Free Republic

UniSC's Professor Patrick Nunn and Roselyn Kumar didn't set out to rewrite history.They were simply trying to research how India's coastline had changed over the centuries...At some point in the 16th century, the depictions and illustrations of Calicut stopped matching up with the old ones.The river was wrong. So were the boats. Where was the promised great maritime city and the trees heaving with fruit?...It was like Calicut had somehow teleported to a completely different location...The trouble started in 1498 with a man who was no stranger to trouble—Vasco da Gama. Da Gama had been sent by the King of...

An active-duty missile corvette of the Indian Navy is on its way to Vietnam as a gift, the first warship given by India to any country. The domestically built corvette INS Kirpan left India's east coast on Wednesday (Jun 28), the navy said. India and Vietnam have strengthened their ties in recent years, with a special focus on defence, as both countries are concerned over an increasingly assertive China. India has given smaller boats and military equipment to countries like Maldives and Mauritius in the past and a submarine to Myanmar.

In a speech to the League of Conservation Voters, President Biden announced "plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean. This all-electric train will provide a nonpolluting alternative to fossil-fueled air and sea transport." Biden rebuffed skeptics by pointing out that "people said the California bullet train could never be built, but it's under construction right now. This triumph of modern engineering can be replicated around the world. Two of the best and brightest Americans will make sure this happens. First, my son Hunter has already gotten buy-in from his Chinese business partners...

I wonder if Biden’s proposed railroad from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean will generate massive industrial production growth? Is this more Bidenomics?? Industrial production unexpectedly dips in May. It peaked eight months ago. On a year-over-year basis, May’s Industrial Production declined to a lame 0.23%. As The Fed hikes rates and slows M2 Money growth. Today the Fed released its Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization report for May 2023. Industrial production edged down 0.2 percent in May following two consecutive months of increases. The Bloomberg Econoday consensus was a small increase. In May, the index for manufacturing ticked up...

On today’s installment of “What the Hell Did Biden Actually Just Say?” we have the alleged president of the most powerful country in the world announcing his plan to build, and I quote, “a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean.”Seriously.Those are his own words. This isn’t some Deep Fake video; it’s Presidentish Joe Biden speaking Wednesday night at the League of Conservation Voters’ annual Capital Dinner, whatever that is.Biden Wants to Build an 8,000-Mile Ocean Train

President Biden raised eyebrows on social media this week after appearing to reveal plans to build a railroad from the Pacific Ocean "across" the Indian Ocean. "We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean," Biden told the League of Conservation Voters at their annual dinner in Washington, D.C., Wednesday night. "We have plans to build in Angola, one of the largest solar plants in the world. I could go on, but I'm not. I'm going off script. I'm going to get in trouble."

POTUS POTTY PANTS being Joe Dementia. Short Video clip ......................

Amidst tension with China along the northern borders, the Indian Navy has carried out its first exercise in recent years with two new aircraft carriers – INS Vikramaditya and INS Vikrant – along with 35 aircraft and other warships to demonstrate its maritime muscles in the Indian Ocean region. The power projection in the Arabian Sea involves MiG-29K fighter jets that operated from the carrier’s decks and a wide array of choppers ranging from the new MH60R to older generation Kamov, Sea King and Chetak besides the homegrown advanced lightweight helicopters. “INS Vikramaditya and INS Vikrant were the centre-pieces of...

The Chagos Islands may be little more than specks in the middle of the Indian Ocean, but they are at the center of a looming diplomatic row over a key American military base and the rise of Chinese power. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic have raised fears that the British government's decision to begin negotiations to hand over the islands to Mauritius could allow China the chance to build its own military facility on the archipelago — right under the nose of American forces at Diego Garcia. The issue is one of the most important strategic locations in...

The silent ceramic objects that survive from medieval Indian Ocean trade carry incredible stories of a time when South Asia had the upper hand over China...In the 830s CE, a ship tried to make a daring crossing. Navigating treacherous reefs and shoals, it was attempting to move from the South China Sea to the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra. After a brief stop there, it intended to catch the monsoon winds to India. This attempt failed, and the ship’s contents — ranging from marvellously carved golden plates to glazed ceramics, from a diplomat’s ink-stone to a small toy dog...

A UAE-led heritage project is shedding new light on the origins of Zanzibar’s Stone Town.Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an original settlement at the Unesco World Heritage site in Tanzania that dates back to the 11th century.It proves the town — previously thought to be an 18th century Omani Arab town — was actually established much earlier by local Swahili people, archaeologists believe.During a major dig this summer, they unearthed traces of homes, cooking pits and significant amounts of pottery from this era.They were then able to pinpoint the settlement’s transition to stone buildings by the 14th century...Stone Town became...

India commissioned its first home-built aircraft carrier Friday as it seeks to counter regional rival China's much larger and growing fleet, and expand its own indigenous shipbuilding capabilities. The INS Vikrant, whose name is a Sanskrit word for “powerful" or "courageous," is India's second operational aircraft carrier, joining the Soviet-era INS Vikramaditya that it purchased from Russia in 2004 to defend the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal. The new 262-meter (860-foot) carrier, designed by the Indian navy and built at the Cochin shipyard in southern India, was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of the country's commemoration...

The oldest known shipwreck in the Indian Ocean has been sitting on the seafloor off the southern coast of Sri Lanka for some 2,000 years...The wreck lies 110 feet (33 meters) below the ocean's surface, just off the fishing village of Godavaya, where German archaeologists in the 1990s found a harbor that was an important port along the maritime Silk Road during the second century A.D..."Everything's pretty broken," said Deborah Carlson, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, who is leading the expedition to the Godavaya wreck with colleagues from the United States, Sri Lanka and...

New Delhi -- India is set to finalise a long-conceived proposal to procure 30 multi-mission armed Predator drones from the US for the three services at an estimated cost of over USD 3 billion (around Rs 22,000 crore), official sources said on Tuesday. The proposal to acquire the MQ-9B long-endurance drones, armed with air-to-ground missiles, is likely to be cleared by the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) in the next few weeks following which it will be placed before the PM-led Cabinet Committee on Security, they said. The sources said various key aspects of the procurement including the cost component and...

French actress Brigitte Bardot was fined to the tune of €20,000 — approximately $23,100 — for calling native Indian Ocean islanders “savages.” In 2019, Bardot, who is known for her acting in French projects, wrote a letter referring to the Reunionese — who inhabit the island La Reunion — as “natives who still have savage genes” in response to how they treat animals. According to the Telegraph, she specifically spoke about the Hindu Tamil population, criticizing them for “sacrificing goats” and using the “cannibalism of past centuries.”

For a long time, scientists had assumed a gradual expansion of African people through Sinai into both Europe and Asia. Then, bizarrely, it became clear from both genetics and archaeology that Europe was peopled later (after 40,000 years ago) than Australia (before 50,000 years ago). Meanwhile, the geneticists were beginning to insist that many Africans and all non-Africans shared closely related DNA sequences that originated only after about 70,000-60,000 years ago in Africa. So a new idea was born, sometimes called the "beachcomber express," in which the first ex-Africans were seashore dwellers who spread rapidly around the coast of the...

Federico De Romanis, "Comparative Perspectives on the Pepper Trade." ...compares quantitative data and other accounts of the pepper trade in Roman and Early Modern times and finds many broad similarities. Through his reading of both Roman and Early Modern European sources, De Romanis establishes that the Romans must have used both large and small ships carrying a very high proportion of pepper in their cargoes on the voyage from India. On the basis of recent readings of the Muziris papyrus, he argues that the Hermapollon, a large Roman ship, carried about 620 tons of pepper. De Romanis also considers the...

In 2018, a message in a bottle dating back to 1886 - 132 years ago - was found half-buried in the sand of a Western Australian beach. According to its contents, it spent more than a century swimming around, before it was discovered nearly 950 kilometres (590 miles) from where it was thrown off a ship in the Indian Ocean. Beachgoer Tonya Illman found the old gin bottle with a rolled-up message in January 2018, 50 meters (164 feet) from the shoreline at the high water mark on Wedge Island. Even though it was missing a cork, surprisingly both the...

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized China for creating unnecessary risks as an uncontrolled core segment of its biggest rocket reentered Earth’s atmosphere and mostly burned up over the Maldives before landing in the Indian Ocean on May 9. “It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris,” the former senator said in a statement.

PATTANAM, India -- Pottery shards, beads, Roman copper coins, and ancient wine bottles litter the strata beneath this small seaside village in India's southern Kerala state. The 250 families, mostly agricultural laborers, who live in Pattanam, 260 kilometers (161 miles) north of Kerala's capital Thiruvananthapuram, find the objects pretty, but would rather dig up the ground and build larger homes. But according to archaeologists K.P. Shajan and V. Selvakumar, they may be destroying the remnants of Muziris, a well-documented trading port where Rome and India met almost 3,000 years ago. They say that, based on remote sensing data, a river...