Deaths | featured news

A southern New Jersey man who admitted killing a teenager 23 years ago was haunted by nighttime visions of the boy's mother, according to the suspect's best friend. Steven Goff, 41, of Ventnor, turned himself in to police Monday and confessed to the 1990 stabbing of 15-year-old Frederick "Ricky" Hart in Galloway Township.

Chinese authorities tried to calm spreading health concerns Wednesday after a third person was reported to have died from a new type of bird flu. The emergence in China of the H7N9 strain of avian flu — a total of nine cases have been reported since it was revealed last weekend — are troubling because the strain has not previously been found in humans.

At least 53 people were killed and 90 others wounded Wednesday in an insurgent attack on an Afghanistan governor's compound where Taliban fighters were facing trial, local officials said. Nine insurgents with explosives strapped to their bodies stormed the compound in Farah province, bordering Iran, Reuters reported.

A doctor overseeing the French version of the "Survivor" reality show has committed suicide following the sudden death of a contestant who he had treated, France's biggest TV station says. Dr. Thierry Costa killed himself on location Monday on an island in Cambodia, the TF1 station said. Costa, 38, blamed the press for damaging his professional reputation in a handwritten suicide note that TF1 published on its website.

Figured another way, the 2010 toll meant the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population, researchers said.

Authorities say the son of professional wrestler Ric Flair has been found dead in a North Carolina hotel room. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police says officers were called to a hotel on the city's south side around 10:30 a.m. Friday. When they arrived, they found the body of 25-year-old Reid Fliehr, who also was a wrestler.

A Brunswick, Georgia, city commissioner is accused of influencing a witness and obstructing law enforcement in the investigation into the shooting death of a 13-month-old boy, the Glynn County Sheriff's Office said Friday.

Richard Griffiths, the versatile British actor who played the boy wizard's unsympathetic Uncle Vernon in the "Harry Potter" movies, has died. He was 65. Agent Simon Beresford announced Friday that Griffiths died a day earlier of complications following heart surgery at University Hospital in Coventry, central England.

Iraqi officials say four car bombs have struck Shiite mosques in Baghdad, killing at least 19 people and wounding 72.

The elderly man charged with fatally shooting his neighbors at their apartment complex in Dallas on Monday denied killing Michelle Jackson, and said he acted in self-defense when he killed her fiancé, Jamie Stafford. According to an arrest warrant, Chung Kim, 75 — incensed that Jackson and Stafford put dog feces near his front door — shot Jackson as she stood on her balcony above his first-floor apartment. He then stalked upstairs and fired at Stafford, the warrant says, who was attempting to escape through the back patio door.