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CHICAGO (AFP) — Grave robbers stripped at least 300 plots at a historic black cemetery outside Chicago, dumped many of the bodies and then resold the plots for a profit, officials said Thursday. The years-long scheme was carried out by the cemetery's manager and three gravediggers who sold the "used" graves so they could pocket the fees rather than pass them along to the Arizona-based owners. "This was not done in a very delicate way," Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart said at a press conference. "They would excavate a grave, excavate the entire site and then they would proceed to...

Debt collectors are dunning the dead, seeking payment from deceased debtors or their next-of-kin by using sophisticated databases that scan probate court records and other information sources as a way to bolster revenues in depressing economic times, according to news reports. The New York Times is reporting that though many banks may need a bailout and some homeowners can't make their mortgage payments, the departed are definitely paying down their part of the debt. Post-mortem harassment is the latest trend in debt collecting, and one of the thriving parts of the reviled industry. In Minneapolis, Minn., teams of debt agents...

Federal regulators have green-lighted the first trial of an embryonic stem-cell treatment in humans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the go-ahead for Geron Corporation to start a phase I safety trial of its therapy GRNOPC1 for spinal cord injuries, the Menlo Park, Calif.–based company announced today. It first sought permission for the trial four years ago and spent much of the last year trying to satisfy the FDA’s concerns about it. "This marks the beginning of what is potentially a new chapter in medical therapeutics—one that reaches beyond pills to a new level of healing: the restoration...

Two former Philadelphia funeral directors on Tuesday admitted to selling cadavers to a ring that cut them up and sold the body parts to hospitals for implants. Gerald Garzone and his brother Louis Garzone pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired with others to take bones, skin and organs from 244 bodies in their funeral homes between February 2004 and September 2005. They were part of a scheme that plundered 1,077 bodies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania without the permission of relatives in an operation that netted the conspirators $3.8 million. One of the bodies belonged to Alistair...

Analysts used to joke about waiting for the results from cemetery precincts in Chicago before calling elections. In Louisiana, that may be closer to the truth than one might imagine. WBRZ reports on a voter registration scandal that had Democrats submitting thousands of fraudulent enrollments, included George W. Bush and a bunch of dead people:Secretary of State Jay Dardenne said Tuesday he will meet today with a Democrat-affiliated group responsible for a voter registration effort that is inundating East Baton Rouge and other parish registrars with bogus and incomplete applications.Dardenne said his investigators are trying to determine if any state...

Albuquerque, N.M. (AP) -- Working in secret, federal archaeologists have dug up the remains of dozens of soldiers and children near a Civil War-era fort after an informant tipped them off about widespread grave-looting. The exhumations, conducted from August to October, removed 67 skeletons from the parched desert soil around Fort Craig — 39 men, two women and 26 infants and children, according to two federal archaeologists who helped with the dig. They also found scores of empty graves and determined 20 had been looted. The government kept its exhumation of the unmarked cemetery near the historic New Mexico fort...

London - Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday threw his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to remove organs from dead patients without explicit consent. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Mr. Brown said such a move would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year. The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of a national register or family members objected.

Found in a farmer's field: The 2,000-year-old skeleton of the lost lady of Rome By CHRIS BROOKE Last updated at 09:14am on 23rd November 2007 In her lifetime she was a member of a wealthy family based in a bustling British outpost of the world's mightiest empire. The imperial glory has long faded. But, almost 2,000 years on, archaeologists have discovered a corner of an English field that is forever Rome. They have unearthed a coffin containing a remarkably well-preserved skeleton in the village of Aldborough, near Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire - once the site of a major Roman town, Isurium...

After she died in 1824 at the age of 30, Sarah Symonds rested in an out-of-the-way cemetery in the small town of Hillsborough, N.H., for more than 180 years. But sometime around Halloween her sleep was disturbed. Someone dug up her coffin and her remains, leaving behind only a few shards of wood, a meticulously dug hole, and a mystery for the local police. "It was dug in a very strange manner. It's perfect," said Hillsborough Police Chief Brian Brown. "You'd have to see it. The sides are all squared. The bottom's level." "We just don't have any answers right...

(LONDON) — Chinese medical officials agreed Friday not to transplant organs from prisoners or others in custody, except into members of their immediate families. The agreement was reached at a meeting of the World Medical Association in Copenhagen. China has previously acknowledged that kidneys, livers, corneas and other organs are routinely removed from prisoners sentenced to death row. But officials insist that this only happens when consent is provided. Critics argue that death-row prisoners are not truly free to consent and may feel compelled to become donors, violating personal, religious or cultural beliefs. The announcement Friday comes after several years...

Jim Livingston never gave much thought to the bone transplanted in his neck until that Sunday afternoon when his doctor called to tell him about the recall."Do they want it back?" he asked, half-jokingly.Quickly it became clear that this was no laughing matter.Bone allegedly stolen from a corpse had been used in Livingston's neck to relieve the pain of a ruptured disk.With that bit of news, the 44-year-old Weatherford father joined hundreds of others nationwide who are living with the knowledge that they carry bones and tissue taken illegally from cadavers in what has become a bizarre tale of selling...

700-year-old tree coffin discovered in Quang Tri 17:43' 04/09/2007 (GMT+7) VietNamNet Bridge – The Quang Tri Museum has recently received an ancient coffin made from a tree trunk, according to the museum’s director, Mai Truong Manh. The coffin was discovered on August 28 in Trung Chi village, Dong Luong ward, Dong Ha commune at 1.2 m underground when local residents were digging for the construction of an electricity post. The coffin is 2.25 m in length, 0.49 m in width and 0.28 m in height with the body and lid skillfully done. According to experts, burying the dead in tree...

Doors will soon open to reveal one of the mysteries of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News in an exclusive interview... "Finally, people all over the world will know what is behind the second door in the southern shaft and the third door in the northern shaft," Hawass said... [T]hese 8-inch square shafts remained unexplored until 1993, when German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink sent a robot through the southern shaft. Nine years later, Hawass performed an investigation of the southern shaft on live television. As the world held its...

The three men arrested for allegedly digging up the grave of a woman who died last week in Grant County are also charged with attempted sexual assault. The three men appeared in Grant County Circuit Court on Tuesday. According to a criminal complaint, the three men were charged with digging up the grave at the St. Charles Catholic Cemetery in Cassville with the intent to have sex with the victim's body, WISC-TV reported. Alexander Grunke, his twin brother Nicholas Grunke and their friend Dustin Radke -- all 20 years old -- have been in a Grant County jail since Saturday....

Calling all truth activists! Come to NYC for a weekend that will change the world with events which commemorate the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and expose 5 years of official deception. Just like the neocons have used 9/11 as an "opportunity to refashion the world", according to Donald Rumsfeld, let's use the opportunity of the 5th anniversary to inform the world that we're a huge constituency who seeks to honor the victims by pursuing the truth and calling for justice. It has been 5 years too long for truth and justice! We must do all we can to...

I.R.S. to Cut Tax AuditorsBy DAVID CAY JOHNSTON Published: July 23, 2006 The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others. The administration plans to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, in less than 70 days. Kevin Brown, an I.R.S. deputy commissioner, confirmed the cuts after The...

Senators voted Thursday to reject a Republican effort to abolish taxes on inherited estates during an election year with control of Congress at stake. GOP leaders had pushed senators to permanently eliminate the estate tax, which disappears in 2010 under President Bush's first tax cut, but rears up again a year later. A 57-41 vote fell three votes short of advancing the bill. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the Senate will vote again this year on a tax that opponents call the "death tax." "Getting rid of the death tax is just too important an issue to give...

Three animal rights extremists involved in the theft of the body of an elderly woman from her grave were yesterday jailed for 12 years each in what is seen by police and prosecutors as a groundbreaking case.The militants, including a vicar's son and a psychiatric nurse, led what they called a "holocaust" against a farm which bred guinea pigs for medical research. Jon Ablewhite, John Smith and Kerry Whitburn pursued a six-year hate campaign against Darley Oaks farm in Newchurch, Staffordshire. Whitburn's girlfriend, Josephine Mayo, was sentenced to four years for a lesser part in the campaign. Almost 100 people...

The law requires that any resident of the Nutmeg State with an estate of more than $2 million pay a death tax of up to 16%--merely for the privilege of dying in Connecticut. The legislators in Hartford hope that the tax will raise $150 million in revenue each year--money that will come in only if the legislators in Hartford are also planning to build a Berlin Wall around the state. Otherwise, expect a stampede of retirees and family businesses out of Connecticut into the many states without a death tax, such as Florida, which has a constitutional prohibition against estate...

Death and Taxes The House votes to eliminate the inheritance tax. by Irwin M. Stelzer 05/09/2005, Volume 010, Issue 32 SEVERAL YEARS AGO I SUGGESTED in these pages that it would be good conservative policy to raise, rather than lower, inheritance taxes. After all, American conservatives, traditional and neo, believe in a meritocracy in which material success should depend mostly on our own efforts and accomplishments, rather than those of our ancestors. But Congress disagrees. Or at least the House does. It has voted to eliminate inheritance taxes permanently, and the Senate now has to decide whether to go along....