Word: abolisher
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...Obama's latest olive branch is also a political calculation. While Gregg wielded significant power as the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, the Commerce Department is viewed as a Cabinet backwater-a notion bolstered by Gregg himself, who in 1995 supported a nonbinding resolution that would abolish the very department he has agreed to run. Bonnie Newman, Gregg's former chief of staff, was appointed to replace him in the U.S. Senate...
...Even more significantly, where states once hurried to adopt death penalty laws, the pendulum now appears to be swinging in the other direction. In 2007 New Jersey became the first state in 40 years to abolish its death penalty. In that same year repeal bills were narrowly defeated in Montana, Nebraska and New Mexico, all of which are revisiting the issue this year. Now the focus is on Maryland. After years of failed attempts by death penalty opponents to bring a repeal bill to a vote in the state legislature, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley is personally sponsoring this year...
...questions. In 2006, the Labour party was embroiled in an investigation into accusations of peerages being dangled in front of wealthy donors to secure loans. No charges were ever brought but the episode adds to sensitivities about the House of Lords. In 1997, Labour came to power promising to abolish hereditary peers. In 1999, it expelled most of the hereditary peers, but attempts to complete the reforms by replacing the Lords with a partially or wholly elected Upper Chamber have run into the sand. In May 2008, Gordon Brown announced that the government would issue a report updating its position...
...peak of about 300 a year in the 1990s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, to 115 people in 2007. The reduction comes as more states, such as New York, New Jersey and Illinois have passed death penalty moratoriums; while some, like Maryland, are considering whether to abolish executions altogether...
...Texas still accounts for 50% of the executions in the U.S., and with an appeal process of 10 years (the shortest among the states), the numbers are unlikely to decrease significantly. According to Kristin Houle, director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the state averaged nearly one lethal injection per week over a five month period in 2008. There have been 423 executions in Texas since the state reininstituted the death penalty in 1982, and 374 condemned men and women are currently residing on Texas' Death Row. (One resident, Michael Blair, walked off death row this year...