Dispel the Illusion

A vehicle that has been specially developed to make executions more cost-effective and efficient ... This former member of the China People's Party will be handcuffed to a so-called 'humane' bed and executed inside a gleaming new, hi-tech, mobile 'death van.' After trials of the mobile execution service were launched quietly three years ago - then hushed up to prevent an international row about the abuse of human rights before the Olympics last summer - these vehicles are now being deployed across China.

Voters in the small northeastern Missouri town of Winfield re-elected their mayor for a fourth term on Tuesday, about a month after his death. Ballots had already been printed and absentee voting had already begun when Harry Stonebraker died of a heart attack at age 69 on March 11. He won easily in Tuesday's general election with 206 votes, or 90 per cent.

The Government minister responsible for the revived EU constitution made an astonishing gaffe by admitting she had never read it. Europe Minister Caroline Flint admitted she had only been 'briefed' on parts of a document that surrenders a raft of British powers to Brussels ... During a Commons debate, Ms Flint confessed she had not read all of the despised charter. Critics said it was an 'extraordinary admission' to make.

The Honduran National Congress has passed a law banning the sale of so-called "emergency contraception," which in fact causes abortions as well as preventing pregnancy, according to local news reports. Also known as the "morning after pill," the drug contains a hormone that, if received after a new human life has been created, prevents it from attaching to the uterine wall, resulting in its death soon afterward. It is washed out in the following period.

The White House mail office has confirmed it received a "deluge" of as many as 2.25 million red envelopes symbolizing the empty promise of lives snuffed out in abortion in a massive campaign that was larger than most White House mailing movements in the last 35 years. White House mail worker "Steve" has handled letters for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for more than three decades ... Asked if he has seen a flood of red envelopes bound for the White House, Steve chuckled. "Uh, yes," he said emphatically. "Believe me, they made it here."

The teenage gangs in inner cities; the increasing knife culture; the angry 19-year-old who lashed out and killed the boy in a bakery; the shocking case of an 18-year-old youth who, when in foster care, raped the two-year-old in the family and abused the nine-year-old; the extensive survey earlier this year that expressed a widespread anxiety about the state of the nation's children and the fact that childhood ends too quickly; the finding that a teacher suffers a violent attack almost every school day; the growth in childhood obesity, in teenage and pre-teenage binge drinking, in under-age sex and under-age pregnancies – there is a sense of a growing crisis in childhood, certainly a crisis in the way that we think of children.

Hispanics made up nearly half of the more than 1 million people who became U.S. citizens last year, according to a Hispanic advocacy group. The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials said the number of Latinos who became Americans in fiscal year 2008 more than doubled over the previous year, to 461,317. That's nearly half of the record 1,046,539 new citizens overall in 2008, a 58 percent increase from 2007.