Oct. 12 SAUDI ARABIA: 2 Saudis beheaded for murder 2 Saudi men were beheaded by the sword on Sunday after they were convicted of murdering two compatriots, the Saudi interior ministry said. Musaed bin Attiyah al-Ruwaili was executed in the northern town of Ar'ar after he was found guilty of "detaining, beating and electrocuting Ahmad bin Obaid al-Anzi until he passed away," the ministry said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency. Badr bin Hmoud al-Khumaisi was executed in the western Jeddah region after he was found guilty of fatally shooting Shayem bin Saleh al-Rashidi following a dispute, the ministry said. The beheadings bring to 74 the number of executions announced by Saudi Arabia this year. Last year, a record 153 people were executed in the oil-rich Gulf kingdom, which applies a strict version of Sharia, or Islamic law. This figure compared with 37 in 2006 and the previous record number of 113 executions in 2000. Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking can all carry the death penalty in the ultra-conservative country, where executions are usually carried out in public. (source: The Times of India) SOMALIA: 3 Somalis sentenced to death A Somali court yesterday handed death sentences to 3 men convicted of kidnapping a British national working for a Canadian oil firm in the breakaway region of Puntland, an official said. "The 3 defendants were sentenced to death after they were found guilty of being kidnappers," said Mohamed Abdi Aware, head of the supreme court in the Puntland port town of Bosasso. A 4th suspect was handed a 15-year prison term in absentia for assisting the trio in kidnapping Carl Fletcher, who worked for Africa Oil Corporation, in Puntland on Wednesday. Security forces freed him hours later. Puntland usually executes its death row convicts by firing squad. Armed gangs in Puntland and elsewhere in Somalia have carried out scores of kidnappings in recent months, often targeting foreigners or Somalis working with international organisations to demand ransoms. The self-declared state of Puntland in the north has been largely spared the latest violence, but it has been used by pirates seizing foreign vessels and gangs smuggling goods, arms and people across the Gulf of Aden. (source: Agence France Presse) NIGERIA: Govt to Make Kidnapping Capital Offence In a bid to stem the alarming and embarrassing spate of kidnappings in Abia State, the government has said it would soon make the offence attract a capital punishment, just like armed robbery. The new anti-kidnapping measure was made known by the state attorney general and commissioner for justice, Mr. Okey Amechi, while speaking at this year's Legal Year celebration held at the Michael Okpara auditorium Umua-hia. He said a bill has already been sent to the State House of Assembly and once passed into law and assented to by the governor kidnappers in Abia State would face the same music as convicted armed robbers. The commissioner, who was represented at the event by the director of civil litigation Mrs. Scholastica Chioma, noted that efforts geared at reforming the administration of the justice system in the country cannot yield fruits until the Bar and Bench come to agreement. He specifically called for collective synergy between the Bar and the Bench in order to institutionalise an efficient justice delivery system as nothing could be achieved in the face of myriads of dichotomy existing between the bench an the bar. Amechi therefore called for more cooperation between the Bar and the Bench, saying the Practice Direction guidelines issued by the Chief Judge of the state on assumption for quick disposal of cases in courts, would suffer serious setbacks without the co-operation of the 2 legal bodies. The Commissioner for Justice lamented the rising cases of professional misconducts in the bar including bribery, fraudulent activities and embezzlement of clients money and urged that members of the bar should adhere strictly to ethics of the legal profession. In his speech the Chief Judge, Justice Sunday Imo, said a total of 6, 374 criminal and civil matters were brought before the High Courts in the state in the preceding year and that a total of 1, 238 of them were disposed. Governor Theodore Orji, represented by his deputy, Comrade Chris Akomas, pledged to bring more succour to the state judiciary, saying that he was aware that those who sit in judgement must be insulated from avarice and corruption so as to discharge their duties effectively. (source: This Day) UGANDA: Abolish death penalty - European Union THE European Union (EU) has urged the Government to abolish the death penalty and devise viable alternatives to capital punishment. "The EU is the leading institutional actor in contesting the death penalty worldwide and its actions in this area represent a key priority of its external human rights policy," said Ambassador Vincent de Visscher. He was speaking at the launch of a book titled: "Towards Abolition of the Death Penalty in Uganda," at the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) head offices in Nsambya on Friday. Visscher said: "The EU considers capital punishment to be a cruel and inhuman punishment, which fails to provide deterrence to criminal behaviour and represents an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity." "It is impossible to become a member of the EU without first abolishing the death penalty." Although the death sentence is still law in Uganda, the Constitutional Court has recently ruled that it was not mandatory to pass the sentence. Livingstone Ssewanyana, the FHRI executive director, said there was need for solutions and alternatives like life-imprisonment, which are more viable than death. (source: The New Vision) < RUSSIA----book review: In search of ... 'The Lost Spy' On the night of Feb. 20, 1939, three Soviet secret policemen knocked on a door at the Hotel Moskva in the Russian capital. They demanded to see the (fake) passport of its occupant, gave him a few minutes to gather some belongings and whisked him away to the notorious Lubyanka prison. Charged with espionage, he was questioned for almost a year before being sentenced to eight years in Norilsk, a mining center hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle and one of the bleakest islands in the Gulag Archipelago. So far, so routine. Something like this happened to millions of Russians during Stalin's paranoid regime. But this arrestee was different. He was an American citizen named Isaiah Oggins. And he was not spying for his native land. Since the 1920s, he had been a Russian spy, working in several countries, including his own. Andrew Meier's a biography of Oggins, "The Lost Spy," is, necessarily, a little vague on those matters. Putting it mildly, it is not in the nature of a secret agent's work to leave an easily documented record of his clandestine activities. Nevertheless, "The Lost Spy" is utterly fascinating, a sad and sinuous study of true belief carried beyond all reason by a man who committed himself to the labyrinthine way without once, so far as Meier can determine, openly discussing what motivated him or offering an ideological rationale. That makes him, in some sense, a perfect spy, a guy who took his secrets with him to his unmarked grave. In retrospect, it is easy to imagine Cy -- the name he formally adopted -- Oggins leading an entirely different life. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in Willimantic, Conn., where his father was a shopkeeper. Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time magazine, speculates that his radicalization may have begun when the Industrial Workers of the World attempted to organize the American Thread Co., Willimantic's dominant employer, during the radical agitations that preceded America's entry into World War I. Maybe so, but Cy entered Columbia University in 1917 intent upon becoming a historian. He probably supported the antiwar movement and was certainly influenced by the oppressive campaign against radicals in the postwar years. But one suspects it was his courtship and marriage to Nerma Berman, a tiny, noisy, radical firebrand, that completed his conversion to communism. Still, for a time he pursued his doctorate at Columbia, while Nerma worked and studied at the Rand Institute, then the nation's most famous leftist school. When his money ran out, he took an editorial job at Yale University Press. By 1928, the couple were in Berlin, working for the Soviets. There, they rented a house the Russians used as headquarters for decoding and disseminating stolen documents. Later, they were in Paris, keeping an eye on a Romanov relative active in resistance to the Soviets. Still later, Cy was in Manchuria, helping to manage a rather wonky aircraft business but actually keeping an eye on Japanese expansion in the region. His work was very hush-hush but quite low-level. It's hard to see what of import Cy accomplished in these posts. Indeed, it's hard to determine what any spy did then that changed the world. They may have played a sometimes deadly game, but it was largely a feckless one. Espionage, however, seems almost incidental to Meier's book. What it offers that is more interesting is a tour of the more public world of left-wing intellectuals at the time. At Columbia, Cy knew Charles Beard (he of the Constitution's economic interpretation) and Whittaker Chambers. At Rand, Scott Nearing, the golden throat of American radicalism, twitterpated Nerma. The couple were close with Sidney Hook -- beginning his famous journey from left to right --who had the clearest, earliest eye for the monstrousness that lay behind Soviet propaganda. The portrait Meier paints is of a deeply shadowed world, where even the politicians and public intellectuals largely prated nonsense, befuddled by the contrast between the heroic party line and the true horrors of the Soviet police state. Despite the stumbling efforts of the State Department to secure his release, it never happened. By 1947, when his prison term was up, the Russians suspected, possibly rightly, that he would spill such secrets as he had to Sen. Joe McCarthy and his burgeoning ilk. They executed Oggins in a particularly painful manner, by lethal injection. One wishes that Meier might have found more eyewitnesses to this story, more revelatory documents, for there are times when his "must have, might have" constructions irritate. Still, he's done what he can. The history of Communist Russia is one of huge, sickening and infinitely deadly betrayals, so perhaps Cy Oggins' story is only a minor one. Or perhaps not. You could as well argue that it tells us all we really need to know about how the totalitarian spirit perfected itself in the middle of the 20th century. (source: Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide
Rick Halperin Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:02:47 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin
- [Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide Rick Halperin