Free Republic

Researchers Have Finally Solved The Mystery Of The Irish Potato Famine Denise Chow, LiveScience May 24, 2013, 12:03 PM The Irish potato famine that caused mass starvation and approximately 1 million deaths in the mid-19th century was triggered by a newly identified strain of potato blight that has been christened "HERB-1," according to a new study. An international team of molecular biologists studied the historical spread of Phytophthora infestans, a funguslike organism that devastated potato crops and led to the famine in Ireland. The precise strain of the pathogen that caused the devastating outbreak, which lasted from 1845 to 1852,...

One year after resigning in disgrace, Aaron Schock — the high-flying GOP congressman whose penchant for drawing publicity to himself was nearly unrivaled in the House of Representatives — has largely disappeared from view. But federal prosecutors still have their sights on him. There have been a few random glimpses of the Illinois Republican since his abrupt departure from Capitol Hill: having dinner with his father in Peru last summer, and snowboarding with a friend in Aspen, Colorado, in February. Just this month, Schock was seen lugging his gym bag outside the Longworth House Office Building. Sources say he is...

In one of the most arid regions in the world a series of carefully constructed, spiralling holes form lines across the landscape. Known as puquios, their origin has been a puzzle -- one that could only be solved from space. The holes are from the Nasca region of Peru -- an area famous for the Nasca lines, several enormous geometric images carved into the landscape; immaculate archaeological evidence of ceremonial burials; and the rapid decline of this once flourishing society. What adds to the intrigue in the native ancient people of Nasca is how they were able to survive in...

American researcher David Johnson has advanced a theory that Nasca Lines may be related to water. He thinks that the geoglyphs may be a giant map of the underground water sources traced on the land. The Nasca Lines are located in the Peruvian desert, about 200 miles south of Lima. The assortment of perfectly-straight lines lies in an area measuring 37 miles long and 1-mile wide... While looking for sources of water, he noticed that ancient aqueducts, called puquios, seemed to be connected with some of the lines... Johnson gave each figure a meaning: the trapezoids always point to a...

Researchers captured images of the short-eared dog in Puno's jungle regions. For the first time in Peru's history, researchers in the jungles of Puno captured images of an animal that they had long thought to be extinct: the short-eared dog. Also known as the small-eared fox, or Atelocynus microtis, the animal was photographed by camera traps in the Bahuaja Sonene National Park in the Puno jungle, Southern Peru, reports El Comercio. The animal's presence had not been detected in the Peruvian Amazon since 1987 and has been on the red list of threatened species of the International Union of Conservation...

Centre-right candidate Keiko Fujimori has won the first round of Peru's presidential election, exit polls say. Ms. Fujimori, who won about 40% of the vote, will face one of two challengers in a run-off vote in June. Her rivals, centrist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and leftist Veronika Mendoza are neck and neck with about 20% of the vote each, exit polls said. Ms. Fujimori, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, says tacking crime is her priority. She is also supported by some Peruvians who credit her father with defeating the Maoist Shining Path rebel group. Suspected leftist rebels killed three...

Peruvian natural resource managers have questions about how to protect their country’s forests, and they came to Summit County for answers. A U.S. Forest Service division called International Programs, which promotes sustainable forest management and biodiversity conservation in foreign countries, brought top-level Peruvian officials for an educational tour that started Monday in Washington D.C. and ends Friday in Denver. ... In 2009, a U.S-Peru free trade agreement stipulated that Peru must curtail illegal logging, which undercuts the U.S. timber sector, and sustainably manage natural resources, said Erin Carey, who worked with the Forest Service International Programs for the last five...

LIMA (AFP) – Archeologists have discovered a group of ancient tombs in the mountainous jungle of southeastern Peru they say is as important as the discovery of the lost city of Machu Picchu. The tombs belonging to the Wari culture were found on the jungle-covered eastern slope of the Andes in Cuzco department at a long-abandoned city thought to be the last redoubt of Inca resistance to Spanish colonial rule. The Waris, a pre-Inca civilization, had an enormous cultural impact in the Andean region between 600 and 1200. The Inca empire (around 1400 to 1532) was the largest pre-Columbian empire...

Two Poles and one Italian were killed by Shining Path guerrillas in 1991Three European missionary priests killed by Shining Path terrorists in Peru in 1991 have been beatified. According to Associated Press, 30,000 people attended the beatification ceremony for Franciscans Fathers Michal Tomaszek and Zbigniew Strzalkowski of Poland and Fr Alessandro Dordi of Italy in a stadium in Chimbote, in northern Peru, on Saturday. Italian Cardinal Angelo Amato presided over the ceremony and there were representatives from all of the dioceses of Peru and groups from Poland and Italy. Father Zbigniew, 32, and Fr Michal, 30, were killed on August...

New York’s most notorious revolutionary tourist — “sandalista” Lori Berenson — is back in Manhattan from Peru, where she served 15 years in prison for terrorism. Forgive us if we don’t put out a welcome mat. The LaGuardia HS grad and MIT dropout has been stuck in Peru by law until her full 20-year sentence expired. Now that it has, she’s heading home to her parents’ Kips Bay apartment. Though lionized by the left and worshiped by The New York Times, Berenson, now 46, was no naive idealist. She spent years traveling Central America with Marxist groups until she hooked...

An American pilot has been arrested in Peru after police claimed they found 22lbs of cocaine in one of his bags - although he denies it belongs to him. Kenneth Parrock was arrested at Jorge Chavez airport in the city Callao and is currently being held by Peruvian authorities. He was en route to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he was scheduled to fly a TAM Airlines plane to Asia.

LIMA (Reuters) - Lori Berenson, a New Yorker once jailed in Peru for helping Marxist insurgents, is returning to the United States with her six-year-old son after finishing a 20-year sentence, her lawyer said Tuesday. Berenson, 46, was making preparations to leave Peru "in coming hours," said Anibal Apari, her attorney and the father of her son. He declined to be more specific. Apari and Berenson met in prison in 1997. He was also an inmate at the time. Berenson was on parole for the past 5 years after spending 15 years in prison. In 1996, Berenson was found guilty...

Strikingly tall skeletons uncovered in the Ecuador and Peru Amazon region are undergoing examination in Germany, according to a research team headed by British anthropologist Russell Dement. Will these remains prove that a race of tall people existed hundreds of years ago deep in the Amazonian rainforest? Since 2013, the team has reported finding half a dozen human skeletons dating to the early 1400s and the mid-1500s that measure between 7 feet and 8 feet (213 to 243 centimeters) in height. ... In late 2013, Dement received word that a skeleton had been uncovered by a Shuar local, approximately 70...

Andean Crops Cultivated Almost 10,000 Years Ago by Michael Abrams Archaeologists have long thought that people in the Old World were planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting for a good 5,000 years before anyone in the New World did such things. But fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower...

Trying to fathom farming's origins Tuesday, August 14, 2007 3:22 AM By Bradley T. Lepper Tom Dillehay, an archaeologist with Vanderbilt University, and several colleagues announced last month in the journal Science that they had recovered remarkably early evidence for agriculture in South America. Working at several sites in the Nanchoc Valley of northern Peru, they found squash seeds that were more than 9,000 years old. This is nearly twice as old as previously reported farming evidence in the region. Dillehay and his co-authors point out that one of the most important aspects of this discovery is that "horticulture and...

The discovery by Vanderbilt University anthropologist Tom Dillehay and his colleagues, Herbert Eling, Instituto Naciona de Anthropolotica e Historia in Coahulila, Mexico, and Jack Rossen, Ithaca College, was reported in the Nov. 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The anthropologists discovered the canals in Peru's upper middle Zana Valley, approximately 60 kilometers east of the Pacific coast. Preliminary results indicate one of the canals is over 6,700 years old, while another has been confirmed to be over 5,400 years old. They are the oldest such canals yet discovered in South America... Dillehay and his team...

Your substantiality will always be found in me for I will part the waters for you in all you come against! So never let something appear as impossible but "speak grace to your mountains" proudly for as My Blood was shed for you it is I that Rend the Heavens to aid you with My healing Balm of Grace. (( ( Declare ) )) My Children everything "into substance and Being" for I AM your Sword as you speak your needs into LIFE! Step up from faith into the "KNOWING" you CAN Trust , Lean on and Rest in the...

With millions in payloads, drug trafficking rife in world’s number one coca-growing valley MAZAMARI, Peru — It happens about four times a day, right under the nose of Peru’s military: a small single-engine plane drops onto a dirt airstrip in the world’s number one coca-growing valley, delivers a bundle of cash, picks up more than 300 kilos of cocaine and flies to Bolivia. Roughly half of Peru’s cocaine exports have been ferried eastward on this “air bridge,” police say, since the rugged Andean nation became the world’s leading producer of the drug in 2012. Peru’s government has barely impeded the...

Moray is an agricultural terrace complex northwest of Cuzco, south of the Sacred Valley... Temperature differences between the lower and higher levels are higher than you might think! The difference between the lowest and the highest levels can be up to 15 ºC (59 ºF). This is equal to the difference between sea level temperature and 1.000 m (2,380.8 ft) height level temperature. The crater-like formations descend to a depth of approximately 150 m (492 ft). As a comparison, we could say that that's as deep as high a 50-story skyscraper is... The name of Moray wither comes from maize...

--snip-- we're taking a virtual journey down what was once more than 20,000 miles of road traversing some of the world's most challenging terrain — mountains, forests and deserts. The Inca road began at the center of the Inca universe: Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, said to be built in the shape of a crouching puma. It actually was not a single road but a network of royal roads, an instrument of power designed for military transport, religious pilgrimages and to move supplies.