Free Republic

Given the great strides that have been made in preventing and treating heart disease, what explains Tim Russert’s sudden death last week at 58 from a heart attack? The answer, at least in part, is that although doctors knew that Mr. Russert, the longtime moderator of “Meet the Press” on NBC, had coronary artery disease and were treating him for it, they did not realize how severe the disease was because he did not have chest pain or other telltale symptoms that would have justified the kind of invasive tests needed to make a definitive diagnosis. In that sense, his...

The letter below is from one of the Marines whose team I am on who have been involved with the Hamdania Incident, both in fundraising and exposure to the public of information that the media has refused to cover, and that includes all conservative media like FOX News, NEWSMAX, World Net Daily, Ollie North, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Howie Carr. Some of them can be forgiven due to the large amount of e-mails received daily, but others were given extensive telephone interviews, with details, and some of them outright refused to consider this as an issue because it would not...

PHOENIX (AP) — A woman who died in police custody during an airport layover was intoxicated on a potent mix of alcohol and antidepressants and accidentally strangled herself on her shackles, an autopsy released Friday concludes.

Tech gunman shot victims over 100 times By KRISTEN GELINEAU, Associated Press Writer 12 minutes ago Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho fired enough shots to wound his 32 victims more than 100 times before killing himself with a bullet to his head, a medical examiner said Sunday. Dr. William Massello, the assistant medical examiner based in Roanoke, said pathologists have sent blood samples for toxicology testing to determine if Cho was on drugs at the time of his rampage. It could take as long as two weeks to get the results of those tests, he said. Cho was not especially...

UT Southwestern Medical Center Date: January 16, 2007 Napoleon's Mysterious Death Unmasked Science Daily — A new investigation into Napoleon Bonaparte's cause of death might finally put to rest nearly 200 years of lingering mysteries about the illness that killed the French emperor during his island exile, a UT Southwestern Medical Center scientist reports. Dr. Robert Genta, professor of pathology and internal medicine, helped investigate the cause of Napoleon Bonaparte's death nearly 200 years ago by applying modern pathological and tumor-staging methods to historical accounts. (Image courtesy of UT Southwestern Medical Center) American, Swiss and Canadian researchers applied modern pathological...

This is a reference thread with links to previous FR threads discussing the arrest of a suspect, John Mark Karr, in the decade-old cold case concerning the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, plus case resources for continued commentary on investigation of the crime.

A Giant statue by Damien Hirst showing the insides of a pregnant woman and entitled The Virgin Mother was unveiled at the Royal Academy of Arts in London yesterday. The Virgin Mother took 18 months to complete The 35ft bronze sculpture, which dominates the courtyard in front of the gallery, reveals the foetus and the woman's skull, muscles and tissue. The work, weighing 3.5 tons, took a year and a half to make and will form part of the Summer Exhibition, From Life, which starts on June 12. "It will be very interesting to see people's reactions," said Edith Davaney,...

4pm Zarqawi died 52 minutes after air strike, US says · Autopsy finds 'no evidence' of beating or gunshots· Al-Qaida in Iraq names new leader Staff and agenciesMonday June 12, 2006 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took nearly an hour to die after a US air strike destroyed his safe house, the results of a US autopsy showed today. The spokesman said Zarqawi died 52 minutes after the first of two 500lb bombs hit the building and 24 minutes after US forces arrived at the scene.The leader of al-Qaida in Iraq had been meeting a spiritual leader at the house near...

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived for 52 minutes after a U.S. warplane bombed his hideout northeast of Baghdad, and he died of extensive internal injuries consistent with those caused by a bomb blast, the U.S. military said Monday. Col. Steve Jones, command surgeon for Multinational Forces, said an autopsy concluded that al-Zarqawi died from serious injuries to his lungs. An FBI test positively identified al-Zarqawi's remains. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, said U.S. forces arrived about 28 minutes after a fighter jet bombed al-Zarqawi's hideout outside Baqouba on Wednesday. Medics secured al-Zarqawi's airway but...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. military autopsy was finished on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Sunday, but the findings were not immediately released by American officials. "The autopsy is completed. However, we are not releasing results yet," Maj. William Willhoite told The Associated Press. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said officials were awaiting the results of a DNA test. The examination by two U.S. military forensic specialists flown in specially for the autopsy was part of an investigation to reconstruct the last minutes of the terror chieftain's life before an American warplane bombed his hideout late Wednesday....

NEW YORK -- An Indonesian man found dead in the blood-spattered basement of his country's consulate on the Upper East Side took his own life by repeatedly stabbing himself with various knives in a gruesome fashion, authorities said Monday. The man, identified by officials in Indonesia as Bambang Welianto, 36, of Jakarta, was found Sunday with a kitchen knife in his chest and his left wrist almost severed. Several more knives, including a meat cleaver, were found around him inside the four-story Beaux-Arts mansion on East 68th Street, off Fifth Avenue. A spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office, Ellen Borakove,...

Several bloggers have drawn attention to a strange lead in a Washington Post story about the Terri Schiavo autopsy results. The June 16 Post story by David Brown said that "Terri Schiavo died of the effects of a profound and prolonged lack of oxygen to her brain on a day in 1990, but what caused that event isn't known and may never be, the physician who performed her autopsy said…"

The right-to-life versus dying-with-dignity battle over Terri Schindler Schiavo exploded back into life on Monday, bursting back to life from the unlikely scene of a cemetery. "At the burial site of Terri Schiavo’s cremated remains, Michael Schiavo used a bronze grave marker to list Feb. 25, 1990 as the date his wife died," laments Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Washington-based Christian Democracy Coalition (CDC). "Feb. 25, 1990 is the date Terri Schindler Schiavo experienced a still unknown event that left her severely mentally disabled. Terri Schiavo actually died March 31, 2005, nearly two weeks after her feeding tube...

Just when it seemed that every liberal commentator on the Terri Schiavo case was starting to sound like Barney Frank, the great Joan Didion published a long and remarkable article on the case in the quite far left New York Review of Books of June 9. Frank, of course, took the occasion of last week's Schiavo autopsy results as yet another opportunity to denounce Republicans as "this fanatical party willing to impose its own views on people." For those of you still somehow unaware, "imposing their views" is a semiofficial Democratic meme or code phrase meaning "religious people who vote...

Correct me if I'm wrong .. but when the Terri Schiavo matter was consuming front pages and broadcast news, wasn't the issue whether or not she was reacting to her parents and watching that balloon floating around her room? She should not be allowed to die, people said, because with rehab she would improve and then her family could take her to malls and birthday parties and such. Well, the autopsy results are in. [full autopsy pdf] There was no way that Terri Schiavo could benefit in any way from rehabilitation therapy. What's more, she had no cognitive abilities. In...

Autopsy highlights: (my comments in parentheses) T11 endplate fracture (?correllates with bone scan) Renal scar (right) Heart normal (no evidence of "heart attack") "Manner of death: Undetermined" Dr. Stephen Nelson, Neuropathologist, in a report contained within the autopsy report: "The persistent vegetative state and minimally conscious state are clinical diagnoses, not pathologic ones. The neurophysiologic findings of the persistent vegetative state have been well described in the medical literature ... yet there are no similarly published neurophysiologic descriptions specific to the minimally conscious state". "In diffuse axonal injury this abnormality is usually due to a shearing injury after acute trauma"....

...The autopsy in the Terri Schiavo case provides a rare moment of political accountability. We should not "move on," as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist suggested. No, we cannot move on until those politicians who felt entitled to make up facts and toss around unwarranted conclusions about Schiavo's condition take responsibility for what they said -- and apologize... So the big-government conservatives had to invent a story. They had to insist that they knew, just knew , more about Terri Schiavo's condition than the doctors on the scene. They had to question Michael Schiavo's motives and imply that he wanted...

In a press conference held at the National Right to Life convention, Thursday afternoon, the family of Terri Schiavo responded to an autopsy report released by a local medical examiner following the thirteen day starvation and dehydration death of Terri Schiavo. Terri's sister Suzanne Vitadamo read a statement on behalf of herself, Terri's parents Bob and Mary Schindler and Terri's brother Bobby. Vitadamo said the Schindler family was "not challenging the findings" of the report, but she indicated they hoped to provide some perspective missing in the reporting on it. She indicated the Schindler family knew of Terri's severe physical...

It’s okay to dehydrate and starve the disabled. At least that’s what some letter writers to canadafreepress.com are saying as they gloat about the release of Terri Schiavo’s autopsy. "Poor Terri had half a brain left, no chance to ever rehabilitate, no feelings, no thoughts, no way to tell everyone to leave her alone so she could see G-d (sic). It took 15 years but she did it no thanks to people like you," wrote Gloria whose email came from a generic hotmail account (picchetti707@hotmail.com)

June 16, 2005 Atrophy of Compassion Fr. Frank comments on Terri Schiavo autopsy The autopsy of Terri Schiavo has been released to the public, bringing attention once again to this sad and tragic case, and reigniting so many of the debates surrounding her life and death. Does the autopsy shed any light on this tragedy? Does it change anything? The autopsy, of course, is a medical document about Terri's physical condition. It is filled with complicated medical terms and statistics. In and of itself, it tells us simply the details found upon examining Terri's body. An autopsy is not a...