Cremation

The poor economy is taking a toll even on the dead, with an increasing number of bodies in Los Angeles County going unclaimed by families who cannot afford to bury or cremate their loved ones. At the county coroner's office -- which handles homicides and other suspicious deaths -- 36% more cremations were done at taxpayers' expense in the last fiscal year over the previous year, from 525 to 712.

With a spray of water, Guy Gleichmann surfaces from a 40-foot dive during which he helped set his mother's remains in their final resting place: a sunken city where brightly hued fish shimmy among fantastical architecture. "I didn't want to leave," Gleichmann says, doffing mask and mouthpiece. "It's so beautiful down there. It's so serene." The 48-year-old investment manager and diver from Pompano Beach, Fla.

Cremated remains of actor James Doohan, who portrayed engineer Scotty on "Star Trek," and of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper soared into suborbital space Saturday aboard a rocket. It was the first successful launch from Spaceport America, a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert. Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan fired the rocket carrying small amounts of their husbands' ashes, and those of about 200 other people.

Cremation fires crackle all day long on the chipped concrete steps of this riverside holy city, the blazes spewing ash and flakes over the mourners who crowd its famous piers. Sweating, bare-chested men stoke the funeral pyres, squinting against the sting of smoke as they lug and stack the bundles of logs needed to burn the procession of Hindu dead. And when the bodies are incinerated and the families have taken away the ashes of their loved ones, the men sweep the residue into the Ganges River.

Everyone who rides Disneyland's popular "Pirates of the Caribbean" attraction knows "dead men tell no tales," and its animatronic figures aren't talking either. But, oh, if they could. On Friday, workers at the Anaheim theme park spotted a guest on the ride sprinkling an unidentified substance into the water, prompting them to close the attraction and alert police. "A witness described the substance as a baby powder that quickly dissipated," Disneyland resort spokesman Rob Doughty said.

Rick Allnutt has closed all but one section of his funeral home on the north end of town. The chapel is dark and quiet, the reception hall bare. But in the bay out back, two side-by-side ovens rumble as the 1,650-degree heat blasts two corpses into bone and ash. Allnutt has moved the rest of the business to another location and wants to move his crematory to a site near a cemetery in Larimer County, but he has reached a stalemate with health officials there.

The body of a 457-pound woman that lay in a morgue for nearly two months because of a dispute over the cost of her cremation would be cremated within a few days, officials said in Dallas. Charlotte Ann Blue wasn't immediately cremated because of a disagreement between Dallas County and its crematorium contractor. Blue's son, Sam Hunter, said he believed his mother had been cremated under a plan for indigent county residents until he called to get a death certificate.

As hundreds of Louisiana families wait to claim the bodies of loved ones still lying anonymously in crowded morgues, the state medical examiner is investigating at least one parish coroner for allegedly disposing of Hurricane Katrina victims improperly.

U.S. soldiers involved in burning the bodies of Taliban rebels in southern Afghanistan and in a psychological warfare operation to taunt surviving fighters will be given reprimands but not face prosecution, the military said Saturday. News reports of the matter, which occurred last month, stirred complaints in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Some suggested the actions might have violated the Geneva Convention's rules on the treatment of enemy dead. But U.S.

The families of more than 300 people whose bodies were found strewn across the grounds of a Georgia crematory will receive nearly $40 million in a settlement announced Thursday with the business and 58 funeral homes across the South. The funeral homes agreed to pay $36 million and the insurer for Tri-State Crematory $3.5 million. The Marsh family, which operates the crematory, also agreed to preserve two acres as a tribute to the dead.