Free Republic

President Donald Trump's love of gold has extended from the inside of Trump Tower to the decor of the White House... to a new island in the Pacific? The president has been offered the island of Bougainville — complete with its large gold mine — as the 'deal of the century'. Currently part of Papua New Guinea, Bougainville voted overwhelmingly for independence in a 2019 referendum — but the result wasn't legally binding. However, Bougainville's president, former rebel commander Ishmael Toroama, remains undeterred. 'Bougainville is for independence. It is only a matter of time,' he told The World in October,...

Cosmos Magazine reports that 42,000-year-old evidence of human occupation has been identified at the site of Elivavan in southeast Indonesia's Tanimbar Islands. "Along with tiny fragments of pottery we also found evidence of things like bones, shells, and sea urchins that point to the island's role as a hub for early maritime activities," said Hendri Kaharudin of Australian National University. Kaharudin and his colleagues suggest the site is situated along a possible southern route traveled by prehistoric migrants to the region of the paleocontinent known as Sahul, which includes what are now Papua New Guinea and Australia. "This island-hopping strategy...

A massive landslide in Papua New Guinea’s Enga province on May 24, 2024, buried over 2 000 people, according to government reports released today. In a letter to the United Nations resident coordinator, the acting director of the National Disaster Center, Luseta Laso Mana, stated that the landslide buried over 2 000 people and caused major destruction at Yambali village in Enga province on Friday, May 24, 2024. The disaster occurred at approximately 03:00 local time in a remote area about 600 km (370 miles) northwest of the capital, Port Moresby. The landslide also buried a 200-meter (650-foot) stretch of...

The other day, we told you about Biden lying -- again -- about his uncle Bosey getting eaten by cannibals after his plane was shot down during WWII. We also told you about the hilarious hashtag this lie inspired. But not everyone is laughing. In fact, some academics in Papua New Guinea are offended: 'They wouldn't just eat any white men that fell from the sky': Outraged Papua New Guinea academics lash out at Biden's 'unacceptable' suggestion that cannibals ate his WW2 pilot uncle https://t.co/vNFYeegi9X pic.twitter.com/UzSemZcxSR — Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) April 19, 2024 More from The Daily Mail: Outraged...

At least one person has died in violent unrest and riots in Papua New Guinea's capital of Port Moresby. Local media are reporting that the death toll from the unrest could be up to five at this stage, but ABC has only confirmed that one person has died. Paramedics responded to multiple call-outs last night involving severed burns and gunshot wounds, with St. John Ambulance describing it as a "significant emergency situation". Local security services described the rioting overnight as total anarchy. Videos of the unrest showed warehouses engulfed in flames and large crowds of people engaging in looting and...

The White House on Tuesday canceled President Joe Biden’s planned trips to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Australia, which were to have taken place next week on his way home from the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima, Japan. The cancellation, ostensibly necessary so that Biden could return to Washington to participate in debt ceiling negotiations, rattled observers who warned Biden was squandering valuable credibility in the Indo-Pacific region.

When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysterious Denisovans who gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’ offspring from local diseases. Some of these variants still persist in the genomes of people living in Papua New Guinea today, according to a new study.Researchers have known for a decade that living people in Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia, a subregion of the...

The United Nations General Assembly's first committee, which deals with disarmament, global challenges, and threats to peace that affect the international community, voted 152-5, on Friday, on a resolution concerning "the risk of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East". The resolution states that Israel must dispose of all its nuclear weapons and place its nuclear sites under the International Atomic Energy Agency's purview. The resolution, which is submitted every year to the UNGA in New York, was submitted by Egypt and sponsored by the Palestinian Authority and 19 counties including Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. Canada, Israel,...

The quake struck at a depth of 90 kilometers (roughly 56 miles) near Kainantu, a town with a population of roughly 8,500 people, the United States Geological Survey reported. The US National Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of tsunami waves. Earlier in the day it had said hazardous tsunami waves were possible within 1,000 kilometers (roughly 621 miles) along the coasts of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. Papua New Guinea is vulnerable to earthquakes because it lies along the "Ring of Fire" in the Pacific Ocean, where shifting tectonic plates push against each other, causing tremors...It is...

The discovery of pottery from the ancient Lapita culture by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) has shed new light on how Papua New Guinea (PNG) served as a launching pad for the colonization of the Pacific—one of the greatest migrations in human history.The new study makes clear the initial expansion of the Lapita people throughout PNG was far greater than previously thought.The study... is based on the discovery of a distinctive Lapita pottery sherd, a broken piece of pottery with sharp edges, on Brooker Island (200km east of mainland PNG) in 2017 that lead researcher Dr. Ben Shaw...

A small meteor that hit Earth in 2014 was from another star system, and may have left interstellar debris on the seafloor. An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor—and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system—which was...

A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo(opens in new tab) released by the U.S. Space Command (USSC). The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv. 2019...

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve. With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has...

Hindsight is always 20/20, but even used car dealers know there is almost no appreciation on a car once you drive it off the lot — a lesson Papua New Guinea is learning the hard way. Papua New Guinea — which is one of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia, with an average GDP per capita of $2,613 — dropped a mind-boggling $5.6 million on a fleet of luxury cars to impress regional leaders during a 2018 conference. Nearly three years later, the country admits the shallow purchase was a “terrible mistake” and is trying to recoup its losses by...

Oftentimes, the climate alarmists are their own worst enemy. It sounds reasonable enough that carbon emissions might have an impact on the climate, but it's a rather nasty thing to prove, especially when alarmist predictions fail, over and over again. It's far from the "scientific consensus." But the alarmists don't tone down their rhetoric — they ratchet it up to 11. They want to take away your plastic straws, your cars, your burgers. Then there's this behavioral scientist in Sweden who wants us to eat human flesh to deal with the effects of climate change. No, this isn't The Onion...

A​ tsunami alert was issued for Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands but was later cancelled. The epicenter of the quake was about 28 miles northeast of Kokopo, in New Britain province. The city is on a smaller island northeast of the main island and about 495 miles from the the capital of Port Moresby. Papua New Guinea sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire," named for its active volcanoes and earthquakes. About 90 percent of Earth's quakes happen along this 25,000-mile horseshoe that loops from South America to Europe and back down to the coast off Australia

Harvard astronomer Abraham "Avi" Loeb and undergraduate student Amir Siraj have drafted a new paper identifying the second cosmic object to visit the inner solar system from beyond (Oumuamua being the first). The paper has been submitted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, but has yet to be peer reviewed. "The reported meteor entered the solar system with a speed of 60 km/s (134,216 mph) relative to the local standard of rest (obtained by averaging the motion of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun)," Loeb wrote in an email. "Such a high ejection speed can only be...

Such evidence is tough to interpret at this point, paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres of University College London said at the meeting. Interbreeding of closely related populations, such as Denisovans, Neandertals and H. sapiens, generates novel skeletal features that can obscure what started out as, say, a distinctive Denisovan look, she suggested. Whatever evolutionary niche these mysterious hominids occupied, at least three separate Denisovan populations interbred with ancient humans, population geneticist Murray Cox of Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, also reported at the meeting. Genetic remnants of two of those populations appear in modern aboriginal groups in Papua New Guinea,...

[Michael] Alpers, now the Professor of International Health at Curtin University in Western Australia... tells me the story of what he found as a young doctor visiting the New Guinea highlands more than 50 years ago... It was in the field, in early 1962, Alpers first met American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who had by then been studying kuru for several years... Unusually, the paper identified the victims Kigea and Eiru -- as well as Daisey and Georgette -- by name... Two weeks later, the paper appeared in the journal Nature. It identified kuru as a new category of infectious disease...

Saw on local news Tsunami warning. USGS is reporting 7.0 Quake but depth is 40 km (deep for Tsunami)