Free Republic

At the end of David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character the narrator kills off his imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden – played by Brad Pitt – and then watches as multiple buildings explode. The imagery cuts to the heart of the film’s message: a plan to bring down modern civilisation is under way. Over 20 years on, this anarchist and anti-capitalist message has been given a new makeover – with Chinese characteristics. In the version newly available on streaming platform Tencent Video, the narrator still kills off Durden, but the exploding building scene is replaced with...

The hazing antics of two New York City high school students during a school trip stop at a New Jersey motel last year that included branding a fellow student’s buttocks have landed them a two year prison sentence, officials said. The students, whose names were not released because of their age, pleaded guilty earlier this month to two counts of aggravated assault, aggravated hazing and three counts of hazing, the Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office announced Friday. The Queens-based Francis Lewis High School students will serve their time at the New Jersey Training School in Monroe Township, prosecutors said. “We believe...

Reality star and former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner is calling out President Trump after reports that the administration is considering narrowing the legal definition of gender. Jenner, a prominent transgender figure, tweeted an image with the repeated phrase “Trans people won’t be erased,” and tagged Trump. The New York Times reported Sunday that the Trump administration is weighing a motion that would require individuals to identify as male or female based on their genitalia at birth. The move would effectively exclude transgender and nonbinary people from the government’s legal definition of gender and rollback protections for more than a million Americans....

Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say By Denise Grady Oct. 22, 2018 Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless. Researchers who have studied gender issues and provided health care to people who do not fit the typical M/F pigeonholes said that the Trump administration’s latest plan to define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. “The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s...

It came without warning. It would start with a howling noise from a senior football player at Sayreville War Memorial High School, and then the locker room lights were abruptly shut off. In the darkness, a freshman football player would be pinned to the locker-room floor, his arms and feet held down by multiple upperclassmen. Then, the victim would be lifted to his feet while a finger was forced into his rectum. Sometimes, the same finger was then shoved into the freshman player’s mouth. This disturbing hazing within the storied Sayreville football program, as told to NJ Advance Media on...

Green Bay Packers fans turned out in droves to welcome their Super Bowl championship football team back to town on Monday. Fans lined the city streets all along the Packers’ route from Austin-Straubel Airport back to Lambeau Field after the team’s plane landed around 1:45 p.m. The players and coaches traveled in a caravan of Green Bay city buses, and on some streets fans were lined up as much as five or six people deep, on both sides. The crowds grew considerably larger the closer the team got to Lambeau. Upon arriving at the stadium, thousands of fans were waiting...

Normally, after the police serve a search warrant on a location, an itemized list of what has been confiscated is released to the public. But nothing about the Michael Jackson case has been "normal" — not during the investigation, which began in 1993, and not during the most current case, which started in 2003. Most of the Jackson search-warrant returns have been heavily redacted, leaving the public to guess what kind of "books, magazines, videos and DVDs" were taken from Neverland Ranch. Now, Court TV's Investigative Unit can reveal some of the specifics. One of the books confiscated from Jackson's...

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Officials in the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community Monday flatly denied a New Yorker magazine report that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a clandestine unit to crack down on terrorists held at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where inmates were abused. The article, by Seymour Hersh, quotes a former intelligence official saying the unit's instructions were, "Grab whom you must. Do what you want." The report also says the CIA pulled its people from involvement in interrogations at the prison in October "because it was out of control." "This is the most hysterical piece of journalist...

<p>May 15, 2004 -- WE interrupt America's self-flagellation over the Iraqi prison abuse scandal to ask three key crucial questions: 1) Just who were the inmates photographed at Abu Ghraib? Did they innocently wander into that Baghdad-area jail after Friday prayers, or were these the types who turned minarets into snipers' nests?</p>

Pentagon possesses three disks of photos, one of which includes some brief video clips. Many of the photos are redundant, and some have little to do with Iraqi detainees but show sex between U.S. soldiers... Pentagon officials prevailed at least temporarily in their insistence that the administration not immediately release the images, which include the forced masturbation of a detainee...

VATICAN CITY : The abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers is a scandal offensive to God himself, the Vatican said, in its first public comment. "Violence against people offends God himself, who made humans in his own image," the Vatican's foreign minister, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, said in a pre-recorded television interview due to be broadcast later on Friday. He condemned the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, made public last week, as "episodes of brutality, contrary to the most elementary human rights and radically contrary to Christian morals". "The scandal is even worse if these episodes were committed by Christians," Lajolo...