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So here's a story and you can tell me if I am bat s*** crazy or you can laugh or whatever. My wife and I walk along a rural paved road in the evening about a half mile and turn around and come back. We have corn and bean fields on each side and nice wide ditches. One evening about 2 weeks ago on a Monday we were walking back and noticed a dead deer in the ditch on the far side. At first we thought it must have been hut by a car. The strange thing was that it...

Today at least 15 people were killed and many wounded when Israeli forces shelled a UN-run school in northern Gaza. UN Chief Ban Ki Moon condemned the attack. The IDF said it was looking into the matter. Last night the IDF told the Red Cross to evacuate civilians from the UNRWA shelter in Beit Hanoun. But Hamas refused to let the civilians leave the area.

A Goldman Sachs managing director has died following an apparent kiteboarding accident, police said. The body of 39-year-old Nicholas Valtz was found floating off Lazy Point in Napeague Harbor, Long Island, on Sunday. The amateur kiteboarder was still attached to his kite, while his gear was scattered in a grassy area of the harbor. The East Hampton Star reported the Brooklyn resident went kiteboarding early in the morning. When he failed to return by 2pm, relatives he was staying with at a Bridgehampton home called police. 'We’re deeply saddened by this tragedy and our thoughts are with Nick’s family,' Goldman...

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer ordered a review of the state's execution process after a convicted double murderer gasped and snorted for more than an hour and a half before his death Wednesday. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne's office said Joseph Rudolph Wood was pronounced dead at 3:49 p.m. local time, one hour and 57 minutes after the execution started. Wood's lawyers had filed an emergency appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court while the execution was underway, demanding that it be stopped. The appeal said Wood was "gasping and snorting for more than an hour." In ordering the review, Brewer said...

What's a Monty Python reunion without a dead parrot? And why settle for a simple prop you can bang on the counter when you could have a monstrous, 50-foot-tall dead parrot? To promote the live broadcast of the comedy troupe's July 20 performance, UKTV's Gold channel and sculptor Iain Prendergast created a massive fiberglass dead parrot, which was suspended from a crane and laid talons-up in London's Potters Field this week.

Louisiana spent about $1.3 million on food stamps for people who were already dead between 2009 and 2013, the Times-Picayune reports. A report issued by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor Monday revealed the government waste: In all, state benefits went out to 3,938 deceased people over the four-year period examined by the auditor. The Louisiana auditor only reviewed records concerning single people who had died. The total amount of money spent on food stamps for single people in Louisiana during this time was $1.08 billion. Much of the money — $556,000 — was spent on people who had been dead for...

The Israel-Palestinian Authority (PA) peace process is dead, according to Martin Indyk, formerly the U.S. special Middle East envoy who resigned from his post last week. Speaking to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in his first interview since stepping down, Indyk said that there is strong dislike between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. "There is a deep loathing of each leader for the other that has built up over the years," Indyk said in the interview, which was published Thursday. "'Loathing' may be too strong [a word] for how Netanyahu feels about Abu Mazen (Abbas -ed.),"...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Casey Kasem, the internationally famous radio broadcaster with the cheerful manner and gentle voice who became the king of the top 40 countdown with a syndicated show that ran for decades, died Sunday. He was 82.

Block Communications Inc. said it will lay off 136 people at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 131 at the Blade of Toledo, a decision that will help cut costs at the two money-losing dailies where the company has been wrangling with unions for more than a year over concessions. [snip] Negotiations with the unions over a new contract have been ongoing for a year, with Block asking for wage and benefit concessions after years of losses. In March, members of the Newspaper Guild “celebrated” their 3,000th day without a raise with a pie party in the newsroom. Block told employees in...

Our Lady’s Request: Pray for the Dying! R. Jared Staudt“Pray, pray very much. Make sacrifices for sinners. Many souls go to hell, because no one is willing to help them with sacrifice.”-Our Lady of Fatima, July 13, 1917Today is the anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady at Fatima, Portugal. It is also the anniversary of the assassination attempt on Pope St. John Paul II, when Our Lady of Fatima intervened at what seemed the moment of his death to save his life.This is fitting as Our Lady at Fatima appealed to us to assist those at the...

He’s been dead for eight years, but try telling that to the NYPD. Cops have barged into James Jordan Sr.’s family home looking for him more than a dozen times since he died in 2006 — prompting his exasperated relatives to finally post his death certificate on the front door. “I tell them over and over, ‘James isn’t here! He’s dead! It’s that simple. What’s so difficult to understand about that?’ ” the Brooklyn security guard’s widow, Karen, told The Post on Monday. James Jordan Sr., who died from diabetes at age 46, was last arrested in 1996 — for turnstile-jumping,...

Two teenage boys were killed after attempting to burglarize a home along Arcade Boulevard. Sacramento Police responded to a burglary just after midnight on Sunday morning. When they arrived, they found two suspects had been shot and killed by the occupants. Neighbors said the owner is an elderly woman, who has been a victim of several burglaries since her husband passed away. “This Easter, she was robbed, and so she had replaced her deadbolt locks with double locking deadbolts and they still got in after that,” friend and neighbor, Celeste Gawehn said. Gawehn said her the woman asked a family...

HELENA, Mont. -- A western Montana man charged in the shooting death of a 17-year-old exchange student in his garage is receiving death threats and is afraid to leave his home, the man's attorney said Tuesday. Markus Kaarma, 29, was released from jail Monday after posting a $30,000 bond on a charge of deliberate homicide in the death of Diren Dede of Hamburg, Germany. Since then, Kaarma, his partner Janelle Pflager and their 10-month-old baby won't leave their Missoula home after receiving the threats, attorney Paul Ryan said. "They're really on edge about what's going to happen to them and...

Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction espouses the same ideology of destroying Israel as Hamas, with which it signed a unity deal last Wednesday, according to newly revealed video segments of a senior Fatah official. Fatah Central Committee member Tawfiq Tirawi last week posted a video to YouTube of his comments from a pro-terrorist ceremony in Gaza. In his speech mere days before the unity deal, Tirawi said Gaza "will return to the bosom of legitimacy." Tirawi added "the homeland...is...all of Palestine, from its [Jordan] River to its [Mediterranean] Sea," describing a map that effectively wipes out the...

An Italian man was crushed to death on Thursday by a giant crucifix dedicated to the late Pope John Paul II, just days before the Polish pontiff will be made a saint in a ceremony at the Vatican. In a bizarre coincidence, the 21-year-old man was reported to have been living in a street named after Pope John XXIII – who will also be canonised in the ceremony on Sunday, in an event that is unprecedented in the 2,000 year history of the Catholic Church. The man, named as Marco Gusmini, was posing for a photograph with a group of...

The Illinois Medicaid program paid an estimated $12 million for medical services for people listed as deceased in other state records, according to an internal state government memo. The memo dated Friday, which The Associated Press obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, says the state auditor compared clients enrolled in the Medicaid database with state death records dating back to 1970. Auditors identified overpayments for services to roughly 2,900 people after the date of their deaths... Republicans have pressed for the state to use a private company to verify Medicaid eligibility. Maximus Health Services was hired to scrub...

Texas executed by lethal injection on Wednesday a Mexican citizen who was convicted of bludgeoning a man to death and repeatedly raping the man's wife. Ramiro Hernandez, 44, was pronounced dead at 6:28 p.m. CDT at the Texas state death chamber in Huntsville after receiving a dose of lethal drugs, the Texas Department o Texas executes Mexican national for murder and rapef Criminal Justice said. Hernandez was the sixth convict executed in Texas this year and the 16th in the United States.

A mere two weeks since former JPMorgan banker, Kenneth Bellando jumped to his death, Bloomberg reports that the former CEO of Dutch Bank ABN Amro (and his wife and daughter) were found dead at their home after a possible "family tragedy." This expands the dismal list of senior financial services executive deaths to 12 in the last few months. The 57-year-old Jan Peter Schmittmann, was reportedly discovered by his other daughter when she arrived home that morning. Police declined to comment on the cirumstances of his (and his wife and daughter's) death. This is not the first C-level ABN Amro...

German woman, dead six months, found in front of TV BERLIN (Reuters) - The corpse of a 66-year-old German woman who died more than six months ago was found in her apartment, in front of a television set that was still on, the Frankfurter Neue Presse newspaper reported on Tuesday. The woman, in the town of Oberursel near Frankfurt, died of natural causes in a nightgown while watching TV. There was a program guide from September nearby, the newspaper said, describing the body as "partially mummified". Police said residents in the 30-apartment block had noticed an unpleasant smell in the...