Free Republic

***In the 1960s, city leaders demolished part of the Fillmore District, a neighborhood once known as the Harlem of the West, displacing 883 businesses and 20,000 people, most of them Black. Decades later, thousands of people remain displaced and the neighborhood has turned into a predominantly White enclave of multimillion-dollar homes. To compensate for that and other instances of racial discrimination, the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee recently recommended that qualifying Black residents receive $5 million each in reparations. ***The proposed reparations program is not a recompense for slavery, which was never legal in San Francisco, but instead, the...

Debbie White Dove Porreco, at home in Palm Beach, with Max and Mia. Photo by Paul NobleEditor’s note: This story originally ran in 2013 You wouldn’t expect to encounter Pocahontas in Palm Beach, but you have if you’ve met Debbie “White Dove” Porreco, a Native-American princess after whom Pocahontas is often modeled in the media. “Sometimes when I’m dining at Mar-a-Lago, I think to myself, ‘You’ve come a long way from that Indian reservation you started in,” she said. “Pocahontas had dreams and went to England. My dreams brought me to Palm Beach.” That dream would have seemed far away...

Balthazar Napolean de Bourbon, a jovial Indian lawyer and part-time farmer settled in Bhopal, has been told that he is the first in line to the lost French throne. According to media reports, "Bourbon may soon make his first trip to Paris, after he was visited by a relative of Prince Philip, who told him that he is the first in line to the lost French throne." This Indian father of three is being feted as the long-lost descendant of the Bourbon kings who ruled France from the 16th century to the French revolution. A distant cousin of Louis XVI...

Descendant of Muhammad converts to Christianity But faces threat to life if forced to return to Turkey -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 7, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Wolfgang Polzer © 2007 ASSIST News Service A Turk who claims to be a descendant of Islam's prophet Muhammad has converted to Christianity while living in Germany. But Sedar Dedeoglu, of Luedenscheid, now faces a threat to his life if he's forced to return to Turkey, and is seeking help from German authorities. Dedeoglu, who is involved in Christian outreach programs among Muslims, has been receiving death threats from Muslims unwilling to accept his...

Beijing shopgirl could be descendant of Confucius By Richard Spencer in Beijing (Filed: 20/06/2006) Kong Tao is a 24-year-old sales assistant from a humble village background in eastern China, living in Beijing. But popular belief has it that she is a descendant of Confucius, the Great Sage. Now Miss Kong, with three million other people worldwide, may be able to find out whether her claim to fame is well-merited, or whether she can return to obscurity. The Chinese Academy of Science has said it is willing to offer DNA tests to anyone claiming Confucius as an ancestor. Since Confucius's proper...

The Japan Times, March 9, 1997Descendant of Stone Age skeleton found LONDON (Reuter) British scientists Saturday celebrated their feat of tracing a living descendant of a 9,000-year-old skeleton and establishing the world's oldest known family tree. In an astonishing piece of detective work, they matched mitochondrial DNA material extracted from the tooth cavity of Britain's oldest complete skeleton with that of a 42-year-old history teacher, Adrian Targett. The genetic material showed without doubt that Targett is a direct descendant through his mother's line of the skeleton known as Cheddar Man, which was found in 1903 in caves in Cheddar Gorge...

Wednesday, 20 November, 2002, 13:16 GMTElephant man's descendant found Joseph Merrick and Pat Selby will share similar genes Experts have traced a descendant of the the "Elephant Man" Joseph Merrick who could help determine what caused his disfigurements. A television research team called in the help of geneologists in Leicestershire to trace people related to Merrick, who was once exhibited as a circus freak in the 19th Century. Following a BBC appeal, Pat Selby, from Leicester, contacted her local family history society. Now the research team will take DNA samples from her and, using the latest genetic techniques, try to...