Free Republic

2007—Year of the Lapita? Volume 61 Number 1, January/February 2008 by Mark Rose Polynesian Breakthroughs A Polynesian chicken (Anita Gould) and a Chilean chicken bone (Courtesy Alice Storey) There was no doubt about including in our 2007 Top Ten the discovery that chicken bones from ancient Polynesian sites in Tonga and Samoa and El Arenal, a Chilean site occupied between A.D. 700 and 1390, had identical DNA. The chicken was domesticated in Southeast Asia, but how it arrived in the New World before Europeans arrived was a mystery. Now it seems that Polynesian seafarers brought them, adding to the evidence...

Fifty-one years ago today, April 30, 1975, the last American helicopter lifted off the Saigon embassy roof. We had won. Nixon and Kissinger’s Paris Peace Accords forced the North to recognize South Vietnam’s sovereignty. America promised air power and supplies if they violated it. The ARVN was finally ready to defend itself. Then Watergate. Democrats won huge majorities in 1974. They slashed aid by over 75%, banned any U.S. response to Soviet rearmament of the North, and watched as the Communists violated every agreement. No bullets. No gas. No tires for their Jeeps. South Vietnam collapsed—not from lack of courage,...

Navy Under Secretary Hung Cao has been named acting secretary following the departure of John Phelan. Cao and Phelan are both 2026 Wash100 awardees. Who Is Hung Cao? Cao is a retired U.S. Navy captain who took on the role of under secretary of the Navy in October. The Navy diver previously worked as a vice president and client executive at CACI International, where he supported efforts in areas such as electronic warfare, counter-drone technology and enterprise IT. Cao served in the Navy for 25 years, holding a wide range of leadership positions, including division chief of the Defense Threat...

Goodfellow’s BedfellowsWho’s in Bed with the Washington PostBy Fedora Introduction I. A Radical Education: Boston University and Cambridge-Goddard II. Vietnam Roots: Indochina Resource Center A. Luce at International Voluntary Services B. Luce and Cornell’s Hanoi for Lunch Bunch C. Luce’s Tiger Cages and the Indochina Mobile Education Project D. Luce and Branfman: The COLIFAM Connection E. Luce, Branfman, Winter Soldier, and Project Air War F. The Indochina Resource Center: Branfman, Luce, and Goodfellow G. The IRC and the Indochina Peace Campaign: The Hayden-Fonda Link III. Post-Vietnam Transition: Campaign for a Democratic Foreign Policy and Coalition for a New Foreign and...

Do politicians internalize the consequences of their war-related votes? A new paper published in the Journal of Political Economy finds that they do -- when their family is involved. In “No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the U.S. Congress,” authors Eoin F. McGuirk, Nathaniel Hilger, and Nicholas Miller compare conscription-related voting records of members of Congress with and without draft-age sons. They find that legislators with sons eligible for the draft are 7-11 percentage points less likely to vote for conscription than their counterparts with daughters of the same age. The authors compiled a dataset of...

“Country Joe” McDonald, who fronted the band Country Joe and the Fish and became an emblem of the 1960s antiwar counterculture through a prominent appearance at the Woodstock festival, died Saturday at age 84. The singer, born Joseph Allen McDonald, died of Parkinson’s in Berkeley, according to a statement on the group’s social media and reported sources close to his wife. McDonald’s best known song was “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” a Vietnam protest song he performed at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The performance included the infamous call-and-response “Fish Cheer,” which had the audience spelling out the F-word at McDonald’s behest. Born on...

An exploration of Rome's travels in the far east. Get "The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization" https://mdsh.io/invictahistory and use code "Invicta" for 10% off.In this history documentary we seek to answer how far to the east did the Romans go? In previous episodes we covered the preceding links between the east and west which had been formed. Now we follow Roman traders into India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China, and beyond! How Far East Did the Romans Go? (India, Vietnam, China?) DOCUMENTARY | 29:11 Invicta | 1.66M subscribers | 131,135 views | February 1, 2026

American soldiers fighting in Vietnam armed with WWII German MP40s? Sounds ridiculous, but it's absolutely true. One special forces unit used a few old MP40s on operations obtained via the CIA - the famous MACV-SOG. Well, as those of you who have followed this channel for many years will know that I have made a video about this very subject though in the case of German World War II weapons from the perspective of their use by North Vietnam and the VietCong rather than by the Americans. Then I came upon this photograph taken in the mid 1960s in Vietnam,...

China is about to send humanoid robots to work at a busy border with Vietnam. UBTECH Robotics has won a $37 million contract, to deploy its Walker S2 machines there starting this month. The assignment is led by UBTECH Robotics Corp., a Shenzhen-based company that builds full-size humanoid robots for industry and public services. EarthSnap Its engineers focus on embodied intelligence, which is artificial intelligence that controls a physical robot body, so these machines can handle messy, real-world environments. Fangchenggang is a coastal city in Guangxi near the border with Vietnam, where cargo trucks, coaches, and day travelers constantly cycle...

“I approached this bastard and in my hands I had my old Remington Model 11 autoloader crammed with 00 buckshot. Frank Pachmayr had put an extension on the magazine which ran right out to the muzzle and this gave me a reserve of fire which sometimes proved quite advantageous.

According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia, China’s vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), sent a company of troops (over a hundred or more) to the government’s Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on 18 January. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping. A few hours before, the Chinese president – alerted by an informant – set in motion countermeasures. Troops under the command of Cao Qi, head of Xi’s Central Guards Bureau, ambushed Zhang’s soldiers. In the ensuing gunfight at Yangxi Hotel, nine guards were reportedly killed along with dozens of Zhang Youxia’s soldiers. Throughout China, military movements have...

What angers me most about the Minnesota situation is not even the fraud, but the sheer ingratitude behind it. I just spent several weeks in Vietnam, a country where people genuinely love America. History makes that fact almost surreal, but it is absolutely true. For so many people, their greatest dream is to see the United States, not even to immigrate, just to visit. Take the night watch guy at the studio I rent in Saigon. Every night he sat there reading English books. But he was not studying English. He had already mastered that. He was studying American history,...

Sant Chatwal courts controversy for helping Hillary By Arun Kumar, Washington, Sep 3 : Indian American businessman Sant Chatwal helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Clinton's campaigns even as he battled to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens, the Washington Post alleged Monday. The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their "bundlers" while they press to raise record amounts, the daily said. Chatwal's case reached from...

Former US Secretary of State John Kerry was knighted Wednesday by King Charles III, receiving England’s highest honor in a closed-door reception at Buckingham Palace. Kerry, 81, was formally awarded the Knight Commander award of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, which is typically bestowed to recognize foreign diplomats and is the highest honor that a noncitizen of the United Kingdom can receive. The former Massachusetts senator received the honor for “services to tackling climate change.” During the Biden administration, Kerry served as the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and pushed countries to phase out fossil fuels....

<p>It’s the ultimate homecoming photo — a smiling family rushing to reunite with a U.S. Air Force officer in 1973 who spent years as a POW in North Vietnam, his oldest daughter sprinting ahead with her arms outstretched, both feet off the ground.</p>

A Vietnamese mother and business owner whose deportation sparked liberal outrage has an extensive criminal record, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Melissa Tran, 43, has criminal convictions including grand larceny, multiple counts of forgery and fraud, DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. The mom-of-four is the owner of Nail Palace and Spa, a nail salon in Hagerstown, Maryland where she had become a pillar of the community. Tran arrived in the US on a Green Card at the age of 11 after fleeing from Vietnam in 1993. But her world came crashing down when she was unexpectedly detained...

A court in Vietnam handed jail sentences on Wednesday (Nov 12) to two former local officials who wagered millions of dollars under false foreign names, in a closely-watched gambling trial, state media reported. The pair were part of an illegal gambling ring run by South Koreans out of a swanky Hanoi hotel and comprising more than 140 people, prosecutors had alleged. The outfit was said to include former government and communist party officials, entertainers and businesspeople who placed bets totalling more than US$106 million. The slot, roulette and baccarat machines at the gilded King Club in the capital's five-star Pullman...

CLEVELAND (WJW) – Veterans Day 2025 falls on Tuesday, Nov. 11, and is a day to honor and celebrate veterans and active military members nationwide.

The remapping of global supply chains.When President Trump announced a new 100% tariff on Chinese imports, in retaliation for Beijing’s latest export controls on rare earth elements, markets saw only the headline risk. But the real story lies beyond the ticker: a structural reordering of global trade. The world’s supply chains, long anchored to the Chinese mainland, are splintering.Capital is scattering across Asia’s periphery, and shipping routes that once followed predictable trans-Pacific lines are being redrawn into a new web of uncertainty and opportunity. Alongside an eastward turn worth $100 billion in investment, the trends of the last 30 years...

Twenty-one-year-old Steven A. Wowwk arrived as an infantryman in the Army’s First Cavalry Division in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam in early January 1969 to fight in an escalating and increasingly unwinnable war. By June, Wowwk had been wounded twice—the second time seriously—and was sent back to the United States for treatment at Boston’s Chelsea Naval Hospital. It was after returning to the U.S. and while en route to the hospital that Wowwk first encountered hostility as a veteran.