Free Republic

Ecuador halted environmental cooperation deals with Germany worth some 43 million euros to the Latin American country after German lawmakers tried to visit an Amazon rainforest recently opened for oil production, the foreign minister said on Friday. ... "If they think they had the right to doubt the word of Ecuador's government on the issue of Yasuni because they were providing funds, we'll give them their money back with interest," Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters.

A small gold plate belonging to Polish family Sielscy from the Swedish Malmoe turned out to be an archaeological sensation. According to the researchers, it is probably a souvenir from the funeral of the Danish King Harald Bluetooth on the island of Wolin, dated to c. 986 AD. The discovery was made by 11 years old Maja Sielska, who diligently did her school homework about the Middle Ages. While looking through pictures of coins from this period in the textbook and on the Internet, the girl saw a plate with mysterious inscriptions similar to the one she had received from...

On an excavation site in Oegstgeest (South Holland), Leiden University archaeologists discovered a silver bowl dating to the first half of the seventh century. The bowl is decorated with gold-plated representations of animals and plants and inlaid with semi-precious stones. The discovery suggests the existence of an Oegstgeest elite with a wide international network. Researchers believe that the bowl, which is 21 centimetres wide and 11 centimetres high, was buried as part of a ritual sacrifice. Such gilded discoveries are extremely rare. This one is exceptional because such bowls were usually made of bronze and were not, as a rule,...

Known to its Polynesian inhabitants as Rapa Nui, Easter Island is thought to have been colonised around the 13th Century and is famed for its mysterious large stone statues or moai. Otago Anatomy PhD student Monica Tromp and Idaho State University’s Dr John Dudgeon have just published new research clearing up their previous puzzling finding that suggested palm may have been a staple plant food for Rapa Nui’s population over several centuries. However, no other line of archaeological or ethnohistoric evidence supports palm having a dietary role on Easter Island; in fact evidence points to the palm becoming extinct soon...

The belief that a type of technology known as Levallois – where the flakes and blades of stones were used to make useful products such as hunting weapons was invented in Africa and then spread to other continents as the human population expanded can now be discounted say the researchers. At an archaeological site in Armenia called Nor Geghi 1, the researchers discovered that these types of tools already existed there between 325,000 and 335,000 years ago, suggesting that local populations developed them out of a more basic type of technology, known as biface, which was also found at the...

Tis this season! George C. Scott stars in this superb version of Charles Dickens' classic tale of redemption and second chances. In English with Greek subtitles.

I want to second Jonathan’s take on the lawsuit brought by Oklahoma and Nebraska to enjoin the operation of Colorado’s marijuana regulations. Much as I respect Oklahoma’s Attorney General Scott Pruitt, I think this suit lacks merit. Among other vices, it seriously misreads the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which I litigated on behalf of Angel Raich and Diane Monson from the filing of the complaint to the oral argument in the Supreme Court. The Court in Raich ruled that Congress had the power to criminalize the noncommercial and wholly intrastate cultivation, possession and transfer of marijuana notwithstanding...

Co-blogger Jonathan Adler and Vanderbilt law professor Robert Mikos have pointed out some of the flaws in the lawsuit filed by Nebraska and Oklahoma urging a federal court to invalidate marijuana legalization in neighboring Colorado. In the unlikely event that the plaintiff states prevail, they will also have set a very dangerous precedent – one that conservatives are likely to rue in other areas. Nebraska and Oklahoma argue that Colorado’s decision to legalize marijuana under state law, in the face of continuing federal prohibition, harms neighboring states because it facilitates the flow of marijuana across their borders and may increase...

BBC Panorama programme noted that Apple has gone to some lengths to moderate the practices within the factories of its suppliers, and to try and trace the origin of the soldering tin that it uses, but it was very much a programme about “Apple’s factories” and “Apple’s use of illegally mined tin”. The BBC last night aired a Panorama programme highlighting violations at the factories where iPhones are manufactured, as well as the dangers involved in mining some of the tin that ends up as solder inside Apple products. While the Panorama programme did make note of the fact that...

"You're just glad you have your helmet on." That's how New England Patriots receiver Brandon LaFell describes being part of quarterback Tom Brady's head-butt celebrations. There aren't many quarterbacks in the league who show as much emotion as Brady does, especially after a score, and the 37-year-old signal-caller tends to head-butt his teammates when he gets fired up. Well, turns out Brady's teammates are more fearful than excited when they see him running over to them to celebrate. A few Patriots players talked to The Wall Street Journal's Kevin Clark about what it feels like to be on the receiving...

Researchers at Check Point have discovered a serious security vulnerability affecting at least 12 million leading-brand home and SME routers that appears to have gone unnoticed for over a decade. Dubbed the ’Misfortune Cookie’ flaw, the firm plans to give a detailed account of the issue at a forthcoming security conference but in the meantime it’s important to stress that no real-world attacks using it have yet been detected. That said, an attacker exploiting the flaw would be able to monitor all data travelling through a gateway such as files, emails and logins and have the power to infect connected...

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $189,186 in taxpayer dollars to Emory University to study the mortality of transgendered people, using electronic medical records for people who receive care from the Veterans Affairs Administration. “The purpose of this study is to determine whether transgender persons defined as those who medically change the gender assigned to them at birth (male to female or female to male) have higher or lower risk of death and certain diseases than men and women that do not consider themselves transgender,” the grant said. …

Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin (U.S. Army-Ret.) says the Army violated its own regulations by punishing Chaplain Joseph Lawhorn for “using Christian scripture and solutions” in a mandatory suicide prevention training session. Boykin, chair of the Restore Military Religious Freedom Coalition (RMRFC), also said that the treatment of Lawhorn violated the chaplain’s constitutional rights. “First of all, his case is important because it is an infringement on his First Amendment rights,” Boykin told CNSNews.com. “Secondly, he is a chaplain. By definition, chaplains deal with spiritual issues, and all he was doing was explaining how his faith helped him. The third thing,...

From a former abortion clinic worker, Rayna Rapp, who is still pro-choice: Many minority women, even if they are not poor, cannot count on support for their pregnancies, and pregnancy related decision-making, from their healthcare providers. Frankie Smithers, an African-American schoolteacher, told me that when she got her positive pregnancy test results back at City Hospital, she was delighted, but the nurse automatically directed her to make an appointment for an abortion. It took considerable complaint to persuade the woman to schedule a prenatal care visit instead. — Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis...

A team of researchers revealed evidence of an unknown geochemical pathway used by the Earth to sequester water deep within, releasing small amounts through plate tectonics in a process that feeds our oceans "from within," Ohio State University reported.

A nurse from a Seattle abortion clinic said the following at a meeting of abortion providers where they discussed the emotional impact of their work. I was watching the doctor struggle with the cannula, trying to pull it out. I didn’t understand what the resistance was all about. And I was very alarmed and all of the sudden the doctor pulled the cannula out and there, as I was at the woman’s side, I looked down at the cannula and there was a foot sticking out. I will never forget the feeling I had in my chest as the doctor...

Only months ago convicted Terrorist Bill Ayers signed a pro-abortion petition from Stop Patriarchy, a communist pro-choice group, against Texas law HB2 now closing several abortion clinics in the state. Bill Ayers was a member of the terrorist group the Weather Underground which blew up buildings and terrorized America in the 1960’s. Bill Ayers FBI Weather Underground Now, the former terrorist himself, has conducted an interview with Kourosh Ziabari a reporter with Iran’s leading news outlet Fars News Agerncy, where he calls the United States a “terrorist nation” which is in a “decisive decline.”

“German researchers have discovered security flaws that could let hackers, spies and criminals listen to private phone calls and intercept text messages on a potentially massive scale – even when cellular networks are using the most advanced encryption now available,” Craig Timberg reports for The Washington Post. “The flaws, to be reported at a hacker conference in Hamburg this month, are the latest evidence of widespread insecurity on SS7, the global network that allows the world’s cellular carriers to route calls, texts and other services to each other,” Timberg reports. “Experts say it’s increasingly clear that SS7, first designed in...

Paulo Coelho Wants to Give The Interview Away Using BitTorrent By Andy on December 18, 2014 Sony may have withdrawn The Interview but not everyone is scared of releasing the movie. Author Paulo Coelho, whose book The Alchemist has sold in excess of 165 million copies, has just offered to buy the rights to the movie from Sony. He informs TorrentFreak that it would go straight on BitTorrent, for free. As has become customary in the past few weeks, the so-called Guardians of Peace hackers contacted TorrentFreak on Tuesday advising us of the latest release from their Sony hack.