Free Republic

ISLAMIC State is taking over swathes of Africa like it did in Syria and Iraq with "staggeringly brutal" tactics, the Pentagon has warned. According to a report from West Point, the US officer training academy, the group's expansion and regrouping on the continent shows "Islamic State is far from defeated". "By the summer of 2020, it had become resolutely clear that the Islamic State was a changed organisation, but by no means a beaten one," the report, published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Centre, said. The Pentagon report said there has been a "marked upward curve of claimed cumulative attacks...

At least 19 civilians were killed in a weekend attack by Boko Haram Islamists on three remote islands in Niger with many victims burnt alive, a local lawmaker said. Sunday’s onslaught took place on three islands located on Lake Chad, said ElHadj Aboubacar, a deputy from the town of Bosso in southeastern Niger. “We have been informed that at least 19 people have died, most of whom were either burnt alive or drowned in the lake,” he told AFP. There has been no official confirmation of the death toll but a private radio station in Niger has reported that two...

African Ice Core Analysis Reveals Catastrophic Droughts, Shrinking Ice Fields, Civilization Shifts COLUMBUS, Ohio – A detailed analysis of six cores retrieved from the rapidly shrinking ice fields atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro shows that those tropical glaciers began to form about 11,700 years ago. The cores also yielded remarkable evidence of three catastrophic droughts that plagued the tropics 8,300, 5,200 and 4,000 years ago. Lastly, the analysis also supports Ohio State University researchers' prediction that these unique bodies of ice will disappear in the next two decades, the victims of global warming. These findings were published today in the journal...

    Summer 2000 (8.2) Scandinavian Ancestry Tracing Roots to Azerbaijan by Thor Heyerdahl Above: Thor Heyerdahl with Peruvian children who still construct traditional boats made of reeds, the principle material that enabled early migrations on trans-oceanic voyages. Courtesy: Thor Heyerdahl. Archeologist and historian Thor Heyerdahl, 85, has visited Azerbaijan on several occasions during the past two decades. Each time, he garners more evidence to prove his tantalizing theory - that Scandinavian ancestry can be traced to the region now known as Azerbaijan. Heyerdahl first began forming this hypothesis after visiting Gobustan, an ancient cave dwelling found 30 miles ...

Lake Chad, one of the largest boddies of water in Sub-Saharan Africa, is on the verge of drying up, as only 1,500 square kilometres,  of the original 25,000 square kilometres size of the lake still remain. The figure represents 10 percent of the initial size of the lake, which traverses Nigeria and three other neighboring countries -- Chad , Niger , and the Republic of Cameroon. The lake, which banks in Nigeria , in the north-astern state of Borno, with Maiduguri as its administrative capital, is said to share similar hydrological basin with four other countries: Central African Republic, Algeria...

Fish may have once swum across the Sahara, a finding that could shed light on how humanity made its way out of Africa, researchers said. The cradle of humanity lies south of the Sahara, which begs the question as to how our species made its way past it. The Sahara is the largest hot desert in the world, and would seem a major barrier for any humans striving to migrate off the continent. Scientists have often focused on the Nile Valley as the corridor by which humans left Africa. However, considerable research efforts have failed to uncover evidence for its...

The Sahara, the world's largest desert, was once fertile grassland. This fact has been common knowledge in the scientific community for some time, but scientists are still grappling with historic data to determine whether that transition took place abruptly or gradually. At the European Geosciences Union General Assembly held in Vienna, Austria earlier this year, researchers presented new evidence showing that the eastern region of the Sahara desert, particularly the area near Lake Yoa in Chad, dried up slowly and progressively since the mid-Holocene period.

Lake Chad, which once straddled the borders of Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, has shrunk by an estimated 95% since the mid 1960s, due to the growth of agriculture and declining rainfall. Image: Unep