Join us for an evening for Japan's children at the Bowery Hotel. Hosted by Candice Kumai, Harold Dieterle, and Angelo Sosa of Top Chef! We are sadly finding that donations to Japan are much lower than those made to Katrina and the Indonesia/Thailand, so let's do our part to get help out there!
Follow us @4JapanKids #EPH
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Countries which continue to use the death penalty are being left increasingly isolated following a decade of progress towards abolition, Amnesty International has said today in its new report Death Sentences and Executions in 2010.
A total of 31 countries abolished the death penalty in law or in practice during the last 10 years but China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA and Yemen remain amongst the most frequent executioners, some in direct contradiction of international human rights law.
The total number of executions officially recorded by Amnesty International in 2010 went down from at least 714 people in 2009 to at least 527 in 2010, excluding China.
China is believed to have executed thousands in 2010 but continues to maintain its secrecy over its use of the death penalty.
“The minority of states that continue to systematically use the death penalty were responsible for thousands of executions in 2010, defying the global anti-death penalty trend,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
“While executions may be on the decline, a number of countries continue to pass death sentences for drug-related offences, economic crimes, sexual relations between consenting adults and blasphemy, violating international human rights law forbidding the use of the death penalty except for the most serious crimes,” said Salil Shetty. ...
Awww, so sad. Just heard the news:
Berlin's beloved polar bear Knut, who rose to international stardom as a cuddly cub hand-raised by zookeepers, died suddenly on Saturday, a zoo official said.
The world-famous bear died alone in his compound without warning, bear keeper Heiner Kloes told The Associated Press.
"It was a completely normal day: He was with the female bears before, who had just been shut away," Kloes said. "Then, Knut strolled around the enclosure, went into the water, had a short spasm and died." A post mortem will be conducted on Monday to try to pinpoint the cause of death, he said.
Between 600 and 700 people were at Knut's compound and saw the four-year-old bear die, German news agency DAPD reported.
One visitor said she watched Knut lying on the surface of the water motionless with only his back showing for ten minutes until zookeepers came and fenced off the compound. "Everybody was asking, 'What's going on, why is Knut not moving?'" said Camilla Verde, a 30-year-old Italian who lives in Berlin.
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Photo (c) Alexis Duclos/UNHCR
CHOUCHA CAMP, Tunisia, March 16 (UNHCR) – With smooth features and a calm way about him, Abdullah Omar, 25, comes across as someone accustomed to hard choices. But the decision to send his one-year-old daughter back to war-ravaged Somalia, because he could not afford to support her, was one of the hardest he and his wife Khadija have ever faced.
That was five months ago. "There is not a night that goes by when I don't lie awake thinking about my baby and worrying about her," Khadija told me here at the windswept Choucha transit camp just inside Tunisia.
For the young Somali couple it was the most challenging in a series of ordeals that they have endured in the four years since they fled Somalia – from a 10-day truck journey with people smugglers across the Sahara to serving time in detention and being hounded by racist thugs in Tripoli....
Shark humor has its time and place, but not when I'm snorkeling somewhere called Shark Bay. At the Heron Island Research Station, a laboratory on the teardrop-shaped atoll 45 miles (72 km) off Australia's east coast, the suntanned, chirpy station manager gives a parting wave to the three students who are taking me out for my first look at the legendary corals of the Great Barrier Reef. "Just don't get eaten, will you?" she says. Ha-ha. Happily, there are no sharks in Shark Bay that morning; in fact, there's not a whole lot of anything. As I follow the students' snorkels, we pass over circular beds of brown, monochromatic coral and empty expanses of rippled sand. A handful of small, glimmering fish hover in the water column, but they're the only life we see during an hour-long swim. Where are the schools of coral trout? The famed Maori wrasse? Wading back to shore, one of the students shrugs: "Sorry there wasn't more."...
Dawnmarie Souza's comments on her Facebook page didn't win her any points with the boss, but the rest of us owe her a debt of gratitude. In a rare test of old law on a new medium, she helped us understand just how little the online world differs from the land of bricks and mortar.
Souza's career as a paramedic at American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc. may not have been too bright even before she called her boss various genital parts in a November 2009 Facebook posting. She had been hauled on the carpet for several incidents of allegedly rude behavior and had further rankled the emergency-response company by asking to have a union representative present when she was to be questioned about one particular customer's complaint that she had been rude, according to a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) investigation of the case. The company denied the request, and that, in turn, set off her colorful Facebook flurry. American Medical fired her 23 days later. ...