Free Republic

MENLO PARK, CA—In an attempt to stop the spread of real news on the platform, Facebook has banned The Babylon Bee. While many social media networks are struggling with slowing the spread of fake news, Facebook is suffering from the opposite problem. People are sharing jokes thinking they are just funny, fake stories, but then they are finding out that they are closer to the truth than any Fox News or CNN article. "The Babylon Bee claims to be satire, but their articles keep coming true. It's a clear case of false advertising," said Mark Zuckerberg. "We can't allow a...

Made from ancient grape varieties grown in Pompeii, 'Villa dei Misteri' has to be one of the world's most exclusive wines. The grapes are planted in exactly the same position, grown using identical techniques and grow from the same soil the city's wine-makers exploited until Vesuvius buried the city and its inhabitants in AD 79. In the late 1800s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli first excavated some of the city's vineyards from beneath three metres of solid ash. The digs turned up an almost perfect snapshot of ancient wine-growing - and thirteen petrified corpses, huddled against a wall. Casts were made of...

HEFER VALLEY, Israel — The new crisp, acidic and mineral white from a high-end Israeli winery was aged for eight months — or, depending on how you look at it, at least 1,800 years. The wine, called marawi and released last month by Recanati Winery, is the first commercially produced by Israel’s growing modern industry from indigenous grapes. It grew out of a groundbreaking project at Ariel University in the occupied West Bank that aims to use DNA testing to identify — and recreate — ancient wines drunk by the likes of King David and Jesus Christ. Eliyashiv Drori, the...

Large 1,500-year-old winepress unearthed in area once known for wine production. A large, well-preserved 1,500-year-old winery has been exposed during a violent storm in the Sharon Plain region, located between the Mediterranean Sea and Samarian Hills, the Antiquities Authority announced Monday. According to IAA archeologist Alla Nagorski, the discovery was made off the Eyal Interchange several weeks ago when flooding and hail disrupted an excavation at the site, where natural gas lines are scheduled to be embedded. The northern part of the Sharon Plain is considered the most historical wine region in Israel, and is where the first roots of...

Can Wine and Fruit Promote Truth? By Norma Zager “That's what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end.” Lise Hand In today’s world it seems more difficult than ever to maintain a civil discourse. The meeting of minds is often no more civil than ten rounds at Madison Square Garden, with all the blood and sweat necessary to exert a knockout punch. The other evening, Soraya and Isaac Nazarian invited us to...

This morning President Bush tried to take on critics of his stance on immigration while casually dropping by (along with a big press contingent that set up long before he arrived) a meeting among his key officials dealing with the issue. And, in defending the bill pending in the Senate, he said: “I’ve heard all the rhetoric — you’ve heard it, too — about how this is amnesty. Amnesty means that you’ve got to pay a price for having been here illegally, and this bill does that.” At first blush, it looked like some clever political trickery: redefine your opponents’...

<p>I was just in the middle of writing a long and tedious essay, about how to tell a real anti-Semite from a person who too-loudly rejects the charge of anti-Semitism, when a near-perfect real-life example came to hand. That bad actor and worse director Mel Gibson, pulled over for the alleged offense of speeding and the further alleged offense of speeding under the influence, decided that he needed to demand of the arresting officer whether he was or was not Jewish and that he furthermore needed to impart the information that all the world's wars are begun by those of Semitic extraction.</p>