In his lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, the author will volunteer to be a test case before a euthanasia tribunal himself. The tribunal panels would include a legal expert in family matters and a doctor with experience of serious long-term illness.

"If granny walks up to the tribunal and bangs her walking stick on the table and says 'Look, I've really had enough, I hate this bloody disease, and I'd like to die thank you very much young man', I don't see why anyone should stand in her way." He said there was no evidence from countries where assisted dying is allowed of granny being coerced into dying so relatives could get their hands on her money.

"Choice is very important in this matter. But there will be some probably older, probably wiser GPs, who will understand. The tribunal would be acting for the good of society as well as that of the applicant -- and ensure they are of sound and informed mind, firm in their purpose, suffering from a life-threatening and incurable disease and not under the influence of a third party.

"If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice."

According to various reports Professor Roland Reuss, a literature professor from Germany's Heidelberg University, struck out at Google and the Settlement, negotiated in the US by the Association of American Publishers, and the US Authors Guild with Google. He described Google's lofty ideals as "just a whole garbage of hysterical propaganda", and warned of a threat to traditional publishing, saying "you revolutionize the market but the cost is that the producers of goods in this market will be demolished".

Reuss then rounded on Bertelsmann's Richard Sarnoff, who negotiated the deal as chair of the AAP, calling him "naive" and arguing that the deal disregarded the Berne Convention, and the rights of copyright holders to determine how their work was used. According to Publishers Weekly, Sarnoff said the parties to the deal did not anticipate the backlash in Europe. And he added that European works may indeed have to be removed from the settlement.

Cho (whose full name is pronounced joh sung-wee) appears first to have alarmed the noted Virginia Tech poet Nikki Giovanni in a creative writing class in fall 2005, Giovanni said. Cho took pictures of fellow students during class and wrote about death, she said in an interview. "Kids write about murder and suicide all the time. But there was something that made all of us pay attention closely. None of us were comfortable with that," she said.

The students once recited their poems in class. "It was like, 'What are you trying to say here?' It was more sinister," she said. Days later, seven of Giovanni's 70 or so students showed up for a class. She asked them why the others didn't show up and was told that they were afraid of Cho. "Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something," she said.

She approached Cho and told him that he needed to change the type of poems he was writing or drop her class. Giovanni said Cho declined to leave and said, "You can't make me." "Yeah, I can."

"I was willing to resign before I would continue with him," she told CNN. "It was the meanness." Professor Roy started teaching him in a one-on-one workshop, and it didn’t take long for her, too, to worry for her own safety, working out a secret alarm with her assistant. "If she mentioned the name of a dead professor, her assistant would know it was time to call security," The Times reported today. Later in the CNN interview, Professor Giovanni said that reports on Monday that that the gunman was Asian left "no doubt" in her mind who did it. Her interviewer's shock led her to make something very clear. "But I'm not prescient," she said.

In an interview to be broadcast on BBC radio, Rowling said she is still looking for a good pseudonym for a book she plans. The book would be aimed at younger children than the Harry Potter series.

Rowling is currently working on the seventh and final book about the boy magician. The series has sold over 300 million copies and been translated into 63 languages.