I've just read an amazing article about the Death Penalty in India and like its author I'm totally against all forms of Capital Punishment. Still, I am interested in what my readers are thinking about this topic, so I made a poll where you can vote for or against the Death Penalty. Of course the voting is totally anonymous, so don't worry about me seeing your name/IP address or anything like that.
Please leave a comment here if you want to say something more about this issue. Below you can find "Reasons against the death penalty" with a few comments by me and also the article I mentioned above.
Reasons against the death penalty (by antideathpenalty.org)
1. Executions cost more than life in prison.
$2 million per person vs. $500,000 (4x as much!). Free counsel for defense, for appeals, maximum security on a separate death row wing.
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In case you've asked yourself this, cause you've seen the name "Kony" float around the web during the last hours, you asked the right question! The answer is in this video, and I strongly recommend you watch the whole thing, because there is some really important information in it. Also, it's only 30 minutes, not 3 hours, so I bet you'll survive focussing your attention on this video for a while....
Juarez, Mexico is a war zone.
The war is being waged by two rival drug cartels, the Juarez and the Sinoloa, block by block for control of the city and its trafficking routes. The result is extreme levels of violence, corruption and intimidation. And for the past two years, photographer Dominic Bracco II has been covering the war’s effects on the border town’s residents. While he is working there as a journalist, Bracco can’t help but feel invested in the subjects that he’s become so familiar with....
As we come ever closer to 2012, I thought I would examine Africa's recent struggles on its path to unity and a more prosperous region.
Certainly, with 2011's cataclysmic changes taking place in North Africa, most of the African Union's attention has been heavily turned towards the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Nevertheless, the organisation has not been without its own crises to manage in the sub-Saharan region.
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Two days after the sight of flaming cars and anti-Semitic graffiti horrified a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, residents, elected officials and others took part in a march on Sunday against hatred and intolerance.
The police were still investigating the burning of three parked cars on Ocean Parkway and the spray-painting of swastikas and anti-Semitic slurs on benches and the initials “K.K.K.” on the side of a van. The police are treating the episode as a hate crime. No arrests had been made by late Sunday afternoon.
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Thanks to this solar panel, Sara Ruto no longer takes a three-hour taxi ride to a town with electricity to recharge her cellphone.
For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.
Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.
Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.
That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.
“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.
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