Free Republic

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump used contentiousness around transgender people’s access to sports and bathrooms to fire up conservative voters and sway undecideds. And in his first months back in office, Trump has pushed the issue further, erasing mention of transgender people on government websites and passports and trying to remove them from the military. It’s a contradiction of numbers that reveals a deep cultural divide: Transgender people make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, but they have become a major piece on the political chess board — particularly Trump’s. For transgender people and their allies —...

In 1923, famed British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas published a seminal study on Stonehenge, claiming to have found the precise spots where prehistoric people had quarried the stones. There was just one problem with his analysis: It was wrong. And it has taken geologists about 80 years to get it right, a new study finds. To debunk Thomas' work, Bevins and Ixer donned their Sherlock Holmes hats and examined Thomas' maps and rock samples. Thomas (1876-1935) was a geologist for the British Geological Survey who spent just one day in December 1906 surveying Mynydd Preseli... During his Preseli Hills visit,...

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - The former US envoy to the Vatican, Jim Nicholson, recalled Pope John Paul II's vocal opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq on the grounds that war represented a "defeat for humanity." "There was a clear disagreement," Nicholson said of the rift between the Vatican and the White House over the use of military force to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. The pope, who died Saturday, "was a man of peace, and he always hoped for the peace option," Nicholson said in an interview with the Denver Post. "If he could keep war from breaking...