From the Telegraph….

Archaeologists have discovered a lost city carved into the Andes Mountains by the mysterious Chachapoya tribe.

The settlement covers some 12 acres and is perched on a mountainside in the remote Jamalca district of Utcubamba province in the northern jungles of Peru’s Amazon.

The buildings found on the Pachallama peak are in remarkably good condition, estimated to be over 1,000 years old and comprised of the traditional round stone houses built by the Chachapoya, the ‘Cloud Forest People’.

I find it amazing (and cool) that people can still find lost cities by hacking through the jungle with machetes. Who would have thought that was possible outside of the movies?

From the Telegraph….

A new disease that is passed from rats to humans via fleas, much like the Black Death, has been discovered by scientists.

The bacteria can cause serious heart disease in humans are being spread by rat fleas, sparking concern that the infections could become a bigger problem in humans.

Research published in the Journal of Medical Microbiology suggests that brown rats, the biggest and most common rats in Europe, may now be carrying the bacteria.

It is Nagaland…..

Nagaland is known as “The most populated Baptist state in the world”. The state’s population is 1.988 million, out of which 90.02% are Christians[2]. 75% of the state’s population profess the Baptist faith, thus making it more Baptist than Mississippi (in the southern United States), where 52% of its population is Baptist

Can you guess where Nagaland is with out following the link?

Here is an explanation of how Nagaland came to be “The most populated Baptist state in the world” from a missionary’s perspective.

Here is a overview of Nagaland from Global Security.

Here is a YouTube clip from Nagaland.

From TheTyee…..

The other day I took my seven-year-old son Louis to buy some running shoes. “Pick something with Velcro,” I said, as he trotted off to roam the racks.

A clerk, hovering nearby, gave me a jaundiced look, “You know we get high school kids in here who have to buy Velcro because they never learned to tie their shoes. Every year their parents would just buy them Velcro because it was easier than making them learn how to tie laces.”

I stared at him and he went on.

“The other day we had to special order a pair of shoes for this kid’s high school graduation because he couldn’t tie his laces, and he needed a pair of Velcro formal shoes.”

I put the shoes Louis had chosen back on the shelf, and picked out a pair of lace-up running shoes. It wasn’t just that I’d been shamed into compliance by the salesman, but something Jane Jacobs had written about in her last book about the coming dark ages hit home. The loss of knowledge, she said, once vanished, is so difficult to regain — even if it’s something as mundane as tying your shoes.

In case you think this episode is an isolated example, the other day I heard a youth worker, whose job it is to help teens at risk, say that almost none of them know how to tie their shoes. I’m sure this isn’t a causal relationship — wear Velcro, go to jail — but it made me think. What else have we lost, or failed to pass along, to the generation of kids about to inherit an increasingly compromised planet?

I have long argued that my generation is by and large worthless. But I have a hard time believing that kids are growing up without even learning how to tie their shoes.