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<p>LONDON (AP) - China is set to overtake France as the world's number one tourist destination by 2030 as a growing middle class in Asia looks to spend more on travel, according to experts at market research group Euromonitor International.</p>

The remains of a medieval skeleton has shown the first physical evidence that a fern plant could have been used for medicinal purposes in cases such as alopecia, dandruff and kidney stones. The skeleton of a male aged between 21 and 30 years found buried in the medieval necropolis of Can Reiners on the Spanish Balearic Islands, had traces of starch grains consistent with cereal plants, such as wheat and rye, and significantly, a collection of cells in which spores are formed from the underside of a fern leaf... Although there is no way of telling from the skeletal remains...

“I sit in my seat and I immediately smell something, and I thought, ‘Not another flight that smells bad,’” Matthew Meehan of Bay City, Michigan, told Yahoo Lifestyle of last Thursday’s flight from hell. “I realized the person next to me also had their nose covered,” he continued. “And then I went to take my charger out, bent down completely to charge my phone and realized it’s not just a smell, it’s actually feces and it’s all over the back of my legs, it’s all over the floor, all over the wall of the plane.” He and the fellow flier rushed over...

SYDNEY, Australia — Australian military veterans recoiled at a government-backed policy that would allow them to board some commercial airlines ahead of other passengers, calling the move a political stunt that smacked of tokenism. The government announced over the weekend that Virgin Australia would offer priority boarding to veterans and also make in-flight announcements to acknowledge their service, part of a broader push to give veterans, who use a new national ID card, discounts at supermarkets and department stores. Critics, including many veterans, said the policy was at odds with Australia’s egalitarian national ethos. The notion of a veteran singling...

Indonesian investigators, the plane’s manufacturer, Boeing, and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board are formulating a more specific inspection for Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes related to the airspeed problem, Tjahjono said. “If there are urgent findings to be delivered, we will convey them to the operators and to the manufacturer,” he said. Lion Air has said a technical problem with the jet was fixed after problems with the Bali to Jakarta flight. Investigator Nurcahyo Utomo said investigators need to review maintenance records, including what problems were reported, what repairs were done including whether components were replaced, and how the...

Classical scholars from the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" at the WWU have explored a rare bathing facility in southeastern Turkey from the time of the Roman Empire, and a magnificent basilica from Christian late antiquity... says classical scholar and excavation director Engelbert Winter... "The bath, decorated with splendid mosaics, was built in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, when public baths in Syria, unlike in the Latin West, were exceedingly rare. However, the bath was no longer in operation from as early as the 4th century AD". People left the town as a result of wars and economic...

Ram-raiders who left a store empty-handed have inadvertently helped unearth archaeological discoveries dating from medieval and Tudor times. The East of England Co-op in Dedham, Essex, was targeted in an early morning raid on 10 December which caused major structural damage to the building. Archaeologists were then commissioned and a pot, which may have been used to stop "evil influences", was dug up. A timber-framed structure, built during Henry VIII's reign, was also unearthed. The precise nature of the structure has not been confirmed yet, but they have dated it to 1520. Following the ram-raid, villagers pulled together to find...

A red silk velvet bag found in the attic of West Horsley Place, former home of Raleigh’s son, could have been used by Raleigh’s widow to carry around his embalmed head, according to the stately home and a historical costume expert. Accounts of the beheading at the palace of Westminster, London, on 29 October 1618 record that the head was placed in a red bag, and that it and his body, wrapped in his nightgown, were taken away in a mourning coach by his widow. ...One biographer claimed his widow, Elizabeth, formerly Bess Throckmorton, a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, had...

Using ancient proteins and DNA recovered from tiny pieces of animal bone, archaeologists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (IAET) at the Russian Academy of Sciences-Siberia have discovered evidence that domestic animals -cattle, sheep, and goat - made their way into the high mountain corridors of southern Kyrgyzstan more than four millennia ago... in many of the most important channels of the Silk Road itself, including Kyrgyzstan's Alay Valley (a large mountain corridor linking northwest China with the oases cities of Bukhara and Samarkand), very little is...

A new study... suggests that early hominin dispersals beyond Africa did not involve adaptations to environmental extremes, such as to arid and harsh deserts. The discovery of stone tools and cut-marks on fossil animal remains at the site of Ti's al Ghadah provides definitive evidence for hominins in Saudi Arabia at least 100,000 years earlier than previously known. Stable isotope analysis of the fossil fauna indicates a dominance of grassland vegetation, with aridity levels similar to those found in open savanna settings in eastern Africa today. The stable isotope data indicates that early dispersals of our archaic ancestors were part...

Traces of cocoa dating back 5300 years have been found in ancient pots in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This is the oldest proof of cocoa use ever found. It predates the domestication of cocoa by the Olmec and the Maya in Central America by some 1500 years. This evidence was collected in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon, at the Santa Ana La Florida (SALF) archaeological site near Palanda, discovered 16 years ago by the archaeologist Francisco Valdez and his Franco-Ecuadorian team (IRD/INPC) (2). The Mayo Chinchipe, the oldest known Amerindian civilization in the upper Amazon, had consumed cocoa almost continuously from at...

An international team of scientists has completed the first 3D virtual reconstruction of the ribcage of the most complete Neandertal skeleton unearthed to date, potentially shedding new light on how this ancient human moved and breathed. The team, which included researchers from universities in Spain, Israel, and the United States, including the University of Washington, focused on the thorax -- the area of the body containing the rib cage and upper spine, which forms a cavity to house the heart and lungs. Using CT scans of fossils from an approximately 60,000-year-old male skeleton known as Kebara 2, researchers were able...

Where exactly did the Council of Nicea meet in 325? As described in their article "Nicea's Underwater Basilica" in the November/December 2018 issue of BAR, Mustafa Sahin and Mark R. Fairchild have an idea. In 2014, an ancient basilica was discovered 165 feet off the coast of Iznik, submerged 6-10 feet under Lake Askanios. Subsequent survey and excavation headed by Professor Mustafa Sahin of Uludag University determined that this Nicea church had three aisles and a central apse and dated to the late fourth-early fifth century... The floor of the basilica's nave lay 1.6 feet lower than its walls, suggesting...

Security footage from a bus which crashed into a river in China has revealed that the driver was fighting with a passenger moments earlier. The bus plunged 50m (164ft) off a bridge into the Yangtze River in Chongqing on Sunday - at least 13 people died and two more are missing. Early reports said the bus had swerved to avoid an oncoming vehicle. The wreckage of the bus was pulled out of the river from a depth of 71m on Wednesday night. Several of the passengers' bodies had to be retrieved by divers. But the new footage shows the driver...

John Denver - Leaving On A Jet Plane

The man allegedly told Chicago Police that he was intoxicated and passed out. He flew back to Kansas City on another flight.

A husband and wife who fell to their deaths from a popular lookout at Yosemite National Park in the United States were taking a selfie, the man's brother says.

A Lion Air flight between Jakarta and an island off Sumatra has crashed, Indonesian search and rescue officials have said. A search and rescue effort has been launched after the passenger jet lost contact 13 minutes after takeoff on Monday morning. The Boeing 737-800 left the Indonesian capital at 6.20am and was headed north to arrive in Pangkal Pinang, on the island of Bangka, at

Watching the World Series, as is my wont. BMW has a commercial pushing senses beyond the normal five...In a rapid-fire montage of random couples kissing, you can catch a split-second shot of two men kissing. I rewound and replayed it several times. Definite homosexuality. Sheesh, not during baseball....

An ancient fortress which is 3,000 - 3,200 years old and was built with the so called Cyclopean masonry has been found by archaeologists in Bulgaria's Rhodope Mountains, near the town of Zlatograd and the border with Greece, and is taken as evidence that Ancient Thrace was part of the Mycenaean Civilization. The previously undetected fortress is roughly dated to 1,200 BC, i.e. to the time of Ancient Troy and the Trojan War. It is located near Zlatograd, Bulgaria's southernmost town, near the southern slopes of the Rhodope Mountains, in an area that is only about 20 kilometers away from...