Muhammad Is Executed

It's over. Only three years after his conviction, D.C. Sniper John Muhammad was executed by lethal injection. At 9:11pm on Tuesday night, the Virginia Department of Corrections declared he was dead. Muhammad made no final statement.

Yesterday, Muhammad's attorneys asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution, because of his "mental illness". The court rejected the request without comment. Today, Governor Kaine also refused to commute or delay the execution.

Gov. Kaine said, "Having carefully reviewed the petition for clemency and judicial opinions regarding this case, I find no compelling reason to set aside the sentence that was recommended by the jury and then imposed and affirmed by the courts. Accordingly, I decline to intervene."

As regular readers of this blog probably know, I do not like the death penalty and would be happy to see it abolished. But to be honest, I'm having trouble working up any sympathy for Mr. Muhammad. His crimes were vicious, and his innocent victims were chosen at random.

I don't doubt the world is better off without John Muhammad in it.

Snipers Hired To Protect Penguins

The fairy penguins of Australia are the smallest species of penguin. A full-grown adult will only be about 40 centimeters tall (slightly more than one foot). The picture above shows the fairy penguins being fed in the Melbourne Zoo.

There is a colony of these penguins in an Australian National Park near Sydney Harbor. But in the last two weeks, nine of these penguins have been found killed and mutiliated. Because of their tiny size, the penguins are very vulnerable to predators. Park officials don't know what kind of predator is killing the penguins, but they suspect it is a fox or a dog.

Park officials are afraid if they don't act, the unknown predator will wipe out the whole colony. So they have taken some radical action. They have hired two snipers to act as bodyguards for the penguins. They have been instructed to "do what it takes" to protect the colony.

Hopefully, these "bodyguards" will take out the predator before any more of the penguins are lost.