`A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.
[..] President Bush in December said “30,000, more or less” had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since. [..]
This study, “The Human Cost of the War in Iraq,” puts civilian fatalities at 426,369 to 793,663, with a 95% certainty that the figure falls in that range, and the highest probability given to the figure of 601,027.’
`A death-row inmate held in solitary confinement in Vietnam for almost a year is pregnant and is seeking a pardon to give birth, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
The Lao Dong newspaper quoted a police doctor as saying tests in September confirmed that convicted heroin trafficker Nguyen Thi Oanh, 39, was then 11 weeks pregnant.
The report said it was the first time that a death-row prisoner had become pregnant in Vietnam and that police were investigating how it had happened.’
`Greek authorities have denied knowledge of an alleged incident in which Greek officials threw illegal immigrants into the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey. On Tuesday morning, some 31 illegals were plucked out of the sea near the Turkish coastal city of Izmir. They claimed that the Greek Coast Guard had thrown them into the water. They did so, said one survivor, “without even asking if we could swim,” according to Turkey’s state-owned Anatolia news agency. Six people have reportedly drowned; three are missing.
Greek officials denied the charges in general terms. “We never throw people into the sea,” said Haris Bournias, a Greek Coast Guard commander on the island of Chios. [..]’
`A fugitive gunman accused of killing a Florida sheriff’s deputy was shot 68 times by SWAT team officers who found him hiding in the woods, according to autopsy results.
Police fired 110 shots at Angilo Freeland, 27, the target of a massive manhunt in central Florida following the shooting death of Polk County Sheriff’s Deputy Matt Williams Thursday.
“That’s all the bullets we had, or we would have shot him more,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told the Orlando Sentinel newspaper.’
`Venezuela President Hugo Chavez said Sunday he has received warnings from within the White House that the Bush administration is plotting to assassinate him or topple his left-leaning government.
Citing what he said were warnings from an alleged White House informant, Chavez told thousands of supporters at a campaign rally that President Bush has ordered him to be killed before he leaves office in 2008.
Bush “has said that before he goes, Hugo Chavez shouldn’t be the president of Venezuela,” Chavez told the crowd. “The president of the United States has said it, especially in recent days. What he doesn’t know is that I have friends in the White House.”‘
`Security forces took over a Guatemalan prison controlled for more than 10 years by inmates who produced drugs, lived in spacious homes with luxury goods and even rented space for stores and restaurants.
Seven prisoners died when 3,000 police and soldiers firing automatic weapons stormed the Pavon prison just after dawn Monday. Inmates, some carrying grenades, fired back. [..]
Prisoners had set up laboratories to produce cocaine, crack and liquor inside Pavon, on the edge of the town of Fraijanes.’
`A baby died after rolling off a bed and falling into a bucket of her teenage mother’s vomit at a homeless shelter, police said.
The mother, Savarin DeJesus, 18, was charged with criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of a child, and could get five years behind bars. [..]
Authorities said DeJesus spent the evening of Sept. 15 downing gin and smoking cigarettes and then returned before dawn to the shelter where she lived with the 4-month old girl, Niah. DeJesus threw up into a bucket of cleaning solution next to her bed, then passed out on the bed, clutching Niah’s legs, authorities said.’
`A teddy bear has been implicated in 2,500 deaths — trout deaths, that is.
State officials say a teddy bear that fell into a pool at a Fish and Game Department hatchery earlier this month clogged a drain. The clog blocked the flow of oxygen to the pool and suffocated the fish.
Hatcheries supervisor Robert Fawcett said the bear, dressed in yellow raincoat and hat, is believed to be the first stuffed toy to cause fatalities at the facility.’
`A car hit a dirt hill at high speed and flew 200 feet into the second story of an apartment building on Tuesday, killing the driver, police said.
Two people in separate apartments at the time of the 9 a.m. crash escaped injury, and there were no injuries on the street.
Investigators did not know what led the driver, Vincent Pontillo Jr., to speed down a dead-end street. His 2004 Honda Accord, which was launched from a 4-foot dirt hill, penetrated the building up to its rear bumper, police spokesman Officer William Fairchild said.’
`An armed gang of suspected drug traffickers wearing ski masks threw five human heads onto the dance floor of a bar in western Mexico Wednesday in an apparent revenge killing, prosecutors said.
Wielding hand guns and rifles, some 20 men dressed in black drove up to the Luz y Sombra (Light and Shade) bar in the city of Uruapan, barged into the club and fired shots in the air.
They forced late-night revelers to lie on the floor and pulled the five male heads out of plastic bags, dumping them on the dance floor along with a handwritten message, a spokesman for the Michoacan state prosecutors’ office said. [..]
The message said the attack was “divine justice.”’
`An angry mob fatally beat a man whom they mistakenly thought was involved in the disappearance of their friend, shortly before police arrested and charged another person in the crime, police said.
Union County Sheriff’s deputies found Tony Lorin Blakeney at his home with serious injuries Friday. He later died at a hospital.
Ten men, ages 16 to 30, were charged with murder in the attack. They were being held without bond until an October 4 court date.
“This is the worst beating attack I’ve ever seen,” Sheriff Eddie Cathey said.’
`A military shell given to a group of children by a neighbor exploded while they played with it, killing two children and injuring five others, police and witnesses said.
Police were investigating the cause of Tuesday’s explosion, which damaged homes and forced neighbors to wrap bloodied and dazed children in blankets. [..]
Sendejo told The Bakersfield Californian that he thought the shell was spent and often used it as a “conversation piece.” He said the firing pin and bottom shell casing had been removed, along with the gun powder inside.
“I thought it was harmless,” he told the newspaper.’
`[..] In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq’s Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.
As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere. Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces.’
`Evangelist preacher Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle.
But he drowned after walking out to sea from a beach in the capital Libreville in Gabon, west Africa.
One eyewitness said: “He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus.
“He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat.
“He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”‘
`Striptease send-offs at funerals may become a thing of the past in east China after five people were arrested for organizing the intimate farewells, state media reported on Wednesday.
Police swooped last week after two groups of strippers gave “obscene performances” at a farmer’s funeral in Donghai County, Jiangsu province, Xinhua news agency said.
The disrobing served a higher purpose, the report noted.
“Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai’s rural areas to allure viewers,” it said. “Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honored.”‘
`Raccoons are cute, until they kill one of your cats.
That is what a west Olympia neighborhood is learning this summer.
Raccoons have killed about 10 cats in a three-block area near the Garfield Nature Trail at Harrison Avenue West and Foote Street Southwest.
Problem wildlife coordinator Sean Carrell of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife called the situation “bizarre, weird.”‘
`A birthday party went horribly wrong yesterday when a goat at the Winnipeg Zoo was killed by its herd in front of the birthday girl.
Terry Geiger and her boyfriend had taken Geiger’s daughter, Angie, and a friend to the zoo for the six-year-old’s birthday when two Alpine ibex goats started fighting in the enclosure in front of them.
“At first it was entertaining,” Geiger said. “It was like watching the Discovery Channel but it just got worse and worse.”‘
`A suspect has been arrested “for the December 26, 1996, murder of JonBenet Ramsey,” the district attorney in Boulder, Colorado, said Wednesday.
A law enforcement source identified the suspect as 41-year-old John Mark Karr, a one-time school teacher and American citizen who has lived in Conyers, Georgia.
It is the first arrest in the decade-long investigation of child beauty pageant contestant’s slaying. The breakthrough came as a surprise to many who feared the case might never be solved.’
`Indian TV journalists keen for a story encouraged a protester to burn himself to death, giving him matches and fuel, a report quoting police in India said.
The journalists in the eastern state of Bihar kept the cameras rolling as Manoj Mishra, who was demanding back pay, suffered 90 per cent burns to his body, The Indian Express newspaper said.
Police later filed a case against the journalists, accusing them of abetting suicide, the daily said.’
`The body of a graduate student who disappeared in the ocean Thursday while trying to capture a 300-pound green sea turtle was found floating Monday near Sebastian Inlet, about a half-mile south of where he was last seen grabbing onto the back of the giant reptile.
Brevard County sheriff’s Detective Gary Harrell said Boyd Lyon’s body was spotted from a helicopter about 11:30 a.m. 300 yards off the coast. The body yielded no clues as to what happened to the 37-year-old research student who had found a niche in the “hand capture” of male sea turtles.
“There’s no indication to suggest what happened to him,” Harrell said.’
followup to Man Missing After Pulled Into Ocean By Turtle.
`A 32-year-old man banging on a window to get people’s attention died when the glass shattered and cut a major artery in his arm, the Sauk County Sheriff’s Department said.
Jerry Baruffi, of Pleasant Prairie, was at a family reunion at Devil’s Head Resort, said Jim Schmidt, a relative from Chicago. He pounded on a window next to the indoor pool about 10:30 p.m. Saturday when the glass shattered, he said.’
`A Brazilian man died when he tried to open what police believe was a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer in a mechanical workshop on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
Another man who was in the workshop at the time of the explosion was rushed to a hospital with severe burns, a police officer told Reuters.
The workshop was destroyed and several cars parked outside caught fire.’
`Authorities in Orlando, Fla., continued a search Friday for several men who threatened to kill some restaurant employees unless they dropped their pants during a robbery, according to a Local 6 News report.
Orlando police said the unidentified men forced employees into a room with a safe at the Wing House restaurant located on Kirkman Road Wednesday and forced them take off their pants.
The culprits escaped with nearly $3,000 in cash, police said.’
`A woman trying to conquer her fear of heights by skydiving has died after the plane she was to jump from crashed.
Victoria Delacroix, 22, from Beckenham, London, was killed with five others on Saturday in Dittmer, Missouri, US.
The twin-engine light aircraft carrying the skydiving group nose dived and crashed soon after take-off.’
`Victims of the disastrous “Elephant Man” drugs trial have been told they face contracting cancer and other fatal diseases as a result of being poisoned in the bungled tests.
One of the six victims was told last week he is already showing “definite early signs” of lymphatic cancer.
He and three others have also been warned that they are “highly likely” to develop incurable auto-immune diseases.’
followup to Two drug trial men critically ill.
`A man was arrested on charges of practicing medicine without a license after a woman died during a liposuction procedure performed in the basement of a home, authorities said Monday.
Luis Carlos Rebeiro, a native of Brazil, was to be arraigned in district court on Monday following the death of a 23-year-old woman Sunday. [..]
Police also charged Rebeiro with drug possession. A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said she did not know what type of drugs.’
`A man has died after accidentally shooting himself in the groin while driving his car, causing him to smash into a power pole in Melbourne.
Police say it appears the 38-year-old man was carrying a loaded firearm, which accidentally discharged.’
`The attacks started last August, but it has taken several months for the police to realise that there seem to be two separate assailants on the loose. [..]
Most local people believe the two killers are involved in a deadly game of one-upmanship. When one strikes, the other follows.
“The sooner they are caught, the better it is for this whole city,” says Justin Schneider, wearing a red beret as he patrols the park. The 21-year-old is a Guardian Angel – one of 30 volunteers now trying to restore calm on the streets of Phoenix. [..]
“You can’t have two guys on the loose, seeing who can kill the most innocent people,” Mr Schneider says.’
`Nobel peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren.
Campaigning on the rights of young people at the Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Ms Williams spoke passionately about the deaths of innocent children during wartime, particularly in the Middle East, and lambasted Mr Bush.
“I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence’, because I don’t believe that I am non-violent,” said Ms Williams, 64.
“Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.” Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.’
`Israel said today it regretted the deaths of four UN military observers in southern Lebanon and would investigate the air strike that killed them.
“Israel sincerely regrets the tragic death of the U.N. personnel in south Lebanon,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
“We do not target UN personnel and, since the beginning of this conflict, we have made a consistent effort to ensure the safety of all members of (the UN peacekeeping force). This tragic event will be thoroughly investigated,” Mr Regev said.’
