Free Republic

In 2014, Hollywood has embraced telling religious stories on film. No longer, it seems, are religious viewers denied the opportunity to see biblical stories onscreen. In February of this year, Roma Downey and Mark Burnett brought Jesus’ story to the big screen in Son of God. In March, director Darren Aronofsky presented Noah , which— in spite of its narrative flaws— worked as an epic tale. This weekend, Ridley Scott— the newest high-profile director to embrace this trend— offers up a version of Moses’ story in the new drama Exodus: Gods and Kings. Regardless of your religious beliefs, this biblical...

The U.S. Navy’s DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyers are extraordinarily expensive. Since 2009, the cost of the ships has increased 34.4 percent, according to the Congressional Research Service. Each of the three Zumwalt’s being built will cost taxpayers around $3.4 billion. And, that’s on top of the more than $9 billion in research and design funding that has gone into this program. Are they worth the price? The Navy didn’t think so in 2009 when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the program would end with the procurement of just three ships, down from the 32 ships the Navy had initially planned...

The last lunar landing was Apollo 17, which took place on Dec. 11, 1972. Commander Eugene Cernan and lunar module pilot Harrison Schmitt did three moonwalks in the Taurus-Littrow valley, scoping out the highlands to try to get a geologic sense of the area. Among their more memorable findings are orange soil.

BusinessInsider: Here's The Rise Of ISIS In One Short Animated Video"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of ISIS's predecessor. ISIS's blitz across Iraq left many stunned this past summer, especially after the jihadist group captured Mosul, the country's second-largest city in …"

Jihadist Killings Equal to a 9/11 Pentagon Attack Every Day for a Month ABC News 1 hour ago "That is the toll jihadist violence took around the world in just 30 days, from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30, 2014. There were 664 jihadist attacks in 14 countries across the world last month, according to a detailed study done by …"

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special. For those remembering how they stared with wonder and awe at the jerky stop-motion animation and shivered with delicious fear at the perils faced by the plucky buck with the incandescent schnoz, the notion that this program occurred a half century ago would be a marvelous testament to the enduring power of the show’s appeal . . . if it didn’t make you feel so damned old. If it does, that is. For young kids today it’s a cultural artifact from a time so remote it...

When the stunt-planners at Greenpeace sent teams of activists to trespass this week at Peru's Nazca archeological site, they must have thought their bumper-sticker messaging would look good on a Facebook page next to the 2,000-year-old geodesic drawings. After all, the group is known for stringing banners from bridges and skyscrapers to draw attention to its environmental campaigns, and with U.N. climate talks taking place in Lima this week, the activists clearly wanted to make an impact. And so they have. The impact of their footprints on the fragile desert site, in fact, will last "hundreds or thousands of years,"...

The question about the origin of oceans on Earth is one of the most important questions with respect to the formation of our planet and the origin of life. The most popular theory is that water was brought by impacts of comets and asteroids. Data from the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis (ROSINA) instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft indicate that terrestrial water did not come from comets like 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The findings were published today in the journal Science. Researchers agree that water must have been delivered to Earth by small bodies at a later...

Even as they publicly condemn Tea Party Republicans as hostage-taking legislative thugs, the truth is that some Democrats are quietly jealous of them. Think of it: The Tea Party gang gets to intimidate party leaders, threaten legislation, block nominees, shut down the government and default on the debt if they don’t get their way. They cause major trouble. Boy, does that sound good. The extreme right has power, and that’s something the left hasn’t had much of for a long time. But in the aftermath of the party’s disastrous midterm performance, it’s very possible that the Democratic Party leadership will...

“No nation ever continued happy, whose chief magistrate was its absolute master; and no nation miserable, whose supreme power was properly checked and divided.” These words were written by Thomas Gordon in 1722. Perhaps he picked them up from John Locke’s 1689 Two Treatises of Government. In any event, our framing generation certainly understood what to do with power in a republic, for their design “properly checked and divided” powers. They first divided it vertically between member republics and the government created by those republics. Second, authority was carefully parceled out horizontally among three branches. This past month, depending on...

...The analyses revealed that the glass originate from the same glass workshops in Egypt that supplied the glass that the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun took with him to his grave in 1323 BC... Globalisation in the Bronze Age Twenty-three glass beads from Denmark were analysed using plasma-spectrometry. Without destroying the fragile beads, this technique makes it possible to compare the chemical composition of trace elements in the beads with reference material from Amarna in Egypt and Nippur in Mesopotamia, about 50 km south east of Baghdad in Iraq. The comparison showed that the chemical composition of the two sets of trace...

Archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw discovered evidence of destruction and capture of the ancient city of Metsamor, one of the most famous archaeological sites in the vicinity of Yerevan. "In the entire area of research we found layers of burning and ash. The city was probably captured by the army of Argishti I, the ruler of Urartu," told PAP Krzysztof Jakubiak, head of the project. Argishti I was the king of Urartu, the biblical Kingdom of Ararat in the Armenian Highlands. During his reign, the boundaries of the state expanded to the Caucasus, the area of...

A study of a rock engraving discovered within Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar finds that the cross-hatched impression was likely created by Neanderthals and excluding the possibility of an unintentional or utilitarian origin, would represent Neanderthals' capacity for abstract expression. Previously-discovered cave art has been exclusively attributed to modern humans, who arrived in Western Europe around 40,000 years ago. In July 2012, researchers discovered the abstract pattern engraved in the rock of Gorham's Cave which is located on the southeast face of the Rock of Gibraltar. The cross-hatched pattern was overlain by undisturbed sediment in which Neanderthal artefacts had previously been...

Members of the Arad Rescue Unit, undergoing early morning routine training, noticed suspicious activity in the northern cliff of Nahal Ze'elim, in the region of the Leopard's Ascent (Judean Desert). After alerting the authorities a group of antiquity thieves searching for Dead Sea scrolls and other potentially valuable artefacts, were caught red-handed. The "The Cave of the Skulls", which is located in the side of a cliff, can only be reached on foot via a narrow goat path on top of rock fall, that passes upright bedrock walls and is extremely precarious. The robbers, who had used climbing gear to...

Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner is found dead on the street with Mumia Abu-Jamal, a well-known activist and freelance journalist, lying severely wounded nearby. In 1982, Abu-Jamal was tried for and convicted of Faulkner's murder, but because of the murky circumstances surrounding the incident and a trial that many believe was unfair, activists have since protested Abu-Jamal's imprisonment. Reportedly, Abu-Jamal, a journalist who had been fired by National Public Radio for his outspokenness, was driving a cab at around 4 a.m., when he saw his brother engaged in an altercation with Faulkner on the street. Evidence used in the trial...

Richard Thill survived Pearl Harbor and waited 73 years for an ovation many of his comrades would never hear. So a stubbornly long New York Jets drive and icy wind at TCF Bank Stadium could not ruin his moment. The Vikings salute military veterans during the first television timeout of the second quarter each home game. Thill was a special honoree Sunday, Dec. 7 -- a solemn anniversary in U.S. history, one he hopes never fades from memory. The 91-year-old St. Paul native was introduced with a video tribute that included an interview and familiar black-and-white newsreels that showed the...

The Anglo-Saxon warrior at Hastings is perhaps not so very different from the British “Tommy” in the trenches,’ photographer Thom Atkinson says. At the Battle of Hastings, soldiers' choice of weaponary was extensive. ..... Re-enactment groups, collectors, historians and serving soldiers helped photographer Thom Atkinson assemble the components for each shot. ‘It was hard to track down knowledgeable people with the correct equipment,’ he says. ‘The pictures are really the product of their knowledge and experience.’

Rent-controlled tenants say they were lured to the luxury tower by a wrap-around balcony but were shocked to discover a 6-foot fence during move in Erin McFadzen and her boyfriend Erik Clancy now claim the wiring is so market-rate paying tenants, who have smaller balconies, don't get jealous The developer of the Q41 building in Queens, Queensboro Development, says the fence is there as a staging area for window washers A luxurious New York City building is prohibiting its rent-controlled tenants from enjoying their terrace so market rate-paying residents — who have smaller balconies — don't get jealous, claims a...

...for tens of thousands of years, the Khoisan's ancestors were members of "the largest population" on the planet, according to a new study. The Khoisan have long stood apart from other groups within Africa. They look distinct, speak in "click" languages, and have also maintained the greatest genetic diversity known among human populations. Usually, big populations harbor the most diversity. But census counts show that the 100,000 Khoisan speakers in Africa today are far outnumbered by other groups, such as the 45 million Bantu speakers and their 180 million descendants who now speak Swahili and other languages. Researchers have thought...

A hoard of Roman and Pictish silver has been unearthed by archaeologists working in a field in Aberdeenshire. The find, which contains more than 100 pieces including coins and jewellery, has been hailed as the most northern of its kind in Europe. The discovery was made earlier this year by archaeologists from National Museums Scotland and the University of Aberdeen's Northern Picts project at an undisclosed location. It will now become the subject of a programme of research involving detailed analysis and cataloguing through the Glenmorangie Research Project - a three-year sponsorship of National Museums Scotland to support the study...