Free Republic

There are plenty of examples of structures built from recycled materials—even Buddhist temples have been made from them. In Sima Valley, California, an entire village known as Grandma Prisbey’s Bottle Village was constructed from reused glass. But this is no new concept—back in 1960, executives at the Heineken brewery drew up a plan for a “brick that holds beer,” a rectangular beer bottle that could also be used to build homes. Gerard Adriaan Heineken acquired the “Haystack” brewery in 1864 in Amsterdam, marking the formal beginning of the eponymous brand that is now one of the most successful international breweries....

...we’ll be working for the next few weeks at the site of Aguas Buenas, located to north of the city of Juigalpa. The Central Nicaragua Archaeological Project is an ongoing archaeological investigation to shed light on the prehistory of Nicaragua, in particular its extraordinary indigenous tradition of monumental stone sculptures and its poorly understood ceremonial complexes. As part of this, the Aguas Buenas archaeological site holds special interest. Our recent explorations of the site have revealed its unequalled architectural characteristics and extraordinary number of mounds, spread out over the hilly Chontales landscape by means of wide concentric semi-circles. Current knowledge...

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Nicholas Winton rescued hundreds of young Jews from the Nazis and is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. We meet some of the children he savedThe birthday party will be modest and understated, in keeping with the man. Sir Nicholas Winton is 104 tomorrow and naturally some of his children will be there to wish him well. Not only his blood offspring but those known as Winton’s Children – the ones he saved from near-certain death three-quarters of a century ago. Nicholas – Nicky – Winton hates to be thought of as a hero, hates being compared with Oskar...

When rationing was introduced in January 1940, the Ministry of Food distributed various leaflets to the public. They fell into different categories: some explained new ingredients such as dried eggs, while others offered helpful guides to making the most of the rations.

Circa 1960 - LAPD Robbery Squad officers dressed as women “as part of an operation to catch a purse snatcher who murdered an elderly woman while she was on her way to church.”

They say you should write what you know, but the greatest writer of all completely ignored the world on his doorstep. William Shakespeare set plays in Venice, Rome, Scotland and other locations around the world. Some of his plays revolve around the British Court, but he set almost nothing in the rough-and-tumble of 16th-century London or sleepy Stratford upon Avon, where he spent most of his life. This is all the more puzzling when, as a new exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA) proves, his life was so intimately bound up with the capital. The show commemorates the 400th...

An archaeological survey on the famous Scots isle of Iona -- where St Columba landed 1450 years ago to spread Christianity in Scotland -- has shown signs of ancient burials. This is the first geophysical investigation to be undertaken away from the core focus of the Columban monastic enclosure and the Benedictine Abbey... examined two areas in the fields to the south of the village - one close to the current village hall and south of the Nunnery and the other at Martyr’s Bay... where there is a mound beside the road where skeletal remains were excavated in the 1960s......

The peak period for baby-making sex in ancient Egypt was in July and August, when the weather was at its hottest. Researchers made this discovery at a cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt whose burials date back around 1,800 years. The oasis is located about 450 miles (720 kilometers) southwest of Cairo. The people buried in the cemetery lived in the ancient town of Kellis, with a population of at least several thousand. These people lived at a time when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt, when Christianity was spreading but also when traditional Egyptian religious beliefs were still strong....

Cairo, May 16 (EFE).- Archaeologists found the 1,400-year-old remains of a Nubian soldier in Aswan, a city in southern Egypt, Minister of State for Antiquities Ahmed Eisa said. The soldier's remains were discovered in a field that dates to the Late Roman Period and Early Middle Age near the border of Egypt and Nubia. The find shows that conflicts broke out periodically along the frontier between Egypt and Nubia, a region that covered parts of southern Egypt and northern Sudan. The soldier's remains are in good condition and he appeared to be between 25 and 35 at the time of...

One of the most controversial proposed members of the human evolutionary family, considered an ancient ape by some skeptical scientists, is the real hominid deal, an analysis of a newly reconstructed skull base finds. By 4.4 million years ago, Ardipithecus ramidus already possessed a relatively short, broad skull base with a forward-placed opening for the spinal cord, an arrangement exclusive to ancient hominids and people today, William Kimbel of Arizona State University in Tempe reported on April 11 at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists annual meeting. Although features of the skull's floor evolved substantially in Homo species leading to...

The oldest known fossils of an ape and a monkey have been uncovered, providing an intriguing glimpse of a crucial time in primate evolution. The discoveries suggest that by 25 million years ago, two major groups of primates were distinct: one that today includes apes and humans and another that encompasses Old World monkeys such as baboons and macaques. Previous studies using living primates’ DNA suggested that ancient apes and Old World monkeys parted from a common ancestor between 25 million and 30 million years ago. The new ape and monkey fossils, from Tanzania’s Rukwa Rift Basin, suggest that the...

A 5,300-year-old man found sticking out of an Alpine glacier in 1991 possessed more genes in common with Neandertals than Europeans today do. The man’s Neandertal heritage is a preliminary sign that Stone Age interbreeding occurred more frequently than many scientists assume. Two researchers determined that the previously analyzed genome of Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman (SN: 3/24/12, p. 5) included roughly 4 to 4.5 percent Neandertal genes. Modern Europeans’ genetic library includes an average of 2.5 percent Neandertal genes. Human groups that migrated into Europe after 5,000 years ago mated with continental natives and diluted traces of Neandertal genetic ancestry...

Underneath the Honduran rain forests' dense canopy of trees, a team of researchers think they may have found the ruins of la Ciudad Blanca - the White City --- a legendary city of gold sought by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes. In a 1526 letter to Spanish Emperor Charles V, Cortes described an area in the interior of Honduras with riches far greater than those of Mexico. In 1839, according to a report by Nature World News, American diplomat and aspiring archaeologist John Lloyd Sturges went out in search of ruins in western Honduras and found the Mayan city of Copan,...

The results of an earlier round of sampling in El Castillo cave, published last June1, showed that the oldest of the paintings, a simple red spot, dates to at least 40,800 years ago, roughly when the first modern humans reached western Europe. Pike and his colleagues think that when they analyse the latest samples, the paintings may turn out to be older still, perhaps by thousands of years -- too old to have been made by modern humans. If so, the artists must have been Neanderthals, the brawny, archaic people who were already living in Europe... An early date for...

Maybe it was a teenager engaged in a Viking version of tagging a school desk. In any case, someone took out his knife, bent down and traced the outline of his foot on the deck of the Gokstad Ship. Today, 1,100 years later, researcher and storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad shows us a couple of deck planks that are among her favourite artefacts at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo... The Gokstad Ship was excavated in the late 1800s and is a permanent feature of the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo. For about a decade, from 890...

. "Cry Havoc, and Let Slip the Dogs of War" Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene I ========================================== Joe Biden's political days are numbered. He will be forced and blackmailed to resign the Vice Presidency before Memorial Day 2014. Biden will be "politically assassinated" by the twin lethal armored pincers of the Gestapo-like House of Clinton and a quiet but (politically) deadly CIA, who are in stealth mode to bring-down the putrid Obama Administration for its murderous complicity in the Benghazi Scandal. Biden should closely review the history of Nixonian Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was caught in the crosshairs...

Cambodia was a pretty cool place to be in the 1960s and early Â’70s. Psychedelic rock music was introduced to the country by North American soldiers during the Vietnam War. But when the communist Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975, they killed all the singers and banned music (and books and dancing and poetry and pretty much anything fun or intellectually stimulating). Not surprisingly, many fled the country to avoid execution, but they still hold onto those rock songs as memories of better times. Like Bochan Huy and her family. Bochan, now 33 and a singer in Oakland,...

"In a coal camp, the company owned all the properties, the houses and everything associated with the camp. Miners who worked there, just worked for wages and the pay they received was not enough to provide decent living for their families. The houses were mostly four rooms without indoor plumbing, there were no streets, just dirt lanes filled with coal ashes from the "warm morning' stoves that were used to heat the home. Some houses only had a single fireplace for heat in the cold winters....." ...Dozens of color photos.... "A general store owned by the company, allowed the miners...

40 years ago today, May 19th, 1973 Archibald Cox was appointed special prosecutor.

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United States Army soldier Henry L. Johnson, also known as “Black Death,” earned his fearsome nickname in France during World War I. After being ambushed by German forces and taken captive, Johnson freed himself and other soldiers using just a rifle and a knife. His heroic act was rewarded by France officials and has been awarded posthumously several times over. NewsOne takes a look back at the riveting tale of Johnson’s run-in with the Germans as he fought his way to freedom and future glory. Details of Johnson’s early life are scattered, with some historians saying he was born in...

I watch Bob Beckel on the Five and he asserts that we're "out to get Hillary" because we think we can keep her from running for president if we pin the Benghzi scandal on her. This is premised on the notion that she wants to run and the Democrats want her to run. What if she does not want to run, and the Democrats don't really want her to run, or not nearly as much as they pretend to want her to run? I don't think they love Hillary as much as they FEAR her. They don't seem to be...

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Academics from Britain and China claim to have found links between Neolithic cave paintings and the Dongba religion of Yunnan Province. The latest research establishes a pattern that reveals the origins of Dongba writings going back 7,000 years. This crucial evidence is now on display at the UK’s Northhampton University. For thousands of years, locked away in the mountainous province of Yunnan, Dongba has been the main religion of the Naxi people. Even today it uses an ancient pictograph–based language to document its culture – the world’s only surviving form of such a writing. Now studies of Neolithic cave paintings...

The Google Map of eastern Honduras is almost blank. A vast and virtually unexplored rainforest region known as the Mosquitia covers around 32,000 square miles, home to dense jungle, hostile terrain and the terrifying-sounding jumping viper. Legend has it that somewhere beneath the forest canopy lies the ancient city of Ciudad Blanca – and now archaeologists think they may have found it. Tomorrow in Cancun, Mexico, an interdisciplinary group of scientists from fields including archaeology, anthropology and geology will appear at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference to present the technology that has allowed them to discover a “lost world”...

The Cape of Cavalleria on the northern coast of Menorca provides a natural shelter for the port of Sanitja from the northern and northeastern winds. This natural port was first occupied as a military camp during the Roman conquest of the Balearic Islands by General Metelus between 123 and 121 BCE, and the harbour settlement grew over the following centuries. In 1996 the formal study of this area began, revealing one of the most important archaeological sites on the island of Menorca. The initial work between 1996 and 2008, revealed that the military camp had an unexpectedly long occupation of...

The so-called Elephant's Tomb in the Roman necropolis of Carmona (Seville, Spain) was not always used for burials. The original structure of the building and a window through which the sun shines directly in the equinoxes suggest that it was a temple of Mithraism, an unofficial religion in the Roman Empire. The position of Taurus and Scorpio during the equinoxes gives force to the theory... The origin and function of the construction have been the subject of much debate. Archaeologists from the University of Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain) have conducted a detailed analysis of the structure and now suggest...

Archaeologists are to explore the remains of a Roman naval base in Cumbria in the hope of finding evidence of a civilian settlement from more than 1,800 years ago. The fort, often referred to as Glannaventa, was built to protect the North West from Irish invasion and was occupied from AD 120 through to the 4th Century. Sited at the edge of an eroding cliff overlooking the River Esk, parts of the fort and settlement are believed to have been reused to build the village of Ravenglass and the early Muncaster Castle. Over the centuries the Roman remains have been...

"Tools were made by a specific canon of Neanderthals living in Central Europe. These items have a cutting edge on both sides, they are bifacial" - said Dr. Wisniewski. Tools, including bifaces and asymmetric blades, are made of siliceous rocks, commonly called flint. According to head researcher, Neanderthals made their tools with holders made of antlers, wood or other materials. This is evidenced by the results of the microscopic analysis of similar items discovered in Germany. Among the flint, archaeologists also found fragments of coarse grained crystalline rock used as pestles - support tools in the manufacture of other tools....

Malta's megalithic temples are slowly revealing secrets about a population that was clever, artistic, creative and talented with an eye for detail and a taste for the delicate and the exotic. Heritage Malta this evening surprised guests at the Malta Fashion Week with an exhibition entitled Jewellery through the times showing that Malta's first residents were not the aggressive, dirty individuals with unkempt hair which most imagine them to have been. The exhibition was followed by a fashion show of replica prehistoric jewellery, which preceded the main highlight: changing the misconception related to the image of prehistoric people by means...

Excavations by Environment Agency contractors creating a new bird reserve on Teesside have revealed Bronze and Iron Age artefacts -- and the remains of a former Roman settlement which was previously unknown. The discoveries at Greatham Creek are significant as they are the first such remains ever to be found next to the salt marsh on the north bank of the Tees Estuary... Among the finds are flint tools and pottery fragments, an arrowhead, jet jewellery, flint thumbnail scrapers, Bronze Age blades, ancient burial mounds and the remains of several Roman roundhouses... Much of the inter-tidal habitat around the Tees...

Fig. 1. Map of the Harrat in Syria, Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Stephan F.J. Kempe1, Ahmad Al-Malbeh21: Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany; 2: Hashemite University Zarka, Jordan The eastern “panhandle” of the kingdom of Jordan is partly covered by a vast and rugged lava desert, the Harrat, covering about ca. 11.400 km2 (Fig. 1). Scoured by wind in winter and scorched dry by the sun in summer, the surface is covered by black basalt stones, making this area seem as uninviting, hostile and inaccessible as is imaginable.Nevertheless this modern day desolate desert proves to be as rich in archaeological heritage...

Russ & Daughters on New York’s Lower East Side belongs on every gourmand’s list of essential destinations. Its fresh bagels with homemade cream cheese and razor thin smoked salmon are quite literally from another world. For 100 years, this culinary and cultural institution has been doing it all from scratch, sourcing the world’s best fish and using all-natural ingredients. It all began with Joel Russ, who emigrated from Eastern Europe in 1907. “Grandpa” Russ was part of a stream of a million and half Jews who fled the region between 1880 and 1923 who ended up in Manhattan’s Lower East...

Wednesday morning, Glenn Beck asked his radio audience for possible names for the basket of scandals facing the Obama administration (Benghazi, IRS Intimidation, AP Phone Records). Beck requested that Twitter users post their suggestions on the social media site using the hashtag #oscandalnames. The hashtag started trending worldwide almost immediately. Obamas Scandals Need A Soundtrack Heres Our List Several good names were posted online, but no official scandal name has been selected by Beck and his crew. That idea sparked some on TheBlaze edit staff to wonder about a soundtrack for the scandals. A list of pop hits from the...

“I’m from out of town, and I like a good pastrami sandwich,” said Jeffrey A. Devore, a lawyer from West Palm Beach, Fla., who was sitting in Katz’s, the Lower East Side delicatessen that, like the neighborhood itself, has become a study in contrasts. Mr. Devore had driven into Manhattan in his rental car after a court hearing in Newark and had taken a seat amid what a critic once described as the “terrazzo-and-Formica ambience, with a cafeteria counter along one side and signs instructing you, as of yore, to ‘Send a salami to your boy in the Army.’” Beneath...

When did frying chicken become so intimidating? There are cooks out there who have spherified martini olives and piped buttercreams without ever biting into a piece of homemade fried chicken. There are even more cooks who have attempted fried chicken once, only to renounce it immediately. “It was too far outside my comfort zone,” said one friend, an accomplished cook who has stuffed many a zucchini. Another friend brought picture-perfect chicken to a picnic (wrapped in a tea towel, yet) that was raw at the bone. I have sympathy for these people. They have been traumatized by grease fires, flour-crusted...

It seems very odd that the MSM would be participating so vigorously in the reporting on the various scandals that have exploded on the scene since mid last week. I've seen numerous comments scattered about skeptical of the motives behind this uncharacteristic attack by the MSM on the Obama administration. Buried within the Benghazi debacle is information that I believe this administration has carefully kept as obscure as they possibly could for years now, and are now muddying the waters in an effort to keep commentary on the core nature of the Benghazi situation minimalized. The subject they wish to...

Billie Sol Estes, a flamboyant Texas huckster who became one of the most notorious men in America in 1962 when he was accused of looting a federal crop subsidy program, has died. He was 88... One of the strangest episodes in his life involved the death of a U.S. Department of Agriculture official who was investigating Estes just before he was accused in the fertilizer tank case. Henry Marshall's 1961 death was initially ruled a suicide even though he had five bullet wounds. But in 1984, Estes told a grand jury that Johnson had ordered the official killed to prevent...

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Frontpage InterviewÂ’s guest today is Irina Tsukerman, the coordinator for Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People, a new initiative which focuses on the digital documentation of sites and narratives connected to Soviet persecution of Jews, as well as sites and stories associated with acts of resistance.FP: Irina Tsukerman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.I would like to talk to you today about your new initiative, Soviet Crimes Against the Jewish People.But letÂ’s begin with you telling us a bit about your background and what inspired you to start this effort.Tsukerman: I was born in Ukraine, when it was still part of the...

When the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered the 4,000-year-old Palace of Minos on Crete in 1900, he saw the vestiges of a long-lost civilization whose artefacts set it apart from later Bronze-Age Greeks. The Minoans, as Evans named them, were refugees from Northern Egypt who had been expelled by invaders from the South about 5,000 years ago, he claimed. Modern archaeologists have questioned that version of events, and now ancient DNA recovered from Cretan caves suggests that the Minoan civilization emerged from the early farmers who settled the island thousands of years earlier....

Archaeologists have unearthed what could be the earliest evidence of ancient human ancestors hunting and scavenging meat. Animal bones and thousands of stone tools used by ancient hominins suggest that early human ancestors were butchering and scavenging animals at least 2 million years ago.

Money flowed, jazz music rang out, and fashionable young women in 1920s London, Paris and New York set aside behaviour previously deemed 'appropriate' in favour of high spirits, short skirts, hedonism and social liberation. These giddy, creative, enthusiastic women of the Roaring Twenties' were named 'flappers' because of their effervescent personalities. They were writers, actresses, painters, society heiresses, and they were a new breed of women typified by newly bobbed hair, thick make-up and predilections for smoking, drinking, dancing the Charleston... and then some. As Baz Luhrmann's new cinematic remake of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby prepares...

Bruce Walker has recently re-published “Sinisterism: The Secular Religion of the Lie,” and expanded it into two volumes (Outskirts Press, Denver, 2013, third edition). The first volume contends the left-right ideological spectrum needs to be scrapped if people truly want to understand modern secular history. Walker demonstrates the left-right divide that pits Nazis on the far right against Communists on the far left, with varying degrees of Socialism and Capitalism in between, should be replaced with the honest admission that we often live in a mad, mad, mad, mad world – or what Walker brands as different branches of “Sinisterism”...

On Monday, March 21, 2011 the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta received word that the remains of either a plesiosaur or an ichthyosaur had been discovered in the Milllennium Mine operated by the petroleum company Suncor Inc. This mine is located about 30 km north of the town of Fort McMurray (population ~50,000) in northeastern Alberta (about 800km north of Drumheller), and is one of the places where bitumen rich sand is mined and refined into various petroleum products. On Wednesday, March 23, 2011 myself and technician Darren Tanke flew up to Fort McMurray expecting to see...

Bulldozers and backhoes have essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids, which survived millennia of storms, rain and wind only to succumb to a construction company seeking gravel for road fill. The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology says the destruction was detected late last week, and only a small portion of the center of the pyramid mound was left standing, according to the Associated Press. 7Newsbelize.com, the website for TV channel 7 in the small Caribbean country, accompanied a handful of archaeologists to the site recent.

This recent passage plus the morphing gif was discovered in a recently found book claimed to be written by Nostradamus. Leaders of different eras of a future global empire More Dissimilar yet the same, More Similar Than Different. One speaks, stands from the left, black as the evening sky. His counterpart speaks from the right, The color of snow, cold as ice, brilliant, bright, white. Both speak with a the tongue of the serpent, Who could hardly speak any differently,yet strangely their actions, motives make them perfect dopplegangers in their entwined fates.

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