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Suicide

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92
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SEE ALSO: Canton; Suicide
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Jan 2005Average number of suicides per 100,000 residents in states carried by President Bush in November : 13.5
Source:

Michael Miller, Harvard Medical School (Boston)/Harper's research

Nov 2004Ratio of suicides worldwide in 2001 to war deaths : 7:2
Source:

World Health Organization (Geneva, Switzerland)

Sep 2003 Chance that an American believes that "suicide is an acceptable solution in certain circumstances": 1 in 4
Source:

Harris Interactive (Rochester, N.Y.)

Dec 2002Number of "sub-harm" suicide "gestures" made this year by detainees held at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay: 30
Source:

Joint Task Force 160, U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Jan 2002Ratio of the number of U.S. soldiers killed by hostile fire since 1990 to the number who have committed suicide: 1:5
Source:

U.S. Army (Arlington, Va.)

Jul 2001Rank of cancer and suicide, respectively, among the top causes of death of Japanese bureaucrats last year: 1, 2
Source:

Embassy of Japan (Washington)

Aug 1999Chance that a student death at school in the last year was a suicide: 1 in 5
Source:

The National School Safety Center (Westlake Village, Calif.)

Feb 1999Percentage change since 1997 in the number of South Korean suicides: +36
Source:

Korean Institute of Criminology (Seoul)

May 1998Number of New York City pedestrians splattered with blood last winter after a suicide's 17-story jump: 3
Source:

Bellevue Hospital Center (N.Y.C.)

May 1998Factor by which the average suicide rate in a city where gambling is legal exceeds that in a city where it is not: 2
Source:

Professor David P. Phillips, University of California at San Diego (La Jolla, Calif.)

October 12, 9:00 PM , 2020A suicide bomber killed 43 people at a food-distribution center for refugees in Pakistan, and researchers determined that Al-Qaeda is profitable.
Source 1:

VOA

Source 2:

NYT

December 25, 2015Two suicide bombings killed 44 people in Damascus; Syrian state television claimed that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks, while opposition leaders claimed Bashar al-Assad's regime was responsible.
Source 1:

BBC

Source 2:

CNN

December 7, 2011A Bolivian teenager was reported to have committed suicide by piranha.
Source:

Daily Mail

November 2, 2011Newfoundland lieutenant-governor John Crosbie apologized for telling a joke in which a caller to a suicide hotline in Pakistan is asked whether he can drive a truck, and an Iranian judiciary official said that two of his country’s soccer players, accused of inappropriate celebratory behavior after one pressed his hand between the other’s buttocks following a goal, may be publicly lashed on the field where the incident took place. “When I was playing in Germany,” said former national-team member Mehdi Mahdavikia of the groping, “such things happened all the time.”
Source 1:

Globe and Mail

Source 2:

Washington Post

October 30, 2011A Taliban suicide bomber rammed a Toyota Corolla loaded with an estimated 1,500 pounds of explosives into an armored bus in Kabul, killing 17 people; the Taliban killed three civilians and a policeman in a suicide attack then seized an animal clinic in Kandahar; and Abdisalan Hussein Ali, 22, a former pre-med student at the University of Minnesota, blew himself up in a suicide attack on African Union troops in Mogadishu. “Don't just sit around, you know,” said Ali in an audio suicide note that was posted online, “and be, you know, a couch potato and just like, just chill all day.”
Source 1:

Guardian

Source 2:

Guardian

Source 3:

New York Times

Source 4:

New York Times

October 20, 2011A Zanesville, Ohio, man freed 56 exotic animals from his private zoo and then committed suicide. As townspeople hid indoors, deputies captured or shot lions and tigers and bears. “There was a loss of life here, and we thank God it was not human life,” said Columbus Zoo director emeritus Jack Hanna. “It was animal life, and that's my life.” A herpetic macaque remained at large, but was presumed eaten by a big cat.
Source 1:

Columbus Dispatch

Source 2:

CNN

September 5, 2011A pipeline exploded in Nairobi, killing at least 75; a bomb exploded near the Delhi High Court in India, killing 11; two suicide bombers attacked the home of a high-ranking military officer in Quetta, Pakistan, killing 23; and 24 people were shot in as many hours in New York City.
Source 1:

AP

Source 2:

BBC

Source 3:

AP

Source 4:

Daily News

August 26, 2011A car bomb set off by a Boko Haram suicide attacker at the United Nations’ headquarters in Nigeria killed 23 people, a suicide attack on a Sunni mosque in Baghdad killed 28, and former vice-president Dick Cheney predicted that heads would be “exploding all over Washington’’ when his memoir is released on August 30. In the book, Cheney reveals that he was unconscious for several weeks following a 2010 heart attack, expresses regret that the Bush administration didn’t bomb Syria, and details friction in the federal government in the days after 9/11. “Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma asked why the executive branch had the right to decide when members of Congress, a coequal branch of government, could come back to Washington,” Cheney writes, adding that he answered, “Because we’ve got the helicopters, Don.”
Source 1:

NPR

Source 2:

Channel 6 news

Source 3:

Washington Post

Source 4:

LA Times

Source 5:

Politico

August 12, 2011The U.S. Army reported that 32 soldiers committed suicide during the month of July, the highest number since figures started being released in 2009.
Source:

Washington Post

August 10, 2011A series of explosions in more than 15 Iraqi cities killed at least 60 people, six suicide bombers killed 22 people in an attack on a provincial governor's compound in Afghanistan, and an F-16 strike wiped out the Taliban insurgents who killed 38 Afghan and U.S. troops in a rocket attack on a helicopter.
Source 1:

AP via NOLA.com

Source 2:

AP via Globe and Mail

Source 3:

AP

July 17, 2011An Afghan police officer assassinated Ahmed Wali Karzai, half brother of president Hamid Karzai and the de facto governor of Afghanistan’s Kandahar region, whom U.S. officials suspected of having connections to the opium trade. During a memorial service for Karzai at a local mosque, a suicide bomber detonated explosives hidden in his turban, killing three. Another suicide bomber killed a close aide to President Karzai. The United Nations reported that the first six months of this year have been the deadliest for civilians in Afghanistan since the U.S. invaded in 2001, and NATO representatives held a private ceremony in Bamiyan Province to begin handing over responsibility for the country’s security to Afghan forces.
Source 1:

New York Times

Source 2:

New York Times

Source 3:

Reuters

June 29, 2011Protests in Greece, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain were met with violence from government forces, and 21 people were killed during a suicide assault on the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul. Among the dead were the nine attackers, one of whom provided cell phone updates of the siege to the Taliban, which claimed 50 of its targets had died.
Source 1:

Associated Press

Source 2:

Al Jazeera English

Source 3:

Al Jazeera English

Source 4:

Associated Press

Source 5:

Associated Press

June 3, 2011Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian, who participated in more than 130 assisted suicides before a 2000 murder conviction, died of natural causes at 83, and Queenie, the world's only waterskiing elephant, was euthanized at 59.
Source 1:

McKnight's

Source 2:

The Guardian

April 21, 2011Researchers determined that the happiest states have the highest suicide rates. “If humans are subject to mood swings,” said Dr. Andrew Oswald, “the lows of life may thus be most tolerable in an environment in which other humans are unhappy.”
Source:

Science Daily

February 15, 2011Sheyla Hershey, whose fake breasts were the world’s largest before doctors had to remove the implants, attempted suicide the night before she was scheduled to have an operation to return her to a size KKK.
Source:

Sun

January 29, 2011In China, where the suicide rate among senior citizens was found to have tripled over the past decade, the Civil Affairs Ministry introduced legislation that would require adult children to regularly visit their elderly parents.
Source:

New York Times

January 24, 2011A suicide bomber struck Moscow's Domodedovo airport, killing as many as 34 people and leaving at least 168 injured. “From the preliminary information we have, it was a terror attack,” said Russian president Dmitry Medvedev in a televised briefing. Former Department of Homeland Security official Stephen A. Baker noted, “They’d like to be bombing planes and they can’t, so they’re bombing airports.” Artyom Zhilenkov, a taxi driver, claimed he was about 10 yards from the bomber, a short, dark man carrying a suitcase. “How did I manage to save myself? I don’t know,” he said. “The people behind me on my left and right were blown apart. Maybe because of that.”
Source 1:

NYTimes

Source 2:

NPR

November 15, 2010President Obama announced plans for U.S. combat troops to withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014, though NATO representatives predicted the country would still be facing “eye-watering” levels of violence, and Target, a dog rescued from Afghanistan after she alerted troops to a suicide bomber and saved dozens of soldiers, was accidentally euthanized at an Arizona shelter.
Source 1:

AP via MSNBC

Source 2:

The Guardian

Source 3:

CNN

November 1, 2010As Iraqi forces stormed a church in Baghdad, gunmen holding hostages there set off two suicide vests filled with ball bearings, killing 58 and wounding 75 more. “It's a horrible scene,“ said Iraqi police officer Hussain Nahidh. ”Many people went to the hospitals without legs and hands.“ Iraqi defense minister Abdul-Kader Jassem al-Obeidi called it ”a successful operation with a minimum of casualties.“ The militant group Islamic State of Iraq called the church “the dirty den of idolatry” and promised further attacks against Iraqi Christians.
Source:

New York Times

October 28, 2010Afghan President Hamid Karzai wept about bombs and suicide attacks during a televised speech at a high school. “I'm worried, oh people, I'm worried,” he said about his three-year-old son. “God forbid Mirwais should be forced to leave Afghanistan.”
Source:

BBC South Asia

May 26, 2010A 19-year-old became the ninth worker to commit suicide this year at the Chinese factory that manufactures the Apple iPad, and the U.S. was running out of both IP addresses and the paint used for highway divider stripes.
Source 1:

Christian Science Monitor

Source 2:

CNN

Source 3:

Yahoo News

May 13, 2010A middle-aged landlord in the Chinese city of Hanzhong was overheard complaining about his rent on his way to a kindergarten, where he used a cleaver to hack to death a teacher, her mother, and seven children before returning home and committing suicide;
Source:

NYT

April 4, 2010Three suicide car bombs exploded in quick succession near foreign embassies in Baghdad, killing at least 41 people, injuring hundreds, tossing sections of 12-foot-tall walls down the street, blasting birds out of the air, and leaving human bones scattered about.
Source:

New York Times

March 29, 2010Nine teenagers were charged with crimes including statutory rape, stalking, and harassment in relation to the suicide of fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince, a pretty Irish freshman at Massachusetts' South Hadley High School. In January, Prince, who briefly dated a popular senior on the football team, hanged herself with her scarf after months of being bullied by her ex and a gaggle of mean girls; several hours after Prince died, one of the accused posted “accomplished” to Prince's Facebook page. “What a rotten little town we have,” said local resident Donna Tower.
Source 1:

Boston Herald

Source 2:

New York Times

March 24, 2010The Indian military planned to make grenades out of the bhut jolokia, the world's spiciest chili pepper, and British intelligence claimed Al Qaeda was equipping female suicide bombers with nearly undetectable, exploding breast implants.
Source 1:

AP

Source 2:

Fox News

March 14, 2010Two suicide bombs in a market in Lahore, Pakistan, killed at least 55 people, a rickshaw bomb killed 13 in the Pakistani town of Saidu Sharif, and 35 people were killed in a series of Taliban attacks in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Source 1:

NYT

Source 2:

NYT

Source 3:

NYT

Source 4:

AFP via Rawstory

February 28, 2010One of Marie Osmond's eight children committed suicide,.
Source:

New York Times

February 4, 2010In Afghanistan's Helmand Province, the Taliban were ambushing the American military using “ancient signaling techniques”; three people were killed and 17 wounded in a suicide-bomb attack in Kandahar, and a drone strike killed 29 presumed terrorists in northwestern Pakistan, where the Taliban were stalking American soldiers and their hired mercenaries. “We know the movement of U.S. Marines and Blackwater guys,” said a spokesman for the group. “We have prepared suicide bombers to go after them.”
Source 1:

NY Times

Source 2:

BBC News

Source 3:

CNN

Source 4:

CNN

February 4, 2010 Muslim doctors were fitting women with exploding breast implants for use in suicide attacks.
Source:

World Net Daily via Drudge

January 1, 2010 Suicide bombers killed seven people at a CIA base in Afghanistan, 88 people at a volleyball tournament in Pakistan, and 25 people in Iraq's Anbar province.
Source:

Washington Post

December 7, 2009In Iraq, the announcement by the Presidency Council that parliamentary elections would take place on March 6 was immediately followed by five bomb blasts in Baghdad--at least three of them by suicide attackers--killing more than 120 people. At a mosque in northeast Baghdad, a woman, her arms and legs burned by an explosion, shouted, “Are we cursed? When will we be finished with this election issue?”
Source:

NY Times

October 30, 2009Abdullah Abdullah, presidential challenger to Hamid Karzai, announced that he was quitting the runoff election. In a choked-up voice he cited concerns about increased violence in Afghanistan and outrage at the fraudulent election process. The election was cancelled and Karzai was declared president. More U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in October than in any month since that war began eight years ago. A suicide bombing by Taliban militants killed six U.N. staff, and Major General Mike Flynn, director of intelligence for General Stanley McChrystal's headquarters in Kabul, warned that the number of insurgents in Afghanistan (many of whom were from other countries) was now between 19,000 and 27,000, a ten-fold increase since 2004. “I wouldn't say it's out of control right now,” Flynn explained, “but this is a California wildfire and we're having to bring in firemen from New York.”
Source 1:

New York Times

Source 2:

Washington Post

Source 3:

Associated Press

Source 4:

Airforce Times

October 12, 2009As the United States marked the eighth anniversary of its war in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal asked President Barack Obama to send 40,000 more troops there. Senator John McCain was in favor of the surge, while Vice President Joe Biden argued for unmanned drones. Within days of Pakistan's announcing a new anti-Taliban offensive in Waziristan, the tribal area that borders Afghanistan, a suicide bomber dressed as a paramilitary officer blew himself up inside a U.N. aid agency in Islamabad, two car bombs killed dozens in markets in Peshawar, and ten gunmen disguised in army fatigues attacked the country's military headquarters, holding 45 hostages until a commando raid freed 42 of them; the remaining hostages and nine of the militants were killed.
Source 1:

AP via Yahoo News

Source 2:

foxnews.com

Source 3:

AP via Yahoo News

Source 4:

AP via Yahoo News

July 5, 2009Former Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair was found dead in Nashville, possibly a victim of a murder-suicide by his girlfriend.
Source 1:

Tennessean

Source 2:

Dallas Morning News

June 20, 2009A suicide bombing at a mosque in northern Iraq killed 67 people and wounded about 200.
Source:

VOA News

June 2, 2009A 31-year-old Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo Bay who had been imprisoned since 2002 committed suicide. Pentagon officials would not provide details about the detainee's death, but it is known that he was on a hunger strike and thus held in the psychiatric ward, where he was force-fed in a restraint chair and likely kept sedated. “They harbored some hope that President Obama would move swiftly to resolve the situation,” said David Remes, a lawyer who represents 16 other Yemeni detainees, “but they can’t see any progress so far or any light at the end of the tunnel.”
Source:

New York Times

May 24, 2009Daniel Carasso, the 103-year-old Catalan who popularized yogurt, died, as did Edwin Shneidman, a 91-year-old authority on suicide, and Wayne Allwine, the actor who voiced Mickey Mouse for 32 years.
Source 1:

New York Times

Source 2:

New York Times

Source 3:

Associated Press

May 23, 2009The former president of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, committed suicide by jumping off a cliff. “Don't be too sad,” wrote Roh, who was accused of corruption, in a note to his wife and two children. “Don't be sorry. Don't blame anyone. Accept it as fate.”
Source:

New York Times

March 23, 2009 Sylvia Plath's son, evolutionary biologist Nicholas Hughes, hanged himself in Alaska.
Source:

The New York Times

March 16, 2009The House of Representatives, reacting to a plan by AIG to pay its executives as much as $218 million in bonuses, voted 328 to 93 in favor of a 90-percent tax on executive bonuses at firms that receive $5 billion or more in federal funds. Eighty-five Republicans voted for the bill despite their party's traditional opposition to tax increases. “The American people,” explained Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), “are all watching here.” “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them,” said Senator Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) of the AIG executives, “if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow, and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things--resign, or go commit suicide.”
Source 1:

Politico

Source 2:

CBCNews.ca

Source 3:

Politico

March 10, 2009In Iraq at least 33 people were killed in a suicide attack at a national reconciliation conference; at a soccer game near Baghdad a player was shot dead attempting to score what would have been the tying goal in the final minute of an amateur game.
Source:

BBC News

February 20, 2009A suicide bomber attacked the funeral of an assassinated local Shia leader in the Pakistani village of Dera Ismail Khan, killing 30 people.
Source:

WP

January 4, 2009A female suicide bomber in Baghdad blew herself up in front of a Shia shrine, killing 37 pilgrims.
Source:

NYT

December 22, 2008A suicide car bomb at a school in Shalbandi, Pakistan, killed more than 30 people, suicide bombs in Afghanistan killed at least 20 people, including 13 schoolchildren, a car bomb in Baghdad killed at least 24 people, and cancer rates were on the rise worldwide.
Source 1:

New York Times

Source 2:

New York Times

Source 3:

New York Times

Source 4:

New York Times

December 22, 2008The abuse by Iraqi soldiers and police of such prescription drugs as Artane and Valium—known on the Iraqi street as “the capsule,” “the cross,” or “the eyebrow”—was on the rise. “We don't commit suicide,” explained an officer, “and that's why we resort to Artane and other drugs.”
Source:

New York Times

December 8, 2008On the last day of Eid al-Adha, or the Festival of Sacrifice, a suicide bomber killed at least 50 people at a restaurant near Kirkuk, Iraq, where local Kurdish and Arab leaders were holding a “meeting of understanding.” Elsewhere, Eid was ruined by the financial crisis. “What does it say about me,” asked Zeinab Mansour, a 32-year-old woman in Cairo buying meat for her Eid meal, “when I have to ask the butcher to give me bones that he used to throw to the dogs?”
Source 1:

LAT

Source 2:

AP via Google

October 3, 2008A Baghdad suicide bomber killed 14 people who had been celebrating the end of Ramadan. “Nobody expects anything like this,” said Jamal Tawfiq, a 28-year-old Iraqi who gathered body parts in a plastic bag.
Source:

New York Times

September 13, 2008Author David Foster Wallace committed suicide,.
Source:

Los Angeles Times

August 21, 2008The United States agreed to an “aspirational timetable” that calls for troops to be removed from Iraq by December 31, 2011; west of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed 25 people at a neighborhood celebration.
Source:

The New York Times

August 21, 2008 Suicide bombers blew up a munitions factory in Wah, Pakistan, killing at least 63 people.
Source:

BBC News

August 5, 2008The U.S. Army failed to censor a new medical textbook that teaches updated military surgical practices and depicts blast amputations, dead children, and a suicide bomber's rib embedded in a soldier. “There was never any doubt in my mind that the Army would publish this,” said Dr. Stephen P. Hetz, a retired colonel and the book's co-author. “It was just a matter of getting around the nitwits.”
Source:

NYTimes.com

August 1, 2008Bruce E. Ivins, a top biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, died in an apparent suicide. Ivins was the prime suspect in an FBI investigation into the fall 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people and were widely linked at the time to Saddam Hussein. “He was going to go out in a blaze of glory,” said Jean Duley, a social worker who claimed that Dr. Ivins shared his homicidal fantasies with her. “He was going to take everybody out with him.” Ivins also wrote letters to his local newspaper about his religious views. “You can get on board or be left behind,” he wrote shortly after the 2004 election, “because the Christian Nation Express is pulling out of the station!” Some scientists doubted that a vaccine researcher like Ivins would have the skills needed to make inhalable anthrax, and others questioned the FBI's methods, which included using bloodhounds to track the mail. “I think the pressure got to him,” said Ivins' brother Tom. “He's not a man like I am.”
Source 1:

Frederick News-Post

Source 2:

WP

Source 3:

LAT

Source 4:

Baltimore Sun

Source 5:

Salon

Source 6:

Salon

Source 7:

NYT

Source 8:

NYT

Source 9:

NYT

Source 10:

Baltimore Sun

Source 11:

LAT

July 29, 2008 Iraqi officials said that a suicide attack that killed eight people in Baquba, Iraq, had been carried out by a woman, as indicated by the pair of feminine legs found nearby, and four female suicide bombers killed 57 people in Baghdad and Kirkuk.
Source 1:

New York Times

Source 2:

New York Times

July 25, 2008The mortgage crisis was causing suicides.
Source:

FOX News

July 3, 2008Psychologist Himanshu Tyagi claimed that children raised to use online social networking sites will “put less value on their real world identities” and may be in danger of “impulsive behaviour or even suicide.”
Source:

BBCnews.com

June 17, 2008It was revealed that the Veterans Affairs Department had tested an anti-smoking drug on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder but failed to warn them that possible side effects included psychotic behavior and suicide.
Source 1:

ABC

Source 2:

FOX

June 1, 2008In Baghdad, a car bomb in a parking lot near the Iranian Embassy killed two civilians and wounded five others, and west of the city, in the town of Hit, a suicide bomber killed ten people and wounded twelve at a police checkpoint.
Source:

AP

April 18, 2008 Suicide bombers struck in Gaza, Afghanistan, and Iraq. “We are seeing the globalization of suicide bombs,” said Mohammed Hafez, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School; U.S. officials revealed that suicide bombing was on the rise, with more than 658 attacks worldwide last year, double the number in any of the past 25 years.
Source 1:

Washington Post

Source 2:

Calcutta News

Source 3:

Canada East Online

Source 4:

Washington Post

April 6, 2008A Vidalia, Georgia, man who had married the widow of the man whose suicide provided him with a heart transplant twelve years ago committed suicide;.
Source:

MSNBC

March 25, 2008 Euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian announced that he was running for Congress.
Source:

LAT

March 19, 2008An 81-year-old Australian committed suicide by building a robot that shot him four times in the head.
Source:

Fox News

February 19, 2008 Researchers were at a loss to explain why suicide rates recently rose sharply for Americans aged 45-54, and it was revealed that the man who killed five Northern Illinois University students and himself had stopped taking Prozac shortly before his death because it “made him feel like a zombie and lazy.”
Source 1:

NY Times

Source 2:

NY Times

February 18, 2008A suicide bomber killed at least 100 spectators at a dogfight near Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Source 1:

BBC

Source 2:

New York Times

January 27, 2008At 20 points along the Gaza Strip's southern border, Hamas operatives detonated explosives to topple an Israeli-built fence, allowing as many as 200,000 Palestinians—13 percent of the territory's population—to cross into Egypt and shop. The Gazans purchased camels, candy, cement, chairs, cheese, cigarettes, computers, cows, doughnuts, gasoline, generators, goats, mattresses, medicine, motorcycles, pistols, potato chips, sheep, snack cakes, soap, and televisions. Supplies at Egyptian shops dwindled, prices spiked, and fistfights ensued. Several Gazan women married Egyptians, and the Israel Defense Force patrolled its southern border for would-be suicide bombers and hostage takers.
Source 1:

New York Times

Source 2:

Jerusalem Post

Source 3:

AFP

Source 4:

Dublin Independent

January 17, 2008It was observed that Tahina spectabilis, a giant palm tree of Madagascar, commits suicide when it flowers at the end of its century-long lifespan.
Source:

BBC News

November 10, 2007At least 75 people, including 59 children, were killed in Afghanistan's deadliest suicide bombing since the fall of the Taliban.
Source:

Guardian unlimited

October 5, 2007Bo Ward, the proprietor of a barbershop near the Army’s Fort Campbell, committed suicide at a town meeting in Clarksville, Tennessee. Ward had requested that his home be rezoned as a commercial property to increase its value and to offset the losses he suffered when most of his regular patrons, among them General David Petraeus, were deployed to Iraq; the City Council refused. “Y’all have put me under,” said the barber before inserting a pistol into his mouth. “I’m out of here.”
Source:

San Jose Mercury News

September 8, 2007 Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for two suicide bombs that killed at least 50 people in Algeria.
Source:

BBC

August 29, 2007Officials in Tarrytown, New York, installed suicide-prevention telephones on the Tappan Zee bridge.
Source:

WCBSTV

August 19, 2007A study suggested that women with breast implants were three times more likely to commit suicide than those without.
Source:

Boston Herald

August 16, 2007The Army's suicide rate was at an all-time high, leading the Army to hold a poster contest.
Source 1:

Army Times

Source 2:

AP via NYT

July 12, 2007A truck carrying 200 suicide-bomb vests was seized near the Syrian border.
Source:

NYT

July 2, 2007Police found a pair of Mercedes-Benz sedans filled with gasoline and nails parked in the center of London, and two men crashed a Jeep Cherokee into the glass doors of Terminal One at Glasgow Airport. The vehicle failed to penetrate the doors, but the driver poured gasoline over himself and the Jeep, and the Jeep blazed. The throng of travelers in the terminal stampeded away from the inferno, and the flaming driver staggered out of the Jeep, threw punches, and shouted, “Allah, Allah.” The crowd of travelers in the terminal stampeded away from the fireball. Stephen Clarkson, a bystander, pounced on the burning man. “I managed to knock the fellow to the ground,” said Clarkson. “His clothes had partially burned from his body. His hair was on fire. His whole body was on fire.” Police arrested the charred driver and the unscathed passenger. The discovery of a suspicious device on the driver’s person resulted in the evacuation of the hospital where his burns were being treated, and authorities blew up a suspicious car in the hospital parking lot. Detectives blamed an eight-person Al Qaeda cell controlled by someone they called “Mr. Big” and commenced raids. Three suspected collaborators of the would-be suicide bombers, including a 27-year-old woman, were apprehended.
Source:

Telegraph

June 2, 2007 Jack Kevorkian was released from prison.
Source:

AP via Washington Post

May 26, 2007Jack Kevorkian was preparing to leave prison after serving eight years for assisting in the suicide of a Michigan man.
Source:

AP via Yahoo! News

May 21, 2007An Irish soldier who won the Military Cross for single-handedly defeating a Baghdad suicide bomber was facing a court-martial for auctioning his medal on eBay.
Source:

Ananova

April 29, 2007A suicide bomber killed 26 people in Peshawar, Pakistan, in an attack targeting Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, who was wounded. “We have got the severed head of the bomber, and it is identifiable,” said Information Minister Asif Iqbal Daudzai.
Source:

Reuters

April 12, 2007In Iraq, suicide bombs exploded in the parliament cafeteria and on a bridge over the Tigris, toppling cars into the river and killing 10 people.
Source 1:

AP via IHT

Source 2:

AP via NYT

April 6, 2007In Iraq, the sixth suicide chlorine attack in two months killed 20 people in the Anbar province.
Source:

New York Times

February 25, 2007The day after a Sunni imam in Fallujah issued a condemnation against Sunni militants, a truck bomb exploded beside his mosque, killing 36 worshippers and wounding at least 62 more. A suicide bomber at a Baghdad university blew herself up, killing more than 40 people and scattering purses, pens, textbooks, and fingers.
Source 1:

New York Times

Source 2:

New York Times

November 9, 2006To protest the Iraq war, a man named Malachi Ritscher committed suicide in Chicago by setting himself on fire next to a 25-foot-tall sculpture called “Flame of the Millennium.” Along with a self-penned obituary, the 52-year-old Ritscher posted a farewell message on his website in which he described the “deep shame” of a day in 2002 when he stood, knife in hand, next to Donald Rumsfeld, but was unable to bring himself to slash the defense secretary's throat. “I too love God and country,” wrote Ritscher, “and feel called upon to serve.”
Source 1:

Malachi Ritscher

Source 2:

Chicago Reader

Source 3:

Chicago Sun-Times

October 19, 2006A convicted killer on Texas death row committed suicide 15 hours before he was supposed to die by lethal injection by slitting his jugular vein with a makeshift blade; prison authorities found the message “I didn't do it” smeared in blood on the walls of his cell.
Source:

AP via MSNBC

September 20, 2006In Jordan, a failed suicide bomber was sentenced to be hanged.
Source:

New York times

July 13, 2006Jack Kevorkian, who is dying, said that he would not choose suicide.
Source:

CNN

June 20, 2006Swedish researchers announced that the Toxoplasma parasite hijacks human cells and forces them to commit suicide.
Source:

The New York Times

June 12, 2006Three detainees at the American prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, committed suicide using nooses made from clothing and bedsheets. “They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own,” said Navy Rear-Admiral Harry Harris. “I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.” All three men had been in the camp for about four years and had recently engaged in a hunger strike.
Source:

Scotsman

May 26, 2006 Jack Kevorkian was very ill and reportedly had less than a year to live.
Source:

ABC News

April 20, 2006In Singapore an 18-year-old man, ashamed of his small penis, committed suicide by jumping from a building.
Source:

HTTabloid.com

January 17, 2006The U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Oregon law allowing for physician-assisted suicide.
Source:

CBC.ca

January 15, 2006In Aberystwyth, Wales, a woman was banned from the local seafront after she repeatedly attempted to drown herself.
Source:

BBC News

August 5, 2005A man in Yorkshire, England, filmed his own suicide on his mobile phone and beamed it to his girlfriend.
Source:

Sky News

March 21, 2005A woman in India committed suicide so that her two blind sons could each receive one of her eyes. Doctors said there was little chance that such a transplant would work.
Source:

Reuters

February 21, 2005Hunter S. Thompson killed himself with a .45.
Source:

The Guardian

February 12, 2005In Afghanistan, a French soldier committed suicide.
Source:

News.com.au

January 24, 2005The military confirmed that 23 Guantánamo Bay prisoners attempted mass suicide in August 2003 to protest their detention.
Source:

MSNBC

January 22, 2005Hours after an Italian man killed himself because his wife had been in a coma for four months, she woke up.
Source:

Reuters

January 14, 2005A man jumped from the Millau viaduct, the world's tallest bridge, to become its first suicide.
Source:

AFP

November 4, 2004In Japan, young women were being raped by the men with whom they'd hoped to commit suicide.
Source:

The Japan Times

October 16, 2004Members of an Army Reserve unit in Baghdad refused to deliver a fuel shipment because they said that it was a "suicide mission."
Source:

New York Times

October 16, 2004The FDA ordered all antidepressants to carry a "black box" warning that the drugs might cause children and adolescents to have suicidal thoughts.
Source:

Associated Press

September 23, 2004New research concluded that low-birthweight babies are twice as likely to commit suicide.
Source:

BBC

September 8, 2004The World Health Organization reported that suicide kills more people worldwide than murder and war put together.
Source:

New Scientist

June 12, 2004 Alcohol abuse was up in the U.S..
Source:

Associated Press

June 11, 2004A tourist committed suicide by jumping out of a helicopter over the Grand Canyon.
Source:

Associated Press

June 11, 2004 Suicide was up in Japan.
Source:

New York Times

June 6, 2004In Colorado, a man in an armored bulldozer went berserk and destroyed several buildings and then killed himself.
Source:

Associated Press

June 3, 2004The attorney general of New York sued GlaxoSmithKline for suppressing studies that showed that its antidepressant drug Paxil might cause adolescents to have suicidal thoughts.
Source:

New York Times

April 16, 2004The FDA admitted that it refused to permit its lead expert on the subject to testify publicly that antidepressant drugs cause children to become suicidal.
Source:

New York Times

March 26, 2004The Army confirmed that the suicide rate has been higher among soldiers stationed in Iraq.
Source:

New York Times

March 23, 2004Federal regulators issued a warning that antidepressant medication can drive some patients to suicide.
Source:

New York Times

December 11, 2003The British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency warned doctors not to give antidepressants such as Zoloft, Paxil, and Celexa to children and adolescents, because the drugs have been linked to suicide and self-harm.
Source:

New York Times

October 16, 2003The Staten Island Ferry crashed in New York City; of the 10 people who died, two were decapitated and some were cut in half. Several people lost limbs. The captain, who apparently passed out, left the scene immediately, slashed his wrists and shot himself twice in the chest with a pellet gun.
Source:

New York Times

March 25, 2003 Many hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the war in cities all over the world. Protests in San Francisco were particularly lively. One group of protesters vomited on the sidewalk in front of a federal building after drinking large quantities of red, white, and blue milk; others pulled out mats and practiced yoga in front of the police. A federal park ranger tried to run over protesters in his truck and then attempted to run down a reporter. One protester apparently committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge.
March 11, 2003 Another Guantánamo Bay detainee attempted to commit suicide; it was the twenty-first such attempt.
March 4, 2003 Bernard Loiseau, one of France's greatest chefs, committed suicide after his Cote d'Or restaurant was downgraded by GaultMillau from a score of 19 to 17.
February 11, 2003 Suicide attempts were up among the detainees at Camp X-Ray.
January 21, 2003 The European Space Agency cancelled plans to land a spaceship on a comet, and a British man beheaded himself with a homemade guillotine.
November 19, 2002 A German prosecutor agreed to return the brain of Ulrike Meinhoff, the cofounder of the Red Army Faction, to her family. A certain Dr. Bernard Bogarts was believed to be in possession of the brain, which was removed from Meinhoff's body in 1976 after she committed suicide; Dr. Bogarts has claimed that the brain exhibits “pathological modifications” that might explain Meinhoff's violent behavior. Two other Red Army Faction brains were also said to be missing.
November 12, 2002 Irv Rubin, the leader of the Jewish Defense League, was declared brain dead after he apparently slit his own throat and jumped from a balcony. Rubin was in jail for allegedly trying to blow up a mosque. His wife refused to believe that he had attempted suicide: “This was a hit,” she said.
October 15, 2002 Two British and one American scientist were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on cell death, the process by which healthy cells commit suicide.
October 8, 2002 The World Health Organization reported that war, murder, and suicide account for 1.6 million deaths each year.
September 24, 2002 British and Australian researchers found that suicide rates increase under right-wing governments.
September 24, 2002 Pundits continued to reassure readers that the Constitution of the United States of America is not, in fact, a suicide pact.
June 18, 2002 A 71-year-old man ran amok at a Benedictine monastery in rural Missouri and shot two monks dead before committing suicide.
May 21, 2002 After failing to diagnose mad cow disease in a dairy cow, a Japanese vet killed herself. “I'm so sorry for my unforgivable fault as a veterinarian,” she wrote in a suicide note.
May 14, 2002 A man in Malacky, Slovakia, tried unsuccessfully to decapitate himself with a homemade guillotine in front of the local tax office because he was unable to pay the taxes on his house. “It did not cut his head off completely,” said a policeman, “but he wounded himself so badly that he died afterwards.”
March 19, 2002 A Dutch man protesting the quality of wide-screen televisions held 18 hostages for seven hours before killing himself.
January 29, 2002 In Lisbon, Portugal, a 61-year-old man committed suicide by jumping into a lion pit; he bothered the lions until a 10-year-old lioness got irritated and broke his neck.
January 15, 2002 It was reported that the patriotic teenager who flew a small airplane into a Tampa, Florida, office building, dedicating his suicide to Osama bin Laden, was taking Accutane, a prescription acne medication that has been linked to suicides.
November 13, 2001Federal agents, who now believe the anthrax to be the work of a lone domestic terrorist, still have not gotten around to locating all the labs in the United States where the bacteria can be legally handled, though they were busy cracking down on medical marijuana in California and assisted suicide in Oregon.
October 9, 2001 Osama bin Laden taunted the United States in a televised statement and said, “America will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine, and before all the army of infidels depart the land of Mohammad, peace be upon him.” A suicide truck bomb killed 26 people at the Legislative Assembly of Kashmir.
July 24, 2001A New York City artist, distraught after her boyfriend ended their relationship by email, broadcast her suicide attempt over the Internet; she was rescued when a witness called 911.
March 13, 2001A seventeen-year-old boy beat his father to death with a baseball bat because he didn't want to turn off two radios and a television that he was listening to simultaneously; the boy told police that he then went bowling, tried to slash his wrists, and deliberately crashed his dead father's Jeep in a second attempt to end it all.
February 13, 2001A Dutch man was hospitalized in the Hague after he jumped, three times, from a bridge in three successive suicide attempts; police found him back up on the bridge, suffering from hypothermia, staring down at the icy depths.
February 6, 2001Falun Gong spokesmen pointed out that Master Li, their spiritual leader, prohibits suicide, though flying and being in two places at once are encouraged.
January 9, 2001 New York police snipers were mobilized after two men from Pennsylvania, Michael Lewis and Eric “Black Hole” Storm, told officials that twenty members of a “survivor” cult were planning to commit suicide by drinking poisoned juice on the steps of City Hall; no one showed up, and the two men were taken away to the Bellevue psychiatric ward.
0, 2000It was determined that last month was the hottest June on record worldwide and the worst month for Army suicides since the Vietnam era.
Source 1:

CNN

Source 2:

CNN

December 26, 2000A Hewlett-Packard employee who jumped out of a corporate plane at two thousand feet, landing in a vegetable garden, committed suicide, a coroner decided.
August 22, 2000 Japanese were committing suicide in record numbers.
March 29, 2000Female suicide bombers blew themselves up in two Moscow subway stations, killing dozens of people. “I remember,” said Kirill Gribov, who survived the attack, “a cloud of gas coming from the wrecked train in front of us, colored in pink, maybe because of blood.”
Source:

NYT


May 2012

IGNORANCE OF THINGS PAST
Who Wins and Who Loses When We Forget American History
By Lewis H. Lapham

THE LAST TOWER
The Decline and Fall of Public Housing
By Ben Austen

OUR RACCOON YEAR
A story by Paul Theroux

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE END OF TIME
By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi