Free Republic

The captain of the boys’ soccer team that was dramatically rescued after being trapped in a flooded Thai cave for two weeks in 2018 has died. He was 18. Duangpetch Promthep was found unconscious in his dorm in Leicestershire, UK, on Sunday, and died at the hospital on Tuesday, the BBC reported. The cause of death has not been confirmed but it is not being treated as suspicious. The talented player’s passing comes just months after he arrived at Brooke House College Football Academy, where he received a scholarship last summer. “Today my dream has come true,” he wrote on...

BAYVILLE, New Jersey — The heartbroken boyfriend of bullied New Jersey teen Adriana Kuch can’t stop crying and re-watching an online video of the cruel attack that led to her suicide, his mom and Adriana’s dad told The Post on Friday. Jason Lopez, 16, is haunted by the thought he might have been able to prevent Adriana, 14, from taking her own life after the humiliating beating she suffered at Central Regional High School in Berkeley Township, said a worried Wendy Lopez, 50. “He’ll wake up in the middle of the night screaming and crying,” Lopez told The Post, adding...

Four students have been charged in a New Jersey school hallway attack on a classmate who killed herself days later, prosecutors said. One was charged with aggravated assault, another with harassment and two others with conspiracy to commit aggravated assault, Ocean County Prosecutor Bradley D. Billhimer said in a statement Friday. Their names have not been released. NBC News does not usually name minors charged with a crime, even those charged as adults. "Each juvenile and their guardian was served with a copy of their complaint and are released pending future court appearances," Billhimer said. The prosecutor's announcement is the...

A video of two students viciously beating a 9-year-old student on a Florida school bus has surfaced online, alarming the community and prompting a swift reaction from the girl’s parents. The disturbing footage shows two boys repeatedly striking the girl as she is folded over in a seat, barely defending herself with one hand as she tightly grips her backpack with the other. Many of the punches land on the girl’s head, neck and face. No fellow students or adults intervened to stop the brutal assault.

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned children should be banned from social media until they are 18 to avoid a 'distorted' sense of self in their developmental years. Murthy expressed that 13 is far too young for kids to be on sites, such as TikTok and Instagram. His warning came following the release of a study that suggested teenagers on social media will likely become 'hypersensitive' to criticism as adults. 'I believe 13 is too early,' Murthy told CNN Newsroom. 'And I think that it's a time, early adolescence, where kids are developing their identity, their sense of self...And the skewed...

LAUREL — Multiple Laurel parents say they are currently— or planning on— homeschooling their children following claims of bullying in Laurel schools. The parents voiced their concerns on a social media post in a private Laurel resident group after a concerned mother posted asking for advice on dealing with bullying for her son. Samantha Willis from Laurel is a mother of six and told MTN News on Wednesday that the problem is so bad, she's considering pulling her children from the schools and switching to homeschooling. “I actually pulled them (temporarily) from school last year due to it. You bring...

A mother of a middle school student was shocked when the Joshua Independent School District in Joshua, Texas, charged her over $7,000 in public records fees to disclose how many bullying reports the district had received since 2015. The Goldwater Institute first reported this outrageous demand for a simple sum of documents. The mother is combatting the exorbitant fee via an appeal to the Texas Attorney General’s Office. The mother, Terrie Chumchal, filed the request following the district’s lack of aid over a two-year period of vicious bullying in which her son repeatedly tried to obtain help from his school,...

Typically, in American schools, bullying is like the dark cousin to prom, student elections, or football practice: Maybe you weren’t involved, but you knew that someone, somewhere was. In 2011, President Obama spoke against this inevitability at the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention. “With big ears and the name that I have, I wasn’t immune. I didn’t emerge unscathed,” he said. “But because it’s something that happens a lot, and it’s something that’s always been around, sometimes we’ve turned a blind eye to the problem.” We know that we shouldn’t turn a blind eye: Research shows that bullying is...

President Xi Jinping on Sunday kicked-off the 20th congress of China's ruling Communist Party with warnings that he may use force to retake Taiwan as he slammed foreign interference in its reunification efforts. The gathering of roughly 2,300 delegates from around the country began in the vast Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square amid tight security and under blue skies after several smoggy days in the Chinese capital. Xi began a speech that touted the party's safeguarding of national security, maintaining social stability, protecting people's lives and taking control of the situation in Hong...

Rayne Barton, 62, didn’t expect that her first visit to the doctor in months would end in arrest, but there she was on July 22, in the waiting room with her wrists handcuffed behind her back. She would not be seeing the doctor that day. Barton, of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, would not leave as requested after she refused to wear a COVID-19 face mask, which is required at Hypertension and Kidney Specialists in Lancaster. Hypertension and Kidney Specialists is an independent practice with an office on the Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health Suburban Pavilion property. At the request of the office...

I will never get over the fact that our society seems to produce a steady stream of young men who think it is heroic to murder innocent people. I read their histories. I look at the social science research. I’ve tried to understand the typical pathway they take to get to their evil behavior. The common thing to say about mass shooters is that they have mental health issues, but that’s often misleading. This has been studied in a variety of ways. A majority of mass shooters do not have diagnosed mental illness. It’s mostly the circumstances that drive them...

School officials believe a threat posted on social media against a Montgomery County high school was actually part of an elaborate plan to bully another student. The threat against Winston Churchill High School was posted on social media Tuesday. Montgomery County Police (MCP) Detectives investigated the threat and found there was "no immediate credible threat" to the school. Principal John Taylor now says the posted threat was part of a plan to bully the student who owns the account that was used to make the threats. Taylor claims the bullied student had no involvement in posting the threats. "That student...

Perhaps no group of people is more alarmed about Elon Musk’s plan to make Twitter a free speech free-for-all than those most likely to be targeted for harassment: women, racial minorities and other marginalized groups. They fear that a more hands-off approach to policing the platform will embolden purveyors of hate speech, bullying and disinformation to ratchet up their bad behavior — a possibility Musk has done little to dispel. Yet even those who have faced extreme harassment on Twitter say they are unlikely to quit the platform. Despite the negative psychological toll, they still place a high value on...

China launched a cyber attack against a major American media institution. Russia is amassing troops on Ukraine’s border. Hundreds of thousands of people illegally cross America’s southern border and nearly 44,000 bridges across our country are deemed structurally deficient. That’s just a smattering of the serious issues facing our country while we continue fumbling our way through the pandemic unleashed by China. Considering all that, why would we take the time to opine about bullying and complaining about how more needs to be done, yada-yada? Fair question. I thought the same. Is bullying, especially cyberbullying, really an issue worthy of...

The family of a 17-year-old junior who was hospitalized last week after a fight at Brashear High School said it was the fourth time this academic year that the boy had been attacked by the same student and blamed school administrators for failing to take action to ensure his safety. Video of the latest incident, which occurred Friday, shows a student lifting up the 17-year-old boy and slamming him head first into the ground in a school hallway, then stomping on his head. The boy was left unresponsive and was taken to a hospital by a city ambulance. Pittsburgh Public...

The “Think Good” campaign to change online discourse, initiated by President Isaac Herzog and Meta (formerly Facebook) in Israel, went online on Tuesday morning. As part of the initiative, dozens of celebrities and public figures in Israel will share video clips of themselves reading the most hurtful responses that they have received online, with the offensive words censored and overlaid with words of positive reinforcement. The purpose of the initiative is to expose to millions of followers the difficulty of reading nasty replies, to encourage people to think twice before using hurtful language, and to think positive thoughts before hitting...

When many Americans come across the term "integration," thoughts of Black students enrolling in predominately white schools likely come to mind. However, one Midwestern school district is turning this narrative on its head by having white students desegregate predominately Black institutions. Minneapolis recently unveiled a citywide plan to rezone school districts to combat rising segregation rates in the city's public education system. The New York Times reported approximately one-third of students throughout the city (about 10,000) were assigned to new schools, emphasizing getting white kids into predominately Black academies....

Killed in Tuesday's school shooting were Tate Myre, 16, Hana St Juliana, 14, and 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin School shooter opened fire on people at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit around 12:50pm Tuesday Eight people were injured, including a teacher and a girl, 14, who was in critical condition and on a ventilator The Sheriff's Office said the suspect, a 15-year-old male, used 9mm Sig Sauer pistol purchased by his father Sheriff Michael Bouchard said the suspected shooter, who is in custody, was not cooperating with his officers Chilling video footage shows students hiding in a barricaded classroom as the...

One of the common tropes among anti-vaxxers lately is that the Covid-19 vaccine “changes your DNA.” Oh, the horrors! Do they even know what they mean by that? Almost certainly not. Anti-vaxxers generally have no idea how biology works; often they are so confused that I’m tempted to say they are not even wrong. Even when they are right about something, it’s for the wrong reasons. Many articles have already been posted explaining that the vaccine can’t alter your DNA, including a wildly popular piece at Forbes and explainers by the CDC and UNICEF. So let’s dig into this strange...

Over the last few years, Big Tech has unleashed many different attacks on WND, the pioneering Christian journalism organization now in its 25th year. From classifying WND as an "extremist group," to writing WND out of its search algorithms, to de-monetizing WND's YouTube channel, to confining WND to "Facebook jail" for over a year, the attacks never end. However, as of this week, Big Tech has upped its game: Google has now officially de-monetized WND – permanently. That could end up cutting WND's online ad revenue roughly in half, since not only does de-monetization mean the removal of all Google...