Free Republic

A social media influencer who extolled the virtues of a vegan diet of raw tropical fruit has died, reportedly of malnutrition, exhaustion and infections. Zhanna Samsonova, a Russian blogger who regularly posted about her extreme diet of raw tropical fruit on Instagram and TikTok, was living and working in south-east Asia. The 39-year-old claimed she had not drank water for six years, drinking fruit and vegetable juices instead. She regularly spoke of taking pride in the fact that people could not believe she was approaching her 40th birthday.

Alexander Hardcastle spent a decade searching for the fabled theatre, which is said to be buried beneath the remains of Akragas, a city established by Greek colonists six centuries before Christ on the southern coast of Sicily... Hardcastle, a former soldier who had served with the Royal Engineers in the Boer War, believed that remains of the stone-built theatre had survived, despite Akragas being shaken by earthquakes, sacked by the Carthaginians and plundered for its stone. The Harrow-educated gentleman scholar, who was born in Belgravia, spent a fortune on the quest between 1920 and 1930, but lost all his money...

A 1,500-year-old church which was buried under debris from an earthquake for more than a millennium has reopened to the public after a painstaking restoration of some of the world’s earliest Christian art. The sixth-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua is located in the ancient Roman Forum, at the bottom of the Palatine Hill, where Roman emperors lived for centuries in sumptuous palaces.

World leaders played an interactive nuclear war game designed to test their responses to a terrorist atomic "dirty bomb" attack that threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. David Cameron joined Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping and other world leaders to play a "nukes on the loose" war game to see how they would cope with a terrorist nuclear attack. The German chancellor grumbled at being asked to play games and take tests with the Prime Minister, US and Chinese presidents around a table with dozens of heads of state at a nuclear summit in The...