They were found through a quirk of the region’s geopolitical history, which left a photographic trail of WWII aerial photos and declassified Cold War-era spy satellite images.

A group of children were listening to a story beneath the shade of an African juniper tree in a small church forest near Debre Tabor in northern Ethiopia. Three women walked along a path, the sound of their chatting permeating the dense trees as our group of 12 people, clearly foreigners, approached.

When the children spotted us at the forest’s edge, they came running along the dusty path, jumped over a low rock wall, ducked under branches and approached us curiously. I was tagging along with a group of researchers led by ecologist Dr Catherine Cardelús from Colgate University in New York state and Bernahu Tsegay from Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia who were here to learn about the forest’s ecology. The kids, meanwhile, were already experts. They knew every inch of the place; having grown up in these trees, this is the only forest they have ever seen.

I was in a ‘sacred forest’, more than 1,000 of which are scattered across the landscape in a near perfect lattice, each protecting a traditional Ethiopian Orthodox church at its centre. These small, neat clusters of trees, each about 2km away from the next, ensure that the local people are never far from the forests that are so deeply rooted in their social and spiritual lives. They’re used as community centres, meeting places and schools; for religious ceremonies, burial grounds and even bathrooms; and provide the only shade for miles. Although some sacred forests are fairly accessible, like the island forests on Lake Tana that can be visited on a half-day boat tour from the city of Bahir Dar, in the rural, mountainous landscapes of South Gondar, east of Bahir Dar, where I now was, the church forests can be harder to find.

Each dot of green stands out on the landscape because they are some of the only trees left in a country that’s experienced widespread deforestation. Some forests are more than 1,000 years old, and these precious trees have been spared thanks to shadow conservation – conservation as a by-product of religious stewardship. But they are small and threatened by encroaching roads, buildings and farmers' fields. Paradoxically, humans have both protected them yet pose the biggest threat to their future.

In south Texas, in the places where D.C. bureaucrats never go, the ordinary people are acutely sensitive to the issues at stake. Mere weeks back my colleagues met with ranchers in Starr County, Texas — remote, rural, and hard up on the Rio Grande — and one of those ranchers, a man who has encountered armed traffickers from Mexico on his own property more than once, asked about exactly this. He was a U.S. Army veteran who defended his country at war, he said, so why won’t the United States defend him?

He’s asking the right question. Washington, D.C., is giving the wrong answer. The good question and its bad answer illuminate what’s really at stake in the buoy-barrier case, which is — as is so often true — about things far beyond itself. Every American citizen in every American community has a legitimate expectation that his government will not attack his way of life, and will not side with foreign powers against him.

The Biden regime does both. In understanding what it means, we hear echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s distress from two centuries back: “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” But the Union is not done yet. The question is whether the regime in D.C. will succeed in rendering it a tool for our repression — or Texas will succeed in returning it to its founding purpose.

The question is open. All we can say for sure is that if the Biden regime fights for Mexico, it is Texas, now, that fights for America.

Although many travellers will have heard of the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, few will know about the "new Lalibela" being carved out of the rockface by a devoted monk.

Legend has it that the dramatic rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were created with the help of a team of angels. Buried deep into the rock in the highlands of northern Ethiopia, the 11 monolithic churches were built in the late 12th and early 13th Centuries by King Lalibela, who, so he claimed, had built the churches on the instruction from God.

With the Crusades in full swing and the pilgrimage sites of Jerusalem too dangerous to visit, the Lalibela churches were envisioned to be a "new" Jerusalem and a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopia's large Orthodox Christian community.

Today, the churches remain a major place of pilgrimage for Ethiopia's Christians. They're also a Unesco World Heritage site, and international travellers flock here to see one of Africa's most extraordinary historical spots.

It’s taken 400 years of scientific discoveries to make it possible for anyone to find his location anywhere on the globe using GPS. //

With the letters GPS, we instantly recognize an innovation that has revolutionized our lives. The concept was born half a century ago in a sweltering room at the Pentagon over Labor Day weekend in 1973.

That’s the genesis of the concept for a constellation of platforms orbiting the Earth, transmitting radio signals to determine location. Many years of calculation, experiment, and miniaturization led to the Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR) satellites that became known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). //

Our society has been blessed with rare and precious genius that has combined across centuries to yield the civilizational achievements we enjoy today. Orbital mechanics originated from careful geometric analysis by Johannes Kepler in the 17th century. Two centuries later, electromagnetism was empirically measured by Michael Faraday and mathematically characterized by James Clerk Maxwell.

Atomic oscillation arose from the quantized radiation law Max Planck discovered, while Albert Einstein discovered relativistic effects, both in the early 20th century. These were the giants on whose shoulders later scientists and engineers stood to build their guideposts in the heavens.

While only a tiny fraction of the electorate understands the enormity of government waste, fraud, and abuse, now and then we learn of some extraordinary achievements underwritten with your tax dollars. GPS is one of them.