Free Republic

Origins: On 6 January 2007, Knoxville, Tennessee, residents Christopher Newsom, Jr., 23, and Channon Christian, 21, went out for a dinner date at a local restaurant, then headed to a friend's house to watch a movie. They never came back. When the couple had failed to return by the following morning, their parents notified police. Christopher Newsom's body was found near some railroad tracks in East Knoxville that afternoon, but Channon Christian remained missing. A trace run on Channon's cell phone helped authorities locate her abandoned vehicle the next day, and fingerprints raised from an envelope inside the automobile led...

What does it take for a healthy man to choose to have his testicles removed? Roger Davies is one of a surprising number who have found salvation in castration. Like many sensitive teenagers, Roger Davies felt different from his peers. He wasn’t into sport and abhorred the aggression he saw in other boys. When, at the age of 22, he still hadn’t grown out of his sense of isolation, he took radical action: he travelled to America and underwent castration. “I’m really happy with who I am now,” says the 25-year-old cleaner and caterer from Southport. “I don’t have any...

Two held for killing & chopping man in 'love triangle' By Zheng Caixiong (China Daily) Updated: 2007-01-15 06:47 GUANGZHOU: Police have detained a young man and a woman suspected of dismembering a man and sending his body parts to three different cities by post. The man is an employee of a local logistics company, while the woman is a prostitute, according to the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis News. "The case is thought to involve a murder for love," the newspaper quoted a police source as saying yesterday. The victim was a 50-year-old man who had once visited the prostitute, the newspaper...

Among social activists and feminists, combating female genital mutilation (FGM) is an important policy goal. Sometimes called female circumcision or female genital cutting, FGM is the cutting of the clitoris of girls in order to curb their sexual desire and preserve their sexual honor before marriage. The practice, prevalent in some majority Muslim countries, has a tremendous cost: many girls bleed to death or die of infection. Most are traumatized. Those who survive can suffer adverse health effects during marriage and pregnancy. New information from Iraqi Kurdistan raises the possibility that the problem is more prevalent in the Middle East...

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery. Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and...

A GEORGIA court today found a man guilty of sexually mutilating his two-year-old daughter with a pair of scissors, the first proven case of female genital mutilation in the US. AKhalid Adem, a 31-year-old Ethiopian immigrant, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for aggravated battery and cruelty to children for the 2001 crime, which the mother said she did not discover until two years later when she took her daughter to the doctor. Adem had faced a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison. Before the sentencing, Fortunate Adem, the mother of the girl who now is seven years...

<p>Fox News reporting a new video is out. It shows two dead american soldiers burned and being dragged through the streets.</p> <p>There is a belief that they are the bodies of troopers Tucker and Menchaca.</p>

OLYMPIA — Medicaid officials plan to rewrite regulations to make it clear the state will no longer cover sex-change operations. But before the new regulations are in place, the state will likely have to pay for more surgeries. In a pair of rulings issued last month, a state appeals board ordered Medicaid to pay for two people to travel out of state to undergo sex-change operations. The state estimates the procedures, also known as sex-reassignment surgery, will cost $50,000 to $60,000 each... But Porter said the state plans to continue covering other services — such as hormone treatment and psychotherapy...

THE Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda has put on the internet a video showing the mutilated bodies of two US soldiers kidnapped in June and executed to "avenge" an Iraqi woman raped near Mahmudiyah south of Baghdad. "Here is a film on the remains of the bodies of the two American soldiers kidnapped near Yussufiyah (south of Baghdad). We are showing it to avenge our sister who was raped by a soldier belonging to the same division as these two soldiers," said a preamble by the Mujahedeen Al-Shura Council, an al-Qaeda dominated alliance of armed Sunni groups in Iraq. When guerillas...

WORRIED that her daughters' budding breasts would expose them to the risk of sexual harassment and even rape, Philomene Moungang started "ironing" the girls' bosoms with a heated stone. "I did it to my two girls when they were eight years old. I would take the grinding stone, heat it in the fire and press it hard on the breasts," the mother said. "They cried and said it was painful. But I explained that it was for their own good." Breast "ironing" - the use of hard or heated objects to try to stunt breast growth in girls - is...

It's now open & 'official', Islamists call Christians 'animals' ISLAMOFASCISM! http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_3959579 2 US soldiers bodies found mutilated and tortured http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/20/soldiers.missing/index.html [Islamic website connected to Al Qaeda said:] "We announce the good news to our Islamic nation that we executed God's will and slaughtered the two crusader animals we had in captivity," said the claim, reportedly from the Mujahedeen Shura Council, a group linked to al Qaeda.

BAGHDAD, Sept 12 (KUNA) -- Al-Iraqiya satellite television channel on Monday aired video footage showing dead bodies of Iraqi people, including children, mutilated by gunmen in the city of Tal Afar, northern Iraq. It showed photos of Iraqi children between the ages of six and 17, with their bodies and faces mutilated while lying down in their bedrooms, in addition to other photos of demolished and looted houses. The station also aired video footage of Tal Afar residents in camps outside the city, as they were forced to leave due to bombings and terror threats.

JOHANNESBURG, April 27 — For well over a decade, southern Africans have battled the spread of H.I.V. with everything from condoms and abstinence campaigns to doses of antiretroviral drugs for pregnant women — and yet the epidemic continues unabated. Now a growing number of clinicians and policy makers in the region are pointing to a simple and possibly potent weapon against new infections: circumcision for men. Armed with new studies suggesting that male circumcision can reduce the chance of H.I.V. infection in men, and perhaps in women, health workers in two southern African nations are pressing to make circumcisions broadly...

Premature babies experience real pain rather than just displaying reflex reactions, scientists said yesterday.Brain scans carried out on premature babies during blood tests showed surges of blood and oxygen in the sensory areas of their brains - demonstrating that pain was being processed. Previous research had shown that even the youngest newborns are capable of showing the behavioural signs of pain but it had been unclear whether these were simply bodily reflexes. Prof Maria Fitzgerald, from the department of anatomy and developmental biology at University College London, who led the team, said: "We have shown for the first time that...

Following are excerpts from a debate on female circumcision in Egypt. Al-Azhar University lecturer Dr. Muhammad Wahdan and lecturer on Islamic religious law Dr. Malika Zarrar participated in the debate, which aired on the Kuwaiti Al-Rai TV on March 28, 2006. Dr. Muhammad Wahdan: Ibn Al-Qayyem recounts that when Hagar married Abraham and got pregnant, Sara was very jealous of her. Because of her jealousy, she swore by Allah that she would cut off three of Hagar's body parts. Abraham was afraid that she would cut off Hagar's nose or ears, so he instructed her to pierce Hagar's ears and...

Eunuchs hold annual congregation in Agra By Brajesh Kr Singh, Agra: It was a confluence of different sort when thousands of eunuchs gathered here to participate in a twenty-day long annual congregation, which commenced here on Tuesday. Over 4,000 eunuchs from across the country gathered for the elaborate function, marked by song and dance performances as the general public watched with delight. The eunuchs dressed in their festive finery bedecked with heavy jewellery, parading through the streets of the ancient city danced to the tunes of popular Bollywood numbers. Shobha Nehru, a eunuch, comparing the meet to a marriage celebration...

Cattle rancher Clyde Chess never learned who -- or what -- killed his heifer 11 years ago, removing its lips, tongue, ears, heart and reproductive organs with laserlike precision. But he has a theory. "I suspect, and I know it sounds farfetched, it was government testing," he said. "They're the only ones that have that kind of technology." This is eastern El Paso County, where stories of mysterious black aircraft, unexplained lights in the sky and bizarre cattle experimentation aren't considered too farfetched. Many remember a string of cattle mutilations in the 1970s. It's been a long time since Colorado...

A professional nurses group is proposing that "self-harming" patients who are intent on mutilating themselves be given clean blades, bandages and "how-to" advice so they can cut themselves more safely. The proposal for "safe" self-harm will be debated in April at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Congress and is expected to prove controversial. Current practice mirrors what most people expect of the medical profession – stopping anyone from harming himself and removing any sharp objects that could be used to cut the skin. According to the National Mental Health Association, self-harm – also termed self-mutilation, self-injury or self-abuse –...

Nurses want patients who are intent on harming themselves to be provided with clean blades so that they can cut themselves more safely. They say people determined to harm themselves should be helped to minimise the risk of infection from dirty blades, in the same way as drug addicts are issued with clean needles. This could include giving the “self-harm” patients sterile blades and clean packets of bandages or ensuring that they keep their own blades clean. Nurses would also give patients advice about which parts of the body it is safer to cut. The proposal for “safe” self-harm —...