Free Republic

ROME (Reuters) - An Italian pensioner committed suicide after his wife fell into a coma, but just hours after he killed himself the woman woke up, Italian media reported on Saturday. Recalling the end of "Romeo and Juliet," the 70-year-old man, Ettore, who had sat by his wife's bedside for four months after she slipped into a coma following a heart attack, finally gave up hope and gassed himself in the garage of his family home. Less than a day later, his wife, Rossana, woke up in her hospital bed in Padua and immediately asked for him. The northern town...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Sri Lankan hangman Suranimala has never seen an execution, confesses the sight of the gallows makes him a little nervous and lacks the most crucial tool of his trade -- a rope. The slight, soft-spoken 24-year-old has spent his first three years in the job pushing papers in the chief jailer's office at Welikada prison in Colombo, but all that is about to change. Sri Lanka reactivated its dormant death penalty last month after a near 30-year-lull to combat a surge in grisly crimes and contract killings, which means it is now finally time for...

A Good Way to Lose Subscribers... Thu Jan 22, 8:44 AM ET LONDON (Reuters) - A hiking magazine apologized on Thursday after it published a route plan that would have sent walkers striding into thin air off the north face of Britain's largest mountain, Ben Nevis. The magazine, Trail, missed out a vital bearing needed to guide climbers off the summit of the Scottish mountain in bad weather. Anyone who had followed the magazine's directions would have plunged down a sheer cliff into nearby Gardyloo Gully. Editor Guy Procter, himself a keen hillwalker, said that Trail published 200 routes every...