I have yet to see a death case among the dozen coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial... People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Said : Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, way back in 2001 (Aug. 10), delivering a lecture on the importance of public service law at the University of the District of Columbia as reported in a news item by The Associated Press. Ginsburg had admitted that she found the death penalty "the hardest part of the job." "If given her druthers, she would "go back to the day to when the Supreme Court said the death penalty can't be applied with an even hand," Ginsburg had mentioned.

Justice Ginsburg voiced her support for a moratorium on the death penalty and criticized the inadequate funding available for those who represent poor people. "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty," said Ginsburg. "I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial." 

"Our system of justice works best when opposing positions are well represented and fully aired," she reportedly said.

The discussion on the award of capital punishment is age-old. Amnesty International, in a statement, says "it opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception regardless of the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the offender, or the method used by the state to kill the prisoner. The organization campaigns for total abolition of capital punishment. Proponents put forward a number of arguments for retaining the death penalty, including that it is necessary for an effective criminal justice system. However, these arguments do not stand up to scrutiny. One often cited argument is that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to serious crimes. In reality, there is no evidence that the death penalty is a stronger deterrent against crime than custodial sentences."

According to the 2012 report of Amnesty International, at least 582 executions were known to have been carried in 21 countries. However, these figures do not include the thousands of people who were believed to have been executed in China. Since its 2009 report, Amnesty International stopped publishing its estimates on the use of the death penalty in China, where such data are considered a state secret. The report says : "Amnesty International renews its challenge to the Chinese authorities to publish figures for the number of people sentenced to death and executed each year, to confirm their claims that there has been a significant reduction in the use of the death penalty in the country since 2007". The total number of people sentenced to death was at least 1,722 in 58 countries in 2012.

11th World Day Against the Death Penalty was observed on October 10, 2013.

The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, formed in 2003, is an alliance of more than 140 NGOs, bar associations, local authorities and unions with the ultimate aim of the universal abolition of the death penalty. The organisation helps activists worldwide to unite and participate in the struggle for universal abolition of the death penalty. The coalition believes that "No state should have the power to take a citizen’s life."

Capital punishment or the death penalty violates the principle of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that "everyone has the right to life and that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." It is also against the spirit of three resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly - in December 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2012 - seeking a moratorium on the use of the death penalty.

I don’t know of anybody in the business community who takes the side of the Taliban minority

Dirk Van Dongen
(Pic : Richard A. Bloom)

said Dirk Van Dongen, longtime chief lobbyist for the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) who has known Boehner since the lawmaker’s first election, according to the Washington Post's story of today titled "Business groups stand by Boehner, plot against tea party." Dirk Van Dongen is President of NAW, which represents the $4.9 trillion dollar American wholesale distribution industry. He is regarded as a powerful fundraiser and a political advicer, too. His comment quite clearly compares the pressure tactics adopted by the  tea party members, during the entire shutdown episode, with the Taliban - a well-known terrorist organization.

The story, by Jia Lynn Yang and Tom Hamburger, says that John A. Boehner still has the support of the business community despite the fact that he yielded to the pressure of a bunch of tea party lawmakers and activist groups such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth and in the process "nearly drove the country to a debt default." The shutdown and debt-ceiling fight have exposed a rift in the Republican Party and  Boehner and his circle of powerful business allies and influential organizations - such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - are now getting ready to take on tea party candidates in a few Republican primary races in at least three states - Michigan, Alabama, and possibly Idaho.

Commenting on the above story, a Washington Post reader with user name 'outsider6', wrote : "It's funny to read bloggers bash Boehner. It seems to me the guy has a brutal job managing a group that includes about 30% who are utterly devoid of common sense. I refer, of course, to the Tea Party RINOs. People clamor for a 3rd party in this country -- well, we have one. The TP-RINOs have wormed their way into the GOP. Th GOP is essentially a european-style governing coalition more than a party. Boehner had the unenviable task of unmasking the TP-RINOs as destructive and dangerous to his caucus and to the more moderate factions in the country who supported them. By letting this play out, he provided cover to his moderate faction while exposing the TP-RINO wing. If an actual budget emerges from the conference committee in January and passes both houses, I say Boehner is Man of the Year." 

The comment sounds to be quite logical, perhaps.

Hitler's formidable abilities as an actor are often overlooked. There are only very rare situations where we can say he was being genuine. This is what makes it so difficult to answer the question of what he was like as a person. Hitler had a very normal love life with Eva Braun. He was also supposedly missing one testicle, which made him reluctant to undress in front of women

Hitler had a very normal
love life with Eva Braun (Picture : AP)

Said Volker Ullrich, a German historian, journalist and author, in an interview with Jan Fleischhauer of Spiegel.

Volker Ullrich has provided many details about Adolf Hitler in the interview published today. The questions were based on his book (to be released this week) : New German Biography: Hitler's Underestimated Charisma. When asked what he thought of Hitler in view of the general feeling that Hitler was a psychopath, especially because someone capable of committing such crimes could not have been normal, Ulrich replied : "Hitler was without a doubt exceptional in his criminal deeds. Yet in many respects, he was not at all out of the ordinary. We will never be able to understand the terrible things that happened between 1933 and 1945 if we deny from the outset that Hitler also had human characteristics, and if we fail to take into account not only his criminal energies, but also the appealing qualities he had. 

So long as we view him only as a horrifying monster, the allure he undoubtedly exerted will remain a riddle." "He was not as crazy as some scholars of psycho history would have us believe, at least, with their far too simplistic lines of argumentation. He may even have been more normal than we might wish," he added.

Ullrich said : "I bring the man back to the forefront. This creates not a completely new picture of Hitler, but still a more complex and contradictory one than we're familiar with," when asked why he had to write Hitler's biography when already two authors have done that - one by Joachim Fest (1973) and another by Ian Kershaw (in two volumes, 1998). 

Regarding "Hitler the Person" - a key chapter in his book, Ullrich said : "The remarkable thing about Hitler was his talent for dissimulation. He could be very pleasant, even to people he detested. Yet he was also incredibly cold even to people very close to him. He not only could chat very pleasantly among his close acquaintances, but absolutely knew how to listen as well." Hitler lived in the men's dormitory for three years in Vienna where he maintained decidedly friendly contact with Jews. The dealers who bought his paintings at a decent price were also Jews. Hitler was never more than average as an artist. His great talent was for the games of politics. It's easy to underestimate the exceptional qualities and abilities he brought to bear in order to succeed in this field. In the space of just three years, he rose from an unknown veteran to the king of Munich, filling the city's largest halls week after week. He was also a skilled tactician, outmaneuvering his competition step by step. He surrounded himself with followers who looked up to him devoutly. And he secured the support of influential patrons.

Volker Ullrich(Picture by Jörg Müller/ Agentur Focus/ DER SPIEGEL)

Hitler constructed his speeches very deliberately. He began very calmly, tentatively, almost as if he were feeling his way forward and trying to sense to what degree he had a hold of the audience so far. Not until he was certain of their approval did he escalate his word choice and gestures, becoming more aggressive. He continued this for two or three hours until he reached the climax, an intoxicating peak that left many listeners with tears running down their faces. There were people who held a very negative view of Hitler at first, yet still got swept up and carried away when they experienced him. 

When asked what would have been the scenario if Hitler had not existed, Ullrich said : "One possibility would have been an authoritarian government largely directed by the military. Anti-Jewish laws presumably would have been implemented without Hitler as well. But the Holocaust - this last, radical extreme of the political Utopian vision of a racially homogeneous society - never would have happened. It is unimaginable without Hitler.

Brain Preservation & Mind Uploading to Overcome Death : A high quality brain chemical preservation procedure can save thousands, perhaps millions of lives. If we or one of our loved ones are faced with imminent death in the near future, we want the real opportunity to choose such a brain preservation procedure to keep them in suspended animation

Ken Hayworth

Says the Brain Preservation Foundation in an open letter aimed at raising awareness regarding the science, ethics and legality surrounding the emerging scientific process of chemical, whole-brain preservation. This document is intended for members of the government, medical and scientific communities as well as the general public. Those who agree with  the Foundation's observations and reasoning can sign an ipetition in favour of their proposal.

According to Ken Hayworth, President and Co-Founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, with proposed imaging technology scientists can theoretically gather all of the circuits of a human brain - the connectome - to collect the data necessary to recreate a person. Hayworth is currently a Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) in Ashburn, Virginia. Prior to moving to JFRC, Hayworth was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

The open letter has called upon the medical and scientific community "to seriously evaluate the possibility of chemically preserving an entire human brain at the ultrastructure level, to develop the surgical techniques necessary to do so, and when a verified protocol is developed, to work with appropriate members of the medical and governmental community to integrate an elective chemical brain preservation procedure into mainstream medical practice in hospitals in every country of the world." The letter further says "We profess this right because we realize that sooner or later we will contract an illness for which current medical practice is insufficient to prevent our death. At which time, instead of simply allowing the natural decay process to proceed, we should have the option to have the exact structure of our brain’s neuronal circuits immediately preserved by the best means possible, which by today’s laboratory standards is rapid glutaraldehyde fixation (via vascular perfusion) followed by further chemical fixation and embedding in plastic for long‐term storage."

We live in very exciting times. Soon, people all over
the world may have at least two reliable and proven
ways to preserve their brains, including their
individual memories and identities, after they die.

There are many who would desire the option to perfectly and inexpensively preserve their brains at the nanometer scale today, for the possibility that future science might be able to read their memories or restore their full identities, as desired. millions of people have at least briefly considered the possibility of having themselves or their loved ones cryonically preserved (very low-temperature preservation and storage) in the hope that future medical technology might revive and cure them. Giving sceintific details of the process, the letter says "We choose brain preservation over natural decay because we accept the current scientific consensus that
our unique conscious self is generated by processes within our physical brain. Further, we accept that all the memories, skills, and personality traits that make us unique are hardwired into the physical and molecular connections among our brain’s hundred billion neurons. Such a structural basis of memory and personality is demonstrated by the fact that surgical patients are often put into a state of Profound Hypothermia and Circulatory Arrest (PHCA) in which all patterned brain activity is halted for up to a full hour, yet these patients revive with memory and personality completely intact. The structural basis of memory and personality – the synaptic connectivity between neurons – can be preserved essentially perfectly by today’s chemical fixation and plastic embedding techniques. Extrapolating from current technologies for the nano‐imaging of plastic embedded brain tissue, we believe that one day science will have advanced sufficiently to allow complete retrieval of memories from such a preserved brain. Thus, to us, brain preservation is a way to prevent the permanent loss of our uniqueness and a way to pass this uniqueness on to future generations."

The letter has sought that the brain preservation procedure must be considered an emergency surgical procedure demanding as rapid a response as CPR, defibrillation and PHCA. Under today’s laws, if a patient’s respiration and blood flow has ceased, if there is no brain activity, and if current medical techniques are unable to restore these processes within a relatively short period of time then the patient is declared legally dead. In current law there is no consideration given to the possibility of preserving the patient in a static state for long periods of time (decades) so that they can reach future medical technology capable of bringing them back to life. These laws must be modified to reflect the advances in science and technology that have made such a scenario likely.  

Hayworth, in his recent paper in the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, has discussed in detail the roadmap to achieve the goal of Brain Preservation & Mind Uploading, what he calls, "landing a man in cyberspace and returning him safely to consciousness."

The Brain Preservation Foundation has announced a cash prize for the first individual or team to rigorously demonstrate a surgical technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage. The Foundation feels that the development and deployment of a standardized, high quality Whole‐Brain Plastic Embedding (WBPE) procedure is going to be an important achievement to advance the research to achieve the final goal.

Interested? Sign the ipetition.

As professional hostage-takers, we never take hostages unless we have a well-thought-out plan, realistic demands, and a clear exit strategy. Any comparison between what we do and these inane Tea Party antics are derogatory and unacceptable

Said a group representing America’s hostage-takers, according to today's Borowitz Report published in The New Yorker. According to the Borowitz Report, the group has "blasted President Obama for his repeated comparisons between them and the Tea Party Republicans, calling his remarks “degrading and hurtful.”

The National Alliance of Hostage-Takers and Blackmailers (NAHTB), in a press statement sent to Borowitz, said : “For years, our members have been subjected to offensive Hollywood stereotypes of hostage-takers as crazed madmen, cackling evildoers, and worse. The President’s degrading and hurtful remarks only reinforce those negative images.”

9/19 Luckovich cartoon: Hostage taking

The Borowitz Report, however, has reported that, in order to calm down the NAHTB members, White House press spokesman offered an apology : “As you can imagine, in the heat of a crisis we often say things we don’t mean. The President regrets any hurt his remarks may have caused.” The spokesman also assured NAHTB that the President has decided to resist his temptation to call the Tea Party Republicans terrorists, lunatics, or babies in order to avoid offending other similar groups who may or may not be associated with the NAHTB.

The Borowitz Report, which keeps us informed about such important and sensitive developments taking place behind the scene, deserves to be liked and shared by more and more netizens. Political cartoons from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution\'s Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Luckovich are also eye openers.

(Courtsey : Andy Borowitz - The New Yorker's satirical Borowitz Report and Mike Luckovich)

Use Your Heartbeat as the Password and Prevent Your Heart from Hacking : We present Heart-to-Heart (H2H), a system to authenticate external medical device controllers and programmers to Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) including pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators, which are partially or wholly embedded in the human body.

Farinaz Koushanfar, left, an associate professor of
electrical & computer engineering at Rice Univ.,
and graduate student Masoud Rostami have created
a system to secure implantable medical devices like
pacemakers & insulin pumps from wireless attacks.
(Photo by Jeff Fitlow)

Said : researchers - Farinaz Koushanfar, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, and graduate student Masoud Rostami in a paper titled "Balancing Security andUtility in Medical Devices?" According to Rice University's news release, they have come up with a secure way to dramatically cut the risk that an implantable medical device (IMD) could be altered remotely without authorization. Pacemakers, insulin pumps, defibrillators and other implantable medical devices often have wireless capabilities that allow emergency workers to monitor patients. But these devices have a potential downside: They can be hacked. Their technology would use the patient’s own heartbeat as a kind of password that could only be accessed through touch. Their research was supported by the Office of Naval Research and Army Research Office.

Can a pacemaker be hacked?

"Docs warn pacemaker can be hacked" was the headline of a news item on March 13 at NBC News which cited a report that warned users of one specific pacemaker that their equipment faced the risk of hacking. A video showing this was also presented by the NBC.

Barnaby Jack

In fact, Barnaby Jack, a security researcher, who knew the secrets of pacemaker hacking and was going to reveal those secrets at a hacker conference in Las Vegas, was found dead in San Francisco in July this year only a few days before the conference. He had extensively examined the wireless functioning of these critical life devices - pacemakers and ICDs (implantable cardioverter defibrillators) - in order to find out their vulnerability to hacking using a remote control. His mysterious death raised a few eyebrows questioning the timing of it and some people even pointed fingers to the device makers' lobby responsible for his death. 

According to Daily Mail, New Zealand-born Barnaby Jack, 35, was going to make a presentation on Hacking Humans. In his presentation, he was planning to highlight the shortcomings of commonly used pacemakers by demonstrating how he could hack into them and kill the heart patient from 50ft away with a deadly power surge triggered by a wireless transmitter. According to Barnaby,  some pacemakers could be commanded to deliver a deadly 830-volt shock from someone on a laptop up to 50ft away, confirming that the result was because of the poor software programming by medical device manufacturing companies. 

Steven Greenberg

Steven Greenberg, M.D., a leading cardiologist and a pioneer in the development and use of pacemakers - at St. Francis Hospital’s world renowned Arrhythmia and Pacemaker Center, was the first physician in the U.S. to implant the FDA-approved AccentTM RF pacemaker, the high-tech device manufactured by St. Jude Medical, Inc. 

Dr. Greenberg - who died on Dec. 12, 2012 at 56 - had said at that time : “Wireless communication is used everywhere today. Now, it can help us provide round-the-clock care for our patients through a secure notification system that can be programmed to meet a patient’s specific needs,” says Dr. Greenberg. “Rather than checking on a device a few times a year, daily alerts allow me to know about important changes in my patient’s condition or device functions so I can act more quickly in addressing any issues.”

"Cardiac pacing is a proven means of maintaining heart function for patients with various heart conditions. Over 650,000 pacemakers are implanted annually in patients worldwide, including over 280,000 in the United States. Over 3.5 million people in the developed world have implanted pacemakers. Another approximately 900,000 have an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or cardiac resynchronization (CRT) device," reveals Daniel M. Storey in his patent application (number: 20130046368) for a related invention.

Heart-to-Heart Presentation by Farinaz and Rostami

Rice University engineers have created a system 
to secure wireless implantable medical devices 
like pacemakers and insulin pumps. 
Their system requires the medical worker to touch 
the patient with a programmer device to gain access 
to information on the implant. The patient’s 
unique heartbeat serves as a temporary password. 
(Credit: Masoud Rostami/Rice University)

Koushanfar and Rostami will present Heart-to-Heart, an authentication system for IMDs, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Berlin in November 4-8, 2013. They developed the technology with Ari Juels, former chief scientist at RSALaboratories, a security company in Cambridge, Mass. IMDs generally lack the kind of password security found on a home Wi-Fi router because emergency medical technicians often need quick access to the information the devices store to save a life, Rostami said. But that leaves the IMDs open to attack. “If you have a device inside your body, a person could walk by, push a button and violate your privacy, even give you a shock,” he said. “He could make (an insulin pump) inject insulin or update the software of your pacemaker. But our proposed solution forces anybody who wants to read the device to touch you.”

The system would require software in the IMD to talk to the “touch” device, called the programmer. When a medical technician touches the patient, the programmer would pick up an electrocardiogram (EKG) signature from the beating heart. The internal and external devices would compare minute details of the EKG and execute a “handshake.” If signals gathered by both at the same instantly match, they become the password that grants the external device access.

“The signal from your heartbeat is different every second, so the password is different each time,” Rostami said. “You can’t use it even a minute later.” He compared the EKG to a chart of a financial stock. “We’re looking at the minutia,” Rostami said. “If you zoom in on a stock, it ticks up and it ticks down every microsecond. Those fine details are the byproduct of a very complex system and they can’t be predicted.” A human heartbeat is the same, he said. It seems steady, but on closer view every beat has unique characteristics that can be read and matched. “We treat your heart as if it were a random number generator,” he said.

The system could potentially be used with the millions of IMDs already in use, Koushanfar said. “To our knowledge, this is the first fully secure solution that has small overhead and can work with legacy systems,” she said. “Like any device that has wireless access, we can simply update the software.” Koushanfar noted the software would require very little of an IMD’s precious power, unlike other suggested secure solutions that require computationally intensive – and battery draining – cryptography. “We’re hopeful,” she said. “We think everything here is a practical technology.” Implementation would require cooperation with device manufacturers who, Koushanfar said, hold their valuable, proprietary secrets very close to the chest, as well as approval by the US Food and Drug Administration.

But the time to pursue IMD security is here, Rostami insisted. “People will have more implantable devices, not fewer,” he said. “We already have devices for the heart and insulin pumps, and now researchers are talking about putting neuron stimulators inside the brain. We should make sure all these things are secure.”

‘Shoot First’ Policy of Malaysian Police : “Home Minister Zahid is Malaysia’s top law enforcement official, yet he is promoting the illegal use of lethal force. Prime Minister Najib should be clear he won’t tolerate such statements or unlawful practices, which show a callous disregard for basic right

Phil Robertson

Said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. He was commenting on Malaysian home minister’s support for the police to “shoot first” when apprehending criminal suspects. Referring Ahmad Zahid Hamidi's speech justifying his stand, Robertson said : “Killings of criminal suspects by Malaysian police suggest that Minister Zahid’s disturbing remarks may already reflect the practice of some law enforcement officials. Too many people have died in a hail of police bullets for Malaysia’s leaders to continue to sit on their hands.” Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a news release of October 8, 2013, has alleged that "the home minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi made remarks in a speech in Malacca on October 6, 2013, that showed gross indifference for the right to life and the rights of the country’s minority populations." Zahid in his speech - an audio recording of which was made public by the online news portal Malaysiakini - reportedly claimed that 28,000 of some 40,000 gang members in the country were Indian Malaysians who prey on the majority ethnic Malay population. 

Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi

He also said : “What is the situation of robbery victims, murder victims during shootings? Most of them are our Malays. Most of them are our race. I think that the best way is we no longer compromise with them. There is no need to give them any warning. If [we] get the evidence, [we] shoot first.” 

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Prime Minister Najib Razak to remove the home minister because he has been racial and violating human rights. There have been reports of extra-judicial killings, ethnic cleansing under the guise of combating crime, and detention without trial. Human Rights Watch has highlighted specific incidences in this regard.

World Organisation AgainstTorture (OMCT)- a Switzerland based NGO - and its member organisation SUARAM, in Malaysia, have also reported serious human rights violations committed by the police and other law enforcement agencies such as the Malaysian Anti Corruption Commission (MACC) and the Immigration Department. According to a recent report of the OMCT-SUARAM, human rights violations have included torture and other forms of ill-treatment, notably unnecessary and excessive use of force and firearms when carrying out arrests and public order policing. The Malaysian Police has continued to pursue a “shoot first” policy against suspects with impunity. Since 2009, SUARAM has documented about 173 cases of police fatal shootings and 24 cases of suspicious deaths in custody, while two deaths occurred at the MACC offices. Malaysia continues to have a legal frame work that creates an environment facilitating torture and ill-treatment. A “shoot first” policy by law enforcement personnel violates international human rights law and standards. OMCT-SUARAM urged the government to show its commitment to abolish torture and other forms of ill-treatment by ratifying and implementing effectively the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention AgainstTorture (OPCAT).

In a press release today, Lawyers for Liberty - a human rights and law reform initiative - has also condemned Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s ‘shoot first’ approach to law enforcement and demanded that the home minister must be arrested and prosecuted. "By encouraging law enforcers to ‘shoot first’, the Home Minister has effectively ordered policemen and officials to disregard the criminal justice system, due process and has legitimized the cold-blooded murder of ‘suspects’ without ever being brought before a court of law," the release said.