Word: public
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...saint stretches credulity. Brazilians know and admire the man who dragged himself up from poverty to become President of the world's fifth most populous nation. But while the film ends in 1980, the years since have produced a different Lula, the intemperate leader who swears in public and rails at the press for investigating graft, and whose government was tainted by one of the most egregious corruption schemes in Brazilian history...
...told President Richard Nixon that Vang Pao had 39,000 troops engaged in active fighting. But casualties were so bad, he wrote, that Vang Pao's forces were using teenagers as young as 13 to fill their lines. This massive effort was hidden from the American public for years. It became known as the secret war, and the Hmong mercenaries as the secret army...
...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...
...there are signs of change. In 2007 China's Supreme People's Court resumed reviewing all death-penalty cases following public anger at a number of questionable convictions, among them the case of a man who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for murdering his wife - who later turned up alive. In the first half of 2008, the Supreme People's Court overturned about 15% of the death sentences that were forwarded to it, an official told the state-run China Daily newspaper...
...exact number is guarded as a state secret. Some scholars are urging more openness. Chen Guangzhong, a professor at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, wrote an article in the prominent Chinese publication Southern Weekend earlier this month arguing that the government should make execution statistics public. "Despite its sensitivity, [the death penalty] is an area that has been able to be discussed to a certain extent within the Chinese media by legal experts," says Rosenzweig, "which is one reason why I think that's where the force for progress will come, from within China." (Watch "Obama...