MONROVIA (Reuters) –
An American United Nations peacekeeper under investigation for sexual exploitation and abuse of minors in Liberia has been found dead in his house in the West African country, the U.N. said on Wednesday.

The U.N. gave no further details about the circumstances of the death but two Liberian security sources said it appeared that the American, a civilian in the Liberia mission, known as UNMIL, had committed suicide due to the investigations.

Several U.N. missions across Africa have been plagued by allegations of abuse of women and children by peacekeepers and the world body has been widely criticized for its handling of the crises despite vowing a zero tolerance policy.

"UNMIL has learned of the untimely death of one of its international civilian staff members, an American citizen, who died on 24 August at his home in Monrovia," the U.N. said in a statement.

"The circumstances of his death are being investigated. The staff member was the subject of an investigation into allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of minors."

UNMIL said the Liberian government and the U.S. embassy in Monrovia had been involved in the investigations but neither were immediately available for comment.

However, a police source told Reuters that an American citizen had killed himself and one Sierra Leonean and two Liberian girls linked to him had been arrested.

An official at the Ministry of National Security said the American had been involved in sex trade over the last year but he gave no further details.

"I think it was ... shame that made him commit suicide. He did not want to undergo serious punishment and so, he had to kill himself," the official said, asking not to be named.

(Reporting by Alphonso Toweh; Additional reporting by Patrick Worsnip at the United Nations; Writing by David Lewis)

SPRINGFIELD, Va. – Turns out you can fear a government takeover of health care even if the government already took over your health care.
How else to explain the reservations of seniors like 85-year-old Dee Jollie, one of the millions of people covered by Medicare, the government health insurance program for Americans 65 and older, yet still have deep concerns about President Barack Obama's proposed health care overhaul?
"I think it'll be government control," Jollie said this week while waiting for her congressman to hold a health care town hall meeting at her upscale retirement home.
"When that occurs, you don't have any control," Jollie added. "I think we will no longer be able to choose our own doctor," she said — notwithstanding repeated claims to the contrary from Obama, whom she supported for president.
The trepidation that's taken hold among the elderly over Obama's drive to remake the nation's health care system is turning into one more political headache for Democrats as they struggle to reach agreement on sweeping health legislation that can pass the House and Senate after Labor Day.
Older Americans, who vote at a higher rate than other age groups, also hold deeper concerns than others about proposed health care changes, surveys have shown. An ABC/Washington Post poll this month found 45 percent of respondents overall supporting Democrats' proposed health care changes, while just 34 percent of seniors were in support. The elderly use health care services more than others and have perhaps the most to lose and least to gain from any changes in the present system.
Republicans are moving to exploit those concerns, producing a "Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights" this week that touches on sensitive points, including protecting Medicare and ensuring government doesn't come between patients and doctors.
Democrats accuse the GOP of fear-mongering around claims about fictitious "death panels," rationing and nonexistent threats to Medicare. They insist seniors' health care will be safeguarded.
"Nobody is talking about cutting Medicare benefits," Obama said during an online AARP forum in July.
Yet a problem for Democrats is that mixed in with the misinformation there are some real causes for concern, some analysts say.
Evolving health care legislation probably will be paid for in part by cutting some $500 billion from Medicare over 10 years. Obama and his supporters say the cuts would not affect benefits and would strengthen Medicare by reducing fraud and abuse and attacking inefficiencies such as unnecessary hospital readmissions and overpayments to insurance companies that operate private plans within Medicare. But some health care experts say some seniors will probably have to pay more along the way.
"Seniors are rightly concerned that half a trillion dollars in cuts might have some impact on access and quality of care," said Mark McClellan, a doctor and health economist who ran Medicare for former President George W. Bush and also served in the Clinton administration.
McClellan said the concerns could be particularly justified for the 25 percent of Medicare users who are covered through private Medicare Advantage plans, which would absorb about 30 percent of the cuts under Democratic proposals.
If Democrats can't succeed in allaying such fears, it could spell trouble for Obama's goal of passing a health care overhaul bill this year.
"The American public in general has to be supportive of health care reform, and obviously seniors are a big part of that," said David Certner, legislative policy director at AARP, which has lost some 60,000 members recently over its support for a health care overhaul even though it has yet to endorse any specific proposal.
"They're big users of health care. And combining the fact that it's more personal to them as an issue and they vote in higher numbers, it's a critical constituency," Certner said.
Those Medicare cuts bothered some seniors at the Greenspring Retirement Community, where Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly held his town hall.
"They're going to take it away from Medicare," Florence Arden, 86, said after the lively but civil meeting. She said Medicare is at risk because officials want to "cut down on all the programs ... and spread it around."

"No, it isn't," disagreed her friend and ballroom dancing companion Yvonne Fisher, 85.

"Yes, it is," Arden said.

"I think a lot of lousy myths are going around," Fisher said.

"I don't think this administration is too fond of older people," Arden countered.

Connolly and others say Democrats have done a poor job getting the message to seniors about how they could benefit under the legislation. Measures include reducing or eliminating a gap in prescription drug coverage under Medicare, eliminating copays and deductibles for preventive services, extending subsidies to more low-income seniors and plowing some $245 billion into Medicare to ensure physician payments are not cut in coming years.

"You could see reassurance start to ripple through the audience as we got into substantive discussion, put out some fires, false fires, and started to talk about the basket of reforms that really make sense," Connolly said.

He noted that concerns about socialized medicine and government control were also expressed in the mid-1960s, when Medicare was created.

"Many of the same fears were voiced then," Connolly said. "Do you think one Republican in this room or one Democrat or one independent would give up his or her Medicare? Not one of them."

NEW YORK – Author Dominick Dunne, who told stories of shocking crimes among the rich and famous through his magazine articles and best-selling novels such as "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," died Wednesday in his home at age 83.
Dunne's son, actor-director Griffin Dunne, said in a statement released by Vanity Fair magazine that his father had been battling bladder cancer. But the cancer had not prevented Dunne from working and socializing, his twin passions.
In September 2008, against the orders of his doctor and the wishes of his family, Dunne flew to Las Vegas to attend the kidnap-robbery trial of O.J. Simpson, a postscript to his coverage of Simpson's 1995 murder trial, which spiked Dunne's considerable fame.
In the past year, Dunne had traveled to Germany and the Dominican Republic for experimental stem cell treatments to fight his cancer. He wrote that he and actress Farrah Fawcett were in the same cancer clinic in Bavaria but didn't see each other. Fawcett, a 1970s sex symbol and TV star of "Charlie's Angels," died in June at age 62.
Dunne discontinued his column at Vanity Fair to concentrate on finishing another novel, "Too Much Money," which is to come out in December. He also made a number of appearances to promote a documentary film about his life, "After the Party," which was being released on DVD.
Dunne, who lived in Manhattan, was beginning to write his memoirs and, until close to the end of his life, he posted messages on his Web site commenting on events in his life and thanking his fans for their support.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter praised Dunne as a gifted reporter who proved as fascinating as the people he wrote about.
"Anyone who remembers the sight of O.J. Simpson trying on the famous glove probably remembers a bespectacled Dunne, resplendent in his trademark Turnbull & Asser monogrammed shirt, on the court bench behind him," Carter wrote in a statement released Wednesday. "It is fair to say that the halls of Vanity Fair will be lonelier without him and that, indeed, we will not see his like anytime soon, if ever again."
Earlier this summer, Dunne was well enough to attend a Manhattan party hosted by Tina Brown. Chatting with an Associated Press reporter, he spoke of Michael Jackson, who had recently died, and remembered lunching with the singer and Elizabeth Taylor. Jackson was so excited to see her, Dunne said, he presented her with a diamond necklace just for the occasion.
Dunne was part of a famous family that also included his brother, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne; his brother's wife, author Joan Didion; and his son.
A one-time movie producer, Dunne carved a new career starting in the 1980s as a chronicler of the problems of the wealthy and powerful.
Tragedy struck his life in 1982 when his actress daughter, Dominique, was slain — and that experience informed his fiction and his journalistic efforts from then on.
"If you go through what I went through, losing my daughter, you have strong, strong feelings of revenge," Dunne said in 1990 in discussing his novel "People Like Us," in which the protagonist shoots the man convicted of killing his daughter.
"As a novelist, I could create a situation in which I could do in the book what I couldn't do in real life. I intended for Gus (the character in the book) to kill the guy. But when I got to that part I couldn't write it. He wounds him and goes to prison himself for a couple of years."
He was as successful as a journalist as he was as a novelist and spent many of his later years in courtrooms covering high profile trials. Writing for Vanity Fair, he covered such cases as the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in 1991 and the trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez, accused of murdering their millionaire parents, in 1993.
"You're talking about kids who had everything — the cars, the tennis courts, swimming pools, credit cards. And yet this happened," he said at the time of the Menendez trial.
As much as those trials riveted the nation, they were far overshadowed in 1994 when football great O.J. Simpson was accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. With a trial that stretched out over a year and cable TV outlets providing endless coverage, the bespectacled Dunne became a familiar face to millions.
"I especially like to watch the jurors," Dunne explained to Fox TV during the trial. "I always pick out about four jurors who become my favorites. I sort of try to anticipate what they are thinking and how they are reacting."

He called his book on the Simpson trial, "Another City, Not My Own," "a novel in the form of a memoir." It, too, reached the best-seller lists.

"Every word is true, but it's written in the style of a novel," he said.

From the gritty world of the courtroom during the day, he would move into the glamorous realm of high society at night, dining with the rich and famous, charming them with his inside stories of the Simpson trial.

He was a colorful raconteur and his stories mesmerized listeners. He was a much sought after dinner guest on both coasts and in the glamour capitals of Europe where he frequently traveled. He was a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, interviewing members of royalty and movie stars.

His assignments took him to London to cover the inquest into Princess Diana's death and to Monaco to look into the mysterious death of billionaire Edmond Safra.

He continued appearing regularly on television, and in 2002 debuted a weekly program on Court TV, "Power, Privilege and Justice."

"I am openly pro-prosecution and make no bones about it," he told the San Francisco Chronicle that year. "I don't think there are enough people out there sticking up for victims."

The show gave him an added dose of celebrity when it was distributed in foreign countries.

He had already been working on "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," a fictionalized retelling of a sensational 1950s society murder, when his 22-year-old daughter Dominique was strangled by her former boyfriend, John Sweeney, in 1982, shortly after she had completed her first movie, "Poltergeist."

Sweeney was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, and was freed after serving less than four years of a six-year sentence. The verdict was seen as a major victory for the defense, and Dunne bitterly told the judge in court, "you withheld important information from this jury about this man's history of violent behavior." He later told the Los Angeles Times the sentence was "a tap on the wrist."

In a 1985 AP interview, Dunne said he nearly stopped writing when Dominique was slain.

"I was going to stop the book," Dunne said. "I didn't want to do a book that dealt with a murder. But my book editor wouldn't let me quit. She was incredibly sympathetic and lenient on time. I'm glad now that she didn't let me quit."

"People Like Us" and "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles" were both turned into miniseries, and he stressed he had nothing to do with the changes the TV scriptwriters made.

"If I had wanted it that way, I would have written it that way," Dunne told TV Guide, referring to changes made in the key character in "People Like Us" to make him more sympathetic.

Among his other books were the 1993 "A Season in Purgatory," that helped revive interest in the 1975 slaying of teenager Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn. A Kennedy relative, Michael Skakel, was convicted in the killing in 2002.

He also wrote "An Inconvenient Woman" and "The Mansions of Limbo."

In 1999, Dunne published a memoir called, "The Way We Lived Then," a compilation of photographs of him and his family with famous people and his recollections of the glamour life he and his wife Lenny enjoyed for many years.

Dunne was born in 1925 in Hartford, Conn., to a wealthy Roman Catholic family and grew up in some of the same social circles as the Kennedys. In his memoir, he traced his fascination with Hollywood to a childhood trip he took "out West" with an aunt. They took one of those home of the stars bus tours and he vowed to come back and be part of the glamorous world he had glimpsed.

He served in the Army during World War II and graduated from Williams College in 1949.

While in the Army, he was awarded the Bronze Star for heroism in 1944 for carrying two wounded men to safety at the Battle of Merz in Feisberg, Germany.

He wrote that, "Winning a medal was the only thing I can ever remember doing that won any admiration from my father."

At Williams College in Massachusetts, he and a fellow student, Stephen Sondheim, appeared in plays together. After college, he went to New York where he landed a job in the fledgling TV industry as stage manager of the "Howdy Doody" children's show. NBC brought him to Hollywood to stage manage the famous TV version of "The Petrified Forest' with Humphrey Bogart.

Among his credits as a producer were the TV series "Adventures in Paradise" and "The Boys in the Band," a pioneering 1970 drama about gay life. Two of his films, "The Panic in Needle Park" and "Play It As It Lays," were written or co-written by his brother John and sister-in-law Didion.

He was invited to celebrity parties and said he decided then, "This is how I want to live."

But Dunne said his years living the high life in Hollywood left him divorced, broke and addicted, and he moved to a cabin in Oregon to dry out and to start over as a novelist. While his brother was the famous Dunne at that time, the Times said, "nowadays, (Dominick) Dunne is far better known."

John Gregory Dunne died in 2003.

Dunne and his wife, Ellen Griffin Dunne, known as Lenny, were married in 1954. They divorced in the 1960s but he wrote that afterward they remained close nonetheless. She died in 1997.

Beside Dominique, they had two sons, Alexander and Griffin. Griffin has acted in such films as "An American Werewolf in London" and "After Hours." He branched into directing and producing as well, with "Fierce People" and "Practical Magic" among his credits.

___

Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch in Los Angeles and AP National Writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.

HYANNIS PORT, Massachusetts (AFP) –
The United States has been mourning and paying tribute as the family of Edward Kennedy prepared to accompany the liberal lion's body on its final journey.

All government buildings lowered the Stars and Stripes to half-mast, as did private homes in the Massachusetts seaside resort of Hyannis Port, where the veteran senator, aged 77, died Tuesday at his family compound.

President Barack Obama led tributes, saying "the outpouring of love, gratitude and fond memories which we have all witnessed is a testimony to the way this singular figure in American history touched so many lives."

On Thursday, family members were to accompany the coffin of Kennedy, whose elder brothers president John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated, in a cortege to his home city of Boston.

There, the senator's body was to lie in state at the John F. Kennedy presidential library ahead of a Catholic funeral Mass Saturday where Obama was scheduled to deliver a eulogy.

Later that day the Democratic Party giant's remains were to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, alongside his slain brothers. Obama was not expected to attend the burial.

Kennedy, who served 47 years in the Senate, died after a long battle with brain cancer.

His disappearance ends his family's half-century-long dominance of the Democratic Party and robs Obama of a crucial ally in an increasingly uphill battle to reform the US health care system.

Although long hated by the right, he came to be respected on both sides of the political divide as a larger-than-life figure whose tragedy-filled career was the stuff of American history.

Many thought Kennedy destined for the highest office after the murders of his brothers -- first John in 1963, then Robert, as he campaigned for the presidency, in 1968.

Personal scandal got in the way of White House ambitions, particularly the 1969 death of a female passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, when he drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, near Cape Cod, and fled the scene.

Yet by the end, the man dubbed the liberal lion for his championing of progressive causes earned the respect even of former foes.

Praise poured in from across the world, while US television outlets and newspapers were flooded with retrospectives on his eventful, if controversial life.

In Hyannis Port, police closed access to the compound, a sprawling beachfront residence that served as Cape Cod headquarters for the Kennedy clan.

More than 100 journalists and ranks of trucks with huge satellite dishes besieged the residence as strong winds whipped through the moored yachts.

An emotional Ana Lages, a chemical engineer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, placed flowers at the police line.

Kennedy, who long fought for immigrants' rights, had helped her get a green card 30 years ago, she said, sobbing.

"I'm very grateful to him," she said. While not sharing his left-leaning politics, she admired "a man who helped so many people."

Kennedy neighbor James Quinn called his death "the end of an era. There's no one really to pass the torch to."

Obama, whose presidency is becoming mired in the battle over health care, in part owed his meteoric rise to the White House last year to Kennedy's stunning endorsement.

Interrupting his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, just across the Nantucket Sound from Hyannis Port, Obama said that "even though we knew this day was coming for some time now, we awaited it with no small amount of dread."

A healthy Kennedy would have been a valuable ally to Obama today. He was renowned for his legislative skills and just a year ago described bringing health coverage to the 47 million uninsured Americans as "the cause of my life."

But there was also praise from political rivals.

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch lamented the loss of a "treasured friend."

This "giant of a man," he said, "with all his ideological verbosity and idealism, was a rare person who at times could put aside differences and look for common solutions."

World leaders also lauded Kennedy as "a great American" and paid tribute to his campaigning for peace and social welfare.

"He is admired around the world as the senator of senators," Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.

Irish leaders called Kennedy a "great friend" and trumpeted his role in helping Catholics and Protestants to achieve peace in Northern Ireland.

Kennedy died just two weeks after his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, passed away at the age of 88. Gravely ill, the US senator did not attend the funeral.