Free Republic

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WASHINGTON - With the United States and Pakistan united in a war against terrorism, the suggestion Friday that the United States once threatened to bomb the Pakistanis "back to the Stone Age" landed like a diplomatic bombshell. Acting swiftly to defuse concern over any such threat, the White House dismissed it as a misunderstanding, the former deputy secretary of state who allegedly issued the threat denied ever using such incendiary words, and President Bush attempted to smooth it over with a joke. Yet Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who made the alleged U.S. threat public in a television interview airing this...

President Bush said Friday he was "taken aback" by a purported U.S. threat to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it did not cooperate in the fight against terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. He praised Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf for being one of the first foreign leaders to come out after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to stand with the U.S. to "help root out an enemy." At a joint White House news conference, Musharraf said a peace treaty between his government and tribes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is not meant to support the Taliban. He...

MADRID, Spain - Priceless art dating from the Stone Age has been damaged by forest fires in northwest Spain, officials said Friday. Some of the fires were set deliberately.Colored paintings and rock carvings of wildlife and geometric patterns dating back 4,000 years have been charred and blackened by fires in Campo Lameiro and Cotobade in northwestern Galicia, said a local government spokeswoman, Iria Mendez.It is too early to determine whether some of the art, which is considered a national treasure, has been irreparably damaged, Mendez said.Hundreds of fires have raged through the heavily wooded northwestern corner of Spain in the...

Globalization: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is having a grand time cavorting around the world on his Axis Of Evil tour. But we notice he's disgusting as many countries as he's wooing. Vietnam is the most interesting. Chavez blew into Hanoi on Monday and right away began praising Vietnam's government in exactly the way it didn't want: by hailing communism. "Vietnam, with its valor, defeated imperialism not only on the battlefield, but also has maintained socialism in the ideological arena," the South American dictator intoned. Uh-huh. To Vietnam's officials, who've been trying diligently to integrate their nation into the world economy, that's...

A survey of British skulls from the early part of the New Stone Age, or Neolithic, shows societies then were more violent than was supposed. Early Neolithic Britons had a one in 20 chance of suffering a skull fracture at the hands of someone else and a one in 50 chance of dying from their injuries. Details were presented at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology and reported in New Scientist magazine. Blunt instruments such as clubs were responsible for most of the traumas. This is not the first time human-induced injuries have been identified in Neolithic...

PARIS, 24 Dec. (IPS) In its first major social challenge and in continuation of the crackdown of all freedoms in Iran, the new Government under the Islamo-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has arrested at least 14 members of the Single Bus Company of Tehran and Suburbs (SBCTS), informed sources reported on Saturday. The order for the arrest, detention and seizure of all documents of the arrested men was issued by Judge Sa’id Mortazavi, the Prosecutor for Tehran and Islamic Revolution Tribunals. A protégé of Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, the leader of the Islamic Republic, Mr. Mortazavi is better known by the public,...

Study traces Egyptians’ stone-age roots Dec. 17, 2005 Special to World Science Some 64 centuries ago, a prehistoric people of obscure origins farmed an area along Egypt’s Nile River. Barely out of the Stone Age, they produced simple but well-made pottery, jewelry and stone tools, and carefully buried their dead with ritual objects in apparent preparation for an afterlife. These items often included doll-like female figurines with exaggerated sexual features, thought to possibly symbolize rebirth. Details from a tomb painting from Hierakonpolis, from prehistoric Egypt's Naqada culture. A new study suggests the Naqada people, the earlier Badarians and the later...

Stone Age sites found under North Sea Date released 12 September 2003 Experts have discovered the first ever evidence of Stone Age settlements in the British North Sea, dating back as far as 10,000 years. Subject to further investigation, one of them could be the earliest underwater archaeological site in the UK. The exciting find, discovered by accident by a team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, could lead to a rewriting of the history books and revolutionise our understanding of the way our ancestors lived. The discovery of several stone artefacts, including tools and arrowheads, have pinpointed...

Stone Age elephant remains foundThe skeleton was found at the site of a new station Construction work on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) in Kent has unearthed the 400,000-year-old remains of an elephant. The skeleton was found on the site of the new Ebbsfleet station, an area thought to be an early Stone Age site. Bones from other large animals, including rhinoceros, buffalo and wild horses, have also been found nearby. The remains were preserved in muddy sediment near what was once the edge of a small lake, a spokesman said. The elephant, which has been identified as a...

<p>Surf or turf? If you've faced that decision in a restaurant, consider what Stone Age people in coastal Britain went through, with a traditional seafood diet on one hand and newly domesticated plants and animals on the other. A new study says that about 6,000 years ago, they chose turf in a big way.</p>

AN EXCITING archaeological discovery has been made at Culmore in Derry by two men who stumbled across a large stone artefact, which pre-dates the Egyptian Pyramids by a few thousand years. When Frank Gillespie began work on his garden wall in Culmore he had little idea that just below his feet lay a large stone axe estimated to be around 8-9,000 years-old. Frank's father Hugh Gillespie, of Lone Moor Road, had been digging the foundation for the wall when he unearthed the ancient tool. "My father found it and left it to one side, paying little notice, but when I...

Iranian Court Punishes Vandals with Donkey Rides TEHRAN (Reuters) - An Iranian court ordered five vandals to ride around their neighborhood on donkeys, facing backwards, in a bid to take them down a peg or two, the daily Entekhab newspaper said Sunday. The court also sentenced the five young men to be lashed and to an unspecified spell in jail after local people in a south Tehran district filed complaints against them ranging from breaking shop windows to gang fights. The paper carried a picture of one of the glum-faced men, perched on the rear of a donkey, surrounded by...