Free Republic

The White House is bristling at the suggestion that President Obama is becoming more warlike and, therefore, more like his predecessor, George W. Bush. At the White House press briefing on Friday, reporters asked presidential spokesman Josh Earnest for his reaction to the cover photo of the Economist magazine, which depicts Mr. Obama in the flight suit worn by Mr. Bush during the Iraq war in 2003, with the new caption “Mission Relaunched.” It’s a reference to Mr. Obama renewing the war against Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria. But Mr. Earnest called “unfair” the suggestion that the president...

(CNSNews.com) - Retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin—who is the former commander of the U.S. Special Forces Command, the former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and who worked with the CIA—told CNSNews.com in a video interview last week that he believes it is a reasonable supposition that the U.S. was supporting or planning to support the Syrian rebels via Benghazi, Libya. The CIA, however, says Boykin’s supposition is erroneous and that the U.S. was not conducting or planning covert action to support Syrian rebels through Benghazi. “These assertions are both baseless and flat wrong,” a CIA spokesperson told...

Plastered Syrian Skulls from the Dawn of Civilisation In the Neolithic period the Levantine Fertile Crescent ushered in one of the most profound cultural revolutions in the history of the Mediterranean basin. This environmentally blessed cradle of civilisation played host to modern humans as they made the crucial transition from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers to emerge as proto-urban societies. A conspicuous enigma of the world’s first ‘city dwellers’ was the most extraordinary ritual practice of plastering human skulls, which is attested at several major Neolithic sites, such as Jericho in the Palestinian Territories, Çatalhöyük in Turkey, and ‘Ain Ghazal in...