Free Republic

Austin Broderson, a 19-year-old bareback rider and sophomore at Casper College, is recovering after enduring what many rodeo insiders are calling the worst wreck they’ve ever seen at the National Western Stock Show in Denver on Monday. Prayers have been going up all over the West this week for a young Casper College cowboy whose rigging slipped while riding bareback at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, and ended in what many rodeo insiders say was the worst bareback riding wreck in recent memory. Austin Broderson, 19, a sophomore on the Thunderbirds’ rodeo team, had put on a successful...

A 32-year-old man has been arrested and charged with arson after he allegedly set fire to a New York barn on Thursday, killing more than two dozen race horses. The tragic events took place at the Tioga Downs Casino complex in Nichols, New York, around an hour south of Syracuse. The New York State Police say they responded to a structure fire, later releasing a statement to confirm that 'over two dozen racehorses died' in the blaze. The statement added: 'One person who entered the burning barn in an attempt to save horses suffered second-degree burns and was transported to...

Cody Dorman, whose bond with namesake Thoroughbred Cody's Wish captured the hearts of the racing world, died Sunday, shortly after watching trackside at Santa Anita as his “best friend” scored a second consecutive victory in the Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile. Dorman, who was 17, was born with Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. Patients typically do not live beyond early childhood.

A bizarre raid saw a SWAT team arrest four squatters running an illegal strip club out of a suburban Atlanta home - which allegedly had everything from dancers to live horses on the property. Neighbors were finally able to get authorities to come out to the home at 4951 Wewatta Street in South Fulton after complaining about the nightmare next door. In addition to the illegal dancers, there were also noisy parties held at the house on weekends and car races, neighbors said. 'They would get live horses. One day they had live horses,' an unidentified neighbor said. The neighbors...

...Çavuştepe Castle is located in the Çavuştepe neighborhood on the Van-Hakkari-Iran highway in the Gürpınar District, 25 km southeast of Van. It was built in the middle of the 8th century BC by the Urartian King Sarduri II.The first excavations in Çavuştepe Castle were carried out under the presidency of Prof. Dr. Afif Erzen and continued to be done for 25 years between 1961 and 1986 while the second-period excavations started in 2014 and have been carried out under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Rafet Çavuşoğlu since then..."In our work this year, as in every year, we encountered a new...

A man on a horse has been arrested for DUI after California Highway Patrol officers spotted him riding through the streets of a small town with an open container of alcohol. Officer Kody Brackett noticed the boozy cowboy galloping through Merced, 70 miles north of Fresno, and bucked into action. A video shared by the CHP showed the horse walking alongside a police vehicle, which the cops described as 'a display of true compassion.' This incident serves as a surprising reminder that the state's drunken driving laws also apply to horse riders. The California Vehicle Code 21050 reads: 'Every person...

Archaeologists From the Eurasian National University (Enu) Have Uncovered a Pyramidal Structure at the Kyrykungir Archaeological Site. Kyrykungir is a funerary complex near the village of Toktamys, located in the Abay region of Kazakhstan.Previous excavations since 2014 have identified clusters of burial mounds from the Hun and Saka periods, containing funerary deposits of ceramic vessels, food offerings, and bronze beads.In a press announcement by the Eurasian National University, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a hexagonal pyramidal that dates from the early Bronze Age around 2,000 BC...According to the researchers, the structure is hexagonal in shape, with each of the six...

Betsy Bueno got the call from a neighbor on July 10. “It’s really bad with the dog and the horse, Betsy,” her acquaintance said. “Can you please go check?” So Bueno drove roughly a half-mile north of her home, to a field abutting Petaluma Hill Road in unincorporated Sonoma County, to a scene she had visited many times in the preceding months. This time it was much worse. A large German shepherd had taken a brown and white horse (known as a paint) to the ground, and was viciously attacking it. The exhausted horse thrashed and shrieked, but was unable...

ORLANDO, Fla. – Grand theft auto? More like grand theft animal. The Orlando Police Department is searching for a horse that was stolen out of its trailer on June 22. Surveillance footage shows an unidentified person approaching the parked horse trailer on a bicycle around 3:15 a.m. at 725 S. Kirkman Rd. The person is then seen guiding the horse out of the trailer, then riding away on their bike while leading the horse behind them. The horse is described as a black-and-white Paso Fino and appears in video footage to be small in stature. Anyone with information about the...

Pharmacists are urgently calling for the Government to approve controversial 'horse de-wormer' drug ivermectin to treat a mite infection of the skin amid reports of rising cases and widespread treatment shortages. The highly contagious condition, scabies, causes intense itching, a raised rash and is easily spread in close contact with others. There has been a spike in outbreaks over the past year, particularly among the elderly in care homes and young adults at university. Experts now warn some cases are becoming harder to treat. High Street chemists say that the main drugs used for the skin condition – creams which...

EVs are heavy. That extra weight they carry could be putting some portions of infrastructure at risk. The Telegraph reports officials in the UK are worried that older multi-level parking garages could be at risk of collapse due to all that weight.

Enigmatic circular stone formations reminiscent of those in Europe are found on remote hilltops and valleys throughout Saudi Arabia. The rings are 5 to 100 meters in diameter and are surrounded by stone walls a foot or two tall. Some of the rings have "tails" that stretch out for hundreds of meters. From the air, the patterns have a striking resemblance to designs etched in Peru's Nazca plateau. Little is known about the circles and virtually nothing about their purpose.

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public. They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands. Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes...

Giant stone structures in the Azraq Oasis in Jordan They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public. They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines -- ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru -- and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands. Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of...

The number of identified archaeological sites in the Middle East has been tripled by an outdated technology that could not be replicated today—Cold War satellite photographs. The Corona Atlas of the Middle East, unveiled last week in the United States, has added some 10,000 sites to the 4,500 previously known archaeological sites between Egypt and Iran. The photographs, taken mostly in the 1960s for a project managed by the CIA, captured the landscape of the region before it was substantially altered by the spread of modern cities, agricultural development, and the construction of dams and other infrastructure. “Some of these...

Their purpose is unknown, and archaeologists are unsure when these structures were built. Analysis of the photographs, as well as artifacts found on the ground, suggest the circles date back at least 2,000 years, but they may be much older. They could even have been constructed in prehistoric times, before writing was invented, scientists say. Though the Big Circles were first spotted by aircraft in the 1920s, little research has focused on these structures, and many scientists are not even aware of their existence, something these archaeologists hope the new aerial images will help to change. The "most important contribution...

Archaeologists at the University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology have used satellite imagery to identify and map over 350 monumental hunting structures known as ‘kites’ across northern Saudi Arabia and southern Iraq – most of which had never been previously documented...Termed kites by early aircraft pilots, these structures consist of low stone walls making up a head enclosure and a number of guiding walls, sometimes kilometres long. They are believed to have been used to guide game such as gazelles into an area where they could be captured or killed...Kites cannot be observed easily from the ground, however the advent...

"Archaeologists deep in the Jordanian desert have discovered a 9,000-year-old ritualistic complex near what is thought to be the earliest known large human-built structure worldwide." "The Stone Age shrine site, excavated last year, was used by gazelle hunters and features carved stone figures, an altar and a miniature model of a large-scale hunting trap. The giant game traps the model represents -- so-called "desert kites" -- were made of long walls that converge to corral running gazelles into enclosures or holes for slaughter. Similar structures of two or more stone walls, some several kilometres (miles) long, have been found in...

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...

Horses have been intrinsically entwined with human history for the past five millennia, acting as an early means of rapid transport and playing a key part in agriculture, warfare and sport.Despite this, major decades-long mysteries have surrounded where and how modern horses were first domesticated. Yet a large international team of zooarchaeologists, historians and geneticists, all experts in horse evolutionary history, has recently started coming up with some answers. The results are showing just how much this can reveal about both the horse itself and about human history and culture—and how much we still have to find out."Horses are perhaps...