Free Republic

University of Kansas students are being offered buttons through the school's library system meant to make their preferred gender pronouns clear. Various University of Kansas Libraries employees now sport the square-shaped pins, with extra ones also doled out to interested students, the Lawrence Journal-World reports. Library leaders say the buttons are part of the library system's 'You Belong Here' marketing effort meant to lure undergraduates and ensure that they feel welcome, including transgender students. The buttons come in three versions: 'He him his,' ''She her hers' and, for people who don't identify themselves as male or female, 'They them theirs.'...

Darwin Award nominee Jose Vaca, 29, may be in a jail cell, but he is lucky to be alive. Vaca was driving through Bakersfield, CA, on December 19th when he and a friend were pulled over by police. The convicted felon had a rifle in the car with him and he decided to use the traffic stop as an opportunity to test a theory he had about police brutality, and “What I was hoping for them to do was tell me, ‘Drop the gun! Back away from the firearm! Get on the ground! Turn around!’ And it was going...

Jim Harbaugh met with the media in Miami Thursday, one day before his Wolverines face the Florida State Seminoles in the Orange Bowl, and his press conference ended on a bizarre note when a reporter earnestly asked him if he planned to take his players to the beach so they could “see some bikinis.”

The Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus will celebrate Carrie Fisher’s life with a Princess Leia-themed, second line-style parade in New Orleans on Friday evening. Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the popular Star Wars film series, died yesterday at the age of 60. According to NOLA.com, participants will gather at Markey Park in the Bywater at 3pm. The approximately one-hour parade will begin at 4pm, andd will travel one block north down Mazant Street before turning right on Dauphine Street. It will then turn left on Poland Avenue and make its way to Castillo Blanco (Chewbacchus’ headquarters) on the corner of...

A Chinese shopping mall is ringing in the year of the rooster with a giant sculpture of a chicken that looks like US president-elect Donald Trump. China has gone cuckoo for the cartoonish pastiche — complete with orange pompadour — of the billionaire politician in Taiyuan, capital of the northern province of Shanxi.

A (Cocagne) New Brunswick trapper received an unexpected gift on Christmas Day—a rare melanistic bobcat. Studies show there has only been one other black bobcat caught in Canada. "I thought it was a house cat," said Oswald McFadden, who has run the same trapline for the last decade. "When I saw the tail I knew it wasn't a house cat. Then I looked at the ears, I knew it was definitely a bobcat." Melanism is a genetic trait that displays a black-coloured pigment and can often be found in species like squirrels and jaguars. Much like jaguars, this bobcat's spots...

Mad masonry skills on display

The holiday of Kwanzaa begins on Monday with a celebration in Los Angeles that will also mark the 50th anniversary of the holiday’s first observance, in 1966.

An Australian couple woke up Christmas morning to find a fur seal doing its best impression of a hood ornament on their car, but residents of the town say this is not the first time a seal has tried to move in to the neighborhood. Animal control officers in Newstead, a suburb of Tasmania, subdued the seal as it ran from driveway to driveway and car to car through the neighborhood, apparently unsure how to get back to the nearby waterway it came from. "We got up and there was this great big seal on the roof of the car,...

Did the Russians really rig the 2016 US election? You bet they did! Secret documents recently discovered in a bin behind a Kremlin-district 24-hour cabbage and tobacco store reveal for the first time the devious extent of Russian interference. These plans were decades in the making. Read on, as never-before-seen communiques between Russian agents Sergei Potrov and Dimitri Bienko outline the wicked plot – beginning in 1947, on the day of Hillary Clinton’s birth: Dearest Dimitri I am pleased to report that phase one of Operation Cankles is total success! Soviet implantation of stupid American woman resulted in birth today...

FRASER, Mich. (AP) - A sinkhole forming north of Detroit forced the Christmas Eve evacuations of more than a dozen homes and the closure of a busy roadway that was expected to collapse due to a possible sewer problem. Police and firefighters were called to the neighborhood in Fraser about 6 a.m. Saturday after a homeowner called authorities and said his house was sinking. "You can hear the basement walls cracking, so we evacuated that family right away," Fraser Public Safety Director George Rouhib told The Macomb Daily in Mount Clemens. "The house is getting worse - the bricks are...

A fake news report that went viral on the internet quoted Israel’s defence minister as threatening to “destroy Pakistan with a nuclear attack”. This infuriated Khawaja Asif, who is a regular internet user and frequently tweets from his personal account. Probably a bit too offended that the presumed warning came from Israel, a country Pakistan refuses to recognise, the minister played it too hastily to even stop and verify the authenticity of the news item. Asif took to Twitter in a scathing post directed at Israel in a bid to pay the hostile state in the same coin. “Israeli defence...

Yes, Virginia, there are surfing Santas in Florida. Hundreds of surfers in Santa costumes and thousands of spectators will descend Saturday on Cocoa Beach for the eighth annual Christmas Eve Surfing Santas extravaganza. The Santas will be surfing the waves all morning and raising money for two charities by selling T-shirts. One charity is the Florida Surf Museum. The other charity provides financial assistance for cancer patients needing to travel for their treatment. The first surfing Santas event started in 2009 when George Trosset, his son and daughter-in-law thought it would be funny to dress up as Santa Claus and...

MILWAUKEE -- Unidentified Falling Object -- it's a UFO that has one local man scratching his head. His van damaged by a large object, but so far, no one can say exactly what that object is. The damage is extensive, the owner of the van thinks the object fell from the sky. It's a mystery that plays out like an episode of "The X-Files." ... "It's like a cone shape, but on the top it's heavy and inside it's hollow," said Robinson.

Now this is Christmas Cheer! Merry Christmas everyone.

Hey everyone. In what has become a Christmas Eve tradition, of sorts, I would like to wish all of those Freepers who, like myself, have for whatever reason found themselves alone this Christmas Eve. I hope this thread can, as in previous years, serve as a gathering place for the solo folks who may otherwise have little or no contact with others on this celebrated evening. You are not alone, really. God bless us, God bless us everyone.

Donald Trump and his doctor claim he’s 6-foot-3, but his New York driver’s license says he’s actually an inch shorter. A copy of Trump’s license, obtained by POLITICO through an open-records request, lists the president-elect at 6-foot-2.

FULL TITLE: Vicious trolls launch wave of death threats at family of transgender girl, 9, who made history by appearing on the cover of National Geographic A brave nine-year-old transgender girl who appeared on the cover of National Geographic has been targeted by trolls, some of whom have called for her parents to be 'exterminated'. Avery Jackson, from Kansas, was born a boy, but announced to her mother Debi that she was a girl at the age of four. The nine-year-old made history this month when she became the first transgender person to appear on the prestigious magazine's front-page. Avery's...

FULL TITLE: Mother of gang member who killed 17-year-old transgender woman goes on rant saying victim was living in sin as a homosexual The mother of a gang member who confessed to brutally murdering a transgender teenage girl in a hate crime has claimed her son's victim was 'living in sin'. Kelly Wilkins, from Mobile, Alabama, is the mother of 29-year-old Josh Brandon Vallum - who pleaded guilty to a hate crime on Wednesday over the killing of 17-year-old Mercedes Williamson. Williamson was found dead and partially buried in a field on June 3, 2015. Vallum confessed to the killing,...

Josephine Evans would have owed a pretty penny had the late fee, which was just 5 cents a day in 1959, not been waived: at least $1,000Barbara Roston was a teenager when she checked out "Gone With the Wind" from the Brooklyn Public Library back in 1959. Fifty-seven years later, she's finally returned it. Just recently Roston decided to reread her copy of the book, yellowed and fragile. "I somehow flipped to the very back of the book, where, to my horror, I saw the Brooklyn Public Library sticker," she said. Josephine Evans was working at the desk of the...