Adams: Free or charge N. Ireland suspects

Police in Northern Ireland should either charge or release suspects held over the killings of a policeman and two soldiers, Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein said Monday. Nicholas Hughes, whose mother gassed herself in 1963 at her London home while her two children slept in the next room, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, his sister Frieda told The Times newspaper.

Share

Tragic poet Sylvia Plath’s son kills himself

The family history of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath took another tragic turn Monday when it was revealed that their son had committed suicide after battling depression. Nicholas Hughes, whose mother gassed herself in 1963 at her London home while her two children slept in the next room, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, his sister Frieda told The Times newspaper. Hughes, 47, was unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks

Share

Scientists discover new species in ocean’s depths

Until last December, no one had ever seen the bottom of the Tasman Fracture, a trench that drops more than four kilometers below the surface of the ocean. A group of Australian and American researchers recently spent a month hundreds of kilometers southwest of the Tasmanian coast, exploring the fracture’s depths. Jess Adkins, a professor at Caltech and one of the project’s lead scientists, remembers sitting in his control room and watching the underwater life on his monitors with a sense of awe

Share

The Inside Story on the Breakdown at the SEC

Historians looking for an early sign that the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression might be deeper than expected could do worse than listen in on a predawn teleconference one Friday last spring. Top Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank officials hunched over their phones in a last-ditch bid to bail out the giant investment bank Bear Stearns Cos.

Share