clipped from cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Scriptural scholars are abuzz over a stone tablet that is said to bear previously unknown prophecies about a Jewish messiah who would rise from the dead in three days. But there are far more questions than answers about the tablet, which some have suggested could represent "a new Dead Sea Scroll in stone."

Do the tablet and the inked text really date back to the first century B.C., as claimed? Where did the artifact come from? Can the gaps in the text be filled in to make sense? Is the seeming reference to a coming resurrection correct, and to whom does that passage refer? Finally, what impact would a pre-Christian reference to suffering, death and resurrection have on Christian scholarship?

Such questions are being addressed this week in Jerusalem, at an international conference marking the 60th anniversary of the Dead Sea Scrolls' discovery. They're also being addressed in reports about the "Vision of Gabriel" tablet that have trickled out over the past few months.

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk

Does this show there's life on Mars?

The alien figure was pictured at the far left of one of the panoramic photographs taken by the exploration rover, Spirit, from the top of a low plateau in late 2007.

clipped from www.news.com.au

IT was once the final resting place for some of the country's first settlers - but now their remains are being exhumed to make way for a plant and equipment room.

Yesterday more than 3000 curious people turned up at the Sydney Town Hall to watch as workers meticulously uncovered 53 graves of adults and children.

The First Fleet graveyard is the city's first cemetery dates back to 1792 and was the resting place for a convicts, free settlers and soldiers.

Now part of the cemetery is being turned into "an essential plant and equipment room" according to the City of Sydney Council which says the renovations are part of a $60 million upgrade.

First Fleet graveyard exhumed

"It was enormous. It shows major public interest and descendants of a lot of these people are still around," archaeologist Mary Casey said.

Dr Casey said there were no more open days planned as the project is being prepared for the next stage.

clipped from www.foxnews.com

n 1942, 8-year-old Moshe Bar-Yuda walked hand-in-hand with his father to a collection point in his hometown in Slovakia, and watched him being shipped off to a Nazi labor camp. The boy never saw him again, and for 66 years was left to wonder about his father's fate.

Now, because of a newly opened Nazi archive, the mystery has been resolved.

Bar-Yuda, now 74, was one of the first to obtain Nazi documents now available to the public after they were stashed away for more than 60 years in a secret German archive containing the largest registry of Holocaust victims ever. Up to now, only limited queries were answered.

The archive proved that Bar-Yuda's father, Alfred Kastner, was killed in a Nazi gas chamber at the Majdanek death camp in Poland. Bar-Yuda said despite the tragic ending, he was grateful to finally have some closure and an exact date to recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.