaments and of loans to belligerents.But it became clear that the US was only prepared to provide support under rigorous conditions.

The US Government was prepared to support Britain in the war against the Germans, but its ultimate aim was to supplant the UK in the world economy. From 1940 onwards Morganthau had pressured the British Government to sell off its large US investments in companies such as Shell, Lever Brothers, insurance companies and others, as well as investments elsewhere in the world. He also pressured Britain to run down its gold and foreign currency reserves which were already more or less exhausted by 1941.

When religious voices assail humanism, they attack it as a belief in nothing, just another form of faith, no more provable than any other. They blame it for (supposed) American moral rot. But as a humanist, I don't believe morality needs some supernatural source

Humanism is a philosophy, not a religion or faith. It originated in ancient times with thinkers like Epicurus and Lucretius, with a rebirth in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It's a way of understanding life and world, anchored in reason and reality.

Our earthly life is the only one we get. Nothing can ultimately matter except the feelings of sentient beings. We can infer from all this that our purpose is to make human life as good as possible. This purpose gives our lives ample meaning. Humanism provides the bedrock of morality. It encourages every person, oneself included, to live fully and attain happiness, a word that signifies equal respect for the dignity of all humans and freedom of thought and expression.

Pontius Pilate is a man many Jews and Christians love to hate. For Christians, the Roman governor of Judaea played a central role in the execution of Jesus around A.D. 30, while for Jews he was a callous ruler who set the stage for the rebellion that led to the destruction of Jerusalem four decades later. But a new discovery suggests that Pilate also spent a good deal of time and money embellishing the famous city that drew Jewish pilgrims as well as visitors from around the Roman Empire.

The latest coins discovered beneath the paving stones date to around A.D. 31. The most common Jerusalem coins from the first century were minted after 40, “so not having them beneath the street means the street was built before their appearance, in other words only in the time of Pilate,” says Donald Ariel, a coin expert with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

During a ceremony last June inaugurating part of the tunnel, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman dismissed these concerns. The project, he said, “confirms with evidence, with science, with archaeological studies that which many of us already knew, certainly in our heart: the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people.” And, if the science proves correct, it was a despised Roman who helped make it a city renowned across the empire for its holy sites and monumental architecture.

.“While America has never been able to right every wrong, America has made the world a more secure and prosperous place,” Obama declared at the time. “And our leadership is necessary to underwrite the global security and prosperity that our children and our grandchildren will depend upon.”Contrast Obama’s move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with President Trump’s betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran — and, of course, Russia, because almost everything Trump does seems to end up benefiting Moscow.

Given the Kurdish heroism in arresting genocide against the Yazidi in 2014, it is savagely ironic that Trump’s betrayal has now put the Kurds themselves at risk of war crimes and ethnic cleansing by Turkey.

So we’re sending more troops to Saudi Arabia to help a misogynist dictatorship that kills a journalist for an American newspaper, even as we betray the Kurds who have been trying to build a democratic enclave that empowers women; we’re sending troops to Saudi Arabia to confront Iran, even as we give Iran a helping hand in Syria.This is where incoherence and inhumanity converge

In the three and a half weeks since Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, House investigators have broken through the administration’s stonewalling of Congress and heard dozens of hours of testimony from key witnesses.The public, however, has seen virtually none of it—and that dynamic could ultimately threaten the Democrats’ bid to get public opinion firmly on their side.

What the process has done, however, is open the party up to criticism from Republicans that it’s running an overly secretive operation, including from those who have not marched in lockstep with Trump.

While Republicans point out that previous impeachment inquiries have been conducted more openly, Democrats counter that unlike Watergate with President Richard Nixon or the Kenneth Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton, they are starting from scratch, without the help of an exhaustive report from a special prosecutor.

A yearslong State Department investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that while the use of the system for official business increased the risk of compromising classified information, there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.

Ms. Clinton blamed the F.B.I.’s handling of the inquiry for crippling her campaign after James B. Comey, then the bureau’s director, reopened his investigation into the server days before the general election after initially declining to bring charges.

The use of a private email system “did not necessarily” increase the likelihood of classified information being transmitted on unclassified systems, investigators concluded, but it did add “an increased degree of risk of compromise.”

Using studies of tree rings going back centuries, scientists have unearthed clear evidence that the rise of human-generated greenhouse gases was having an effect on global drought conditions as early as 1900.

The tree-ring data analyzed in the study highlight three periods over the past 120 years in which a human fingerprint on drought and moisture is, to varying degrees, evident.

The last period, from 1981 to 2017, saw a reappearance of the human influence on drought and moisture. The study concludes that this signal is “likely to grow stronger in the next several decades,” adding that the “human consequences of this, particularly drying over large parts of North America and Eurasia, are likely to be severe.”

councils have been increasingly encouraging those facing or experiencing homelessness to try renting privately, rather than wait for a council house. However, only 1 in 20 of two-bed properties in the research were affordable.

“The number of people who are living — and even dying — on our streets is truly disgraceful. More than a million families are stuck on waiting lists for social housing, with many parents bringing up their children in totally unfit accommodation in the private rented sector, priced out by sky-high rents and living with no security about their futures.”

Reporters from the Bureau contacted the landlords of 180 two-bed properties that would have been affordable on housing benefits. In each case the reporter claimed to be a single mother with an 8-year-old daughter. Half of those landlords said definitively that they would not let to anyone on benefits. Of those that were left, most said they would consider letting to our hypothetical family, but only if they could fulfil further conditions, such as paying six months’ rent in advance or providing a guarantor.

Harems, fezes and monkeys. Long shisha pipes are entwined around the hands of beguiling pale nudes like snakes, and turbaned guards loiter uselessly nearby. If any of these images are familiar to you, it’s hardly surprising. A world-famous 19th-Century art movement was responsible for these depictions of the Arab world being imprinted on your mind.

these were hardly objective visual records that strove to portray accurately the wider Arab world. Their visual insistence that ‘the Orient’ was a backwards, lotus-eating fairyland would validate exploitative and fetishised ideas of what life was like there in Europe and the US for centuries.

The British Museum’s exhibition looks at how Islam – and by extension Islamic art – was represented in the West, and it’s clear from 19th-Century Orientalist paintings that tiles, jars, carpets and furnishings inspired by Islamic geometric designs and art history were greatly admired for their beauty.

Until now, it was reasonable to debate whether Trump was simply an unconventional president, the first with no prior experience serving in either our military or government, or whether he was truly willing to work with foreign dictators to place his own political interests ahead of our nation’s. This week, we learned that this was a false choice—he’s both.

He betrayed our Kurdish allies, aided Russia and Iran, and gave ISIS a chance to reconstitute itself—all to serve his own perceived political interests

If the Senate fails to act now to constrain the president and dissuade foreign dictators from asking Trump to desert longtime allies, disregard U.S. interests, and overturn years of U.S. foreign policy, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in New York, the complaint states that the three families initially had no issues taking a ferry from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn to Wall Street on Sept. 21. Their fortunes changed, however, while trying to board another ferry to Brooklyn Pier 6.

staffer for the commuter-ferry service reportedly said “security” had told her not to let them aboard. According to the complaint, two of the women in the group were wearing hijabs, in addition to other religious clothing, and had “pronounced accents.”

“All New Yorkers, regardless of creed, deserve equal and fair service free of discrimination, especially when using public transportation like the NYC Ferry,” Mohamed wrote. “These families were humiliated and traumatized in public view and treated as suspect because they happen to be Muslim. That is unacceptable. We hope the City will live up to its commitment of nondiscrimination and swiftly correct this injustice.”

“Those people like Ebola. They’re becoming famous and successful from it,” hollers a middle-aged male parishioner wearing a black suit, near the end of an 8-minute ramble. “They can keep it. Ebola will never reach this church,”

Mention Ebola in Goma and you’ll hear a riot of rumors, half-truths, and conspiracy theories about the disease: that it doesn’t exist; that it’s been imported for financial gain; that it’s being used to kill people as part of an organ theft plot. A study published in September in the journal PLOS One found that 72% of respondents were dissatisfied with or mistrustful of the Ebola response and 12% believed that the disease “was fabricated and did not exist in the area.” Misinformation is a key factor in making the outbreak so difficult to stamp out

Long an incurable disease, Ebola may someday be preventable and treatable thanks to recent drug advances. Still, with an almost 70% fatality rate during this current outbreak, Ebola continues to be obscenely lethal. To survive it, early medical intervention is key. But Pastor Jules Mulindwa, a compact man with a receding hairline and a thin mustache, has his own protocol. While he doesn’t discount medical science, he doesn’t believe it’s necessary.

But what is evident now is that the European Union wants Britain to leave already, so it can move on to more pressing issues, from migration and enlargement to the contentious post-Brexit seven-year budget.

Europe’s main goal, he added, was to avoid a no-deal Brexit. Though that option would damage Britain more, it would also hurt the European economy, which is already slowing.

Even if Mr. Johnson succeeds, European leaders worry that he is not sincere about negotiating a future trade agreement that hinders him from cutting British corporate taxes and regulations.