Word: death
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Nine years ago, Muna seduced a 16-year-old Israeli boy over the Internet, luring him into a liaison that resulted in his death. Muna was a 24-year-old Palestinian journalist from the West Bank city of Ramallah when she began trawling Internet chat rooms at about the time of the second intifadeh. She soon found Ofir Rahum, a schoolboy from the Israeli city of Ashkelon. She said she was a newly immigrated Moroccan Jew named Sali, and she soon initiated a sexually charged cyber-relationship. The young man was bedazzled that an older woman was so passionate about...
...British man convicted of heroin-trafficking has drawn attention to the country's harsh criminal-justice system. The execution has sparked a diplomatic row between China and the U.K., but global condemnation will do little to provoke reform. China is the world leader in the use of the death penalty - Amnesty International documented some 1,700 judicial killings in China last year, but the true total could be as much as three times that - and Beijing makes no apologies for its hard line. In a statement issued after the execution, a Chinese court said drug crimes were "serious criminal offenses...
...while China often complains that criticism by foreign governments amounts to outside interference in its internal affairs, there are signs that the rapidly modernizing country is curbing its use of the death penalty of its own accord. The reforms are modest, to be sure, but some observers see them as a rare bright spot amid an overall bleak trend for human rights in China. (Read "China's Harsh Warning to Political Dissidents...
...past, the Chinese government has cited the need for deterrence and public support of the death penalty to justify its broad use of capital punishment. In online forums on Chinese websites, opinion over the Shaikh case tends to back the official stance. "We should stick to the Chinese law no matter what, instead of bending under the pressure from Western countries," wrote a commentator in a chat room on Tianya.com. "Otherwise, we would only damage the dignity of China's judicial system...
...Indeed, the case will have little effect on how China views the death penalty. "While there's some role for international opinion and international engagement with China on capital punishment, I think that the primary motive force for change and progress in the area of capital punishment in China is going to be internal," says Joshua Rosenzweig, Hong Kong-based manager of the Dui Hua Foundation, a U.S. human-rights group...