Free Republic

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — The Trump administration is bringing a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees next week in what it says is the start of a larger relocation effort for a minority group who are being persecuted by their Black-led government because of their race.The South Africans’ applications are being fast-tracked by the U.S. after President Donald Trump announced the relocation program in February. The Trump administration has taken an anti-migrant stance, suspending refugee programs and halting arrivals from other parts of the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan and most countries in...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has spelled out a nationalist rationale for his country’s military incursion into two restive provinces in eastern Ukraine largely controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists, but it is primarily about protecting Moscow’s energy interests. That was true in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and I was a Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, for which I wrote dozens of stories about the insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk that Russia helped foment. And it remains true now. To understand the Kremlin’s motivations in regard to its smaller, and relatively impoverished, neighbor, the key fact to know is that...

Human poop can reveal more than you might think, even when it's really, really old. In a new study of a Central American Maya civilization, samples of ancient feces have shown how the size of this community varied significantly in response to contemporary climate change. Researchers identified four distinct periods of population size shift as a reaction to particularly dry or particularly wet periods, which haven't all been documented before: 1350-950 BCE, 400-210 BCE, 90-280 CE, and 730-900 CE. In addition, the flattened poop piles show that the city of Itzan – which in the modern day would be in...

An elderly Catholic sculptor in Nagasaki, Japan, is all set to complete and install the world’s tallest wooden statue of the Virgin Mary after four decades of time, energy and money. Eiji Oyamatsu, 88, a Catholic from Fujisawa, Kanagawa prefecture, will unveil the 10-meter wooden statue of Mary with the child Jesus at the end of June, reported Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The statue pays tribute to thousands of Christian martyrs of Nagasaki in the 17th century. The single-handed effort by Oyamatsu encouraged a group of volunteers to form the Citizens’ Association for Minami-Shimabara World Heritage in 2018. The group...

Both the English and the Native Americans Used Children to Learn the Mysterious Ways of Their New Neighbors In 1608, Thomas Savage, age 13, arrived on the first ship from England bringing supplies to the newly founded Jamestown colony. He had been in Virginia just a few weeks when he was presented as a gift to Wahunsenaca, the great Powhatan who ruled over most of the people along the rivers leading into the lower Chesapeake Bay area. In return, Powhatan gave the English a young man named Namontack. Such exchanges of young people were considered normal. As English expeditions began...

“What do floods in Texas have to do with the coming Ice Age?” asks reader Caroline Snyder. “Quite a lot actually! “Looking at the historic record, we only have to go back to the 16th Century; a time when the Little Ice Age was causing devastation across Europe, but what of the South-West US?“ This article, amongst other things, looks to first hand accounts by Europeans amongst other things. Little Ice Age (Excerpt) – “…if you think it’s cold here in the Southwest now, you should have been around back in the days when the Spanish, Mexicans and Anglos settled...

The Jamestown settlement in Virginia, which officially was started on May 14, 1607, was one of the first European colonies to last in North America, and was historically significant for hosting the first parliamentary assembly in America. But Jamestown barely survived, as recent headlines about the confirmation of cannibalism at the colony confirm. The adaption to the North American continent by the early Europeans was extremely problematic. The success of tobacco as an early cash crop helped Jamestown weather the loss of most early colonists to disease, starvation, and attacks by the resident population of Native Americans. A turning point...