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Myanmar cyclone death toll will hit 200,000, say British By Graeme Jenkins in Rangoon Last Updated: 12:05AM BST 16/05/2008 British officials have said that the number of dead and missing after the Burmese cyclone is expected to rise to more than 200,000. There are more calls for the secret military regime in Burma to allow aid workers into the country, following the deadly cyclone. The Foreign Office said British officials were working on the basis that 217,000 people had died or were unaccounted for. The figure, which a spokesman said was based on new United Nations estimates, is approaching the...

VIENNA, May 14, 2008 (AFP) - An Austrian man has confessed to hacking his wife, daughter, parents and father-in-law to death with an axe, leaving the bodies strewn at locations throughout the country, police said Wednesday. The bodies of the 39-year-old man's family were discovered in Vienna, Linz and Ansfelden after he turned himself in to the police in the early hours of Wednesday, Vienna police said in a statement. His 42-year-old wife and his seven-year-old daughter were found in their flat in the well-to-do area of Hietzing in the Austrian capital, where the man was believed to have killed...

Abortion is back in the news yet, understandably, many women still find it difficult to talk about. Here Lucy Cavendish – who has been through it twice – offers a candid view Virtually every woman I know of my generation has had an abortion. The problem is that no one talks about it. It is hidden away as if it were a dirty secret. This week, however, every time I've opened a newspaper or turned on the radio, abortion has been the topic du jour. First, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries called for the legal limit for terminations to be...

It wasn't the dinosaurs' fault the asteroid hit them. Okay, let's back up a bit. I am alluding to an hypothesis, first advanced by Luis Alvarez and son, that a large asteroid hit the earth, causing the mass die-off of dinosaur and many other species, at what we used to call "the K-T boundary" (the end of the Cretaceous geological period) about 65 million years ago. This was proposed in 1980, and given apparent confirmation by the discovery of traces of a huge impact crater in the Yucatan around 1990. It then quickly became Al-Gorey "settled science" - before being...

Pat Tillman's mother spoke with Action News Anchor Robbie Timmons today, while on a book tour for "Boots On The Ground By Dusk."

THE death toll in cyclone-ravaged Burma could hit 500,000 – more than TWICE the total killed by the Boxing Day Tsunami. Last night’s warning came as it emerged that 17 Britons, including ex-pats and backpackers, were still missing. Sources said 200,000 people were already dead or dying. But the figure could rise to HALF A MILLION through disease and hunger if the nation’s hardline army rulers continue to block aid for the devastated lowlands of the Irrawaddy Delta. That would dwarf the 230,000 deaths across South East Asia in the 2004 catastrophe. Nyo Ohn Myint, of exiled opposition party The...

"This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper," wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of "The Hollow Men." ................ Some saw it as the whimper of a man facing the executioner's ax. Others say Eliot was referring to the middle-aged protagonist of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," who had "measured out my life with coffee spoons" and soon would "wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Recent reports suggest God has another end in store for us. .......... More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but...

BEIJING (Reuters) - A deadly virus has spread rapidly in eastern China, killing at least 21 children and infecting nearly 3,000, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

Amsterdam, Netherlands (LifeNews.com) -- The official number of euthanasia cases in the Netherlands is on the rise, but not all cases of killing patients are included. The official report mentions only three cases involving physicians who didn't follow the proper protocols when killing the patient. The ANP news service indicated the number of euthanasia cases rose to 2,120 last year from 1,923 in 2006.

Even though they thought their faith would heal their daughter, two Wisconsin parents now face criminal charges in the child's death. Eleven-year-old Kara Neumann from untreated diabetes on Easter Sunday. Dale and Leilani Neumann are both charged with second-degree reckless homicide. The family lives in Weston, southeast of Wausau. "By Saturday you have a child that is not eating, is not drinking, is really not moving, not walking, and isn't able to speak -- and I think any combination of one of all of those symptoms would have alerted any other parents to seek medical attention," Marathon County District Attorney...

DALLAS — The skeletal remains of a 93-year-old woman may have remained on a couch in her living room for months while other people continued living in the house, authorities said. Neighbors reported seeing cars come and go from the home as recently as this week before police, doing a welfare check at the request of a neighbor, found a body inside Monday.

Lawyers Argue Muhammad Had Mitigating Factors Jurors might not have sentenced convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad to death if they had known that he was abused as a child, that he has brain damage and that there were conflicting witness accounts to some of the shootings, Muhammad's appeals lawyers argued in court papers this week.

Gary Phillip Andorfer, 49, of Tempe, Arizona died April 22, 2008. Gary was a good man, husband, and father.Gary's dream was to own a store to provide good religious literature to Valley Catholics . He opened Catholic Books and Gifts in Tempe. A few years later, I met Gary at a rosary prayer meeting, where Gary asked me to design a website for him so that he could sell Baptism and First Communion apparel online. Thus CatholicChildrensCompany.com, my first e-commerce website project, was born. Gary became my friend over the years, and we prayed for Gary when he told us...

Maybe the brilliant mind of the Free Republic members can advise on this. I run a genealogy site for the family. In here we post information obtained from the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), published by the U.S. Government. Let's say someone passes on and their spouse is receiving benefits. The SSDI publishes the SS# of the passed family member. Is it possible for the spouse to have complications arising from the theft of their loved ones ID?

Barack Obama, meet John Adams. Adams noted during the Boston Massacre trial that “Facts are stubborn things.” And it appears that, for the moment, the facts have caught up with Obama here in Massachusetts. How else to explain the amazing, astounding and unthinkable results of the latest SurveyUSA presidential poll: Republican John McCain is tied with Barack Obama in the Bay State. The last Republican to win Massachusetts? Ronald Reagan. The last Republican before that? Dwight Eisenhower. Even George McGovern managed to carry Massachusetts in 1972, the one Democratic holdout in Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide. Replace “McGovern” with “MoveOn.org” and...

The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar. Washington's economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe. Months ago, I offered that China, Russia and other cash-rich nations held the antidote to the incipient credit crisis: "If the US wants to remain the magnet for world capital flows it became during the 1990s, it will have...

Vitamin pills 'increase risk of early death' By Kate Devlin, Medical Correspondent Last Updated: 12:01am BST 16/04/2008 Popular vitamin supplements taken by millions of people in the hope of improving their health may do no good and could increase the risk of a premature death, researchers report today. They warn healthy people who take antioxidant supplements, including vitamins A and E, to try to keep diseases such as cancer at bay that they are interfering with their natural body defences and may be increasing their risk of an early death by up to 16 per cent. Antioxidants, including vitamins A,...

Vitamin D And Calcium Influence Cell Death In The Colon, Researchers Find ScienceDaily (Apr. 14, 2008) — Researchers at Emory University are learning how vitamins and minerals in the diet can stimulate or prevent the appearance of colon cancer. Emory investigators will present their findings on biological markers that could influence colon cancer risk in three abstracts at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in San Diego. In a clinical study of 92 patients, supplementing diet with calcium and vitamin D appeared to increase the levels of a protein called Bax that controls programmed cell death in the colon....

Four death row prisoners have been executed in Japan, the authorities have announced. The four inmates, aged between 41 and 64, were hanged at separate locations in Japan, the justice ministry said. Japan, one of the few industrialised countries to retain the death penalty, appears to be stepping up the pace of prisoner executions. Three capital sentences were carried out in February, as well as nine executions in 2007. Human rights groups are critical of the secrecy surrounding executions in Japan. Relatives are told only after the hangings have taken place and, until December 2007, the names of those executed...

UCF football player Ereck Plancher showed signs of distress during "mat drill" workouts last month before he collapsed and later died, four of Plancher's UCF teammates told the Orlando Sentinel. Plancher, a 19-year-old receiver from Naples, was taken to a hospital on March 18 and was pronounced dead about an hour after the drills. A preliminary autopsy was inconclusive. Further tests are under way to determine the cause of Plancher's death. The UCF players, who asked for anonymity because they fear retribution from football coaches, said Plancher's final practice was more intense than the basic conditioning workout described by UCF...

The chances of surviving the Black Death Why did some people survive the Black Death, and others succumb? At the time of the plague – which ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351, carrying off 50 million people, perhaps half the population – various prophylactics were tried, from the killing of birds, cats and rats to the wearing of leather breeches (protecting the legs from flea bites) and the burning of aromatic spices and herbs. Now it seems that the best way of avoiding death from the disease was to be fit and healthy. Sharon DeWitte and James Wood of the...

Court Backs Texas in Dispute With Bush Tuesday, March 25, 2008 10:04 AM WASHINGTON -- President Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered a Texas court to reopen the case of a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday. In a case that mixes presidential power, international relations and the death penalty, the court sided with Texas 6-3. Bush was in the unusual position of siding with death row prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty. An international court ruled in...

Cause Of Death Of Russian Baby Mammoth Discovered ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2008) — On September 27, 2004, the front part of a baby mammoth’s body was found in Olchan mine in the Oimyakon Region of Yakutia. Specialists of the Museum of Mammoth of the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North, Academy of Sciences of Sakha Republic (Yakutia), have been thoroughly studying the finding and they have published the first outcomes. There remained only the head, part of the proboscis, the neck area and part of the breast of the baby mammoth’s body. The body is practically cut off behind...

"What is life compared to that day which will have no evening for the elect, or to that night which will have no dawning for the damned? On earth, people attach themselves to everything and everyone except to Him, who alone ought to have our love and to whom we refuse it. Jesus in the Tabernacle waits for souls to love Him and He finds none. Hardly one soul in a thousand loves Him as it should. Love Him and make up to Him for this guilty indifference which exists all over this world." * * * * * *...

An Oklahoma state representative has received thousands of hostile e-mail messages after she said that homosexuality is a bigger threat to national security than terrorism. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation is investigating more than 17,000 mostly hostile e-mails that were sent to State Rep. Sally Kern after parts of a speech she gave to a Republican organization earlier this year were posted on YouTube, said bureau spokeswoman Jessica Brown. Listen to portions of the speech. During the speech, Kern said that "the homosexual agenda is just destroying this nation" and that homosexuality poses a bigger threat to the United...

PONTIAC, Mich. (AP) — Assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian is planning a run for Congress. Kevorkian was released from prison last year and remains on parole. But the 79-year-old told The Oakland Press for an article published Wednesday that he plans to run for office as a candidate with no party affiliation. "We need some honesty and sincerity instead of corrupt government in Washington," Kevorkian said.

Navy officials have suspended parachute training at a facility near Marana after the second SEAL in less than a month died in an accident there. The latest incident occurred at about 8 a.m. Thursday when a SEAL suffered fatal injuries during parachute training at Pinal Airpark, according to a news release from the Navy's Special Warfare Command. The SEAL was flown to University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The SEAL, who isn't being identified until his family is contacted, was based on the East Coast. In the wake of Thursday's incident and another fatal parachuting exercise on Feb....

That, says the Washington Post's Fifth Column of One™ Dana Milbank, is the theme of the new and reinvigorated Hillary! campaign. On the call with Wolfson and Lewis, Jane Hamsher from the liberal blog Firedoglake pointed out that Clinton's phone-ringing ad was "reinforcing the be-afraid-all-the-time Republican campaign theme." And if that's the argument, she added, "isn't John McCain ultimately the winner?"Whether he is or not, Clinton looked as if she'd borrowed a page from the Bush White House at her Westin meeting. Against a backdrop of six U.S. flags and several of the flag officers who support her, she raised...

There's an argument out there that oral sex is not sex. For some grown-ups, it's a way to deny that they're cheating. To some young people, oral sex preserves virginity—technically speaking—and allows for what is perceived as risk-free sexual intimacy. From a medical perspective, however, this is sex—and generally, as practiced, it's unsafe. People seem clueless that sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and human papillomavirus can take hold in parts of the oral cavity during sex with infected partners and that the oral contact can infect the genitals, too. HPV is a particularly scurrilous threat, since it...

Not long ago, my son and I had a dinner argument over the war against radical Islamist terrorism. He’s a brilliant academic, about to enter graduate school for either math, physics, or both, but he sometimes gets trapped in his rationalism — which, to be honest, isn’t exactly the worst thing a father could wish for his son. He insisted that violence only made the problem worse, and that we had to find a negotiated settlement with Islamist terrorists.Alan Dershowitz had an answer for that in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. In an essay entitled “Worshippers of Death,” Dershowitz argued that...

All of my adult life, William F. Buckley Jr. has been a player on the national stage. It is hard to believe that Buckley is no longer with us – that he has to be moved in our mental computers from an active folder to one labeled memory. Thousands of writers have claimed that Buckley was the father of modern conservatism. Maybe. What is certain is that Buckley has carried the conservative standard from the time he wrote his seminal book, God and Man at Yale. He followed this with the founding of the National Review in 1955. The National...

The Pentagon has paid more than $40 million to Iraqis whose family members were accidentally killed or their property destroyed by coalition military action since the beginning of 2005, according to interviews and documents that provide a glimpse into the extent of continuing civilian casualties in the conflict. The condolence payments are meant to mitigate anger against the U.S. military as it works to reduce violence in Iraq. They are in keeping with a system in Iraqi Muslim culture in which a payment for damage or death eliminates the need for revenge. Though they have spent the money, military officials...

Death penalty: Your verdict [UK]ALMOST 100,000 Sun readers unite today to call for the return of the death penalty. Monster Mark Dixie, Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright and the teenage killers of hero dad Garry Newlove have sickened the nation in recent weeks as details emerged of their vile crimes. All received jail sentences. But as the clamour grew for the return of capital punishment, The Sun on Saturday dared to ask the burning question: “Do we really want it back?” And a staggering 99 per cent of the 95,000 readers who responded to our You The Jury poll said the...

E.J. Dionne wonders whether John McCain may have his priorities askew in the upcoming election. By focusing on terrorism as the "transcendent challenge", McCain may misunderstand the concerns of ordinary Americans in 2008 and make himself irrelevant, Dionne argues: Whether McCain is right or wrong matters to everything the United States will do in the coming years. It is incumbent upon McCain to explain what he really means by "transcendent challenge." Presumably, he's saying that Islamic extremism is more important than everything else -- the rise of China and India as global powers, growing resistance to American influence in Europe,...

Panama relatives say hundreds poisoned By JUAN ZAMORANO, Associated Press Writer Thu Feb 14, 6:29 PM ET Panama's government has vastly underestimated the number of people who died from taking medications tainted with a chemical commonly found in antifreeze and brake fluid, family members and a lawyer for the victims said Thursday. The official death toll, set late last month in a report by the attorney general's Legal Medicine and Forensic Science Institute, is 115. But victims' families dispute the methodology used to produce that figure and estimate the number of poisoning deaths at up to 300. "We do not...

Man starves himself to death in treehouse By Harry de Quetteville in Berlin Last Updated: 1:48am GMT 14/02/2008 A man in Germany has committed suicide by hiding deep in a forest and starving himself to death. The man, who has not been named, kept a diary as his life ebbed away. Police said that two hunters had found the decaying corpse of the 58-year-old man in an isolated hide. It was discovered in a make-shift treehouse 16ft off the ground in a forest about 60 miles from his hometown of Hanover. By his body was a chronicle of the 24...

IOne of the great strengths of the Latin theological tradition has been the development and articulation of a Christian social and personal morality. Catholic theologians and philosophers have reflected deeply on divine law, justice, and the common good and have integrated this reflection into the spiritual life and practice of the Church. But this development has come at a price: God has been portrayed principally as Law-giver, soteriology interpreted through juridical categories, sin reduced to violation of commandment and preaching to moral exhortation. Consequently, Catholic spiritual life has often taken on an unhealthy legalistic cast.Consider how the doctrine of Purgatory...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11, 2008 – The Defense Department announced today it has sworn criminal charges and is seeking the death penalty against six detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The detainees charged include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and five others charged in connection with the attacks, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, legal advisor to the convening authority in DoD’s Office of Military Commissions, told reporters at the Pentagon. Besides Mohammed, those charged are: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarek bin Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi,...

The investigation continues Thursday morning into how 7-year-old Tevin Park-Flowers died. It happened one week ago at the Not Your Ordinary School in North Austin, and now parents are pulling their kids out of the school. Twenty-two pupils have been withdrawn from Not Your Ordinary School since last Wednesday, when Tevin was found unconscious, hanging on a hook in a gym bathroom. He died at Dell Children's Medical Center on Friday. So far, parents have withdrawn eight students from the Yager campus and 14 students from the Magnolia McCullough campus. Tevin was enrolled in second grade at the Magnolia McCullough...

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is planning to charge six detainees at Guantanamo Bay for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on America and seek the death penalty. Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said an announcement of the charges could come Monday. A second official said that military leaders also will seek the death penalty for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Among those held at Guantanamo is Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the attack six years ago in which hijacked planes were flown into buildings in New York and Washington. Five others are expected to be named in...

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether the Constitution allows the death penalty for the rape of a child. --New York Times, January 5, 2008 The best case for the death penalty--or, at least, the best explanation of it--was made, paradoxically, by one of the most famous of its opponents, Albert Camus, the French novelist. Others complained of the alleged unusual cruelty of the death penalty, or insisted that it was not, as claimed, a better deterrent of murder than, say, life imprisonment, and Americans especially complained of the manner in which it was imposed by judge or...

Medici philosopher's mystery death is solved By Malcolm Moore, Rome Correspondent Last Updated: 2:35am GMT 07/02/2008 After 500 years, one of Renaissance Italy's most enduring murder mysteries has been solved by forensic scientists. Ever since Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a mystical and mercurial philosopher at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici, suddenly became sick and died in 1494, it has been rumoured that foul play was involved. Scientists display the bones of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola Pico's fame has faded, but he was a celebrated figure at the Medici court. He gained notoriety when, at the age of 23, he...

Black Death targeted the weak By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 10:01pm GMT 28/01/2008 The Black Death, which killed one person in every three in Europe, was not as indiscriminate as thought, according to studies of remains in mass grave in East Smithfield. Skeletons of plague victims in a mass grave at East Smithfield, London The toll was so high during its height in the 1300s that many have concluded that anyone and everyone who came into contact with the agent, thought to be a bacterium, was doomed. But research published today shows that people who were physically frail...

Best known for his haunting, Oscar-nominated performance as Ennis Del Mar, one of the gay cowboys in 2005 ' s "Brokeback Mountain," Ledger was a massive young talent on the cusp of greatness when he died last week in New York. The native Australian, who is survived by his 2-year-old daughter, Matilda, had recently finished work on this summer's "Batman" sequel, "The Dark Knight," in which he plays a villain, the Joker. Christopher Nolan, the film's director, shared these memories:One night, as I'm standing on LaSalle Street in Chicago, trying to line up a shot for "The Dark Knight," a...

Indonesia bird flu death toll hits 100 Mon Jan 28, 8:00 AM ET A 23-year-old Indonesian woman from East Jakarta has died from bird flu, taking the country's death toll to 100, according to a report from Indonesia's bird flu information centre on Monday. The woman died on Sunday and two separate laboratory tests confirmed she contracted H5N1, the report said. Earlier on Monday, a 9-year-old Indonesian boy who had tested positive for bird flu died, the health ministry said in a statement. The boy from the outskirts of Jakarta died at the Sulianto Saroso hospital on Sunday after being...

President Gordon B. Hinckley of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints died this evening. He was 97. Hinckley's life spanned the 20th century, a time marked by LDS global outreach and technological advances. He saw his church evolve from a tiny sect in the Intermountain West to a respected religious movement with more than 13 million members worldwide.

Death toll nears 800 as post-election violence spirals out of control in Kenya · 19 killed in tourist town as gangs go on rampage · Crisis deepens despite intervention of Annan Xan Rice in Nairobi Monday January 28, 2008 The Guardian (UK) Ethnic clashes were spreading across Kenya's Rift valley last night with at least 19 people burned in their homes or hacked to death in the popular tourist town of Naivasha, 65 miles from Nairobi. The month-long violence, in which nearly 800 people have died, was sparked by the disputed re-election of President Mwai Kibaki, has now changed into...

Daily Exercise Dramatically Lowers Men's Death Rates ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2008) — Increased exercise capacity reduces the risk of death in African-American and Caucasian men, researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. The government-supported Veterans Affairs study included 15,660 participants and is the largest known to assess the link between fitness and mortality. "It is important to emphasize that it takes relatively moderate levels of physical activity -- like brisk walking -- to attain the associated health benefits. Certainly, one does not need to be a marathon runner. This is the message that we need to convey...

A former prison guard accused of giving birth in a motel bathtub and stuffing the full-term baby in the back tank of the toilet was in the Falls County Jail Tuesday, charged with capital murder. Sheriff’s deputies arrested 25-year-old Khaliliha Baucom of Lott earlier Tuesday. Bond was set at $200,000. She was named in a sealed indictment returned in December by the Falls County Grand Jury. Baucom was arrested in November on a warrant charging abuse of a corpse, which is a misdemeanor, but authorities said then a capital murder charge could still be filed. She was free on $2,500...

Is dying really a shrewd career move? Cynics, art dealers and humorists seem to think so. The French painter Jean-François Millet fakes his own death in Mark Twain's play "Is He Dead?" in order to push up his prices: "A painter has so much more talent when he's dead. Indeed the deader he is, the better he is." Dawn Powell used a similar plot device in her comic novel "The Wicked Pavilion," in which an unsuccessful artist touches up the half-finished canvases of a deceased colleague and passes them off as authentic. Both of these examples are, of course, fictional...