Free Republic

Around 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno. In a study published in the journal Geology, researchers show that samples of the desert glass contain tiny fragments with minerals often found in rocks of extraterrestrial origin. Those minerals closely match the composition of material returned to Earth by NASA's Stardust mission, which sampled the particles...

A front-page obituary of David Greenglass published this week in the New York Times is seriously flawed. Not only does it contain inaccurate statements of fact, it also misrepresents the views of historians about the Rosenberg atomic espionage case. The obituary stated that there is a “consensus among historians” that “the Greenglass-Rosenberg atomic bomb details were of little value to the Soviets, except to corroborate what they already knew, and that Ethel Rosenberg had played no active role in the conspiracy.” As five historians who have written six books on Soviet espionage, three specifically on the Rosenberg network and three...