Free Republic

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey apologized on Thursday for her role in a racially insensitive skit involving blackface that her sorority put on when she was a student at Auburn University in the 1960s. Ivey said in a statement on Thursday that while she has no recollection of the skit, or of wearing blackface, she has “genuine remorse” over her participation. Though her fiance at the time, Ben LaRavia, "is the one on tape remembering the skit – and I still don’t recall ever dressing up in overalls or in blackface – I will not deny what is obvious,” Ivey said....

Genetic comparison with chimps suggests that losing chunks of DNA – including one associated with penis spines and facial whiskers – played a crucial role in making us human. Scientists have identified a clutch of subtle genetic changes that have shaped our minds and bodies into the unique form that sets humans apart from chimpanzees and the rest of the animal kingdom. The work by researchers in the US represents a landmark in a search that has occupied philosophers and scientists for millennia and one that goes to the heart of understanding what it means to be human. The findings...

There is a lot of talk these days about the “street.” What’s the word on the street? What does the average person think? How do upper-level policies actually translate down to day-to-day reality? The antique media use the “street” term mostly in relation to the so-called Arab street. Will U.S. actions in Iraq and elsewhere anger the Arab street or win it over? Will we get credit from the street for liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein and helping Iraq establish a democracy, or will the Arab street rise up against us every time the U.S. commits some real or imagined...