Free Republic

Leaders of the world’s most powerful democracies will be joined at the Group of Seven (G7) Summit in Japan on Sunday by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. The surprise addition was confirmed Friday in a joint leadership statement, AP reports. “Our support for Ukraine will not waver,” the G7 leaders said after closed-door meetings, vowing “to stand together against Russia’s illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.”

OMG! Jason Whitlock went there! ... Jason Whitlock empathized with Nancy Pelosi saying Paul Pelosi was playing “hide the hammer” with a Black Lives Matter activist on a Friday night while she was hard at work in Washington DC. ... Jason Whitlock: What I have to stand up and defend, I’m outraged for Nancy Pelosi. This woman has taken the hard earned money she’s made from insider trading and invested it on a pair of cans at 82-years-old and comes home to find out her husband’s playing hide the hammer with a Black Lives Matter guy! You talk about disrupting...

Jason Miller, CEO of GETTR and former spokesperson and adviser for former President Donald Trump, said that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) deceptively edited his testimony that was played during the January 6 Committee’s primetime hearing. During the committee’s primetime hearing, Cheney played a thirty-second clip of Miller’s video-recorded testimony. “In this clip, Miller describes a call between the Trump campaign’s internal data expert and President Trump a few days after the 2020 election,” Cheney said shortly before playing the clip. “I was in the Oval Office. And at some point in the conversation, Matt Oczkowski, who was the lead data...

MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson said Wednesday on “Deadline” that former President Donald Trump was such a “direct danger to American democracy” he had to be “jailed.” Johnson said, “I’m teaching a media literacy class to my students at Morgan State University. The level of cynicism that young people have towards the media, and then you mix that with old folks or older folks who have decided that there’s only one place they want to listen to, it’s hard for anyone to be an arbiter of truth, justice and common sense at this particular point. That’s one of the reasons why...

Link only (Gannett): https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Court-orders-upstate-woman-to-remove-Confederate-16156632.php

NEW YORK (Reuters) - They’re members of a prestigious academic panel with top-secret clearances who’ve advised the Pentagon on some of America’s most vexing national security issues since the Cold War. Over 60 years, they’ve won 11 Nobel prizes and conducted hundreds of government studies. The advisory group, known as Jason, is a team of some 60 of America’s top physicists and scientists who spend each summer in La Jolla, California, conducting studies commissioned by the Pentagon and other U.S. government agencies. On March 28, Trump appointee Michael Griffin – the Pentagon’s chief technology officer – unexpectedly moved to terminate...

Shipbuilders with handmade tools and methods used long ago are re-creating the Argo, the legendary vessel of Jason and the Argonauts. "It's extremely laborious work," said builder Stelios Kalafatidis in the small port of Volos. "We don't have large, proper, modern tools, only our hands and wooden mallets and chisels." ...The Naudomos Institute, a group of shipbuilders and historians heading the project, is using ancient Greek tools and techniques to build the new Argo. Once the ship is ready, they plan to retrace the mythical journey. The team had to ignore everything they knew about modern boatbuilding and use the...

President-elect Donald Trump indicated in an interview with 60-Minutes last weekend that he may be done pursuing the Clintons, backing off campaign statements that the former Secretary of State should be in jail. "She did some bad things, I mean she did some bad things," Trump said. "They’re good people. I don't want to hurt them." But although Trump might be done with the Clintons, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz is not, telling Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson Tuesday investigations into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server and pay-to-play allegations between the State Department and Clinton Foundation...

During a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday, Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) said that he believed that Jonathan E. Meyer, the deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, had overseen the intimidation of a witness who had talked to the committee. “When the committee attorneys asked the witness whether they had been discouraged from speaking with the committee, both the agency and the department attorney repeatedly refused to allow the witness to answer the question, even going so far as to interrupt when the witness appeared willing to answer. How does the...

The CW this week is that McCarthy’s Benghazi gaffe was a gift to Hillary Clinton but it’s also a gift to House conservatives who are looking for a foothold in electing Boehner’s successor. You won’t convince the centrists in the caucus that McCarthy’s too squishy to rule but you might convince them that he’s a political liability whom the GOP can’t risk having as a major spokesman during next year’s death match with the Clintons. All tea partiers need to mount a challenge is a candidate. Hensarling won’t do it, Jordan won’t do it, Ryan won’t do it. Jason Chaffetz?...

All three were born in China, in the ancient Jewish community in Kaifeng. They immigrated to Israel some five years ago and recently completed their conversion and naturalization processes. In two weeks, they'll report to the Israel Defense Forces' Induction Center in Tel Hashomer and join the army. Despite their relatively advanced age (all three are 25 years old), they are dreaming of enlisting in the Golani Brigade.

A 3,300-year-old treasure trove of gold found in northern Germany has stumped German archeologists. One theory suggests that traders transported it thousands of miles from a mine in Central Asia, but other experts are skeptical. Archeologists in Germany have an unlikely new hero: former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They have nothing but praise for the cigar-smoking veteran Social Democratic politician. Why? Because it was Schröder who, together with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, pushed through a plan to pump Russian natural gas to Western Europe. For that purpose, an embankment 440 kilometers (275 miles) long and up to 30 meters (100 feet)...

Chinese archaeologists have discovered an unidentified cluster of tombs on the Pamirs Plateau, unveiling a new mystery on the crossroads of the ancient Silk Road. Eights tombs, each two meters in diameter, were arranged on a 100-meter-long and 50-meter-wide terrace, with lines of black stones and lines of white stones stretching alongside like rays, according to the archaeology team with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that found the tombs in Xinjiang's Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County, a border region neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan, in October. "The tombs are peculiar. No similar ones had been detected before on the Pamirs Plateau,...

The ancient city of Gezer has been an important site since the Bronze Age, because it sat along the Way of the Sea, or the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that connected Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia. The city was ruled over many centuries by Canaanites, Egyptians and Assyrians, and Biblical accounts from roughly the 10th century describe an Egyptian pharaoh giving the city to King Solomon as a wedding gift after marrying his daughter. .... The site has been excavated for a century, and most of the excavations so far date to the the 10th through eighth centuries...

Archeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered the grave of a gold-clad ancient Scythian warrior who has already earned himself a nickname: "The Sun Lord." Researchers uncovered the find in a Scythian grave consisting of seven burial mounds in Karaganda Region east of the capital, Astana. The opulence of the warrior's burial indicates that he was a leader as well as a fighter, expedition leader Arman Beysenov explained. "He was probably a ruler and a warrior simultaneously," Beysenov said in remarks quoted by the Kazinform news agency on July 16. "The person's torso was entirely covered with gold. The figure of a...

Results could shed light on origins of various diseasesJune 3, 2010 — (BRONX, NY) — Using sophisticated genetic analysis, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and New York University School of Medicine have published a study indicating that Jews are a widely dispersed people with a common ancestry. Jews from different regions of the world were found to share many genetic traits that are distinct from other groups and that date back to ancient times. The study also provides the first detailed genetic maps of the major Jewish subpopulations, a resource that can be used to...

Since Colchis was famous in antiquity for gold and precious metal -- it's where the Greek hero Jason went to grab the legendary Golden Fleece -- you'd be wearing gold-spangled robes while pouring and drinking your famous Colchian wine from gold or silver vessels. You'd also be so rich you could afford to bury your wine service with you... A fascinating exhibition, "Wine, Worship & Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani" at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., through Feb. 24, gives a thrilling image of the plenty that nobility enjoyed in that far corner of the ancient...

A replica of the Argo, the ship that according to legend carried Jason and the 50 Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, sailed Saturday from the central Greek city of Volos on a two-month journey to Venice in Italy. Turkey's refusal to guarantee the 93.5-foot (28.5-meter) wooden ship safe passage through the Bosporus Strait meant that the ship will not reach its ancient predecessor's destination of Colchis, in what is modern-day Georgia, at the eastern end of the Black Sea. Its route, instead, will retrace part of the Argonauts' return trip... The ship's crew comprises 50 oarsmen with another...

LOS ANGELES — Since making the announcement last spring that he is a gay professional basketball player, Jason Collins has been widely praised, received much support and made many new friends. But with training camp for a new season under way, he has been waiting for a call from an N.B.A. team. Any N.B.A. team. When Collins, 34, a 7-foot center, wrote his coming-out cover story for Sports Illustrated — “my declaration,” he said — he proudly spoke of having been called a pro’s pro for his team-first, lunch-pail style. Never a star, he has nonetheless had a career spanning...

As is often the case with my brain, I need to mull over things sometimes to decide what I think about them. Such is the case with Jason Richwine, the Heritage Foundation scholar who was driven out when it was discovered that his thesis (which passed inspection at Harvard) reached the following conclusions: So what is actually in the dissertation? The dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on many different types of IQ tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive gap rather than to culture or...