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The father of a San Antonio, Texas, area teenage boy said his son apparently killed himself while participating in the satanic “Blue Whale Challenge” that is spreading on social media. After playing the game online, the parents of 15-year-old Isaiah Gonzalez found him hanging in his bedroom. His father, Jorge Gonzalez, wants other parents to know about the dangers of this game that is believed to have originated in Russia, Fox News reported. “It talks about satanic stuff and stuff like that and my son was never into that,” the teen’s father told KSAT ABC12 in San Antonio. He said...

Actress Stevie Ryan has died in what the L.A. County Coroner’s Office has ruled a suicide by hanging. She was 33. The coroner’s office confirmed online that Ryan died on Saturday, July 1. They did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for additional comment. The actress first rose to fame through her YouTube series called Little Loca, and later transitioned to doing celebrity parodies on the video platform. “I remember waking up and one Little Loca video had like 900 hits and I was like ‘Oh, my gosh. There’s people watching this?’ ” Ryan told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012....

A secondary school has been forced to apologize to parents after an English teacher asked students to draft a suicide note for homework as part of a module on Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. More than 60 pupils at Thomas Tallis school, Kidbrooke, London were asked to pen an imaginary final note after reading one of the play’s most celebrated scenes, when Lady Macbeth takes her own life. Having conspired with her husband to murder King Duncan, Lady Macbeth commits suicide by “self and violent hands” after being driven mad by guilt and violent imagery of his murder. The pupils were asked...

San Antonio Police Department Detective Richard Richardson said police found a receipt for lighter fluid on the body. The purchase was made this morning. He said the man apparently lit himself on fire, jumped off the bridge with a rope around his neck and then fell. "Everything melted," he said. "It's gonna be a while before we ID him." Khiari Brown and Michael Ray, two employees of an AC and heating company, said they were driving down Thousand Oaks when they saw a man on fire climbing over the bridge's railing. "We seen him on this side, halfway on fire...

Former NFL player Ryan O'Callaghan has come out as gay, revealing that his anguish over his sexuality drove him to write a suicide note. The New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs lineman told Outsports that fear of rejection spurred him to hide his homosexuality. He even built a cabin near his Kansas City home and bought guns, planning to take his secret to the grave. It is still exceedingly rare for top-flight male US athletes to come out. The 33-year-old told Outsports, a website focused on LGBT issues in sport, that he realised he was gay while at high...

A juvenile court judge announced a guilty verdict in the trial of Massachusetts woman Michelle Carter who was charged with manslaughter for sending her suicidal boyfriend Conrad Roy III a barrage of text messages encouraging him to kill himself. Judge Lawrence Moniz announced his decision Friday in Bristol Juvenile Court.

About 1,300 US children under the age of 17 die from gun-related injuries per year, a government study has found. Researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also found that guns seriously wounded about 5,800 children each year. Boys accounted for 82% of all child firearm deaths while black children were 10 times more likely to be killed by a gun, according to the study. More than half of these deaths were homicides while 38% were ruled suicide. The study, published in Pediatrics on Monday, also found 6% of firearm-related deaths were fatalities from accidental gun...

TAUNTON, Mass. — For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him. That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that...

Hodgkinson had a history of violence that did not rise to the level to prohibit him from legally owning a firearm. He was the foster father of at least two girls. The first, Wanda Ashley Stock, 17, committed suicide in 1996 by pouring gasoline on herself and setting herself on fire after a few months of living with the Hodgkinsons, the Belleville News-Democrat reports. The Hodgkinsons gave an interview to the paper after her suicide, calling her a “very practical, level-headed girl.”

“The suspect clarified that he is the administrator of a so-called suicide group that had 32 members, all of them underage,” the spokeswoman said. “He assigned them tasks aimed at injuring themselves in order to incite suicide.” But Sidorov is not the only suicide-game “administrator” to have been arrested. Philipp Budeikin, 21, is also being held by Russian police, charged with coaxing up to 16 schoolgirls to kill themselves. The suicide game got its name from the way whales appear to beach themselves deliberately. Its popularity has spread beyond the bounds of Russia, with related suicide attempts being reported in...

Why does Islamic State hate Kurdish armed groups? And why does Turkey try to equate the Kurds with ISIS? The Turkish government has repeatedly declared that the Islamic State (DAESH/ISIS/IS) is the same as the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), the PYD (the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party), and the YPG (the Syrian-Kurdish People's Defense Units). However, ISIS (aka IS or DAESH) sympathizers strongly disagree with this comparison. According to a report by the Ankara-based Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies (ORSAM), the main agenda of Turkish-speaking ISIS supporters on Twitter is the PKK and YPG, and they refer to these two...

Italian Bishops Offer High Praise for Islam News: World News AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to Google+Share to EmailShare to Print by Juliana Freitag  •  ChurchMilitant.com  •  June 3, 2017    2 Comments ROME (Church Militant.com) - A number of Italian bishops are offering praise for Islam and defending it as a religion with a role in salvation. Pope Francis' new appointment as president for the Italian bishops' conference, Cdl. Gualtiero Bassetti, archbishop of Perugia, immediately made his ecumenical priorities clear.   Thousands of Muslims demonstrate in Rome  after radicalized mosques shut down in 2016 At his first public appearance,...

We're living through a time when there seems to be something new and alarming in the news every day. Our media cycle is dominated by the dramatic, and one consequence of this is that alarming events can unfold on the state and local level going unnoticed despite their ultimately national consequences. One such example is before Oregon's state legislature. First introduced in January, an alarming bill, SB 494, would radically change the meaning of healthcare in that state, with the potential for national ripple effects. SB 494 would put countless medically vulnerable persons at risk of a premature and untimely...

Vicky noticed a change in her husband's demeanor when they talked on the phone after the show. "When we spoke after the show, I noticed he was slurring his words; he was different. When he told me he may have taken an extra Ativan or two, I contacted security and asked that they check on him," she continued. "What happened is inexplicable and I am hopeful that further medical reports will provide additional details. I know that he loved our children and he would not hurt them by intentionally taking his own life." An attorney for the Cornell family, Kirk...

DETROIT — Chris Cornell, one of the most lauded and respected contemporary lead singers in rock music with his bands Soundgarden and Audioslave, hanged himself Wednesday in a Detroit hotel room, according to the city’s medical examiner. He was 52. The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office said Thursday it completed the preliminary autopsy on Cornell, but that “a full autopsy report has not yet been completed.” A police spokesman told two Detroit newspapers that the singer was found with a band around his neck. Cornell’s death stunned his family and his die-hard fans, who Cornell just performed for hours earlier...

Another American hero vet has committed suicide. Except this one is personal. This one hits home. This one isn’t just a statistic, or generic. His name was Sgt. Eric Thomsen. I’ll get to his tragic story in a moment. President Obama ignored vets like Sgt. Thomsen for eight long years. A massive scandal engulfed the Veterans Administration during Obama’s presidency. Vets died on fake waiting lists. Fraud was committed because there wasn’t the money to treat our heroes. So, government employees committed criminal acts to make them go away. Vets died. Obama chose to fire or punish none of the...

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. North Carolina police say they're investigating the possible suicide of an Army veteran charged with shooting her service dog as she laughed. Fayetteville Police Lt. Todd Joyce said Sunday investigators believe that 23-year-old Marinna Rollins killed herself. Joyce declined to explain what evidence detectives found. He says police were called to her apartment early Sunday after her body was found by friends. Rollins and 25-year-old Jarren Heng were charged last month with cruelty to animals after investigators say they tied the dog to a tree and shot it multiple times with a rifle.

Edward Crawford, an activist known for throwing a tear gas canister back at police officers in a viral photo during the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri was found dead on Thursday, May 4, from what police officers are describing as a self-inflicted gun wound. Crawford had participated in the protests that followed the death of Michael Brown at the hand of Officer Darren Wilson. According to the St. Louis Police Department, the 27-year-old shot himself in the head after talking with two women about "personal matters." Crawford's father disputes the claims, telling the St. Louis Post Dispatch that his son...

A famous author, who penned biographies for Bobby Kennedy and Edie Sedgwick, leaped to her death from a Manhattan high rise on Sunday. Jean Stein, 83, plunged from the 15th story of 10 Gracie Square on the Upper East Side, in New York at 10.35am. She landed on the an eighth-floor balcony below and paramedics say she died at the scene, New York Daily News.

The Egypt of Pope Francis, Between Reality and Fantasy > Italiano > English> Español> Français> All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English*After Fr. Henri Boulad, another Egyptian Jesuit and Islamologist is framing in politically incorrect terms the upcoming visit of Pope Francis to Egypt. His name is Samir Khalil Samir. He is 79 years old and teaches at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome and at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.Fr. Boulad’s interview with “L'Osservatore Romano” was covered by Settimo Cielo ten days ago:> "Islam, Religion of the Sword." The Alarm of an Egyptian JesuitWhile Fr. Samir’s extensive interview...