Free Republic

, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Police banned any gathering that might provoke disorder in Paris this weekend, saying they had been warned violence was planned for Saturday after two weeks of rioting across France. The intensity of France's most serious unrest in four decades has dropped since President Jacques Chirac's government adopted emergency measures including curfews on Tuesday to curb unrest by youngsters complaining of racism and unemployment. But there was a rise in violence in suburbs of the capital overnight. Police said 463 vehicles were set on fire across France, a slight fall from the previous night, but the...

SAN FRANCISCO - California, New Mexico and Oregon sued the Bush administration over the government's decision to allow road building, logging and other commercial ventures on more than 90,000 square miles of the nation's remaining pristine forests. In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, attorneys general for the three states challenged the U.S. Forest Service's repeal of the Clinton administration's "roadless rule" that banned development on 58.5 million acres of national forest land, mostly in western states. "The Bush administration is putting at risk some of the last, most pristine portions of America's national forests," California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. "Road...

Bird’s-Eye View of the Amazon Airborne Archaeologist Challenges the Myth of a Pristine Wilderness by Ted Mann In the office of a typical archaeologist, you would expect to find things like stone tools, pottery fragments, and maybe even a few Wooly Mammoth bones. But Clark Erickson is no typical archaeologist. Oversize rolls of aerial photographs are stacked into tubular pyramids on a desk and worktable in his University Museum office. They fill up file cabinets and populate a storage room. At last count, he had about 700 giant aerial and satellite images—almost all of them picturing some region of the...

Amazonian find stuns researchers Deep in the Amazon forest of Brazil, archaeologists have found a network of 1,000-year-old towns and villages that refutes two long-held notions: that the pre-Columbian tropical rain forest was a pristine environment that had not been altered by humans, and that the rain forest could not support a complex, sophisticated society. A 15-mile-square region at the headwaters of the Xingu River contains at least 19 villages that are sited at regular intervals and share the same circular design. The villages are connected by a system of broad, parallel highways, Florida researchers reported in yesterday's issue of...

Bush allows oil drilling on pristine Texas beach By David Usborne in New York 23 November 2002 Environmentalists in the United States are again waging war with Republicans in Washington. This time the row is over a decision to allow an energy company to drill two gas wells in a coastal national park in Texas that is home to the world's most endangered species of sea turtle. The federal government is to grant approval to BNP Petroleum to sink two wells in the Padre Island National Seashore, a barrier island on the Gulf of Mexico that features the longest stretch...