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IOWA CITY, Iowa — A body found in an Iowa City park has been identified as a missing University of Iowa professor accused of offering higher grades to female students in exchange for sexual favors.

Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) – Israel released 198 Palestinian security prisoners on Monday, including two who murdered Israelis. The goodwill gesture to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas came just hours before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived here to prod the peace process. On her 24-hour visit, Rice will hold more talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. She reportedly wants them to produce a document that could be presented to the United Nations General Assembly next month, but it appears that will not happen. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who is heading Israel’s negotiating team, reportedly plans to ask Rice to abandon...

GARY, Ind. (Post-Tribune) ― A 14-year-old Tolleston boy died Wednesday from a gunshot wound to his head despite efforts by his cousin to intervene in the shooting. Vernon Elkins, of the 1700 block of Arthur Street, was pronounced dead at The Methodist Hospitals in Gary about two hours after he shot himself with a .38-caliber revolver found in the alley near his home, police said. The teen had been shopping with his family, but was unable to get the shoes he wanted for school because the store didn't have them in his size, Detective Cpl. Arturo Azcona said. When he...

But a dark horse lurks. I’ve been talking to more people about the veep thing, and the picture I get is this: McCain is sitting in front of a console with a switch with two positions: GAMBLE and PLAY IT SAFE. If he moves the switch to GAMBLE, he picks Lieberman… Still, Romney is an unquantifiable here. I mentioned yesterday that if McCain were to pick Ridge, “it will be because he likes him personally and believes Ridge can win Pennsylvania.” Now, it’s not clear to me that McCain will make the choice based on whether a veep could carry...

DENVER -- A Canadian national found dead inside an upscale Denver hotel with a pound of highly toxic sodium cyanide had killed himself, the deputy coroner said Wednesday. However, a spokesman for Dirie's family said he finds the idea that it was suicide "ridiculous." Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, was found dead inside the Burnsley hotel on Aug. 11. In his hotel room, firefighters found nearly a pound of sodium cyanide -- the crystal form of cyanide "This office completed an autopsy. The test results have been returned to our office and the decedent was positive for ingesting cyanide. The manner...

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni came under fire on Monday after it was learned that she personally intervened to help the daughter of a top Palestinian Authority official obtain Israeli citizenship. Israel’s Channel 10 News reported on Sunday that at the request of chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia (also known as Abu Ala), Livni used her clout to push his daughter’s application through the Interior Ministry.

GREELEY, Colo. -- A German Shepherd that was reported lost in June has actually been guarding her owner's body for six weeks after the man took his own life in the remote northeast Colorado plains.Cash, the dog, was found alive on Sunday, next to the body of her master, Jake Baysinger, 25, a resident of La Salle, KMGH-TV in Denver reported.Weld County Deputy Coroner Gracie Marquez said Tuesday that Baysinger's death was ruled a suicide. The cause of death hasn't been determined, but authorities found a gun nearby.His 3-year-old dog was found thin and dehydrated, but veterinarians said she is...

When I saw this headline, I wondered what it could possibly mean: "Drugs like LSD and Ecstasy 'could help terminally ill'." Turns out (drat!) that it doesn't mean that those hits of acid you may have swallowed when you were young and irresponsible will help you live longer. The first clinical trial involving LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland in June with the aim of using "psychedelic psychotherapy" to help terminally ill patients come to terms with imminent death to improve the quality of their remaining life. Eight subjects will receive 200 micrograms of LSD - enough to induce...

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has offered the Palestinian Authority a preliminary final status peace agreement that would see Israel surrender 93 percent of Judea and Samaria. Ha’aretz learned that Olmert presented the deal when he met last week with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and is still waiting on a reply from the Palestinian side. The offer also includes surrendering a small area of Israel’s Negev desert to the Palestinians to make up for the 7 percent of the so-called “West Bank” where large Jewish towns today exist that Israel would retain.

In July, the Oregon Health Plan injudiciously sent a letter to lung-cancer patient Barbara Wagner denying coverage for the expensive chemotherapy her doctor had recommended, and offering instead to cover palliative care “including doctor-assisted suicide.” The firestorm of outrage this letter triggered (to see the outrage for yourself, simply Google the search terms “Barbara Wagner” and “suicide”) penetrated even the dulled sensibilities of the Oregon insurance executives. One Jim Sellers, a spokesman for the Oregon Health Plan, admitted to ABC News that “the letter to Wagner was a public relations blunder and something the state is ‘working on.’” DrRich expects...

TEMPLE TERRACE — Bart Siegel, an outspoken advocate for the display of the giant Confederate flag near the intersection of Interstate 4 and I-75, was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot in his Temple Terrace home Thursday. Siegel, 50, was a Republican accountant who penned long letters to newspapers and verbally sparred with columnists. In 2000, he announced his desire to "stir things up" by running against then-Hillsborough Clerk of the Circuit Court Richard Ake, a Democrat unopposed since 1986. Siegel lost, but kept stirring things up. In the face of a protest, Siegel professed his love for the...

via translation- ALERT - An American tourist killed by a Chinese in Beijing BEIJING - An American tourist was killed Saturday in Beijing by Chinese who then committed suicide in the aftermath of the early Olympic Games, announced the China New Agency.

(IsraelNN.com) A left-wing kibbutz member, who had never seen a Yesha settlement until the day she came to destroy it, asks forgiveness of the people she expelled. "Three years without a home is much too long," she says. The soldier publicized her story, and request for forgiveness, in an interview with Yedidya Meir on the Kol Chai radio station. She had been an active member of a left-wing youth movement in her kibbutz, never having met a "settler" (Jewish resident of Judea, Samaria and Gaza), or been inside a Jewish town there, in her life. After enlisting in the army,...

Update: After all the MSM ranting of an unfair trial, Hamdan gets 66 months including five years and a month time already served. As soon as Salim Ahmed Hamdan was convicted Wednesday, July 6, there were several things expected

Israeli PM Ehud Olmert has agreed to free 120-150 Palestinian prisoners later in August as a gesture of goodwill, Palestinian officials said. Israel confirmed some prisoners would be released but would not say how many. The announcement followed a meeting between Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. It was their first talks since Mr Olmert announced he would stand down from his position after being questioned on corruption allegations. Correspondents say Mr Olmert's decision to step down when his Kadima party selects a new leader is likely to complicate efforts to reach a peace deal this year. Israel...

This coming Monday, the tenth day of the month of Av, marks three years on the Hebrew calendar since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. As if on cue, Israelis received a stark reminder this week that while some might want to put Gaza behind them, the Strip and its problems can not just be wished away. Internecine warfare broke out once again between Hamas and Fatah loyalists, leaving nine Palestinians dead and more than 90 others injured in an ugly exchange of mortar shells, machine-gun fire and summary executions. At least a dozen of the injured were said to be...

GENEVA (AFP) — Palestinian refugees stranded for two years in desperate conditions on the Iraq-Syria border will be resettled in Iceland and Sweden in the coming weeks, the United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday. More than two dozen vulnerable Palestinians from the Al Waleed camp will be leaving for Iceland while another group of 155 refugees from the Al Tanf camp are bound for Sweden, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Ron Redmond told journalists. Redmond said that an estimated 2,300 Palestinians were living in camps along the border amid "dire" health conditions, unable to return to Iraq or...

A Virginia Tech employee shot himself in a room off the Cassell Coliseum arena on Saturday afternoon, officials said. Tech police responded to the incident at 2:15 p.m., and the man was flown to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, police Chief Wendell Flinchum said. Officials declined to identify the man, and his condition is unknown. Although officials said the shooting posed no threat to the campus community, Flinchum said police notified the public by e-mail using part of an alert system put in place after the April 16, 2007, shootings.

If Don Flounders waits for the asbestos-related mesothelioma that is ravaging his lungs to kill him, it will be a slow, painful death. Don and Iris Flounders sought help from Exit International when he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a terminal cancer. The couple traveled to Mexico in January to buy Nembutal so they can take their own lives when the time is right. (ABC News) But one day -- maybe just weeks away and at the moment of his choosing -- the 78-year-old plans to drink a bitter mixture of alcohol and pentobarbital, a barbiturate that is used to...

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping...

<p>FREDERICK, Md. - Bruce E. Ivins was a juggler, a gardener, a church musician, a Red Cross volunteer — and a suspected multiple murderer, according to federal authorities.</p> <p>Some people who knew him scoffed at the government’s assertion that Ivins sent the anthrax letters that killed five people and sickened 17 in the fall of 2001. But court documents indicate the outwardly mild-mannered Ivins had a menacing side.</p>

One of the nation’s top biodefense researchers has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailing assaults of 2001 that killed five, the Los Angeles Times has learned.Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the past 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Md., had been informed of the impending prosecution, people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and with the FBI investigation said.Ivins’ name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case that disrupted mail service...

Government and police spokesmen would have us believe that the carnage in Jerusalem on Wednesday was unavoidable. Husam Taysir Dwayat, the convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer turned jihadist who mowed down innocent people with his bulldozer on Jaffa Road was not suspected of links to terrorist organizations. The sociopathic, violent criminal who had "returned" to Islam over the past month raised no red flags. There was nothing to be done. No one is to blame. If the protestations of the government and the police that nothing could have prevented Dwayat from using his bulldozer to murder three people sound...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Elmendorf's commander will be honored later this week in a memorial service on base. Brig. Gen. Thomas Tinsley was found dead in his home Sunday night. Tinsley died of what appears to be a self inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, according to Air Force officials. They say no note was found. Representatives of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology will make a final ruling on the cause of death. A memorial service for the brigadier general will be held 2 p.m. Thursday at hangar one. The service will be open to the public.

Fix this medical ethics glitch Tuesday, July 29, 2008 The Oregonian Opponents of physician-assisted suicide are fired up this summer, and rightfully so, over an ethically questionable provision of the Oregon Health Plan. The conflict came to light in a recent report in The Register-Guard of Eugene. The newspaper described the sad plight of Barbara Wagner, a 64-year-old Springfield woman with lung cancer. After her oncologist prescribed a cancer drug that would cost $4,000 a month, the newspaper reported, "Wagner was notified that the Oregon Health Plan wouldn't cover the treatment, but that it would cover palliative, or comfort, care,...

A 12-year old schoolgirl was gang-raped by five gunmen in Sarpul province in Northern Afghanistan. The girl and her family asked Hamid Karzai to prosecute the rapists and take their case seriously. They threatened that if they are not provided justice, the whole family will commit mass suicide to get rid of such life. They say, the local authorities keep silence on such cases and did not act to arrest those responsible. While crying, the rape victim told journalists that she was raped in a village called Baghabi in Sarpul province. She says five gunmen poured into their house in...

Edward Davidson, the "spam king" who reportedly forced his wife to help him escape from a Colorado prison on Sunday, has killed himself, a woman, and a toddler, according to The Denver Post. Earlier Thursday, Colorado NBC affiliate 9News.com reported that three people had been found dead in an apparent murder-suicide in the area of East Arkansas Place, near the town of Bennett, Colo. The identities of the victims were not disclosed at the time. Responding to an inquiry from InformationWeek, an officer with the Lakewood, Colo., police department said that he had heard that Davidson might have been involved...

Colorado officials say man, woman, 3-year-old dead; 2 survive ordeal BENNETT, Colo. - A convicted spammer and his wife, who were being sought after she helped him escape prison, were found slain along with their young daughter Thursday in an apparent murder-suicide, authorities said. A teenage girl was shot in the neck and a baby was found unhurt in a car seat inside the vehicle where the three bodies were found, Arapahoe County undersheriff Mark Campbell said. The relationship between the girl, baby and the escaped convict wasn't immediately clear.

The husband of a Taunton woman who police say shot herself after faxing a suicide note to the company foreclosing on her home had a troubled financial history, including three recent bankruptcy attempts and an earlier foreclosure filing, the Herald has learned. Taunton police said Carlene Balderrama, 53, shot herself to death Tuesday after faxing her mortgage company a note implying suicide hours before her home was to be auctioned off. “ ‘By the time you foreclose on my house, I’ll be dead,’ ” Police Chief Raymond O’Berg said the note read. PHH Mortgage Corp. received the fax at 2:27...

OCEANA COUNTY (MI) (NEWSCHANNEL 3) - The man who killed his estranged wife before committing suicide vented his frustrations on his myspace page. Dan Lee Mead, 41, shot himself after he dressed in camouflage, armed himself with a shotgun and kidnapped his wife who'd been staying with her parents.Both bodies were found in the woods near Ferry Township Friday morning.He described his frustration with his marriage, and losing custody of his child.Police say Mead had a history of violence and had been in and out of jail in the past.OCEANA COUNTY (NEWSCHANNEL 3) - The man who killed his estranged...

Excerpt - The kidnappers of five British hostages seized in Baghdad last year have claimed in a video-taped statement that one of the men has killed himself. According to the statement, the hostage – named only as Jason – died on May 25, four days before the first anniversary of the abduction. ~ snip ~

She was like an angel...

WASHINGTON, July 18, 2008 – The Department of Veterans Affairs is launching a pilot outreach program to encourage veterans to use the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline -- 1-800-273-TALK (8255) -- if they need help. The program is being launched July 21 “to see if it helps raise awareness for veterans,” said Lisette Mondello, Veterans Affairs assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs. The program will take place over a three-month period and will first launch in the Washington, D.C., metro area, VA officials said. It will include paid advertising in Washington, D.C., metro stations, metro rail cars, and buses....

Santa Rosa, NM (AHN) -- A suspected murder victim has been found to have committed suicide in an elaborate attempt to make his death look unintentional. Police who initially thought Thomas Hickman, 55, was murdered in New Mexico, after he was found duct taped and shot in the back of head. But now police say the Red Lobster executive re-enacted an episode of CBS's show "CSI" in which a man tied helium balloons to the gun he used to kill himself with so that the gun would float away, leading crime scene investigators to believe a murder was committed. Authorities...

Thomas Hickman drove through New Mexico, police say, until his Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo ran out of gas. Then the 55-year-old North Richland Hills man walked into a field, tied helium balloons to a gun, covered his mouth with duct tape, and shot himself in the back of the head, according to New Mexico State Police. That determination is a far leap from what authorities first suspected when Mr. Hickman's body was discovered March 15 near Santa Rosa, N.M., about 100 miles east of Albuquerque. Authorities initially thought the Red Lobster executive had been kidnapped and slain. Thomas Hickman But...

Michael was such a handsome fellow. I think he had the broadest, most sincere smile I have ever seen. I remember my teen friend working out at the “Y”. He was lifting weights. His T shirt was off. He looked down at his slender teen arms and complained, “They’re so skinny. I’ve got to get some muscle.” What he did not realize is that the arms were not skinny; they were trim, perfect. I thought, “Beauty is wasted on the young, for sure.” At school I helped him with his English — how to construct a paragraph that made sense....

Thomas M. Disch, science fiction writer and poet, committed suicide July 4 in New York. He was sixty-eight years old. Disch was an exceptionally talented writer. Unfortunately, he was a man without hope, without which no man can survive. A futurist who had little use for the future, Disch specialized in stories of humans struggling to survive against inhuman, invincible forces outside of their control. His first novel, 1965's The Genocides, is a bleak no-future tale in which the entire human race is wiped out by aliens; his (arguable) magnum opus, 334 (1972), is a detailed examination of the grim,...

Suicides kill more people than homicide and war, namely 1.8% of worldwide deaths! Global suicide rates have increased 60% over the past 45 years and suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth and young adults, aged 10-24. It's also is one of the leading causes of death for adults between the ages of 25-44, with men ranking 75 to 80 %. Socio-psychological studies rate single men as the least emotionally stable, followed by married men, and single women; married women are the most emotionally stable. The current world suicide rate is approximately 1 million per year, or...

A 17-year-old plunged his car off the summit of Pikes Peak this afternoon, in authorities said appeared to be a suicide attempt. The teen's 1985 Nissan Maxima plunged more than 1,000 feet down the ravine strewn with boulders and skree. He pulled himself from the wreckage, but it took hours for local rescuers and military helicopters to make the daring rescue. "We've had rain, we've had snow, we've had lightning popping around us all day," Steve Sperry, spokesman for El Paso County Search and Rescue, said by cellphone shortly after the teen-ager was lifted from the mountain by a Chinook...

The Oregon Health Plan:The Reality of When the Government Runs Health Care "Elect me and your health care problems will all be over." The people of Oregon fell for that line almost 20 years ago. Expecting Utopia, what they got was a reality check: long lines for a lottery to pick who's covered and suicide coverage--instead of cancer drugs. In 1989. Oregon became the second State, after Hawaii, to attempt complete medical coverage of it's citizens. It has not gone as planned. In fact, it seems to be approaching disaster. Within a few years: In early 2003, the Oregon Health...

There is currently no place on earth called “Palestine” – certainly not in any meaningful legal or diplomatic sense. Nonetheless, most of the world prefers to think otherwise. This basic misunderstanding and misrepresentation is now as common in great universities as it is in ordinary politics. Indeed, wherever one looks for commentary about the Middle East, a symmetrical condition is widely presumed to exist between two fully sovereign and hence equal states. Israel and Palestine. International law and jurisprudence? Forget about it! If this were the only pertinent falsehood here, Israel and its few allies could still deal effectively with...

The US Army has ruled the controversial shooting death of a Massachusetts soldier in Afghanistan was a suicide, according to the soldier's family's website. Ciara Durkin, a 30-year-old Army specialist who worked in finance, was found dead with a single bullet in her head on Sept. 28, 2007, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, near her M-16 rifle. At the time, the Army declared that her death was not combat-related, but provided no more public information. "The Durkin family has received the Army's final report into Ciara's death, with their conclusion that she took her own life," her family said...

Soldier Suicide Ends Sarkozy Ceremony Updated:15:38, Tuesday June 24, 2008 A departure ceremony for French President Nicolas Sarkozy has come to an abrupt end after an Israeli soldier apparently shot himself at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.

Everyone was amazed at the incredible coverage journalist Vlado Taneski was giving to a series of brutal murders in Macedonia. His articles were amazingly detailed and many were following the cases of three murdered women and another missing female with rabid interest, hoping to read that cops had captured a killer. And now authorities say they have. It's the same man who was writing so ably about the case all these years. But Taneski will never stand trial for the brutal crimes. He was discovered dead in his cell late Sunday. The 56-year-old had been arrested and charged in two...

A 49-year-old woman pleaded not guilty to charges arising from her role in a MySpace hoax that ended with a 13-year-old girl committing suicide after being spurned by a fictitious boy. Lori Drew, 49, of Missouri, denied charges of conspiracy to inflict emotional distress and accessing MySpace computers without authorization. She will fact trial on July 29. Prosecutors say Drew set up a fake account on the social networking site and posed, with others, as a 16-year-old boy "Josh Evans" to target a classmate of her teenage daughter, Megan Meier. Meier hanged herself in October 2006, shortly after receiving a...

Lori Drew, accused of helping create a fake MySpace profile and using it to harass a 13-year-old Dardenne Prairie girl who later killed herself, pleaded not guilty this morning in federal court in Los Angeles. The pleas were expected and a minor milestone leading up to what the real battle will be in the case – whether prosecutors' use of a law normally used to target computer hackers will work in a cyber bullying case. Megan Meier, who struggled with depression, hung herself in her bedroom Oct. 16, 2006 , shortly after receiving this message: “The world would be a...

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - A hedge-fund swindler who was supposed to be driving himself to prison abandoned his car on a bridge with the phrase "Suicide is Painless" scrawled on its hood, but no body has been found in the river below — and the victims of his fraud say they doubt he killed himself. The FBI and state police are skeptical, saying they're still looking for Samuel Israel III. Israel, 48, a co-founder and chief executive of the now-collapsed Bayou hedge funds, was sentenced in April to 20 years in federal prison for conspiracy and fraud, to begin Monday...

Are people's financial burdens stressing them to the point where they might kill themselves? ABC warned that they could be. “Good Morning America” did a segment titled “Recession Depression” on June 10. Reporter Chris Cuomo explained personal finances have people so stressed, they are developing health problems. But he didn’t leave the report there. “The link between financial troubles and psychological problems is well documented,” he said. “In the U.S. the seminal example is the Great Depression, when the suicide rate jumped from 14 to 17 for every 100,000 Americans,” stated Cuomo. “And today, with the threat of recession looming...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The mother's voice lacks emotion as she recalls how her daughter became a suicide bomber. art.car.cnn.jpg A woman used this car in a February 13 attack in Iraq. "God willing, she went to heaven," her mother says. "She wanted to die in the name of God," she says on a videotape, her face peering out from under a dark brown head scarf. "She told me she is sick of this life. ... So she spoke about the Americans. I told her, 'Where will you get Americans?' She said she will go after the Americans."

One among 20 IT workers in Bangalore regularly considers suicide,according to a survey done by leading newsmagazine, India Today. The survey further reports that 36% of Bangalore's IT workers can be classified as "probably psychiatric" cases, while 10% report severe, continuous mental stress. These findings are surprising especially since India is on the rise, with stratospheric salaries, opportunity available on an unprecedented scale, and global avenues within reach. Why is the Indian IT worker so unhappy? Incessant international travel making him feel rootless, fear of the pink slip, impossible deadlines of the global economy and constant guilt of not meeting...