Free Republic

The Cochno Stone in West Dunbartonshire bears what is considered to be the finest example of Bronze Age “cup and ring” carvings in Europe. The stone, which measures 42ft by 26ft, was discovered by the Rev James Harvey in 1887 on farmland near what is now the Faifley housing estate on the edge of Clydebank. It is covered in about 90 carved indentations, or “cups”, and grooved spirals, along with a ringed cross and a pair of four-toed feet... In 1964, Glasgow University archaeologists recommended it should be buried under several feet of soil to protect the carvings from further...

"known as King of the Slide Guitar but he was also noted for his use of loud amplification and his stirring voice....Elmore began making music at the age of 12 using a simple one-string instrument ("diddley bow" or "jitterbug") strung up on a shack wall....James was strongly influenced by Robert Johnson, as well as by Kokomo Arnold and Tampa Red. James recorded several of Tampa's songs, and even inherited from his band two of his famous "Broomdusters", There is a dispute as to whether Robert Johnson or Elmore wrote James' trademark song, "Dust My Broom" - wiki .....;

We now mark the 69th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. The generations which made the decisions for World War II have passed away. The generation which faced the tragic violence required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us. As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without response to revisionist contra-factual analyses expounding about what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. The arguments advanced display a pleasing, deliberate ignorance which burnishes this peculiar new morality. However, these views can be countered...

WAUKESHA, Wis. —As parents get their children ready to go back to school, getting them vaccinated is probably on the list. A popular shot for young girls is the HPV vaccine, but a Waukesha mother said her daughter died hours after getting the shot.

How long before the IS (ISIS) Caliphate is recognized as a legitimate government? It took ten years or so for negotiations to start with the Taliban. Hamas is a terror group but the US and Israel "negotiates" with them all the time. When will the Muslims of the world just go ahead and join the group (if you can't beat em, join em)? How long before the left begins protests against bombing or using any other military action against IS?

By May of 1945 an exhausted and overrun Germany had surrendered. The war in Europe was over. The United States, aided by Great Britain, moved closer and closer to Japan. Massive suicide attacks by the Japanese caused great losses to the Pacific Fleet, but did not deter its drive. Japan, thinking the Soviet Union was a friendly neutral in the war in the Pacific, submitted unofficial peace feelers to the United States through them. The Soviet Union, secretly wanting to join the war against Japan, suppressed the feelers. Ironically, the Japanese military made it impossible to pursue peace directly, as...

Saturday marks the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima – devastating acts that helped bring World War Two to a close. (Three days after Hiroshima, Nagasaki was similarly battered). The attacks – the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in world history to date – killed tens of thousands of people and shocked the planet with the scale of their destruction. There has been much controversy over the decision to bomb Japan and some speculation that it might have been racially motivated (given that the U.S. military did not drop such weapons on European civilian targets)....

Today marks one of the United States’ most important – but least celebrated – anniversaries. It is remarkable not only for what happened on this date in 1945 but for what did not happen subsequently. What did happen was that the “Enola Gay,” an American B-29 bomber from the intentionally obscure 509th Composite Group (a U.S. Army Air Force unit tasked with deploying nuclear weapons), dropped “Little Boy,” a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That dramatic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week after the August 9 detonation of “Fat...

Just watch the video..............

Growing up in a Latino household meant that there were a lot of hardcore superstitions running rampant throughout daily life. Superstitious beliefs go together with Hispanic homes in the way that rice and beans and chanclas do. They just fit. From purses on the floor to itchy palms, we've gathered the top eight superstitions every Latino grew up with, and put them in a list, of course. And here they are. Don't Put Your Purse on the Floor Listen, you like your money, right? Well you won't have any if you put that purse on the floor. So pick it...

There's a museum in Tokyo dedicated to Japan's ample history of warfare. But if you visit the plainly named Military Museum, you'll find no reference to the grotesque medical experiments the Japanese army conducted in World War II or the sex slaves it kidnapped.

The mysteries of the Nazca Lines carved into the Peruvian desert have intensified after gales and sandstorms revealed previously unseen ancient designs. A pilot discovered a geoglyph of what appears to be a 196ft-long (60 metre) snake, as well as a type of camelid - such as a llama - above an unidentified bird. These new lines join existing geoglyphs of a dog, hummingbird, condor and a monkey, thought to have been drawn by the ancient Nazca people between the first and sixth centuries The discovery was made by pilot Eduardo Herrán Gómez de la Torre as he flew over...

We now mark the 69th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. The generations which made the decisions for World War II have passed away. The generation which faced the tragic violence required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us. As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without response to revisionist contra-factual analyses expounding about what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. The arguments advanced display a pleasing, deliberate ignorance which burnishes this peculiar new morality. However, these views can be countered...

Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I’ve Remembered all this time. It’s been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed I’ve come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of “verse,” thus: In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience. For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality suggests that it...

Mary Baxter Gresham was 42 when her invalid son, LeRoy, died in June 1865. She had already lost two infant children and had just lived through the upheaval of the Civil War in Macon, Ga. But when 17-year-old LeRoy, know as “Loy,” died on June 18 in the house where he was born, she was devastated. “God has tried me often and in many ways but never has my heart been so wrung as now,” she wrote to her sister, Sallie, on July 12. “And yet the trial had so much mercy mixed with it that my soul swells within...

Earlier this week, I was thinking of writing a column about the lying and duplicity of Obamacare backers who argued that the difference between provisions providing subsidies in states with state-run health exchanges and providing no subsidies in states with federal exchanges resulted from inadvertence or a typographical error. Typical among them was MIT health care expert Jonathan Gruber. The folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute found video of him in 2012 arguing that all or most states would create their own exchanges because they wouldn’t get subsidies if they let the federal government run their exchanges. That was just...

Fifty thousand 'Vikings' landed on the shores of a small village in northern Spain on Sunday, as part of an annual festival which commemorates a Scandinavian invasion which took place a thousand years ago. On the first Sunday of August, Catoria is flooded with ‘blood-thirsty’ men and women from all across Europe. Dressed in animal skins and armed with the finest plastic weaponry, they disembark on the rugged Galician coast with the aim of capturing the Towers of the West, just as Norway’s King Olaf did a millennia ago. The ‘blood’ spilt during the simulated battles does taste distinctly like...

Dish named for China’s capital has its origins in Nanjing, hundreds of kilometres to the south.Beijing: Where does Peking Duck come from? It is a trick question: the dish named for China’s capital has its origins in Nanjing, hundreds of kilometres to the south. The tidbit is one of the revelations in a museum opened earlier this month to mark the 150th anniversary of the Quanjude restaurant, now the seven-storey flagship of a chain with franchises as far away as Australia. Statues of roasters, photos of officials dining and menus going back 100 years trace the duck’s route from humble...

(CNN) -- Four years after the last major conflict in the region, Israel and Hamas have once again been on the brink of war in Gaza, though an Egypt-brokered cease-fire appears to be holding, paving the way for peace talks in future. So what is the group, and what does it hope to achieve by its rocket attacks on Israeli targets? What is Hamas? Hamas is a militant fundamentalist Islamic organization operating in the West Bank and Gaza. The name Hamas is an acronym for "Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamia," or Islamic Resistance Movement in English. The word "hamas" means zeal, or...