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Kenneth Eugene Smith has become the first person in history to be executed with nitrogen gas. The convicted killer, 58, had a tight gas mask placed over his nose and mouth before a stream of 100 percent nitrogen gas suffocated him inside the execution chamber at the William C. Holman prison in Atmore, Alabama. Smith was officially pronounced dead at 8:25 local time, following a 22-minute ordeal where he appeared to remain conscious for several minutes. He shook violently and pulled on the restraints on the gurney, continuing to breathe the nitrogen gas heavily until he succumbed and passed out....

Attorneys for the spiritual adviser of a soon-to-be executed inmate filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that the restrictions placed upon the adviser due to the method of execution are "hostile to religion." Officials with the Alabama Department of Corrections instructed the Rev. Jeff Hood that it could be dangerous to his health when he stands by Kenneth Eugene Smith in the execution chamber, according to a report. Smith is slated to be the first inmate in Alabama to be put to death via nitrogen gas, and Hood purportedly was asked to sign a waiver recognizing the risks that could arise...

Indi Gregory was mandated to die by the courts despite offers of continued treatment and legal protection by the Italian government and Vatican leaders. Indi Gregory, the 8-month-old infant who was forced off life support by the United Kingdom courts system, was baptized before her death despite her family not originally being religious. Dean Gregory, Indi's father, said before her death that he was inspired to baptize his daughter by Christian legal volunteers who fought to keep her alive. Dean said he became convinced of the existence of the devil by his family's treatment in the courtroom. "I am not...

Alabama's Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the state to execute an inmate using nitrogen gas. The state's attorney general’s request for an execution warrant for Kenneth Eugene Smith was granted in a 6-2 decision by an all-Republican court. Last year, the Alabama Department of Corrections called off the execution of Smith when the people responsible for connecting two intravenous lines to him for lethal injection could not do so. While the ruling moves the state closer to becoming the first to attempt execution with nitrogen gas, there is likely to be additional legal dispute on the matter. Alabama joins Oklahoma...

SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too. So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.

After botching a series of executions by lethal injection, the State of Alabama is planning to use nitrogen gas to put condemned prisoners to death. The first execution will amount to a human experiment, because neither Alabama nor any other state has ever tried to kill people this way. Late last month, prison guards distributed the state’s new execution protocol to prisoners in solitary confinement on Alabama’s death row. One hundred and sixty men and five women await execution in Alabama. They would be secured to a gurney, their nose and mouth would be covered by a mask, and nitrogen...

Russian scientist Dr. Dmitry Fedyanin seemed to die doing what he loved. German officials say the 34-year-old expert in ultra-violet light and a senior research fellow at the Nanooptics Department of Siegen University in Germany fell to his death Berchtesgadener Alps National Park after following his hiking app over a cliff. Fedyanin’s body was found at the bottom of Hoher Laafeld peak, which sits at about 7,000 feet. Fedyanin was using his hiking app to make his way down the mountain but the route he was taking didn’t have paths and the app “sent him over mountain precipice.” “Our investigators...

“Craig Robertson, come out with your hands up! This is the FBI.” That’s what residents of a quaint, suburban neighborhood pushed up against Provo Canyon near the BYU campus say they woke up to in the early morning hours Wednesday. “It sounded like it was coming from inside my house,” said one neighbor, who asked not to be identified. What followed was a barrage of gunshots. Moments later, authorities carried the overweight, elderly man out of his house, placed him on the sidewalk and tried, unsuccessfully, to render first aid, according to the witness. Several neighbors said his body remained...

Singapore City: Human Right Advocates have shared that Singapore will be executing a woman for the first time in 19 years. The Singaporean national was found guilty of drug trafficking and will be facing capital punishment for her crime tomorrow - July 28, 2023. Saridewi Djamani, 45, was found guilty of trafficking around 30g (1.06oz) of heroin in 2018. Djamani is the second drug convict to be executed in the past three days. Before her, Mohd Aziz bin Hussain, 56, was executed at Singapore's Changi Prison and has been buried by the authrauthorities. He was sentenced to death in 2018...

On this date in 1783, Diego Cristobal Tupac Amaru — cousin and successor to the famed indigenous rebel Tupac Amaru II — was tortured to death in Cusco. After Tupac Amaru’s execution in May 1781, the rebellion he had kindled fell south to present-day Bolivia and fought on furiously. Diego Cristobal succeeded his kinsman in authority, and with the (unrelated, but allied) Tupac Katari could briefly command vast territories that demanded bloody Spanish reconquest over hostile terrain. “Twenty years after these events,” one 19th century chronicle reports, “This writer saw the plains of Sicasica and Calamaca, for an extent of...

On this date in 1950, Milada Horakova was hanged with three others in Prague’s Pankrac Prison as a spy and traitor to the Communist Czechoslovakian government. Not (yet) as internationally recognizable as Rudolf Slansky,* the Communist General Secretary in Horakova’s time who would run afoul of Stalin and die on the same gallows two years later, Horakova (English Wikipedia page | Czech | the detailed French) is a potent symbol domestically of her country’s Cold War nightmare. Lawyer, social democrat, and a prominent feminist in the interwar and postwar periods — her life’s work, rather overshadowed by an end that...

The United States on Thursday urged Iran not to carry out the executions of three people involved in nationwide protests, with campaigners fearing that authorities will kill them imminently, AFP reported. State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel, echoing a statement last week by Amnesty International, voiced concern that Iran may soon execute Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi and Saeed Yaghoubi, who were arrested in November over protests in the central city of Isfahan. "We join the people of Iran and the international community in calling on Iran to not carry out these executions," Patel was quoted as having told reporters. "The...

...A hideous form of execution, which has not been practiced for twenty years, was revived the other day to strike terror into the hearts of the people. The murder of the Shah was followed by a succession of robberies on the road between Bushire and Isfahan, the nomad tribes going out in large parties and looting villages and caravans, and an Englishman was even stripped naked and beaten with sticks. One hundred thousand pounds was estimated as the value of property that changed hands during one week. Every day individuals came naked into Shiraz, and the roads were strewn with...

A woman who served time in prison for her involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection embraced former President Trump at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Thursday before later saying that former Vice President Mike Pence and “every single” member of Congress who certified the 2020 election should be executed. After QAnon supporter Micki Larson-Olson was pointed out to Trump as a “Jan. 6-er” by the crowd at a packed diner, Trump sought her out, calling her “terrific,” telling her to “hang in there” and giving her a hug, video shows.

An American businessman arrested in Communist China over a decade on apparently flimsy charges of drug trafficking will be put to death, Chinese government officials have announced. Mark Swidan, a Houston, Texas businessman, was arrested in November 2012 and sentenced to death in 2018 on charges he was in China to smuggle illegal drugs. John Kamm, chairman of the Dui Hua human rights foundation, tells Newsweek “the only ‘evidence’ against him is that Swidan once visited a factory where Chinese authorities allege the meth was manufactured, and that he had been in a room rented by another person where drugs...

Sarah’s was to be Bristol‘s final public hanging on the flat roof of the gatehouse of New Gaol in Cumberland Road. She was a house maid to sixty one year old Miss Elizabeth Jefferies, who according to Sarah, did not treat her well and had locked her in the kitchen all night among other perceived abuses. There was almost certain to be conflict between a cranky, elderly spinster and a rebellious young girl and this culminated in Sarah bludgeoning Miss Jefferies to death with a large stone as she slept, on the night of Sunday the 4th of March 1849....

Ukraine said Tuesday it had identified a soldier shot dead in a video that circulated widely across social media, sparking outrage and spurring officials to call for a probe. "According to preliminary data, the deceased is a serviceman of the 30th separate mechanised brigade, Tymofiy Mykolayovych Shadura," the Ukrainian land forces said on Telegram, adding he had been missing since February 3 amid fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America's South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists? Here's the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that "immoral" war against a communist takeover: There's no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It's crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- A man convicted of killing three teenagers while they slept in a Texas Panhandle home more than 25 years ago was executed on Wednesday, the sixth inmate to be put to death in the U.S. this year and the second in as many days. Balentine appeared jovial as witnesses were entering the death chamber, asking if someone standing near the gurney could remove the sheet covering the lower two-thirds of his body “and massage my feet.” Then he chuckled.

Progressive Democrat Rep. Cori Bush (MO) faced backlash online after lamenting the recent execution of Amber (previously “Scott”) McLaughlin, a biological man identifying as a transgender woman who was convicted of brutally raping and killing his ex-girlfriend. Following the execution by the state of Missouri, far-left “Squad” member Cori Bush released a statement saying that McLaughlin was “killed by state-sanctioned, inhumane capital punishment.” “My heart is with her family and loved ones,” the Democrat congresswoman said, making no mention of McLaughlin’s victims. “I yearn for the day when our society acknowledges that state-sanctioned murder will never achieve justice.”