Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not allowed by the global football governing body FIFA to share a message of peace at the FIFA World Cup final on Sunday, CNN reported quoting a source.  

According to the report, the source confirmed that Zelensky’s office reached out to FIFA regarding a possible address via video link but was surprised with the rejection from the officials.  

“We thought FIFA wanted to use its platform for the greater good,” the source told CNN. 

While the initial request was denied, the source added that the two parties are still in contact regarding his involvement in the summit clash and it is possible that Zelensky may end up playing a role as Argentina and France battle it out for the title at the Lusail Stadium in Lusail in Qatar. 

In the past six months, Zelensky has appeared in various international events – ranging from the G7 summit to the Grammy Awards – to keep the global spotlight on the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

However, with FIFA already facing a lot of criticism over the human rights violations brought against Qatar, it seems that the football body is not taking a chance with Zelensky’s address. 

FIFA president Gianni Infantino told reporters on Friday that the governing body has already stopped some “political statements” during the tournament because it has to “take care of everyone.” 

“We are a global organization and we don’t discriminate against anyone,” Infantino said. 

“We are defending values, we are defending human rights and rights of everyone at the World Cup. Those fans and the billions watching on TV, they have their own problems.

They just want to watch 90 or 120 minutes without having to think about anything, but just enjoying a little moment of pleasure and joy.

We have to give them a moment when they can forget about their problems and enjoy football.” 

Kathleen Martinez, an archaeologist at the University of Santo Domingo, has been searching for the lost tomb of Cleopatra for nearly 20 years. Now she believes she’s made a pivotal breakthrough.

Martinez and her team uncovered a 1,305-meter (4,281-foot) tunnel, located 13 meters (43 feet) underground, the Egyptian Ministry for Tourism and Antiquities recently announced — an architectural design experts called an “engineering miracle.”

“The excavation revealed a huge religious center with three sanctuaries, a sacred lake, more than 1,500 objects, busts, statues, golden pieces, a huge collection of coins portraying Alexander the Great, Queen Cleopatra and the Ptolemies,” Martinez told CNN.

Kathleen Martinez discovered a tunnel which may lead to the lost tomb. Credit: Kathleen Martinez-Nazar/Taposiris Magna Project

“The most interesting discovery is the complex of tunnels leading to the Mediterranean Sea and sunken structures,” she added. Exploring these underwater structures will be the next stage of her search for the Egyptian queen’s lost tomb — a journey that began in 2005.

“My perseverance cannot be confused with obsession. I admire Cleopatra as a historical character. She was a victim of propaganda by the Romans, aiming to distort her image,” Martinez said.

“She was an educated woman, probably the first one who studied formally at the Museum in Alexandria, the center of culture in her time,” according to Martinez, who said she admires Cleopatra as a student, a linguist, a mother and a philosopher.

When her husband, the Roman general Mark Antony, died in her arms in 30 BCE, Cleopatra took her own life soon after by allowing an asp to bite her, according to popular belief. The moment has been immortalized in art and literature — but, more than two millennia later, little is known about where their remains lie.

Elizabeth Taylor appears as Cleopatra and Richard Burton as Mark Antony in the 1963 movie “Cleopatra.” Credit: Twentieth Century Fox

A series of clues led Martinez to believe Cleopatra’s tomb might be located in the Temple of Osiris in the ruined city of Taposiris Magna, on Egypt’s northern coast, where the Nile River meets the Mediterranean.

Chief among them was the name itself.According to Martinez,Cleopatra was considered in her time to be “the human incarnation of the goddess Isis,” as Antony was considered to be that of the god Orisis, Isis’ husband.

Martinez believes Cleopatra may have chosen to bury her husband in the temple to reflect this myth. Of all the 20 temples around Alexandria she has studied, Martinez said, “no other place, structure or temple combines so many conditions as the temple of Taposiris Magna.”

Excavations so far have unearthed more than 1,500 ancient objects. Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism

In 2004, Martinez took her theory to Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist who was then Egypt’s minister for antiquities affairs. Her project was approved a year later.

And after years of searching, Martinez feels she is getting close.

The excavations so far have revealed that “the temple was dedicated to Isis” — which Martinez believes is another sign that the lost tomb lies nearby — as well as the tunnels below the sea.

The search for the lost tomb has taken Martinez under the Mediterranean Sea. Credit: Kathleen Martinez-Nazar/Taposiris Magna Project

Now, Martinez said, she is at “the beginning of a new journey” — underwater excavations.

According to a statement issued by the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the Egyptian coastline has been battered by earthquakes over the centuries, causing parts of the Taposiris Magna to collapse and sink under the waves.

This is where Martinez and her team are looking next. Although it is “too early to know where these tunnels lead,” she is hopeful.

If the tunnels lead to Cleopatra, “it will be the most important discovery of the century,” she said.

Jared Kushner appears to be doing everything he can to dispel rumors that he’s the “Mar-a-Lago” mole who ratted out Donald Trump to the FBI, resulting in the agency searching the ex-president’s Palm Beach, Florida resort earlier this month.

In an appearance on Fox News over the weekend, Kushner told anchor Mark Levin that the raid, which he called an “unfortunate turn of events”, was yet another example of Trump’s “enemies” persecuting him.

“President Trump is a fighter,” Kushner, whose new book Breaking History: A White House Memoir, which is being panned by critics, hits bookstore shelves tomorrow, said. “He’s always been a fighter.”

“In the way that he drives his enemies so crazy, they always over pursue him and make mistakes in trying to get him. That’s basically what happened here.”

Multiple sources close to Trump told The Guardian last week that after the FBI searched his home, aides began frantically speculating about who among them was in cahoots with the agency.

They quickly determined the person had to be close–very close–to the ex-president given what agents already knew when they showed up at the front door, including where his safe was located and to look for a specific leather-bound box.

Shortly after the raid, Mary Trump publicly speculated that Kushner was the confidential informant in an appearance on the podcast The Dean Obeidallah Show.

“We need to look very hard at why Jared got $2 billion,” she said, referring to an investment into Kushner’s private equity firm from a fund belonging to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. “We need to look very hard at why he has been so quiet for so many months now.”

She continued, “And we need to think about who could also be implicated in this that would need as big a play as turning Donald in in order to get out of trouble, or at least to mitigate the trouble they’re in.”

“It sounds like somebody in Jared’s position. I’m not saying it’s Jared, but it could be.”

Speaking to Levin, Jared also tried to dispel reports that there is tension between himself and his father-in-law, claiming they just played golf together “a few days ago” before going to to say that leakers are making up “fabulous claims” about his family.

Kushner also took to Twitter to suck up to his father-in-law, tweeting: “Working for @realdonaldtrump was the honor of a lifetime,” along with a photo of the two together on an airplane.

For the first time, researchers successfully sequenced the genome of ancient human fossils from the Late Pleistocene in southern China. The data, published July 14 in the journal Current Biology, suggests that the mysterious hominin belonged to an extinct maternal branch of modern humans that might have contributed to the origin of Native Americans.

“Ancient DNA technique is a really powerful tool,” Su says. “It tells us quite definitively that the Red Deer Cave people were modern humans instead of an archaic species, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans, despite their unusual morphological features,” he says.

The researchers compared the genome of these fossils to that of people from around the world. They found that the bones belonged to an individual that was linked deeply to the East Asian ancestry of Native Americans. Combined with previous research data, this finding led the team to propose that some of the southern East Asia people had traveled north along the coastline of present-day eastern China through Japan and reached Siberia tens of thousands of years ago. They then crossed the Bering Strait between the continents of Asia and North America and became the first people to arrive in the New World.

The journey to making this discovery started over three decades ago, when a group of archaeologists in China discovered a large set of bones in the Maludong, or Red Deer Cave, in southern China’s Yunnan Province. Carbon dating showed that the fossils were from the Late Pleistocene about 14,000 years ago, a period of time when modern humans had migrated to many parts of the world.

From the cave, researchers recovered a hominin skull cap with characteristics of both modern humans and archaic humans. For example, the shape of the skull resembled that of Neanderthals, and its brain appeared to be smaller than that of modern humans. As a result, some anthropologists had thought the skull probably belonged to an unknown archaic human species that lived until fairly recently or to a hybrid population of archaic and modern humans.

In 2018, in collaboration with Xueping Ji, an archaeologist at Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Bing Su at Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues successfully extracted ancient DNA from the skull. Genomic sequencing shows that the hominin belonged to an extinct maternal lineage of a group of modern humans whose surviving decedents are now found in East Asia, the Indo-China peninsula, and Southeast Asia islands.

The finding also shows that during the Late Pleistocene, hominins living in southern East Asia had rich genetic and morphologic diversity, the degree of which is greater than that in northern East Asia during the same period. It suggests that early humans who first arrived in eastern Asia had initially settled in the south before some of them moved to the north, Su says.

“It’s an important piece of evidence for understanding early human migration,” he says.

Next, the team plans to sequence more ancient human DNA by using fossils from southern East Asia, especially ones that predated the Red Deer Cave people.

“Such data will not only help us paint a more complete picture of how our ancestors migrate but also contain important information about how humans change their physical appearance by adapting to local environments over time, such as the variations in skin color in response to changes in sunlight exposure,” Su says.

On 1 November, 1955, the United States recorded one of its first attacks on a commercial airliner after a man packed 25 sticks of dynamite into his mother’s suitcase.

Daisie E. King, a 54-year-old woman from Denver, boarded the plane that day to fly to Alaska with plans to visit her daughter. Her 23-year-old son, John ‘Jack’ Gilbert Graham, told police afterwards he didn’t know what his mother had packed in her luggage other than shotgun shells and other ammunition for hunting.

In reality, he had spent the day of the flight searching for what he described as an ‘early Christmas present’ for his mother before taking the package to the basement, where King had been packing.

The family then headed to Denver’s Stapleton Airport, from which the plane took off at 6:52pm local time. It was only 11 minutes later that an employee in the Stapleton control tower reported seeing a bright flash of white and a flare in the sky, according to an accident report cited by The Denver Channel.

The explosion marked the deadliest act of mass murder in Colorado history, resulting in the deaths of all 44 people on board, including a 13-month old boy.

Investigators working on the case began searching through the remains of the luggage to look for the most badly-damaged items or those which were coated in foreign residue. The search led them to King’s case and consequently to her son, with who she was found to have a tumultuous relationship.

Graham was set to receive an inheritance from his mother, but the pair had fought ‘like cats and dogs’ for years, the FBI said.

The son had lived with various family members through the years and left home at 16, before returning to work in his mother’s restaurant which, two months before the flight, was damaged by an explosion Graham blamed on a disconnected gas line. 

During questioning, the FBI asked Graham about the gift, first thought to be a toolset, he had bought for his mother, and about why he purchased a trip insurance policy of $37,500 in his mother’s name, with himself as the beneficiary, at the airport. A search also revealed a small roll of copper wire similar to the type found on a detonating primer cap in one of Graham’s shirts.

Agents began to find holes in Graham’s story, and the son admitted to causing the explosion at his mother’s restaurant months earlier. He then admitted to causing the explosion on board the plane, saying he had built a time bomb using 25 sticks of dynamite.

Speaking later with psychiatrists, Graham described having put the bomb into his mother’s suitcase before dropping his family off at the airport door and driving to a car park. He set the timer on the bomb to 90 minutes, then took the bag to the baggage drop, where he paid a fee due to it being overweight.

“The number of people to be killed made no difference to me,” Graham told psychiatrists, saying: “It could have been a thousand. When their time comes, there is nothing they can do about it.”

Graham was sentenced to death for murder, and he was executed in a gas chamber on 11 January, 1957.