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Note: The following text is a quote: Delta Flight 273 Passenger Charged with Interfering with Flight Crew and Making False Bomb Threats on Aircraft BANGOR, ME—Derek Michael Stansberry, a U.S. citizen and resident of Riverview, Fla., was charged today in a criminal complaint in the District of Maine with interfering with flight crew members and willfully making false threats about an explosive device on an aircraft, U.S. Attorney Paula D. Silsby announced. Stansberry, 27, a passenger on Delta flight 273 from Paris to Atlanta on April 27, 2010, was arrested yesterday after the flight was diverted to Bangor, Maine, in...

Washington (CNSNews.com) – Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), a professed Roman Catholic, told CNSNews.com Wednesday that federal funding of health plans that cover elective abortions is “not a question of morality” but “a matter of health -- public health.” “Obviously there’s going to be some legal decisions that are going to be coming forward, I’m sure, that are going to adjudicate this,” Kennedy said at the Capitol. “But obviously, we’ve got to protect women’s health. Half of our population are women, and -- this is a matter of public health. He added: “It’s not a question of morality or anything; it’s...

The political odyssey of health care reform in many ways is the story of Ted Kennedy, and as President Obama signed the historic bill into law Tuesday, Kennedy's gravesite was a place of quiet celebration and poignant reflection. The late senator's widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, spent hours Sunday at the simple white cross at Arlington National Cemetery marking where her husband was laid to rest only seven months ago. Ted Kennedy's youngest son, Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-R.I.), visited on Monday morning and left a hand-written note that read: "Dad, the unfinished business is done." And on a dreary...

What an emotional speaker. When you watch this video of this impassioned speech, you can only wonder who on earth voted for this hysterical cretin. Patrick Kennedy Speech If you've not seen this guy speak, watch this. It's almost as funny as a speech by Caroline Kennedy. Another brilliant Kennedy speech by Caroline ummm, you know, ummm Kennedy:Caroline ummm, you know, Kennedy

A Washington Post report about U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy’s decision to retire quotes the Rhode Island congressman as saying he is not leaving for good what the Post calls “the family business.” “I consider it taking a sabbatical,” Kennedy told Post reporter Philip Rucker. Rucker’s story, posted Thursday afternoon on www.WashingtonPost.com, said Kennedy “will transfer his roughly $500,000 in campaign funds to an interest-bearing account, which he says he might tap if he chooses to run for the Senate some day.” Kennedy spokesman Adam Brand suggested in an e-mail exchange with the Providence Journal that, while Kennedy’s campaign fund...

I’m not quite sure what’s more amazing, that Patrick Kennedy put together multiple quasi-coherent thoughts, or that he did it while sober. But for real someone get this guy an Ambien. We know he has medical issues within his family and he’s just going to wind up giving himself a heart attack.

Patches, if your name were - no, I take that back. Patches, you are a joke, period. You are the runt of the litter of the runt of the litter. And the applejack didn’t fall far from the tree.

The son of the late US Senator Edward M. Kennedy has criticized Senator Scott Brown for accelerating his swearing-in, saying it showed Brown's candidacy was "a joke," a publication that covers Capitol Hill reports. Representative Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat from Rhode Island whose father held Brown's seat for 47 years until his death last year, said Thursday that "Brown's whole candidacy was shown to be a joke today when he was sworn in early in order to cast his first vote as an objection to Obama's appointment to the NLRB," according to The Hill's Blog Briefing Room. "Senator Brown is...

--or driving a motor vehicle, as dangerous grogginess may result. After her underwhelming—some might say disastrous—foray into my upstate New York neck of the woods, you might have expected Caroline Kennedy to put in a peppier performance when she returned to the friendly confines of New York City. But Kennedy's statement after her meeting with Al Sharpton today was as soporific as a handful of Ambiens washed down with a slug of Stolichnaya. How bad? Enough that even Chris Matthews was left wondering on this evening's Hardball whether Caroline had displayed the requisite "starch," "gut passion" and political "bug." View...

Remember the good old days? Back during the Dem primaries? When Barack Obama was such an electrifying speaker that women were regularly fainting at his rallies? Ah, how times have changed. Instead of knocking them out with his other-worldly aura, Obama's now . . . putting them to sleep. Check out the woman in the lower-right hand corner of the screencap, seen on CNN today during a live broadcast of Obama on the stump in Virginia. No, I didn't catch her in mid-blink. She actually dozed off just as Obama was ventilating on the horrors of the Bush economy. View...

Steven Kazmierczak had been taking three drugs prescribed for him by his psychiatrist, the Northern Illinois University gunman's girlfriend told CNN. Jessica Baty said Steven Kazmierczak was irritable but not erratic before his shooting rampage. Jessica Baty said Tuesday that her boyfriend of two years had been taking Xanax, used to treat anxiety, and Ambien, a sleep agent, as well as the antidepressant Prozac. Baty said the psychiatrist prescribed the medications, a fact that made her so "nervous" that she tried to persuade Kazmierczak to stop taking one of the drugs.

Steven P. Kazmierczak stopped taking Prozac before he shot to death five Northern Illinois University students and himself, his girlfriend said Sunday in a remark likely to fuel the debate over the risks and benefits of drug treatment for emotional problems. A funeral on Monday in Cicero, Ill., for Catalina Garcia, 20, who was one of five students killed in a shooting Thursday in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University. Over the years, the antidepressant Prozac and its cousins, including Paxil and Zoloft, have been linked to suicide and violence in hundreds of patients. Tens of millions of people...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The string of fires terrorized the Dilworth neighborhood for weeks. Thursday morning, the suspect is due in court, and victims may finally get some closure. Police arrested Susan Davidson in May 2006 for allegedly torching four different homes in Dilworth, including her own. At the time, Davidson was also suspected in setting 11 other fires. Police point to several pieces of evidence linking her to the fires. They also said she told investigators details about the fires which were not revealed to the media or neighbors. Meantime, Davidson’s lawyer said she was taking the sleep aid Ambien...

THE SENSELESS murder of almost three dozen students at Virginia Tech is a profound tragedy. Yet, already some pundits are jumping on that bandwagon which often emerges in the wake of a human tragedy in modern America -- responsibility avoidance. Yes, the blame-shifting has already begun. Barely had Seung-Hui Cho completed his carnage by taking his own wretched life, than those seeking to divert focus from the tortured mind of a mentally deranged young man were declaring that responsibility for the carnage lay not with the individual who perpetrated it, but rather with the system that gave him the tools...

FDA says pills can cause 'sleep-driving' All prescription sleeping pills may sometimes cause sleep-driving, federal health officials warned Wednesday, almost a year after the bizarre side effect first made headlines when Rep. Patrick Kennedy crashed his car after taking Ambien. It's a more complicated version of sleepwalking, but behind the wheel: getting up in the middle of the night and going for a drive -- with no memory of doing so. The Food and Drug Administration wouldn't say exactly how many cases of sleep-driving it had linked to insomnia drugs, but neurology chief Dr. Russell Katz said the agency uncovered...

New evidence has linked a commonly prescribed sleep medication with bizarre behaviours, including a case in which a woman painted her front door in her sleep. UK and Australian health agencies have released information about 240 cases of odd occurrences, including sleepwalking, amnesia and hallucinations among people taking the drug zolpidem. While doctors say that zolpidem can offer much-needed relief for people with sleep disorders, they caution that these newly reported cases should prompt a closer look at its possible side effects.

A judge has rejected a family's plea that a 53-year-old woman in a vegetative state should be allowed to die. He has ordered instead that she should be given a drug that could wake her up. Theoretically the patient could then spend the rest of her life severely disabled and aware of her condition. Sir Mark Potter, president of the High Court Family Division, says the woman should be given zolpidem, a common sleeping pill. It has been used before on victims of severe brain damage who have then regained consciousness. The woman, who cannot be named, suffered a massive...

Close window Published online: 23 May 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060522-9 Sleeping pills offer wake-up call to vegetative patients Drug could overcome brain shutdown caused by trauma.Michael Hopkin Clinical researchers have discovered that they can rouse semi-comatose patients by giving them, bizarrely, a common sleeping drug. If more wide-ranging tests are successful, the drug could become the first effective treatment for 'persistent vegetative state', the condition at the centre of the US legal battle over sufferer Terri Schiavo last year. British and South African doctors have reported the cases of three semi-comatose patients who were revived for several hours at a...

Perhaps the last word should go to Pat Flores, the mother of George Melendez, the 31-year-old coma patient who reassured his parents that he wasn't in pain after taking Ambien, as zolpidem is known in the US. He was starved of oxygen when his car overturned and he landed face down in a garden pond near his home in Houston, Texas, in 1998. "The doctors said he was clinically dead - one said he was a vegetable," says Pat. "After three weeks he suffered multi-organ failure and they said his body would ultimately succumb. They said he would never regain...

We have always been told there is no recovery from persistent vegetative state - doctors can only make a sufferer's last days as painless as possible. But is that really the truth? Across three continents, severely brain-damaged patients are awake and talking after taking ... a sleeping pill. And no one is more baffled than the GP who made the breakthrough. Steve Boggan witnesses these 'strange and wonderful' rebirths For three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his...