DUBLIN, Ireland — President John F. Kennedy was the subject of three separate death threats during his visit to Ireland in 1963, according to newly declassified police documents released Friday.

The documents released by the Irish Justice Department said police received two anonymous telephoned warnings in the weeks before the arrival of the United States’ first Irish Catholic president. A third threat went to the newsroom of the Irish Independent newspaper.

Kennedy’s June 26-29 visit went ahead trouble free as he was greeted by adoring crowds in Dublin, Cork, Galway and at his family homestead in County Wexford, in southeast Ireland.

He was assassinated in Dallas five months later. (more…)

Saddam Hussein said on Monday he would take responsibility “with honor” for any attacks on Iran using conventional or chemical weapons during the 1980-1988 war but he took issue with charges he ordered attacks on Iraqis.

The former president and six others are on trial for the Anfal — Spoils of War — military campaign against ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq in the 1980s in which prosecutors say up to 180,000 people were killed in gas attacks and mass executions.

“In relation to Iran, if any military or civil official claims that Saddam gave orders to use either conventional or special ammunition, which as explained is chemical, I will take responsibility with honor,” Saddam told the court.

But he added: “I will discuss any act committed against our people and any Iraqi citizen, whether Arab or Kurdish. I don’t accept any insult to my principles or to me personally.” (more…)

U.S. prosecutors charged a former Chinese national with stealing military-related trade secrets and using them in sales proposals to China and the Malaysian and Thailand air forces, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said on Thursday.

Xiaodong Sheldon Meng, 42, a Canadian citizen, stole combat and commercial simulation software and other materials from his former employer, San Jose, California-based Quantum3D, according to a statement issued by U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan’s office.

“The economic espionage charges allege that Meng, formerly a resident of Beijing, China, and a resident of Cupertino, California, stole the trade secrets from Quantum3D with the intent that they would be used to benefit the foreign governments of China, Thailand, and Malaysia,” the statement said. (more…)

Iran and US signed an agreement in 1978 which allowed Tehran to seek nuclear technology in order to meet its future energy demands but no one now talks about the agreement, said a political science professor on Tuesday.

Addressing an international conference of world geologists in this ancient city, central Iran, Professor of Political Geography and Geopolitics Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh said it was the US that encouraged Iran to develop nuclear energy.

“At that time, Americans had predicted that Iran’s population would reach 100 million by 2025 and this would face the country with an energy crisis,” said the professor who is also head of the London-based research foundation, ‘Eurosevic Institute’. (more…)

One week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a US Navy listening post on the other side of Oahu intercepted Admiral Yamamoto’s message to the AJapanese fleet to sail to Hawaii. Today, the remains of that radio station can still be seen.

Source: YouTube

• Method used only at higher levels
• Blocks set using a limestone slurry

How the Egyptians really built a Pyramid

The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study.

The research, by materials scientists from national institutions, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs’ craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids.

Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist. (more…)

Volcano avalanche 8,000 years ago triggered 10-story wave

Volcano avalanche in Sicily 8,000 years ago triggered a devastating tsunami taller than a 10-story building that spread across the entire Mediterranean Sea, slamming into the shores of three continents in only a few hours.A new computer simulation of the ancient event reveals for the first time the enormity of the catastrophe and its far-reaching effects.

The Mt. Etna avalanche sent 6 cubic miles of rock and sediment tumbling into the water—enough material to cover the entire island of Manhattan in a layer of debris thicker than the Empire State Building is tall. (more…)

Nixon tried it in Vietnam, once most agreed the war was lost, and it cost 20,000 U.S. lives

Our pugnacious president visited Vietnam last week and found the lesson for Iraq: “We’ll succeed unless we quit.” In this reading of history, the United States was defeated in Vietnam because of a failure of will. If George W. Bush has his way, this won’t happen again. U.S. troops are staying in Iraq.

In his rigidity, Bush sounds eerily like President Lyndon Johnson, who could not acknowledge until too late his Vietnam policy was in shambles. But in the aftermath of the midterm elections, the calls for “phased withdrawal” - coming out of Congress, the Pentagon and the leaky Iraq Study Group - evoke errors of the Nixon years. (more…)

NEW YORK — The war in Iraq has now lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in the war that President Bush’s father fought in, World War II.

As of Sunday, the conflict in Iraq has raged for three years and just over eight months.

Only the Vietnam War (eight years, five months), the Revolutionary War (six years, nine months), and the Civil War (four years) have engaged America longer. (more…)

Planning to write a film script about the case, Shane O’Sullivan, an independent researcher, investigated the assassination of RFK. But, O’Sullivan found much more than he had hoped.

On Monday night, the BBC broadcast O’Sullivan’s report on their high-profile programme, “Newsnight.” O’Sullivan’s findings shocked many people. Working through an exhaustive analysis of videotapes made at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of RFK’s assassination, O’Sullivan identified three figures as former agents of the CIA. Two of the agents O’Sullivan identified could be seen moving away from the hotel pantry shortly after the shooting of RFK.

Following his preliminary identifications, O’Sullivan presented the video images to more authoritative sources, men who knew the three agents personally. While there was a slender degree of uncertainty (circa 5-10%) the men in the videos were positively identified as the former CIA agents: (more…)

From July 2nd, 1997:

WASHINGTON — Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford took pen in hand and changed - ever so slightly - the Warren Commission’s key sentence on the place where a bullet entered John F. Kennedy’s body when he was killed in Dallas.

The effect of Ford’s change was to strengthen the commission’s conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a crucial element in its finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.

A small change, said Ford on Wednesday when it came to light, one intended to clarify meaning, not alter history. (more…)

Report begins around 15 mins into the broadcast.

Source: BBC

In 1968, Robert Kennedy seemed likely to follow his brother, John, into the White House. Then, on June 6, he was assassinated - apparently by a lone gunman. But Shane O’Sullivan says he has evidence implicating three CIA agents in the murder

At first, it seems an open-and-shut case. On June 5 1968, Robert Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary and is set to challenge Richard Nixon for the White House. After midnight, he finishes his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles and is shaking hands with kitchen staff in a crowded pantry when 24-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan steps down from a tray-stacker with a “sick, villainous smile” on his face and starts firing at Kennedy with an eight-shot revolver.

As Kennedy lies dying on the pantry floor, Sirhan is arrested as the lone assassin. He carries the motive in his shirt-pocket (a clipping about Kennedy’s plans to sell bombers to Israel) and notebooks at his house seem to incriminate him. But the autopsy report suggests Sirhan could not have fired the shots that killed Kennedy. (more…)

The sculpture was found just outside of Medicine Hat, Alberta using Google Maps. Click here and then select “Satellite” view to view the scuplture.