Free Republic

As I walked into the department this bright brisk morning, coffee cheerily in hand, the live global seismogram display in the atrium caught my eye with an alarming event that had just happened during my bike ride into work. *gasp* that looks bad *gasp* that looks bad BIG earthquake, somewhere in the vicinity of Central/Southern Asia. Indeed, an earthquake deep (>200 km) beneath the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan had shaken a huge swath of Central and South Asia. The great depth of the earthquake meant less extreme shaking at the epicenter (nobody lives closer than 212 km from the...

Why are the Kalash important?There are three reasons why the Kalash are important in the study of Eurasian prehistory: Their mountainous habitat contributed to isolation and relative immunity from historical population movementsTheir non-Islamic religion has definitely preserved them from recent gene inflowTheir language is unique within the Indo-Aryan family, and it often considered today as part of a separate Dardic family of Indo-Iranian in addition to the more populous Iranian and Indo-Aryan families.The Kalash are crucial for those interested in the origins of Indo-Iranians, and the fact that they are, indeed, a simple West/South Asian mix is not without significance...

Is Bin Laden dead? Yes. Everything else about the White House version of the Bin Laden raid in Pakistan is in flux. How did the Special Operations Command that launched Sea Team Six, know for certain that Bin Laden was at home that night? The White House says they were mostly certain. A fresh explanation, with confirmation, is that the US had visual confirmation of Bin Laden in and out of the house for several months. What happened to the more than a dozen people captured in the compound including Bin Laden's wounded wife? The White House doesn't have a...

Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s special envoy to the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), last month named his boss America’s “educator-in-chief on Islam.” That wasn’t surprising given the President’s Muslim roots and his affinity for some Islamic traditions (he once wrote that the Muslim call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth”). Obama clearly takes this title seriously, as recent events have shown. But Hussain’s designation was ironic because the more Obama talks about Islam, the clearer it becomes that he doesn’t seem to understand its most devout adherents. Obama refuses to acknowledge that radical Islamists are...

ISLAMABAD – A strong earthquake hit Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains Thursday, shaking large areas of the country and neighboring Pakistan, officials said. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the quake, which struck at 10:14 p.m. (1744 GMT) and was centered in a remote part of the Hindu Kush mountains, about 160 miles (250 kilometers) north of Kabul. Given the area's isolation it could take many hours for such reports to emerge. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.0, though Pakistani officials said it was 6.1. Tremors were felt in Kabul,...

A strong earthquake has shaken buildings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.1 and was centered in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan. That's according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake was felt in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Authorities on Tuesday dismissed speculation that Osama bin Laden might be hiding in Pakistan's mountainous north — a region more known for its spectacular scenery than Islamic militancy. A recent visit to the resort town of Chitral by at least one American prompted allegations from a local lawmaker from a hard-line Islamic party that the FBI or CIA had set up an office there to hunt for the al-Qaida chief. "These sort of stories keep appearing," Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao told a news conference in the capital, Islamabad. He denied American agents were based in Chitral....

* Al Qaeda — which operated as an efficient organ of command and control — has been smashed to pieces. Just two of its former top 20 leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be still alive and free — and those two are in hiding, seemingly without regular organizational contact with Islamist cells anywhere in the world. Since December 2001, the two have managed to send a total of six authenticated messages from their hideouts.... * Targeted governments have begun to fight back. In Pakistan, more than 13,000 schools suspected of propagating extremist ideas have been...