Free Republic

The roots of enviro-hysteria Peter Foster Financial Post June 2, 2004 Some of the environmentally concerned are not happy with The Day After Tomorrow. They worry that the Mother of all Disaster Movies, in which the Earth's climate shifts into a new Ice Age over a long weekend, will feed skepticism about global warming. As an antidote, the mediasphere is about to be hit with a shower of new and recycled disaster books. I learned all this in last Sunday's New York Times. Recently, we have been treated to yet another of the Times's bouts of editorial soul-searching, this time...

'Roots: The Heritage Game' is Released; Learn About Black History 11/18/03 11:00:00 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: City Desk, Education Reporter Contact: Susan Rutherford, 866-539-0073 KNOXVILLE, Tenn., Nov. 18 /U.S. Newswire/ -- What do Don Barksdale, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan all have in common? They are all incredible sportsmen. What if you add Chuck Cooper, Robert L. Johnson, and Chamique Holdsclaw to the assortment? All are African-American and each has made a tremendous contribution to American history. Now is the time everyone should know their names and others' without having to research the little known, but significant people on the...

African-Americans offered gene breakthrough to trace roots A US company is offering to trace black people's family bloodlines to specific geographic areas on the African continent. African Ancestry, with its growing databank of African DNA samples, offers two types of DNA tests and has compiled a DNA database of 10,000 people representing 85 ethnic groups from Africa. Each of those groups have tell-tale genetic markers not found in other people. Those markers were passed on generationally and appear in African Americans' cells today. The company's most common test tracks mitochondrial DNA, a mysterious strand of genetic material found outside the...

BAGHDAD -- Sleeping in a billion-dollar palace is not what it used to be in the land of Nebuchadnezzar and Nineveh. American GIs snore away on standard-issue cots in the dim antechambers, once-glittering reception halls and interrogation rooms of the personal citadels of Saddam Hussein, which become barracks when the blast furnace of the July sun shuts down and midnight temperatures plunge to the high 90s. My home for a visit here was in fact a castle: Hussein's Abu Ghraib palace, where the blend of megalomaniacal opulence and horror that was the dictator's essence still hangs in the air. Had...

The eyes of the world are temporarily on Africa because George W. Bush is making his first trip (five days) there. The issues of HIV/AIDS, despotism, inhumanity and corruption on the continent are in the spotlight. For me, an African-American, one of the most important recent trends related to Africa is the courage of a growing number of prominent blacks in the United States to publicly criticize African heads of state. I am especially pleased that black organizations, such as the TransAfrica Forum and Howard University's Africa Action, have sent formal complaints to several African leaders, including Presidents Robert Mugabe...

And that leads Good Morning America's parenting contributor Ann Pleshette Murphy to her second Murphy's Law: Thou Shalt Give Them Roots. Albert Dehart Washington III, who also goes by DD Washington, is learning from Albert Dehart Washington I, a grandfather who is wisely following Murphy's edict. Freed Slave Gave Family Name "My family originated in Dinwoodie County in Virginia and we can trace the family back to 1808," Washington told his grandson. "My great-great grandfather? Well, he was a slave, and he changed his name to Washington after he was freed." Connecting with their family's past not only helps children...

<p>Two Marines who had spent their childhoods in the South Bay were killed earlier this week when the helicopter they were riding in crashed in southern Iraq during a support mission.</p> <p>Sgt. Michael Vernon Lalush, 23, formerly of Sunnyvale, and Capt. Aaron J. Contreras, 31, who was born in San Jose, were both assigned to Marine Light Attack Helicopter Squadron 169 when their UH-1N Huey helicopter went down Sunday in an apparent accident at a forward supply and refueling site. No enemy fire was involved, the Department of Defense said.</p>

Female circumcision tradition has deep roots February 06 2003 at 05:53AM By Coumba Sylla In parts of Senegal, where female circumcision has been practised for centuries, campaigns like the one now before African leaders in Ethiopia to end the "silent tragedy" are brushed off as misinformation. African leaders and international organisations were taking part in a conference in the Ethiopian capital on Wednesday set to end with a call for zero- tolerance of the practice of female genital mutilation. "My parents did it, and, there is no question in my mind, I am going to continue the tradition," Cherif Koundoul,...

Chinese Roots: Skull may complicate human-origins debate Bruce Bower In 1958, farm workers digging in a cave in southern China's Liujiang County discovered several human bones including a skull. Relying on its resemblance to securely dated human fossils in Japan, scientists assigned this Homo sapiens skull an age of 20,000 to 30,000 years. ASIAN CONNECTION. If southern China's Liujiang skull is really more than 100,000 years old, this modern Homo sapiens fossil will shake up theories of human evolution. W. Wang However, the Liujiang finds may be much older than that, according to a report in the December Journal of...

Archaeologists unearth Tyre’s Phoenician rootsDig uncovers 12 burial jars Spanish archaeologists discovered a Phoenician cemetery containing 12 jars during excavations in Tyre on Friday, one of them reported. “We have discovered 12 earthenware jars of various sizes, filled with burned up bones and ashes at the southern entrance of Tyre,” Maria Eugenia Aubet told AFP. Aubet said her team “hopes to find gold jewelry under the ashes, which date back to between the ninth and 10th century before Christ.” “The Phoenicians used to bury their dead in jars along with their jewelry after incinerating their bodies,” she said. The team...

<p>"I have to die a man or live a coward." With these words, a mild-mannered black Detroit physician set in motion forces that would result in a dramatic milestone in America's civil rights movement, extending the notion that a man's home is his castle to blacks.</p>

<p>By now, even the Roman Catholic Church's staunchest defenders must admit that the church's ongoing sex-abuse scandal is not a matter of a few aberrations, but represents a disturbing pattern that perhaps has involved hundreds of victims and priests.</p> <p>The church hierarchy remains in denial, with U.S. bishops proposing a new "zero tolerance" policy that would kick out priests who abuse children in the future, but would, unbelievably, offer a second chance to those who already molested a child.</p>

How Conservatism Guided America's Founding Forrest McDonald Editor's Preview: It was not state weakness, but incipiently totalitarian behavior by unchecked state governments in the years after 1776, that set the stage for the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. National authority must be strengthened; but how? Liberty is secure in the United States today only because Washington, Hamilton, and their conservative allies bested radical ideologues like Jefferson and Madison in the ensuing struggle to shape the U.S. Constitution. Thus John Locke, philosophical father of the latter group, may be a less benign influence on history than is commonly supposed: millenial excesses from...