Free Republic

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...