Palmyra, Syria: Beheaded statues found in the destroyed museum after the recapture of the ancient city last week. Photo: Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images.
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A family waits under a mosaic celebrating the friendship between Russians and Ukrainians at Kievskaya station in Moscow, Russia. Photo: David Trilling.
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Pietro Ingrao, one of the most influential leaders of Italy’s communist party, died on Sunday, Italian media reported. He was 100.
Ingrao joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the midst of World War Two, becoming an anti-fascist partisan. After the war, when the PCI grew into the biggest communist party in Western Europe, Ingrao championed the bloc’s Marxist left. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who is in New York to attend meetings at the United Nations, called Ingrao “one of the most uncomfortable and lucid witnesses of the 20th century, of the left, and of our country”, Corriere della Sera daily said on its Website. [Read more]. |
Pope Francis meets with former Cuban President Fidel Castro at Castro’s residence in Havana, September 20, 2015. Photo: ABC News.
Photos captured the intimate, historic meeting between Pope Francis and Fidel Castro Sunday. The images show the leader of the Catholic Church, who is 78, exchanging gifts with the 89-year old Cuban revolutionary after a Mass that drew hundreds of thousands of people in Havana. Castro and Pope Francis grasp hands and exchange laughs, as shown in images of their private meeting. The pope wears traditional papal garb while Castro wears an Adidas track jacket. The meeting lasted about 30 minutes and included Castro’s wife and some of his extended family. The pope gave Castro a book that the Argentine-born Jesuit wrote. Vatican spokesman Frederico Lombardi described the meeting as a “very informal conversation”. [Read more]. |
Acting on a tip from spelunkers two years ago, scientists in South Africa discovered what the cavers had only dimly glimpsed through a crack in a limestone wall deep in the Rising Star cave: lots and lots of old bones.
The remains covered the earthen floor beyond the narrow opening. This was, the scientists concluded, a large, dark chamber for the dead of a previously unidentified species of the early human lineage – Homo naledi. The new hominin species was announced on Thursday by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language. [Read more]. |
Pieces of a skeleton of Homo naledi, a newly discovered human species. Photo Credit: John Hawks/University of Wisconsin-Madison, via European Pressphoto Agency.
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Obamacare passes hurdle. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday June 25, 2015 ruled 6-3 that the federal subsidies that help nearly 6.4 million people pay for their Obamacare health plans are legal under the Affordable Care Act.
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A woman weeps during the deportation of the Jews of Ioannina (Ιωάννινα), Greece, on March 25, 1944. The deportation was enforced by the German army. Almost all of the people deported were murdered on or shortly after April 11, 1944, when the train carrying them reached Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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A votive sculpture found near the Varvakeion school reflects the type of the restored Athena Parthenos: Roman period, 2nd century CE (National Archaeological Museum of Athens). [From Wikipedia].
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