Free Republic

Old Russia is no more. Current RUssia is doomed. New Russia will emerge. Examples of Russian society disintegrating: Senator Gurilov asserts that: 1. 80% of Russians approve of everything Putin does; 2. The remaining 20% should be exterminated. The monument of Desse Ukrainka, an Ukrainian heroine whose statue is in Moscow, is often gifted with flowers by Russians, whenever there's a strike in Ukraine in which many civilians are killed. The layers of these flowers are routinely arrested. Human rights organizations are being destroyed all over Russia. One politician promises returning refugees from Russia a welcome back to their "wonderful"...

At least 35 people were killed and another 48 injured in a stampede Tuesday that broke out during a funeral procession for the Iranian general killed last week in a U.S.-led airstrike, according to Iranian state media. The incident occurred in Gen. Qassem Soleimani's hometown of Kerman, in southeastern Iran, according to Iran's state media. The report quoted the head of Iran's emergency medical services, Pirhossein Koulivand, according to the Associated Press. Iran has promised retaliation on American interests in the Middle East after an airstrike Thursday at Baghdad International Airport killed the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps'...

An American man has been killed by an endangered tribe in India's Andaman and Nicobar islands. Fishermen who took the man to North Sentinel island say tribespeople shot him with arrows and left his body on the beach. He has been identified as John Allen Chau, a 27 year old from Alabama. Contact with the endangered Andaman tribes living in isolation from the world is illegal because of the risks to them from outside disease. Estimates say the Sentinelese, who are totally cut off from civilisation, number only between 50 and 150.

Of all the places to discover a lost city, this pleasing little community seems an unlikely candidate. There are no vine-covered temples or impenetrable jungles here — just an old-fashioned downtown, a drug store that serves up root beer floats and rambling houses along shady brick lanes. Yet there’s always been something — something just below the surface.

Located far into the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean, North Sentinel Island is one of the most isolated places on earth. Approximately the size of Manhattan, this remote island is home to the Sentinelese tribe, the most dangerous tribe in the world. The North Sentinel island made headlines in 2006 after the tribe murdered two fishermen who had illegally approached the island. After the incident, a 3-mile zone has been imposed around the island, and the Sentinelese have since kept a low profile. The Indian government, who previously tried to establish a relationship with the tribe, have since...

An attempt by President Obama to promote his 'My Brother's Keeper' initiative, which aims to keep youths of color out of trouble, came to a farcical end when rapper Rick Ross's ankle bracelet - which he received on a kidnapping and assault charge - went off. Obama had invited a bevy of hip-hop heavyweights, including Niki Minaj, Common, Busta Rhymes, Pusha T and DJ Khaled, to the meeting at the White House Friday. But none of them - least of all Ross himself - expected the ankle bracelet to interrupt the president, according to TMZ.

For a second straight day, opposition protesters erected burning roadblocks and shattered windows in a section of Haiti's capital on Tuesday to press for new elections less than a week before a January 24 presidential and legislative runoff. A few thousand people joined the demonstration in downtown Port-au-Prince, marching through narrow streets and occasionally chanting: "The revolution has started, get your gun ready." Young men threw rocks, smashing windshields and the windows of a bank. They also overturned vendors' stalls to block law enforcement vehicles. Associated Press journalists saw one injured protester with what appeared to be a bullet wound....

In a South Los Angeles classroom, a boy hassles a girl. The teacher moves him to the back of the room, where he scowls, makes a paper airplane and repeatedly throws it against the wall. Two other boys wander around the class and then nearly come to blows. "Don't you talk about my sister," one says to the other. The teacher steps between them. When she tries to regain order, another boy tells her: "Screw you." It's another day of disruption on this campus in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has been nationally hailed by the White House...

Traces of blood discovered on ancient arrowheads in Guatemala prove the Maya took part in bloody ceremonies to communicate with their gods. Bloodletting ceremonies involved piercing the earlobes, tongues and even genitals of willing participants and using the spilled blood to 'feed' their deities. The arrows were collected from five sites in the central American region, including a temple at Zacpetén where it's thought bloodletting ceremonies took place around 500 years ago.

A pregnant Dorchester woman says she has been too afraid to go outside since getting into a fight with an MBTA bus driver who she said swore at her when she couldn’t pay the fare. A cellphone video posted online that went viral captured the fracas after Husniya Anderson, 32, threw a drink at the 13-year veteran driver who had asked her to get off the bus because she didn’t have enough money for the fare. The video then appears to show the driver attacking Anderson outside the bus as she holds on to her 3-year-old daughter in an effort...

On Friday, the Internal Revenue Service informed Congressional investigators that it could not recover two years of emails from Lois Lerner, the former head of the agency's tax-exempt status department. Lerner has been at the center of the investigation into how and why the IRS applied additional scrutiny to the tax-exempt applications of Tea Party-affiliated organizations.

The "Arab Spring" is Nothing But a Delusion, A Mirage in the Desert Wilderness of The Modern World When will people realize that the words "Arab Spring" constitute absolutely nothing, means absolutely nothing, in terms of a genuine political movement or strategy? The phrase means nothing because it is about nothing, about nothing that constitutes a genuine ability to progress, as a people, as a society, in form of self-government, about anything that characterizes a definable, real world objective or political goal. The term "Arab Spring" goes only as far as that of mere poetic neologisms, a phenomena perpetuated by...

This is the latest meme being posted by liberals and idiots (but I repeat myself) on Facebook. What is funny are the comments by liberals on this image. Here is one example.

Incredible Video Of A Tribe Meeting White People For The First Time Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry Jun. 24, 2011, 6:37 AM This 15 minute video is from 1976 and shows a tribe in Papua New Guinea encountering white people for the first time. The reactions going from fear to wonder to curiosity to joy are incredible to behold. Watch:(Click to the site to view the video)(snip)

When I got to the neighbor's house for Christmas dinner today, the neighbor was out, looking after the cattle, but his wife was in the kitchen, sitting at the table, going through a large bag of transparent tan-colored pharmaceutical bottles, taking out their contents and carefully putting a pill each into different compartments of two plastic boxes (which looked as if fishing-tackle boxes). Auntie had arrived under the cover of darkness the previous night, but was still sleeping. I looked at a couple of bottles, paid for by the hard-pressed taxpayers of Missouri, but being unfamiliar with pharmaceutical drugs, saw...

A very Merry Christmas to decent and civilized people all over the world, but stockings full of coal and sticks to the primitives who almost, but didn't quite, cut it in 2009. The voting for TOP PRIMITIVE OF 2009 didn't seem to go hardly the way I had predicted, but then and again, I've never had much success as a predictor, especially in elections. When looking at the list of the nearly-wons among the primitives, one is reminded that in the 1700s in England (or perhaps it was during the 1800s in France), that an admiral (in England; or perhaps...

I've been working on the top stories about Skins's island for 2009, with that scheduled for release some time the week of December 20-26, when it's a slow day here because of the Christmas holiday. However, there's something else that's needed, for the following week, the week of December 27-January 2, when it's a slow day here because of the New Year's holiday. Nominations now being solicited for the TOP PRIMITIVES OF 2009 nominations close at midnight (central time; 11:00 p.m. mountain time) December 11, 2009 The number of top primitives will be limited only by the number of nominations...

Welcome to the new DU for....., replacing an older edition that first came out in 2008. Given the increasing popularity of P-J Comix's most excellent DUmmie FUnnies, the Best/Worst of DU forum on conservativeunderground, and the DUmpster and DUmping Ground here at conservativecave, it is important that such a guide to watching the DUmmies in DUmmieland be up-to-date in time for the coming mid-term elections. One supposes the first question is, why bother watching the DUmmies, as compared with watching paint dry or changing the air in the tires on the automobile? There are several good reasons for watching the...

Oh my. The other week, the neighbor, who lives six miles up the road, stopped by and invited me to two Thanksgiving dinners; one on Thanksgiving Day itself, the other the day after. He was obviously hoping I would attend both of them--after all, there's not many people in this area of the Sandhills of Nebraska--but I got the sense he really wanted me to come today (Friday), if I wasn't willing to do the Thanksgiving Day thing, too. Well, no, I wasn't willing to do the Thanksgiving Day thing, but I was curious about this day-after-Thanksgiving event, and so...

South African traditional leaders plan to perform ritual animal slaughters to bless stadiums for the 2010 World Cup tournament ahead of the start of the showcase event next June, they said on Friday. Zolani Mkiva, chairman of the Makhonya Royal Trust, a grouping responsible for co-ordinating cultural activities, said the tournament, the first to be held in Africa, needed to be blessed in true "African style." "We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast (cow)," said Mkiva. South Africa is set to host the World Cup -- the world's most watched...