Study Finds That Prehistoric Cave Artists Were Women

Archeologists say the hand stencils created by ancient Europeans were mostly artworks imprinted by female members of prehistoric societies.Measuring and analyzing the hand stencils surrounding the famous 'Spotted Horses' mural in France's 25,000-year-old Pech Merle cave, Pennsylvania State University archaeologists found that most of them belonged to females."Even a superficial examination of published photos suggested to me that there were lots of female hands there," National Geographic quoted archaeologist Dean Snow as saying.The 28,000-year-old hand stencils of Spain's El Castillo cave and the late Paleolithic ones in France's Gargas cave also yielded the same result."We don't know what the roles of artists were in Upper Paleolithic society generally," said Snow. "But it's a step forward to be able to say that a strong majority of them were women."Stenciling, painting and chipping hand imprints onto rock walls started at least 30,000 years ago among humans.

Washington Post Sells Access To Obama Officials, Congressmen, Editors

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" - Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors.The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."The offer - which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters - is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

Saddam: 'I Lied About WMD In Fear Of Iran'

Saddam Hussein allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, it has emerged.The former dictator made the revelations in a series of interviews with the FBI during his incarceration before he was hanged in 2006.Hussein also denied any connection to Osama bin Laden and described him as a "zealot", insisting he had personally never met the al Qaeda leader.

CompuServe Bites The Dust

Wired reports: The original CompuServe service, first offered in 1979, was shut down by its current owner, AOL this past week. It was the first major online service although the number of users has dwindled in recent years. At its height, CompuServe boasted about having over half a million users simultaneously on line. Many innovations we now take for granted, from online shopping, online stock quotations, and global weather forecasts just to name a few, were standard fare on CompuServe in the 1980s. The software [on which it was built], along with all the supported features, from forums for virtually every topic and profession known to man to members' Ourworld Web pages, has been shut down.

The Grand Chessboard: The Game at Play is the Business of War

This cycle of perpetual war will continue until either citizens of the United States stop funding their Federal Government, which is clearly in the business of war, or until they completely dismantle and restructure this corporation which has been empowered, legally or not, to run the affairs of their republic. Unfortunately, since the likelihood of a serious change in foreign policy is very unlikely in the near future for the United States, anyone living in regions where the US is active and has interests should prepare themselves for the worst.