Free Republic

Khamenei has died. The formal announcement is expected to be made tomorrow morning (Tehran time) . Relative to this, all regime organizations including the official regime news agency "Seda va Sima" are beig draped in black.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 21, 2009) — Scientists have found that some individuals in the vegetative and minimally conscious states, despite lacking the means of reporting awareness themselves, can learn and thereby demonstrate at least a partial consciousness. Their findings are reported in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience....This learning requires conscious awareness of the relation between stimuli -- the tone precedes and predicts the puff of air to the eye. This type of learning was not seen in the control subjects, volunteers who had been under anaesthesia.

The Perth hospital in which a woman gave birth to a stillborn baby without staff noticing has defended its level of care. Sharon May was in an induced coma in intensive care while being treated for pneumonia and swine flu at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. Mrs May was 24 weeks' pregnant, when last month while still in a coma she gave birth to a stillborn boy

WERA Racer Chapman Critically Injured At VIR Aug 09, 2009, ©Copyright 2009, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc. http://www.roadracingworld.com/news/article/?article=37639 From a press release issued by Team Velocity Racing: Zac Chapman, a WERA racer and team rider for TVR/EBC Brakes Yamaha, was critically injured in a sprint race on Saturday during WERA’s Cycle Jam at Virginia International Raceway. Chapman supported TVR during the endurance race on Friday, although he opted not to ride. He is recovering from a broken ankle and felt the hour-long stints might be too strenuous. After the endurance race, Chapman stayed to compete on his own bikes throughout the...

With his wife in a seemingly irreversible coma, Michael Smith brought his children to Bethesda North Hospital in Cincinnati to say goodbye to their mother before she was pulled off life support. But Lori Smith’s 8-year-old daughter Megan wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Instead, she said, “Mom, if you love us and you hear us, move your eyes.” “Lori moved her eyes, and that was the first sign that I knew Lori was there,” Michael Smith said. “I didn’t know if Lori was being mom for the last time or what, but God really gave us a miracle and brought...

SANTIAGO, February 18, 2009 (LifeSitenNews.com) - In a story that stands in stark contrast to the Eluana Englaro and Terri Schiavo cases in Italy and the United States, a Chilean man has been visiting his comatose wife for 17 years, and says he won't give up on her.Carlos Abarca has always visited his wife regularly, and now that he has retired from the national police force, he is able to come three times a day.  He says that caring for her is his whole life."My affection will always be focused on her, I have never doubted it," he told the...

A California man, who spent four days in a coma and was about to be disconnected from life support, is now on his way to making a full recovery. Mike Connelly’s family had just given doctors permission to turn off the machines keeping him alive when his stepson noticed a tear slide down the side of his face, the North Coast Times reported. Moments later, another family member was shouting that the 56-year-old was responding. "He said Mike was responding," the stepson told the newspaper. "I didn't believe him, but I went back in there, and it was true. You...

Andrew and Emma Ray with their children London, Jan 28, 2009 / 02:31 am (CNA).- A woman who doctors believed could remain comatose indefinitely recently revived after her husband asked her for a kiss.Just ten days after giving birth to her son, Telford, Shropshire resident Emma Ray suffered a heart attack and collapsed while shopping with her husband, Andrew. Andrew performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her, after which she was taken to a hospital where doctors were able to restart her heart.“She could wake up the following day, she could wake up in a month, or you may be left...

NEW YORK—Martha "Sunny" von Bulow, the heiress who spent the last 28 years of her life in oblivion after what prosecutors alleged in a pair of sensational trials were two murder attempts by her husband, died Saturday at age 76. She died at a nursing home in New York, her children said in a statement issued by family spokeswoman Maureen Connelly.

JOSH VILLA was 26 and driving home after a drink with a friend on 28 August 2005 when his car mounted the kerb and flipped over. Villa was thrown through the windscreen, suffered massive head injuries and fell into a coma. Almost a year later, there was little sign of improvement. "He would open his eyes, but he was not responsive to any external stimuli in his environment," says Theresa Pape of the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Chicago, who helped treat him. Usually there is little more that can be done for people in this condition. Villa was...

A court on Thursday dismissed a petition filed by the family of a comatose 75-year-old woman to let her die. Kim’s children said their mother, who survives on life support, had the right to die with dignity so she would not have to continue living a meaningless life and asked for permission to remove the respirator and discontinue injections and feeding. But the Seoul Western District Court said that stopping treatment conflicted with the principle of the absolute value of life, and there was no way to confirm Kim’s own will. The court ruled that even family members do not...

As a lifelong New Yorker and a contemporary of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, I am amazed that Rudy is still fooling so many people in the rest of the country. Rudy is NOT an acceptable presidential candidate for conservatives. Rudy may have been the best conservatives could hope for as a Mayor of liberal New York City, but he's not a true conservative, a moral exemplar or even faithful to his faith. Rudy's hero was Bobby Kennedy. Rudy once said, "Most of [Bill] Clinton's policies are similar to most of mine." When running for mayor, Mr. Giuliani pledged to "rekindle...

"Paulo Melo, 29, has been in a coma at the Royal Darwin Hospital for two weeks, after severing his spinal cord in a car crash." - read more below: doctor requested, family objected, court granted

http://www.yahoo.com/

Of course, Pro-deathers will be quick to keep the Schiavo case in check.

Interesting article about the awareness of vegetative patients. We are not able to post the New Yorker's content, but check out the link. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/15/071015fa_fact_groopman?printable=true

Milan, Italy (LifeNews.com) -- An Italian court has denied a request by a disabled woman's father to remove her feeding tube and authorize her death by starvation and dehydration. Eluana Englaro has been a coma for 15 years after an automobile accident seriously injured her and, this year, her father asked a Milan court for permission to remove her feeding tube. This isn't the first time Englaro's case had been in court. In April 2005, the Italian Supreme Court confirmed a lower court ruling to keep her feeding tube in place. That case had also been brought by Englaro's father,...

ABC News' Bob Woodruff Reports: Senator Tim Johnson, the South Dakota Democrat who suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage last December, will seek reelection in 2008. Johnson greeted South Dakota voters Tuesday, in his first public appearance since falling ill. We continue to wish Johnson well, but now that Johnson decided to seek reelection it's time for the gloves to come off. Johnson won reelection in 2002 by just 524 votes and was a tempting target even before he became ill. Two Republicans, State Representative Joel Dykstra and business man Sam Kephart, are running for Johnson's seat.

A study by the Coma Science Group of the University of Liège, Belgium, finds that up to half of patients in an acute vegetative state regain some level of consciousness.In the study, which analyzed data collected over a five-year period, researchers assessed and classified comatose patients according to the Coma Recovery Scale. The researchers determined that some 40 percent had been incorrectly diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, when they were in fact in a minimally conscious state. And 10 percent of those diagnosed as being minimally conscious were communicating functionally.A patient who is minimally conscious shows periodic...

Two short weeks after the culmination of a legal battle between his wife and family over whether to maintain his life support, Jesse Ramirez of Arizona appears to be on the road to recovery. According to local reports, Ramirez, 36, suffered traumatic brain injury in a May 30 car accident, which put him in a coma. He had been in this minimally-conscious state for a little more than a week when doctors informed his wife that he may never recover -- and she made the decision to have his feeding and water tubes removed. Ramirez's family made a legal appeal...