Vanishing of the top local cohomology modules over Noetherian rings

Let R be a (not necessarily local) Noetherian ring and M a finitely generated R-module of finite dimension d. Let \fa be an ideal of R and \fM denote the intersection of all prime ideals \fp in Supp_RH^d_{\fa}(M). It is shown that H^d_{\fa}(M)\simeq H^d_{\fM}(M)/\displaystyle{\sum_{n\in \mathbb{N}}}(0:_{H^d_{\fM}(M)}\fa^n), where for an Artinian R-module A we put A=\cap_{n\in \mathbb{N}} \fM^nA. As a consequence, it is proved that for all ideals \fa of R, there are only finitely many non-isomorphic top local cohomology modules H^d_{\fa}(M) having the same support. In addition, we establish an analogue of the Lichtenbaum-Hartshorne Vanishing Theorem over rings that need not be local.