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.
Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times
Before I post this article I wanna add that, as a blog owner, I definitely see the existence of child porn on the internet, because I can see the search terms that led people to my blog posts. I've often posted articles about child abuse and sex slavery in the past and unfortunately those aren't only read by people like you and me, who try to fight against those disgusting people that abuse our children right under our noses. I just wish there was a way to report them. If anyone got an idea, please tell me.
Props to Anonymous for attacking the right sites:
Members of the Anonymous hacktivist movement are claiming responsibility for taking down more than 40 secret child-pornography websites and leaking the names of more than 1,500 members of one of the illegal sites.
The Anonymous campaign began Oct. 14, when members of the hacktivist group found a cache of child-pornography websites while browsing a secret website called the Hidden Wiki, a guidebook to hundreds of underground websites invisible to search engines and regular Internet users. The hackers singled out Lolita City, a file-sharing site used by pedophiles, and leaked the names of the site's 1,589 active members to Pastebin on Tuesday (Oct. 18), the Examiner reported.
Member of Anonymous deciding to hack a website whose stance they don't agree with is by no means shocking news. In the past year, Anonymous-affiliated hackers have gone after the New York Stock Exchange, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Recording Industry Association of America and government sites in Malaysia, Egypt, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.
However, in targeting child pornography sites, and in explaining its methods of attack, these Anonymous-affiliated hackers have revealed a deeply disturbing side of the Internet unknown to most people.
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© Kok Cheow Yeoh
Don Heller: A California Republican against death penalty By Don Heller, Columnist I have been a Republican for many years. I wrote the ballot initiative that reinstated the death penalty in California in 1978. I believe those who commit willful and intentional murder should be locked up and severely punished in the interest of public safety. I made a terrible mistake 33 years ago, but it is one that can be corrected. People are working hard to give voters the opportunity in the next election to replace the death penalty with life in prison without possibility of parole. If given that chance, I call upon all Californians to join me in voting yes to abolish capital punishment. I have not gone soft on crime. I believe that public safety is one of the primary purposes of a government predicated on the rule of law. Justice should be swift and certain. But the death penalty initiative that I drafted was drawn up without fiscal study, input from others, or committee hearings. I made sure that the legal structure that I created would meet tough constitutional standards and checked my work against relevant U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence. But there was none of the give and take envisioned by our forefathers when they created the legislative process more than 200 years ago. Essentially, I wrote alone and the fiscal impact was never considered by the sponsors or myself. ...
Casey Anthony, who earlier this week was found not guilty of killing her daughter, was sentenced on Thursday to four years in jail, not including the nearly three years she has served for lying to investigators, though the precise time she will spend in jail has not yet been determined.
Judge Belvin Perry said that he would have to meet with lawyers for at least an hour or so to decide how much time Ms. Anthony should be credited with serving. A decision is to be reached sometime Thursday. She was also fined $1,000 for each of the four counts of lying she has been convicted of.
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Just weeks after a New York based inmate allegedly confessed to robbing Tupac Shakur in 1994, a man named Clayton Hill has reportedly come forward to confess who allegedly murdered The Notorious B.I.G. and speaks on his own involvement.
On June 8, former Nation of Islam member, Hill, contacted HipHopDX and confessed to being handed a semi-automatic handgun that was allegedly used in the shooting of B.I.G. on March, 1997.
According to a reported email exchange between Hills, 41, and HipHopDX, via CorrLinks, in mid-May 1997 Western Regional Minister from the Nation of Islam, Tony Muhammad, with the approval of Supreme Captain of the Southern Region, Abdul Sharrieff Muhammad, via Account Executive Brother Melvin Muhammad, ordered Hill to pick up Dawoud Muhammad from the Greyhound Bus Station in downtown Atlanta. Dawoud's name was kept from Hill till Dawoud introduced himself as such when meeting....
Like many other popular attractions in Orlando, the Casey Anthony trial requires tickets. Hundreds of people show up each day to watch the murder case unfold. But only those who arrive well before 8 a.m. and wait in June swelter can get a pass allowing them into the soaring, chilly top-floor courtroom where Anthony is trying to avoid the death penalty.
Anthony is accused of murdering her 2-year-old, Caylee, in 2008. In December of that year, investigators found parts of the girl's duct-taped corpse near Anthony's parents' home. Bugs and vegetation had colonized the remains, which had been dumped roughly six months earlier. The sheer horror at the act — and the idea that a mother committed it — catapulted the case from local live-at-5 sideshow to tabloid sensation ("Monster mom partying four days after tot died," one recent report said) to national preoccupation. The case is being followed by millions on live-stream video feeds and constant cable-news reports. In the past few days, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald have become the latest major outlets to begin offering live streams of the case. CNN and NBC air so much coverage of the trial that the networks each decided to erect a two-story, air-conditioned structure in a lot across from the courthouse. The broadcast village around the court often grows to hundreds of media vehicles. (See TIME's photo-essay "Moms Who Kill.")
And yet they are relative latecomers to what is the first major murder trial of the social-media age. The first public mention of the case appeared on MySpace on July 3, 2008, when Cindy Anthony, Casey's mother, posted a distraught message saying her daughter had stolen "lots of money" and wasn't allowing her to see her granddaughter. (A few days later, Cindy called 911 to report a "possible missing child.")...
As you all know, Revok was arrested and convicted for 180 days a while ago. Fortunately he was released three days ago and told us his side of the story.
You guys probably know that I'm a big fan of graffiti, always happy to find some color in the streets. I still can understand, when home owners aren't so happy when someone writes on their walls and they have to pay for the removal. However, charging one of the greatest graffiti artists for painting murals with the property owners consent is just ridiculous! This is a clear attack against the art itself and has nothing to do with vandalism!
Here's Revok's blog post:
-After 44 days and 24,000$ of debt I am finally out of jail… Thank you soo very much to all of you people who showed your support with drawings, paintings, etc. It means a great deal to me that there are people out there that actually give a shit. ...
