Free Republic

Kim Jong-il's Physical State Poor During December Visit to Musan - Rumor amongst locals that this visit to Musan will be his last - In need of assistance as he uses a stick throughout - Looked drawn and on his last legs - People despair that nothing will change whether he dies or not A source in Musan, North Hamgyeong Province, relates that on a tour of Musan Mine at the beginning of December, those that saw his face report him confiding that "This visit to the Musan mine could be Kim Jong-il's last steps." Flatly rejecting conjecture that Kim...

COSTA MESA -- A woman drove around with a decomposing corpse for months before the body was discovered by police. Officers made the gruesome discovery on Monday while responding to a report of an illegally parked car. Police say the woman tried to cover the mummified corpse with pieces of clothing. The car was blocking a driveway in the 2000 block of Tustin Avenue in Costa Mesa. Officers could smell a foul odor coming from the car, and after seeing a leg underneath the clothing, broke a window to get access inside. Inside the car, officers also found a box...

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was said to no longer be capable of functioning in his position. Diplomatic sources said Mubarak's condition has rapidly declined over the last month and his schedule was severely restricted. They said Mubarak was avoiding meetings with most non-Arab leaders to prevent leaks of his true condition. "He is a walking corpse," a senior Arab diplomat who recently attended a meeting with Mubarak said In July, the sources said, Mubarak underwent a lengthy examination at a French military hospital outside Paris. They said the examination took place amid alarm by presidential aides and close relatives over...

A German woman arrested on suspicion of trying to smuggle a corpse onto a plane says her husband was still alive when they reached Liverpool airport. Gitta Jarant told Bild newspaper on Friday she hopes to get the remains of her husband Willi from Britain as soon as possible to have him cremated -- and then return to Berlin. Jarant and her daughter were arrested at Liverpool's John Lennon airport on Saturday suspected of failing to give notice of Willi's death. She told the paper the 91-year-old former pilot had died at the airport just before the flight. "I'm not...

On Obama's use of the word "corps"... this has been making the rounds, but I thought for those who haven't seen it, it is worth posting.

Navy "Corpse-men" everywhere ask: Where's the Mainstream Media? Remember the 1992 Presidential campaign, when then-Vice President Dan Quayle was visiting a Trenton elementary school and was holding spelling flash cards as children were spelling the words on a blackboard in front of him? During this exercise, a 12-year old student wrote his given word, "potato" on the blackboard. As the Vice President checked the flash card containing the word, he informed the student that "he was close, but left a little something off; the "e" on the end." The student, who knew that he had, in fact, spelled the word...

Yes, those are the words of the president, last night at the Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Washington. After listing his administration's accomplishments and vowing that "our most urgent task is job creation," Obama pledged to keep fighting for a national health care system. "We knew this was hard," Obama said. And then he described a letter he received from a campaign worker who suffered from breast cancer and has since died...

Here is video showing the dangers of being so heavily dependent on a teleprompter. President Obama was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast and was telling about a Navy Corpsman who assisted the suffering people of Haiti. But as his head bobbed back and forth between his two teleprompters, he read the word "Corpsman" and pronounced it "Corpse Man" twice. . . . (VIDEO)

Ambulances race to Byrd's home By: Manu Raju September 22, 2009 10:16 AM EST Ambulances and fire trucks were dispatched to the Northern Virginia home of Sen. Robert Byrd Tuesday morning. A neighbor of the 91-year-old West Virginia Democrat said several ambulances were outside his residence in McLean, Va., and a Byrd spokesman said the senator suffered a fall in his home. An officer at the McLean Fire Department said that a unit was dispatched at 9:10 to the address where Byrd lives, but he declined to comment on the substance of the response. Byrd – the longest-serving senator in...

Chinese police report finding bodies of 56 North Korean would-be refugees in Yalu river By Michael Rank Chinese police have reported how the bodies of 56 North Koreans attempting to flee to China, including seven children, were found floating in the Yalu river in 2003. An official notice issued by police in the border town of Baishan in Jilin province describes how 53 corpses were discovered by local people on the morning of October 3, 2003, followed by three more at 5 a.m. the following day. “An examination found that the dead were all citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic...

42.90 Euros Per Arm The German company Tutogen's business in body parts is as secretive as it is lucrative. It extracts bones from corpses in Ukraine to manufacture medical products, as part of a global market worth billions that is centered in the United States. Anatoly Korzhak, a pensioner and former engineer, died in Kiev on August 5, 2004. His body was picked up at 2 a.m. and taken to the forensic medicine institute in the Ukrainian capital. That same night, Korzhak's daughter, Lena Krat, received a telephone call and was asked to come to the institute as soon as...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A funeral director accused of leaving a woman's body to decay in a parked hearse after her relatives failed to pay the bill was arrested on a felony charge of abusing a corpse, police said Wednesday. Watson and Sons Funeral Home embalmed the remains of Edna Kathleen Woods, 52, after she died of natural causes in November 2007, said Gadsden police Sgt. Jeff Wright. Relatives wanted the body cremated but failed to sign the necessary paperwork or pay owner Harold Watson Sr., he said. After storing the corpse at his funeral home for more than a year,...

Residents of Akure, the Ondo State capital are still finding it difficult to believe the explanation by Governor Olusegun Agagu and the state Commissioner for Health, Dr. Kehinde Adedeji, that the missing parts of a corpse deposited at the mortuary of the State Specialist Hospital, Akure were truly eaten by strange rats who have found better diet in human bodies. Although rodents, which experts have said make up more than a third of all living mammal species, adapt to all terrestrial habitats, it remains a mystery that they could survive in a functional mortuary. In Akure, people now joke that...

[ Still Standing He wanted to be known as a stand-up guy, even in death. To fulfill his last wish, the body of 24-year-old Angel Pantoja Medina, who was found dead underneath a bridge in Puerto Rico, was propped upright in the living room of his mother's San Juan home. A local funeral home used a special embalming treatment to keep the body standing upright for his three-day wake.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) ― The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated sexual assault charges against three young men accused of digging up a corpse so one of them could have sex with it. In a 5-2 decision, the court said Wisconsin law makes sex acts with dead people illegal. The ruling reinstates third-degree attempted sexual assault charges against twin brothers Nicholas and Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radke, all 22. The charges carry a punishment of up to 10 years in prison. A circuit court judge and an appeals court had dismissed those charges, saying Wisconsin law does not ban sex...

Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama says Israel is a "constant wound" and a "constant sore" that infects "all of our foreign policy." Obama, under fire for attracting praise and support for his presidential run from the terrorist group Hamas, spoke to Atlantic Monthly at length about his views of the Middle East. Asked if he thought Israel represented a drag on America's reputation overseas, Obama said: "No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse...

HOUSTON -- Police have charged three suspects accused of using the skull of a corpse buried in a Kingwood cemetery to make a bong. Kevin Wade Jones, 17, Matthew Richard Gonzalez, 17, and a 16-year-old boy were all charged with one count of desecrating a corpse. The suspects are accused of digging up the skull of an 11-year-old boy buried in a cemetery for African American war veterans and using it to smoke marijuana.

The controversial public display of Padre Pio's body is attracting a new kind of Irish holidaymaker who likes to combine sunshine and spirituality. Thousands of these 'tourist pilgrims' are travelling to view the mystic monk's remains in San Giovanni Rotondo, before heading off for some secular sight-seeing around the rest of Italy. But the stigmatic saint, whose body has been exhumed 40 years after his death, is the main draw in these religious vacations to the Puglia region. Tour operators are tapping-into this growing market for trips with a sacred flavour. Around 750,000 pilgrims from all over the world have...

NEW YORK (AP) - Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said. David J. Dalaia and James O'Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron's body from the Manhattan apartment that O'Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police. "The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side,"...

NEW YORK - Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store Tuesday and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said. David J. Dalaia and James O'Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron's body from the Manhattan apartment that O'Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police. "The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side,"...