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The latest thing in scents next year could be the oldest perfume in the world, made especially for an Ancient Egyptian female pharaoh, according to German scientists who are analyzing residue found in a 3,400-year-old perfume flacon. The German researchers at the Bonn University Egyptian Museum say they will use the analysis to recreate the original perfume which was buried in an exquisite alabaster vessel bearing the royal insignia of Hatshepsut, the most powerful woman ever to rule Egypt before the Ptolemies and the Romans conquered it. The intact perfume jar has remained sealed since it was interred in the Valley of the Kings 1,400 years before Cleopatra. On a hunch, the Bonn Egyptologists recently ran a CAT scan which revealed 3-D images of a residue at the bottom. "No one had ever done that before," says museum curator Michael Hoeveler-Mueller. "We were frankly overjoyed at the findings. And now we are conducting a chemical analysis of the residue in hopes of b...

  Room 450 Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building   THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Please be seated.   Before I begin today, let me acknowledge, first of all, Your Excellencies, all the ambassadors who are in attendance. I also want to acknowledge both the civilians and our military personnel that are about to be deployed to the region. And I am very grateful to all of you for your extraordinary work.   I want to acknowledge General David Petraeus, who's here, and has been doing an outstanding job at CENTCOM, and we appreciate him. I want to thank Bruce Reidel -- Bruce is down at the end here -- who has worked extensively on our strategic review. I want to acknowledge Karl Eikenberry, who's here, and is our Ambassador-designate to Afghanistan. And to my national security team, thanks for their outstanding work.   Today, I'm announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. And this marks the conclusion of a careful policy review, led by...

Drastic new tactics to prevent school pupils as young as 13 falling into extremism Exclusive by Mark Hughes Crime correspondent Two hundred schoolchildren in Britain, some as young as 13, have been identified as potential terrorists by a police scheme that aims to spot youngsters who are "vulnerable" to Islamic radicalisation. The number was revealed to The Independent by Sir Norman Bettison, the chief constable of West Yorkshire Police and Britain's most senior officer in charge of terror prevention. He said the "Channel project" had intervened in the cases of at least 200 children who were thought to be at risk of extremism, since it began 18 months ago. The number has leapt from 10 children identified by June 2008. The programme, run by the Association of Chief Police Officers, asks teachers, parents and other community figures to be vigilant for signs that may indicate an attraction to extreme views or susceptibility to being "groomed" by radicali...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China's failure to be transparent about its rapidly growing military capabilities has created uncertainty and risks of miscalculation, the Pentagon said in an annual report released on Wednesday. The report, the first under the Obama administration, came weeks after Chinese boats jostled with a U.S. Navy surveillance ship in the South China Sea in a confrontation that heightened tensions over Chinese military activities near its coasts. "Much uncertainty surrounds China's future course, particularly regarding how its expanding military power might be used," according to the report on Chinese military power, which was submitted to the U.S. Congress. China was making advances in denying outsiders access to offshore areas and was improving its nuclear, space, and cyber warfare while making its military modestly more transparent, it said, noting potentially global implications to this trend. China's People's Liberation Army has "left un...

About 100 religious soldiers left a Paratroop Brigade assembly earlier this month to avoid being present at the performance of a female singer, the army weekly Bamahane reported last week. Their departure stemmed from their belief that halakha, or Jewish religious law, prohibits them from hearing a woman sing. Their position has the support of the army rabbinate. The case is only the latest of several such incidents of which Haaretz has learned. The first was reported about two years ago. This month's incident occurred two weeks ago in Haifa, when the Paratroop Brigade was marking its service in the recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. The event featured a short performance by male and female singers, both members of the brigade, who performed the brigade anthem. At that point, soldiers from the hesder program, which combines yeshiva study with army service, left the performance, after notifying their commanders. Several officers wearing skullcaps did the same. No disciplinary actio...

Pakistan's security forces and its intelligence agency have facilitated the rise of the Taliban, with whom they have an "ambiguous" relationship, a former top American army official, now headed to become the country's representative to Afghanistan has said. ISI's relationship with Taliban remains "unclear and ambiguous," Lt Gen Karl Eikenberry, nominated by the US President as his next Ambassador to Afghanistan, said terming it a focus area for the US administration right now. Eikenberry, who was the top US commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007 said this during his testimony in response to a question from Senator John Kerry, who is Chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The Pakistan army, ISI, has had a very unclear - has had a very ambiguous relationship with the Taliban over the last 15 years," he told Kerry when asked to comment on a New York Times report about ISI's involvement in supporting the Taliban and f...

goes up to 1080p, sorta Canon Rebel T1i: Courtesy Canon We all swooned when Canon brought 1080p video recording to the Eos 5D Mark II cameras and showed off the gorgeous footage. But unless you're a pro photographer who can get a tax write-off for it, how likely are you to shell out $2700 for the Mark II? Now, Canon brings HD goodness to the entry level with the $800 Rebel T1i . (Fortunately, Canon's products are more user-friendly than their names are.) Like its predecessors, the latest Rebel brings Canon's latest SLR tech to the entry level. Included are a 15.1-megapixel CMOS image sensor and the DIGIC 4 imaging processor. Together they allow the camera to capture photos at up to ISO 12800 (i.e. seeing better than you can), and grab HD video. The definition of high definition is a little bit mangled, though. 720p video is captured at a standard 30 frames per second. But the "full" HD, with 1080 lines, is limited to 20fps, which will likely give the video a cho...

Obama, Geithner and Bernanke yesterday publicly defended the dollar and denounced proposals by China and Russia to supplant the greenback with a new global currency, and yet the very policies of the Obama administration, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are creating the perfect storm for the dollar's death and its replacement with a new international reserve currency. As we reported on Monday , China has expressed support for Russia's proposal to hand the IMF the power to create a new supra-national global currency in response to the call for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. Last week the Kremlin called for the "creation of a supranational reserve currency to be issued by international institutions as part of a reform of the global financial system." Yesterday, Barack Obama, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke all separately expressed support for the dollar and denounced the Chinese-Russian proposal for a new global currency. "… ...

A usually quiet U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Cemetery, has been unusually active lately. The National Memorial Cemetery of Arizona is a beautiful 225 acre facility located in Phoenix. For the past 30-45 days in the early hours of the morning until sunset, a massive construction operation has been underway. Major amounts of earth have been excavated out about 9-10 feet deep and 600-1000 feet wide. There is multiple locations on the property like this. From the satellite view there appears to be more sections that have been covered with the concrete lids and backfilled to look as if nothing is there. ABC rock is put in place under the burial vaults for good drainage and solid bedding. This will help not contaminate ground water sources from decomposition of human bodies. The cleanliness of the heavy equipment operation and the large perfect cuts of earth is im pressive. These Massive concrete boxes are transported from a nearby storage yard on various privately owned flatbed semi-...

China has expressed support for Russia's proposal to hand the IMF the power to create a new supra-national global currency in response to the call for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. Last week the Kremlin called for the "creation of a supranational reserve currency to be issued by international institutions as part of a reform of the global financial system." The Russian proposal stated that the IMF should take the lead in establishing a "superreserve currency accepted by the whole of the international community." China today expressed support for the initiative and said it was ready to discuss the proposal at the upcoming G20 meeting in London on April 2. Hu Xiaolian, vice governor of the country's Central Bank, said that China, which holds about $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, was prepared to debate the issue as "the dollar's dominance and U.S. economic woes could entail considerable currency fluctuation...

In a strange twist to this report on the first incident of American/Israeli/International forces enforcing the Hamas weapons embargo, it is claimed that the bombs left "18- holes [craters?] diameters ranging between 160 and 430 meters." The weapons used in the barren Sudanese desert, beyond the reach of the media, must have been huge! The Trinity bomb left a crater 330 meters wide. Even if the translator confused meters for feet, what kind of conventional bombs leave craters of 160 feet or more? Below is a picture of a 70 foot crater left by 38,000 pounds of explosives. Does this incident have anything to do with the arrest warrant for Sudanese President Al-Bashir, since his government recently denounced the US/Israeli raid? There is a lot more to this story. الخرطوم ــ خاص «الشروق»: - Khartoum special «sunrise»: – دمرت الطائرات الأمريكية قافلة شاحنات قيل إنها كانت محملة بالأسلحة ومتجهة إلى الحدود المصرية، للشك فى أنها مهربة إلى سيناء، تمهيدا لادخالها عبر الأنف...

Democrats from Andrew Cuomo to Barney Frank to Barack Obama are demanding that the 418 AIG employees who received bonuses give them back. Sure, it's outrageous that the very people who drove AIG off the cliff, along with a whole lot of other financial firms, walked away with million-dollar bonuses paid with taxpayer bailout money. But as the Wall Street Journal opinion page points out, "Taxpayers have already put up $173 billion, or more than a thousand times the amount of those bonuses, to fund the government's AIG 'rescue.'" The Obama Administration is putting the finishing touches on another big bank bailout. Called the Public Private Investor Partnership (PPIP), it is the brainchild of the Treasury Secretary from Wall Street, Tim Geithner. Under the plan, the government will give our money to hedge fund managers to buy "toxic" assets for more than they are worth. The banks that created these toxic turkeys will use the money from the sales to reca...

This letter is for all the Judges who refused to take oath under PCO and who happen to be my uncles as well. I had never thought that one day I will have to convey my message to you people like this, through this mode but we know things are not smooth as they had been and it is one of our testing times. This might be one of the crucial times we are facing but we should be proud that Allah chose us to sacrifice for this country. Yes it is indeed a sacrifice which we have to bequeath, not for ourselves but for this country. Ever since I opened my eyes I have seen my father affiliated with judiciary and now it is like a part of our lives. Our life is like a tree and judiciary is one of its branch. We have grown up with this branch and we cannot let anybody slice it. If we will not protect it then who else? We may not be allowed to attend our schools or universities, we may have got our mobile phones blocked, we may not be allowed to meet anyone or go out, we may be kept in our homes like ...

By Gideon Levy Young Mahdi Abu Ayash lies in the intensive care unit of Al Ahli Hospital in Hebron, with no chance of a meaningful recovery. Look at the picture and understand - or not. Why was this teenager - who maybe, or maybe not, threw rocks at soldiers who had arrested and beaten two of his friends - shot with live ammunition? Is the IDF once again using the Ruger 0.22 caliber rifle, after it was specifically banned as a means of crowd dispersal in December 2001, by the then chief military prosector, Menahem Finkelstein? The doctors said they had never seen such a bullet before, which spins about in the brain and destroys its tissues. Why wasn't tear gas or rubber bullets enough? Or a shot in the air? Why does the IDF spokesman say that the soldiers used "crowd dispersal measures," while the doctors determined it was live ammunition? Why isn't the IDF investigating this grave incident? Why do soldiers need to roam about the town of Beit Omar at night and relentl...