"This is a hugely important discovery," expedition organiser Dmitry Vasilyev told AFP by telephone from Astrakhan State University after returning from excavations near the village of Samosdelka, just north of the Caspian Sea.

"We can now shed light on one of the most intriguing mysteries of that period -- how the Khazars actually lived. We know very little about the Khazars -- about their traditions, their funerary rites, their culture," he said.

The city was the capital of the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic peoples who adopted Judaism as a state religion, from between the 8th and the 10th centuries, when it was captured and sacked by the rulers of ancient Russia.

This week Donny George used the IraqCrisis list to blast his successor:

This man has never been an archaeologist, then how he could become the top Iraqi archaeologist, all the matter is that when they (the minister of tourism and antiquities)wanted to remove me from the position because of my faith, the only one they found from their own party with a PhD was Abbas, so they brought him to the position, and he was removed after only one year not because of political reasons, but because they understood he knew nothing and embarrassed them in so many cases during that year, and this information is from the adviser for the minister of Tourism and Antiquities, bringing Abbas to that position was the sharpest decline in the history of the SBAH in Baghdad.

Marie Stopes, the notorious early 20th century contraception campaigner, eugenicist and anti-Semite, did for Britain what Margaret Sanger did for the US: preached the doctrines of eugenics and promoted contraception and sterilisation to achieve "racial hygiene." So successful was she at altering British society in favour of her eugenics doctrines, the British government has chosen her to be included in a "Women of Distinction" line of stamps.

The Royal Mail announced this weekend that the face of Marie Stopes, who advocated the sterilisation of poor women to promote the "welfare of the race", will feature on the 50p stamp. The stamps will be available beginning 14 October 2008.

Columnist Gerald Warner wrote on his weblog at the Daily Telegraph, "Considering the hysteria nowadays attaching to issues of race, at first sight it seems extraordinary that Stopes should have earned commemoration on a stamp."

"To the [politically correct] establishment, however, even racist peccadilloes can be ignored to honour a pioneer who helped promote the anti-life culture and relieve women of the intolerable trauma of giving birth to a child with a cleft palate."

Just under a year ago, on Sept. 14, 2007, the University and the government of Peru claimed to have found consensus regarding the rightful ownership of artifacts excavated from Machu Picchu in the early 20th century by Yale explorer Hiram Bingham III. But whatever progress was made last fall seemed squandered when Peru threatened litigation in April, and the negotiations did not fare much better over the summer, as Yale hired a lawyer in Peru, an important meeting between the parties ended up being largely trivial and National Geographic made a brief — yet fracturing — appearance in Lima.

The Peruvian Consulate in New York was host to negotiations on Aug. 25 that could have marked a return to good relations between Yale and Peru. University General Counsel Dorothy Robinson confirmed to the News that she and other Yale officials attended the meeting, but did not comment further; Yale spokesman Tom Conroy called the talks “informative.” Conroy added in the e-mail, however, that the absence of Hernan Garrido-Lecca, Peru’s chief negotiator with Yale, limited the extent to which the parties could advance the negotiations at that session.

The Chongqing Economic Times quoted archaeologists as saying that this kind of tomb is very rare and had probably been constructed by migrants to the area.

The tomb was discovered on the morning of August 24, the final day of the Beijing Olympics, by a team of road workers in E’Ling Street, in the Yuzhong district of Chongqing. When the first bowl was dug out, the workers thought nothing of it and discarded it, but as more bowls emerged, they realized they had discovered something unusual and called the city’s cultural relics administration.

The archaeology department sent a team to investigate. They discovered a tomb constructed from porcelain bowls. Lying just 60 centimeters under the road surface, the bowls had been piled together to form a tomb. The coffin and other funerary objects were then placed inside.

The founder of the Alaska Independence Party -- a group that has been courted over the years by Sarah Palin, and one her husband was a member of for roughly seven years -- once professed his"hatred for the American government" and cursed the American flag as a"damn flag."

The AIP founder, Joe Vogler, made the comments in 1991, in an interview that's now housed at the Oral History Program in the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

"The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government," Vogler said in the interview, in which he talked extensively about his desire for Alaskan secession, the key goal of the AIP.

"And I won't be buried under their damn flag," Vogler continued in the interview, which also touched on his disappointment with the American judicial system."I'll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home."

At another point, Volger advocated renouncing allegiance to the United States. In the course of denouncing Federal regulation over land, he said:

"And then you get mad. And you say, the hell with them. And you renounce allegiance, and you pledge your efforts, your effects, your honor, your life to Alaska."

You can listen to audio of the relevant section of the Volger interview here. Bill Schneider, curator of oral history at the library, verified the authenticity of the interview and the quote to me a few moments ago.

Palin has courted the group over the years.

Three years after the controversial interview, in 1994, Palin attended the group's annual convention, according to witnesses who spoke to ABC News' Jake Tapper. The McCain campaign is disputing her presence there, but Tapper found two people to attest to it.

The McCain campaign today produced Palin's voting registration records, and said they proved she was never a member of the party.

But she has repeatedly reached out to the group. The McCain campaign has confirmed she visited the group's 2000 convention, and she addressed its convention this year, as an incumbent governor whose oath of office includes upholding the Constitution of the United States.

Palin's husband, Todd Palin, was a member of the party from 1995-2002 with a brief exception in 2000.

It's worth noting that Vogler isn't just some figure from ancient history. He is still being hailed on AIP's site this year, the same year Palin addressed the group's convention.

It's worth pondering how big a deal it would be if Obama had ever courted the support of a group whose head had said this kind of thing about America and her flag. Oh, wait...

Our map shows how more than 1500 Second World War bombs lie beneath our cities, towns and villages.

Shock figures show that 1677 of the Luftwaffe's unexploded bombs - known as UXBs - remain active across Scotland.

Today the Sunday Mail pinpoints their location, from the town of Portsoy near Inverness to Eyemouth in the south.

The new 5-acre county park is a tribute to persistence and efforts over more than 20 years to save something of the battlefield (also known as Chantilly), which lies under and surrounded by suburban Washington development — highways, malls, townhouses and office buildings.

Opening ceremonies at the park, at 4134 West Ox Rd. in Fairfax, will begin at 10 a.m. The program will include color guard, speakers, wreath-laying and reenactor demonstrations. Details are at www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/oxhill.

According to archaeological records, the Mississippian period saw the creation of some of the first large towns and city centers north of Mexico. The conventional belief has been that this period started around 1050 CE, but the drawings in Picture Cave indicate the period began earlier and in a different location.

Excavations in northern Israel at a huge earthen mound called Tel Rehov revealed the Iron Age settlement. From 2005 to 2007, workers at Tel Rehov uncovered the oldest known remnants of human-made beehives, excavation director Amihai Mazar and colleagues report in the September Antiquity. No evidence of beekeeping has emerged at any other archaeological sites in the Middle East or surrounding regions.

“The discovery of an industrial apiary at Tel Rehov constitutes a unique and extraordinary discovery that revolutionizes our knowledge of this economic endeavor, particularly in ancient Israel,” says Mazar, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.