Strange causes of death

Even though Great Britain abolished capital punishment after in 1964 the last execution was performed by hanging, the country is seemingly thinking things over, and, as the NYT reports, "British Voters May Hang Parliament" (5/4/10).
On the other side of the Atlantic, some Caribbean countries, claiming that the Caribbean Court of Justice is "a hanging court," welcomed a statement by “Barbados Deputy Prime Minister, Freundel Stuart, who is also the country's Attorney General, [and] has announced that the mandatory death sentence will be abolished in Barbados” (Carribean Net News 5/29/09). This most certainly was a relief for every citizen of Barbados.
Several thousand miles north of Barbados, America's first shore wind farm will be built “in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod. The bitterly contested project was held in check for years by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose family’s seaside compound faces the site; he died last August. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered the project reconfigured to minimize its visibility from land” (“Turnarounds” NYT 5/2/10). While the NYT here sounds as if the wind farm is not only a “costly eyesore” but also a lethal one, its own weekend editions can apparently be really fatal: “A note with the ‘On Language’ column on Page 14 this weekend refers to the absence of the regular columnist, William Safire. Mr. Safire died last Sunday, after some copies had gone to press (NYTmagazine 10/3/09).
Back in Great Britain, academics have something else to worry about. Dr. Sam George from the University of Hertfordshire and author of Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing 1760-1820: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant laments that the undead have been “losing their British passports,” presumably after “in 1974, a man who thought he was being tormented by vampires choked to death on garlic” ("Have the Undead Become Americanized?" WSJ 5/6/10).