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China executed 2,400 people in 2013: report The world’s top executioner China put 2,400 people to death last year, a US-based rights group said, shedding rare light on a statistic Beijing tries to keep a state secret. The Dui Hua Foundation said on Tuesday that the figure had gone down by 20 percent since 2012, but China is so sensitive about the issue that it has done nothing to publicise the decline in its use of the death penalty. The foundation, a nonprofit organisation that seeks clemency and better treatment for at-risk detainees, said it obtained its figures from “a judicial official with access to the number of executions carried out each year”. “China currently executes more people every year than the rest of the world combined, but it has executed far fewer people since the power of final review of death sentences was returned to the (Supreme People’s Court) in 2007,” Dui Hua said. hina’s top court examines all death sentences issued in the country, and sent back 39 percent o...

10 beauties given the death penalty and executed over the past nearly 30 years 19-years-old (some say 23-years-old) Ren Xue from Henan Luoyang [above], young and beautiful, the younger sister to two older brothers.  Her eldest brother had a relationship with the eldest daughter of a certain local mine manager surnamed Ding and met opposition by the Ding family including the Ding family’s younger daughter.  Afterward, her brother disappeared without a trace, his fate unknown. Ren Xue had a relationship with a certain college student while at school, even becoming pregnant with a child, but was dumped.  After a physical fight with her boyfriend, she became disfigured and her disposition became oversensitive and antisocial.  Owing to her family not having any connections, Ren Xue had no job whereas the Ding family’s second daughter did despite having inferior academic scores. Photo is of the last moments of Ren Xue’s life. Ren Xue sold her body to mine manager Ding, but...

China, condemned man being fed his last meal before execution in Shanghai READ RELATED STORIES:  Facing their last moments with a smile: The Chinese women about to be executed for drug smuggling A young woman sits cross-legged on the ground laughing playfully as she is fed a lychee. Another plays cards in pair of baggy pink pyjamas. The moving images could show any group of young women as they go about their daily lives in prison. But just hours - and in some cases minutes - after the pictures were taken, each of the four women were led into a concrete yard and executed. The previously unseen photographs have emerged for the first time in nearly a decade - and give an incredibly rare glimpse into final moments of Chinese prisoners on death row. Communist officials are notoriously guarded about the death penalty, in a country that carries out more executions than any other. But in an unprecedented move, an unnamed civilian photographer was allowed inside No 1 Detention Centre for wo...

Execution with no farewell spotlights China death penalty In letters to his daughter from death row, Zeng Chengjie assured her he would be reprieved, like others convicted of economic crimes in China.  Instead he was executed, his body cremated, and his loved ones left to find out days later via a written notice posted at a courthouse.  The incident triggered a public outcry and spotlighted China's combination of a murky criminal justice system and aggressive, sometimes unpredictable, use of capital punishment.  Zeng's 24-year-old daughter rushed to the Changsha Intermediate Court after hearing rumours of her father's death, hoping an official could reassure her.  Instead she found the statement. "I felt like I was in a dream, that this couldn't be happening," Zeng Shan said. "In his letters he always said there was hope."  Even after a relative collected his ashes, she said, "I still couldn't believe it." Zeng had been convicted of ...

US troops killed as shocking images released US soldiers in Iraq today enjoyed little peace, despite confirmation that Saddam Hussein’s feared sons Uday and Qusay were killed after a firefight in the country’s northern city of Mosul. The occupying US forces released photographs of the bodies of the former dictator’s two sons in a bid to quell Iraqi skepticism they were dead. The pictures were also released in the hope that confirmation of their deaths would demoralize guerilla fighters mounting daily attacks on US soldiers. “The death of Qusay and Uday has been welcomed by the Iraqi people because they were a symbol of all the oppression which was imposed on the people of Iraq for decades,” , Adnan Pachachi, a member of Iraq’s fledgling governing council told reporters in London this morning Still, at least four US soldiers were killed today and an undisclosed number injured in separate incidents around the war-ravaged country. Four US troops and two Iraqis, believed to be members of t...

Islamic State Christians execution video displays cinematic sophistication Counterterrorism officials grappling with implications of group's polished productions The Islamic State’s latest mass-beheading video might seem like guerrilla camera work shot on a desolate Libyan beach.  But a closer look reveals a level of cinematic sophistication that U.S. officials and one American filmmaker say likely involved rehearsals and perhaps even multiple takes to pull off successfully. The video purports to show the executions of dozens of Ethiopian Christians against multiple backdrops — including one replete with blood-colored waves lapping up from the Mediterranean. U.S. officials say the carnage appears to have been carried out by a Libya-based offshoot of the Islamic State, but the elaborate pre-production, editing and dissemination of the video were most likely run out of the extremist group’s central media operations in either Syria or Iraq, an effort that puts on full display the terr...

Lynching was the widespread occurrence of extrajudicial killings which began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and ended during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.  Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners.  Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities.  Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and border states. [2] In 1891, the largest single mass lynching in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants. Lynchings followed African Americans with the Great Migration (c. 1916–1970) out of the American South, and were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy a...