† Census Worker’s Lynching Not A Case Of Right-Wing Extremism After All: A two-month investigation into the death of part-time U.S. Census worker Bill Sparkman, 51, has determined that he committed suicide and attempted to make his death look like murder so that his financially struggling son could get a $600,000. payout from several life insurance policies he had taken out, reports the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Police interviewed potential homicide suspects but ruled them out and found no evidence pointing to any conclusion except that Sparkman killed himself. …

Sparkman died at that spot as a result of asphyxiation. Police say he staged the details to try to make it appear he was murdered because he was a federal employee. …

Sparkman's glasses were taped to his head with duct tape. The question that raises is why a killer would care whether Sparkman, who had poor vision, could see what was going on. …

Also, Sparkman was not dangling from the tree the way people commonly perceive hanging.

His legs were bent at the knees and his knees were less than six inches off the ground, authorities said. …

At some point, however, Sparkman could have stood up, taken the pressure off his neck and not died, said Mike Wilder, head of the state medical examiner's office. …

The final piece of evidence police wanted in order to reach a conclusion in the case were the results of DNA testing. The results, received last week, showed there was no DNA other than Sparkman's on the rope, the rag in his mouth or a similar rag found near his body.

Authorities concluded that “Sparkman, acting alone, could have created all the conditions found at the scene,” and while his motives may never be known because he did not leave a suicide note, a police spokesperson guessed that money was at the root of this evil: “He had significant debt and didn't have a full-time job.”

† King Of The Heels: After a three-month investigation, the State Ethics Commission has filed 37 civil charges against Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC), including 18 purchases of first- and business-class airline tickets, violating state law requiring lowest-cost travel; nine improper uses of state-owned aircraft for travel to political and personal events; and 10 instances in which he improperly reimbursed himself with campaign cash, reports The Associated Press:.

Sanford has been under scrutiny since he vanished for five days over the summer, reappearing to tearfully admit to an extramarital affair with the Argentine woman. …

[S]everal lawmakers who have called for Sanford to step down said it was unclear whether the accusations would be weighty enough to propel an impeachment measure.

"If it's relatively minor ethics violations, I don't believe there will be sentiment there to remove the governor," said House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham, R-Cayce. …

But four GOP lawmakers already have filed a resolution that would force Sanford from office because of "dereliction of duty," and the travel allegations play no part in that move. Their measure deals solely with Sanford's absence from the state, when he led his staff to believe he was hiking the Appalachian Trail while he was in Argentina.

† Updates To Previous Posts (ninth item, We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?): In “one of the most extensive domestic terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks,” federal officials have charged 14 people in a recruitment drive that funneled 20 Somali Americans to join Al Shabaab, an insurgent group in Somalia with ties to Al Qaeda, reports The New York Times:

The case represents the largest group of American citizens suspected of joining an extremist movement affiliated with Al Qaeda, senior officials said. Many of the recruits had come to America as young refugees fleeing a brutal civil war, only to settle in a gang-ridden enclave of Minneapolis.

The men named Monday face federal charges ranging from perjury to providing material support to a terrorist organization and conspiring to kill, maim, kidnap or injure people outside the United States.

Law enforcement officials are concerned that the recruits, who hold American passports, could be commissioned to return to the United States to carry out attacks here, though so far there is no evidence of such plots.

“The potential implications to national security are significant,” said Ralph S. Boelter, the special agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He added that the nationwide inquiry would continue with the cooperation of many Somali immigrants and that more arrests might be coming.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Nationalized Healthcare Always LeadsTo Rationing): According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,136 women, 76 percent say they disagree with the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force new recommendations on mammograms; 84 percent of respondents ages 35 to 49 say they plan to get mammograms before age 50; and 76 percent believe that the panel based its conclusions on cost,, reports USA Today.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Incarcerated Murderer Sues To Continue Sex Change Treatments): U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf has denied a request by convicted murderer Michelle Kosilek (née Robert) for additional electrolysis treatments because (s)he failed to prove "irreparable harm" or a "serious medical need" to continue the hair removal treatments while awaiting a decision on whether the state must pay for sex change surgery, reports The Associated Press. The state Department of Correction argues that any remaining hair on Kosilek’s face can be removed by shaving or using depilatories.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Service – Or An Approximation Of It – With A Smile): Writer and novice restauranteur Bruce Buschel set off a tempest in a stockpot when he suggested 100 “dos and don’ts for servers” who want to work at the seafood restaurant he is building in Bridgehampton, NY, reports The East Hampton Star:

On Facebook, a group has been formed inviting members to boycott Mr. Buschel’s restaurant — although it is based in Binghamton, N.Y., and had only three members as of Monday. The people at Hamptons.Curbed.com have followed the blog with great interest. …

Anyone who has ever waited on tables knows that no matter how hard one tries, it is impossible to please everyone all of the time, and some perceived Mr. Buschel’s musings on the industry as condescending.

“Waiters and patrons have a very personal interaction, and people take it very personally,” Mr. Buschel said in defense of his blog. “There are more patrons than there are servers, and I think everybody is unhappy with service in general.”

As Mr. Buschel has admitted, even flaunted, that he has no experience whatsoever in the restaurant business, people who have had a taste of what he’s in for have looked on with amused interest. …

Maura Donahue, a waitress at the Dock restaurant in Montauk, said reading Mr. Buschel’s list of 100 things made her “appreciate that I work in a joint where some of our T-shirts actually say, ‘You make me sick!’ It is obvious … that Buschel has never actually waited on tables in his life, or ever worked in a restaurant for that matter,” and for those reasons, she added, she could never work for him.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Extradite Polanski To Poland): The Swiss Criminal Court has granted Roman Polanski $4.5 million bail – in the form of a bank guarantee - and is expected to be transferred to his “$1.6 million chalet surrounded by snowcapped peaks on the outskirts of Gstaad,” where he will be under house arrest and would be subjected to "constant electronic surveillance," reports The Associated Press. 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, A High-Energy Particle Physics Rapper): In other news from Switzerland, physicists announced that they had produced “candidate collision events” in the giant particle detectors in the Large Hadron Collider, reports The New York Times:

Monday’s collisions were basically a test of the collider systems’ ability to synchronize the beams, in which bunches of protons travel along at nearly the speed of light, and make them collide at the right points. The protons were at their so-called injection energies of 450 billion electron volts, a far cry from the energies the machine will eventually achieve.

In the next weeks before a holiday break, CERN hopes to increase the proton energies to 1.2 trillion electron volts apiece, which would make the hadron collider officially the most powerful in the world, eclipsing the Tevatron (900 billion electron volts) at Fermilab in Illinois.