Vui Kong's Family Kneeling in Front of Istana

[Greatbirdlegend]

Not baseless assumption. I spent 5 years of my childhood in Sabah . I understand how the kids are brought up there and I see it with my own eyes. 19 years ago, able to get to school is already a blessing. Not many had a chance. Perhaps today they are better. I have never gone back to Sabah since because it was one of my worst memories as a child.

 

Everyone of us have had a good life in Singapore. We could think well, we could analyse well, we could rationalise things. basically stuff that we have taken for granted as expectations for ourselves, kids and families. Our economic progress and society has driven us to be better and better. Your kid failed in school and he gets a trashing from you. But he is already way better off than those kids who never even had a chance to go school.

 

My point is, while he has to be hanged because he broke the law, let's not straighaway assume that he "deserves" it because he should know better. Chances is, he does not because he may not rationalise things like us. Perhaps it doesn't matter to you or most of the people here, but I prefer to go into details and judge a person fairly. Let's just say I am the more emphatising sort because I came from that background although this kid is going to be dead anyway.

 

It's getting confusing for me where this is going.

Let's say if you are the judge presiding over this case and the laws are clear on the punishment for his crimes.

How would you judge him fairly?

Death sentence or make an exception?

[Xers007]

[sleeping] ....yawn... i am wondering if sabah is so backwards that there is no TV or newspapers... Edited August 26, 2010 by Xers007

[Sgnick]

So in the past any Singaporean got hanged b4 trafficking drugs in Malaysia? If have, ask the Malaysians to give them their lives back first, then we can talk. They hang, we hang, don't see the problem.

 

But I still pity the family for having to suffer this, but is their own son's action brought this upon himself, they can't blame anyone or expect preferencial treatment.

[Rathcycle]

If hang him liao, Singaporeans go into malaysia will get or not ah ?

[System88]

 

 

waste time....god bless him

[Vulcann]

Really feel for the family. They had ran out of options to save his life and this is really the last ditch. Like many bros mentioned before, based on our strict laws and judiciary system, it would be extremely difficult to get the verdict overturned, especially I believe there was no precedent for capital conviction then being granted pardon. Just feel sad his family had to bear the full brunt of his actions...

 

I was wrong about there being no precedent for the pardoning of capital punishment in Singapore.

 

According to the papers, our well-respected late President Ong ever pardoned a young guy and spared him from the gallows.

 

Doubt in this case he will be able to...

 

[CH_CO]

Law in both countries has death penalty on drugs . So to not know is an excuse. By the way , the drug can cause death so it is as good as bring in a weapon or a firearm. Though he might be young , unless he can bring out the main instigator for his drug or else it is as good as he facing death alone.

 

To me , maybe i lack compassion but as much i know , drug kills more people than poverty. Many people in the 3rd world countries growing poppy have more abusers than anywhere in the world and to restrict supply would mean lesser income and lesser incentive to create the drug. Along with drug abuse , there is the a high chance of Aids, for those goons which want to feel sorry for those drug traffickers , tell me that when a drug abuser robs and stabs you with needle with aids . Then tell me you still feel sorry for them.

 

I do feel that we need to learn from others to have a bin to remove the things they think is illegal before entering Singapore (best if bomb proof) and walk away unharmed. Gives one a second chance or one last chance to think whether if it is worth it.

 

Seriously if you can't take the law in Singapore to be as such , for me , because of these very laws , we have lesser drug abusers and a safer environment to go back in the night. If you think this is taken for granted , i challenge you to walk the streets of new york in the night alone. Ask yourself this question, would you be worried for mother sister , gf , wife if the night is not safe?

Edited August 26, 2010 by CH_CO

[Good-Carbuyer]

Vui Kong's family (his father, brothers, sisters, aunts and cousins), kneeling in front of the Istana this morning. The family was there to deliver their own petition to the President asking him to grant clemency to Vui Kong. Vui Kong is the second youngest in the family.

 

Source

 

You are entitled to your opinions. But do put yourself in their shoes and spare a thought.

Lack of parental guidance, easier to be mislead to attempt suicide through death sentence?

Arrest illegal assembly if they do not disperse?

Do be thoughtful for his victims/potential victims (you and me)

Edited August 26, 2010 by Good-Carbuyer

[Megatop]

We must be firm. Drugs will destroy a society and its people.

 

What's behind Mexico's drug wars

 

To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not.

 

It is being fought with tanks, sub-machine guns and hand grenades, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone.

 

The death toll in Tijuana - one of the front lines of this war - is now higher than in Baghdad.

 

Another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando today - an event that no longer shocks the country.

 

Mexico today is a place where the severed heads of police officers are found week after week, pinned to bloody notes that tell their colleagues: "This is how you learn respect". It is a place where hand grenades are tossed into crowds to intimidate the public into shutting up.

 

It is the state the US Joint Chiefs of Staff say is most likely, after Pakistan, to suffer "a rapid and sudden collapse".

 

Why? When you criminalise a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn't disappear. The trade is simply transferred from off-licences, pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs.

 

In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up - and kill anyone who gets in their way.

 

You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins on offer.

 

Now imagine this process taking over an entire nation, to turn it into a massive production and supply route for the Western world's drug hunger.

 

Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia's coca-growing areas, so the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It's known as the "balloon effect": press down in one place, and the air rushes to another.

 

When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence taking off and warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket. Since then the victims have ranged from a pregnant woman washing her car, to a four-year-old child, to a family in the "wrong" house watching television, to a group of 14 teenagers having a party. Today, 70 per cent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels.

 

The gangs offer Mexican police and politicians a choice: "Plata o ploma". Silver, or lead. Take a bribe, or take a bullet. President Felipe Calderon has been leading a military crackdown on them since 2006 - yet every time he surges the military forward, the gang violence in an area massively increases.

 

This might seem like a paradox, but it isn't. If you knock out the leaders of a drug gang, you don't eradicate demand, or supply. You simply trigger a fresh war for control of the now-vacant patch. The violence creates more violence.

 

This is precisely what happened - to the letter - when the United States prohibited alcohol. A ban produced a vicious rash of criminal gangs to meet the popular demand, and they terrorised the population and bribed the police. Now 1,000 Mexican Al Capones are claiming their billions and waving their guns.

 

Like Capone, the drug gangs love the policy of prohibition. Michael Levine, who had a 30-year career as one of America's most distinguished federal narcotics agents, penetrated to the very top of the Mafia Cruenza, one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in the world in the 1980s.

 

Its leaders told him "that not only did they not fear our war on drugs, they actually counted on it... On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it `a sham put on the American tax-payer' that was `actually good for business'."

 

So there is a growing movement in Mexico to do the one thing these murderous gangs really fear - take the source of their profits, drugs, back into the legal economy. It would bankrupt them swiftly, and entirely. Nobody kills to sell you a glass of Jack Daniels. Nobody beheads police officers or shoots teenagers to sell you a glass of Budweiser. And, after legalisation, nobody would do it to sell you a spliff or a gram of cocaine either. They would be in the hands of unarmed, regulated, legal businesses, paying taxes to the state, at a time when we all need large new sources of tax revenue.

 

The conservative former President, Vicente Fox, has publicly called for legalisation, and he has been joined by a battery of former presidents across Latin America - all sober, right-leaning statesmen who are trying rationally to assess the facts.

 

Every beheading, grenade attack, and assassination underlines their point. Calderon's claims in response that legalisation would lead to a sudden explosion in drug use don't seem to match the facts: Portugal decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001, and drug use there has slightly fallen since.

 

Yet Mexico is being pressured hard by countries like the US and Britain - both led by former drug users - to keep on fighting this war, while any mention of legalisation brings whispered threats of slashed aid and diplomatic shunning.

 

Look carefully at that mound of butchered corpses found yesterday. They are the inevitable and ineluctable product of drug prohibition. This will keep happening for as long as we pursue this policy. If you believe the way to deal with the human appetite for intoxication is to criminalise and militarise, then blood is on your hands.

 

How many people have to die before we finally make a sober assessment of reality, and take the drugs trade back from murderous criminal gangs?

 

 

[Megatop]

72 dead in Mexican drug cartel massacre

 

Migrants had 'refused to be gang's hitmen'

 

MEXICO CITY: A wounded migrant stumbled into a military checkpoint and led marines to a gruesome scene, in what may be the biggest massacre so far in Mexico's bloody drug war: a room strewn with the bodies of 72 fellow travellers, some piled on top of one another, just 160km from their goal, the United States border.

 

The 58 men and 14 women were killed by the Zetas gang, Ecuadorian migrant Luis Fredy Lala Pomavilla told investigators on Wednesday.

 

The gang, started by former Mexican army special forces soldiers and corrupt former police officers, is known to extort money from migrants who pass through its territory. The US government has called the gang the most dangerous organised crime syndicate in Mexico.

 

If the authorities corroborate the story, it would be the most horrifying example yet of the plight of migrants trying to cross a country where drug cartels are increasingly scouting shelters and highways, hoping to extort cash or even recruit vulnerable immigrants.

 

'It's absolutely terrible and it demands the condemnation of all of our society,' said government security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

 

Mr Pomavilla staggered to the checkpoint on Tuesday, with a bullet wound in his neck. He told the marines he had just escaped from gunmen at a ranch in San Fernando, in the northern state of Tamaulipas about 160km from Brownsville, Texas.

 

He said the gunmen offered to pay the migrants US$500 (S$680) a month to work as hitmen for them, and began shooting them when they refused.

 

The Zetas so brutally control some parts of Tamaulipas that many Mexicans do not dare to travel on the highways in the state.

 

Residents in the state tell of loved ones or friends who have disappeared travelling from one town to the next. Many of these kidnappings are never reported for fear that police are working with the criminals.

 

The marines scrambled helicopters to raid the ranch, drawing gunfire from cartel gunmen. One marine and three gunmen died in a gun battle.

 

Then the bodies were discovered, some slumped in the chairs where they had been shot, one federal official said. Photos posted on websites of local media on Wednesday night showed piles of people, some of them blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, slumped on top of one another along the cinderblock walls of an abandoned warehouse.

 

The migrant told the authorities that his captors identified themselves as Zetas, and that the migrants were from Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras. Mr Poire said the government was in contact with those countries to corroborate the identities of the migrants.

 

The marines seized 21 assault rifles, shotguns and rifles, and held a minor, apparently part of the gang.

 

The authorities said they were trying to determine whether the victims were killed at the same time - and why. Mr Poire noted migrants are frequently kidnapped by gunmen demanding money, sometimes contacting relatives in the US to demand ransoms.

 

Violence along the border with the US has soared this year since the Zetas broke with their former employer, the Gulf cartel. The authorities say the Gulf cartel has joined forces with its once-bitter enemies, the Sinaloa and La Familia gangs, to destroy the Zetas, who have grown so powerful they have extended their reach into Central America.

 

It was the third time this year the authorities have discovered large masses of corpses. In May, they discovered 55 bodies in western Guerrero state and 51 bodies on the outskirts of Monterrey last month.

 

ASSOCIATED PRESS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS

[Joseph22]

This is the result of not controlling them in the first place.

[Kiario]

but the article like suggesting to legalise drugs so that crime lords dealing in drugs will go out of business.

[Leftfield]

How come no one from Sabah is offended? Sabah is made to sound like it's Somalia! It is not that backward!

 

So next time must see nationality before sentencing someone to death, developed country tio hang, 3rd world country got chance? what kind of nonsense is this???

[Maxus-MIFA9]

Not baseless assumption. I spent 5 years of my childhood in Sabah . I understand how the kids are brought up there and I see it with my own eyes. 19 years ago, able to get to school is already a blessing. Not many had a chance. Perhaps today they are better. I have never gone back to Sabah since because it was one of my worst memories as a child.

 

Everyone of us have had a good life in Singapore. We could think well, we could analyse well, we could rationalise things. basically stuff that we have taken for granted as expectations for ourselves, kids and families. Our economic progress and society has driven us to be better and better. Your kid failed in school and he gets a trashing from you. But he is already way better off than those kids who never even had a chance to go school.

 

My point is, while he has to be hanged because he broke the law, let's not straighaway assume that he "deserves" it because he should know better. Chances is, he does not because he may not rationalise things like us. Perhaps it doesn't matter to you or most of the people here, but I prefer to go into details and judge a person fairly. Let's just say I am the more emphatising sort because I came from that background although this kid is going to be dead anyway.

 

So................ the 5 from Sarawak (around that ages 19 - 22) who went on rampage with parangs at Kallang area should also be given a chance as they are young and did not know the consequences of the law ........

 

 

[Carer]

donate his organs

[Robo]

donate his organs

 

is it drug infested?

[Hiphiphoray]

i remember a polytechnic classmate of mine was from sarawak. Top student throughout the study course. Now he even open up his very own Marine Insurance company.

 

Ppl from East Malaysia are definately not blur hor. Far from it.

 

 

How come no one from Sabah is offended? Sabah is made to sound like it's Somalia! It is not that backward!

 

So next time must see nationality before sentencing someone to death, developed country tio hang, 3rd world country got chance? what kind of nonsense is this???

 

[Babyt]

my coy also has 1 from sabah...do IT one...not stupid ok.

 

ok not everyone in sabah is clever but so do people in sg.

 

 

Edited August 27, 2010 by Babyt