Raising Fears: The woman who co-founded the...

Raising Fears: The woman who co-founded the Hemlock Society, a group that advocates suicide for terminally ill people, has disappeared in Oregon after a period of depression, raising fears she may have killed herself. Officials say there are “a number of circumstances that were not like they were every day” at Ann Wickett Humphry’s farm. Derek Humphry, author of the bestseller “Final Exit” and her former husband, said the Hemlock Society does not advocate “that you take your life if you’re unhappy or you have a setback. I hope and pray it hasn’t happened.”

* Take a Meeting: King Juan Carlos of Spain called on Americans and Europeans to celebrate next year’s 500th anniversary of Columbus’ visit to the New World not as a discovery but as a meeting. “We are experiencing winds of change like those of 1492 . . . when the meeting took place between two worlds,” he said in New York Monday. “We must not forget that most important in this meeting was man--European man and American man.”

* Strange Bookfellows: Jesse Jackson is writing the foreword to a new book by James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. Jackson said on a visit to his hometown of Greenville, S.C., Monday that he is helping Ray because of the unanswered questions about the 1968 assassination. “I do not believe he acted alone,” said Jackson, a former aide to King who was at the scene of the sniper attack in Memphis. Ray is serving a 99-year sentence after pleading guilty to the murder charge.

* Big Idea: The year was 1917, and the manager of a Tennessee bakery trudged across Appalachia with a load of ginger snaps. But he found people little interested in his dowdy dessert. So the baker slapped some marshmallow cream between a couple of big, soft cookies and dunked the whole thing in chocolate. Bingo. Now, 75 years later, the Moon Pie remains a Southern tradition. “It really caught on,” says Sam Campbell IV, president of the Chattanooga Bakery Co. “We’re kind of like mother and prison and the pickup and trains.”