JAMESTOWN — They were known as the ’20 and odd,’ the first African slaves to set foot in North America at the English colony settled in 1607. For nearly 400 years, historians believed they were transported to Virginia from the West Indies on a Dutch warship. Little else was known of the Africans, who left no trace. Now, new scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began. The slaves were herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in Angola, in Southwest Africa. The ship was seized by British pirates on the high seas — not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean. The slaves represented one ethnic group, not many, as historians first believed. The discovery has tapped a rich vein of history that will go on public view next month at the Jamestown Settlement. The museum and living history program will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding by revamping the exhibits and artifacts — as well as the story of the settlement itself. Although historians have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade from Africa starting […]
The U.N. anti-drug chief announced a ‘staggering’ 60% rise increase in opium cultivation in Afghanistan this year, and demanded that the government arrest scores of major traffickers and remove corrupt officials and police who are profiting from the trade. The record crop yielded 6,100 tons of opium, enough to make 610 tons of heroin, outstripping the demand of the world’s drug users by a third, according to U.N. statistics.
Israel’s spy chief has given a warning that Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip are garnering increasing numbers of weapons and tactical expertise from Hezbollah fighters since the war in southern Lebanon erupted earlier this summer. Yuval Diskin, the director of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of MI5, said Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was being used as a terrorist base and fast becoming a haven for arms smugglers preparing to shift their wares into the Gaza Strip. He added that within Gaza terrorists were building rocket hideouts, a bunker network and an anti-tank missile arsenal as they prepared for an escalated confrontation with Israel. advertisement ‘If we don’t move to counter this smuggling, it will continue and create a situation in Gaza similar to the one in southern Lebanon,’ he said at a private meeting with Israeli MPs last week. He told members of the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee that Hamas had set out to emulate Hezbollah’s tactics in Lebanon, building tunnels and bunkers to help to smuggle weapons and militants across the border from Egypt, since Israel withdrew from Gaza last year. The border is now controlled by the Palestinians and Egypt, with the […]
Lord Foster, the British architect, has been enlisted by the King of Jordan for his most grandiose project yet - a canal carved through the Sinai desert to rescue the Dead Sea from environmental disaster. He has already held talks with the governments of Israel and Jordan about a $3 billion (£1.57 billion) scheme to transfer water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. His proposal is to carry sea water from the Gulf of Aqaba to replenish the Dead Sea, which has shrunk by a third over the past 50 years and faces total evaporation. At stake is the area’s delicate ecology and a tourist industry - that draws 100,000 Britons each year - centred on the sea’s mineral-rich waters and mud. A sequence of canals and pipelines would channel sea water down through the arid Arava valley in southern Israel and Jordan to the salt lake at the lowest point on earth, 415 metres below sea level. Action is urgently needed. Over the past 50 years the Dead Sea’s depth has fallen by 20 metres. The so-called ‘Red to Dead’ plan is to reverse this fall, which has been so dramatic that it […]
Facing the most difficult political environment since they took control of Congress in 1994, Republicans begin the final two months of the midterm campaign in growing danger of losing the House while fighting to preserve at best a slim majority in the Senate, according to strategists and officials in both parties. Over the summer, the political battlefield has expanded well beyond the roughly 20 GOP House seats originally thought to be vulnerable. Now some Republicans concede there may be almost twice as many districts from which Democrats could wrest the 15 additional seats they need to take control. President Bush’s low approval ratings, the sharp divisions over the war in Iraq, dissatisfaction with Congress, and economic anxiety caused by high gasoline prices and stagnant wages have alienated independent voters, energized the Democratic base and thrown once-safe Republican incumbents on the defensive. As the campaign season begins, Democrats are trying to guard against premature celebration, even as their prospects are brighter than most ever imagined. Republicans are hoping for some outside event that would show the president and their party in a better light — a spate of good news from Iraq, a foiled terrorist plot or an […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
