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After St. Peter died upside down on a cross in the Circus of Caligula and Nero, the surviving Christians obtained his body and buried him quickly nearby, on the steeply sloping Vatican Hill to the north of the Circus. That hill had become a makeshift graveyard four months earlier after the fire of Rome had killed so many residents of the metropolis that their loved ones began to use any open spot they could find on the roadsides radiating outside the city. . . . When the tropaion of Peter was found underneath the high altar during archaeological escavations in...

LIBERTY COUNTY, Texas -- Dozens of bodies have been found in a mass grave in Liberty County, officials said Tuesday. The Liberty County Sheriff's Office said 25 to 30 bodies were buried at the intersection of County Roads 2049 and 2048 between Hardin and Daisetta. The bodies are those of children, according to preliminary reports. The FBI was called in to assist the investigation.

CINNAMINSON, N.J. (CBS) – Three New Jersey women are behind bars for a crime, that is becoming more and more common according to police. Authorities say they stole brass markers from the graves of veterans at local cemeteries, and sold the stolen markers to a scrap yard. Authorities tell Eyewitness News the suspects needed drug money.

Yogi Berra rushed to FL hospital...

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped; you were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I must cry out, violence and outrage is my message; the word of the LORD has brought me derision and reproach all the day. I say to myself, I will not mention him, I will speak in his name no more. But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it....

Excavator Nicholas Stampolidis said his team discovered more than 3,000 pieces of gold foil in the 7th-century B.C. twin grave near the ancient town of Eleutherna... The tiny gold ornaments, from 1 to 4 centimetres (0.4 to 1.5 inches) long, had been sewn onto a lavish robe or shroud that initially wrapped the body of a woman and has almost completely rotted away but for a few off-white threads... The woman, who presumably had a high social or religious status, was buried with a second skeleton in a large jar sealed with a stone slab weighing more than half a...

Hundreds of people flocked to a yard sale in Kingston, Ont., on Saturday after hearing a nine-year-old boy wanted to raise money to buy a headstone for his dead father. "I just felt bad because there was no gravestone, so I wanted raise money to buy a gravestone," said Blake McGinness. Blake's father, Rick Lees, who died last year of a stomach aneurysm, is buried at the Wilmer Cemetery just outside Kingston. His gravesite is currently marked only by some of Blake's toys, as the family couldn't afford a gravestone. News of Blake's yard sale spread, prompting hundreds of people...

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican marines found the dumped bodies of 72 people at a rural location in northern Mexico following a shootout with suspected drug cartel gunmen that left one marine and three suspects dead, the Navy reported late Tuesday. The cadavers of 58 men and 14 women were found at a spot near the Gulf coast south of the border city of Matamoros. It appears to be the largest drug-cartel body dumping ground found in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug trafficking in late 2006. "The federal government categorically condemns the barbarous acts committed...

A Dallas man was arrested early this morning when he was found carrying a foot stolen from a Pleasant Grove graveyard, police said. Daniel Wayne Staley, 18, is accused of digging up a grave and removing a foot from a body at a Jewish cemetery near the 3100 block of Buckner Boulevard. "I dug it up from a nearby grave and took it from a Jew girl just because I wanted a foot," he told officers, according to a police report.

Pfc. De'Angello Robinson, 19, traveled seven hours by bus to place a single wreath on the tomb of a soldier whom he'd never met. For him, and the other Marines who took the trip from Camp Johnson in Jacksonville, N.C. to Arlington National Cemetery to decorate graves, the day was about paying tribute to men and women who once stood in their shoes. "In a few months, from where we are getting shipped out, this could be us," said Robinson of the fallen soldiers. "If it is us, I would want somebody to do the same for me so I'm...

video clip ALSIP, Ill. (AP) -- Three gravediggers and a cemetery manager unearthed hundreds of corpses from a historic black cemetery south of Chicago, dumping some in a weeded area and double-stacking others in existing graves, in an elaborate scheme to resell the plots, authorities said Thursday. All four were charged with felonies. Frantic relatives of the deceased descended on Burr Oak Cemetery - the final resting place of lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington - in hopes someone could tell them their loved ones' remains were not among the pile of bones that...

Photo of communist guard with gun and General Draza Mihailovich from the archives of the Military Museum in Belgrade. BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbia's government has formed a special commission to try to locate the grave of a World War II guerrilla leader executed as a traitor by the Communists, officials said Monday. The location of Dragoljub Draza Mihailovic's grave has been unknown since postwar Communist authorities executed him in 1946 for collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. For decades, the issue has fueled divisions in Serbia, where many believe that Mihailovic was a hero who was killed for his loyalty to...

California's increasingly severe and largely self-inflicted economic crisis will deepen on May 19 if, as is probable and desirable, voters reject most of the ballot measures that were drafted as part of a "solution" to the state's budget deficit. They would make matters worse. ... Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating in those states. For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California's business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state's. In the last decade,...

The heirs of an Apache chieftain whose remains are rumored to be held inside Yale's oldest secret society filed a lawsuit today demanding the return of their ancestor's skull. Twenty descendants of the legendary Apache chieftain Geronimo are suing the federal government, the University and the society Skull & Bones in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to seek the return of his remains as well as punitive damages. One hundred years ago today, Geronimo died of pneumonia at Fort Sill, Okla., but the suit alleges members of the society exhumed his remains in 1918 or 1919 and...

The disturbance of human remains in burial grounds is to be allowed for the first time since the early Victorian era to deal with a shortage of graves, The Times has learnt. Under a test scheme to begin in the new year, local authorities across the country will be allowed to exhume remains and rebury them deeper to create space for further burials on top. In some cases, new inscriptions will be added to the existing headstone to ensure that the heritage of the grave is not destroyed. Damaged or insignificant headstones would be removed and replaced with only the...

LONDON -- Plans to transfer the remains of 19th-century Roman Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman from a humble country graveyard to a posh marble sarcophagus have been abandoned because gravediggers could not find his body. When church officials sought to exhume his bones from his grave in a rural English cemetery on Thursday (Oct. 2), all they found were a brass plaque and a scattering of red tassels from his cardinal's hat. The Catholic Church had wanted to shift Newman's remains to Birmingham Oratory, the Midlands edifice that he established in Victorian England, in preparation for his expected beatification as...

Archaeologists excavating north of Jerusalem have found a piece of a sarcofagus - a stone coffin - belonging to a son of a High Priest. The visible inscription reads, "the son of the High Priest" - but the words before it are broken off. It thus cannot be ascertained which High Priest is referred to, nor the name or age of the deceased. Many other findings in the excavation are from the late Second Temple period, and archaeologists assume that the High Priest in question lived between 30 and 70 C.E. Yoli Shwartz, Spokesperson for the Israel Antiquities Authority, notes...

Land soon to become a new housing estate has yielded an unexpected treasure – a 2,000- year-old skeleton, believed to be that of a prince, a warrior or a priest. Planning permission has been granted for more than 600 houses in open fields at North Bersted near Bognor. But before the work could go ahead, an archaeological survey had to be carried out on the site to check if there was anything of historical interest under the topsoil. What the team from the Thames Valley Archaeological Services found was beyond their wildest dreams. After digging tirelessly for several months they...

Pardubice, East Bohemia, July 11 (CTK) - Archaeologists have uncovered a 4000-year-old grave in Mikulovice, east Bohemia, with remains of what might have been considered a vampire at the time, Nova TV has reported. The experts made the terrifying find within their research of a burial site from the Early Bronze Age. One of the graves was situated somewhat aside. The skeleton in it bears traces of unusual treatment. When buried, the dead man was weighed down with two big stones, one on his chest and the other on his head. "Remains treated in this way are now considered as...

A party is being held at the grave of a 7/7 bomber in what is being described as an insult to the 52 London commuters murdered three years ago today. The family of Shehzad Tanweer and 400 guests will "celebrate his life" and "remember him as a martyr" at a village in Pakistan today. Tanweer, 22, Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Hasib Hussain, 18, and 19-year-old Jermaine Lindsay also died when they detonated rucksack bombs on three crowded Tube trains and a No30 bus. Tanweer's uncle, 42-year-old property developer Tahir Pervez, is organising the celebration in which verses of the Koran...