Earlier this year, I wrote to every American death row inmate scheduled for execution in the near future. I asked them about their personal history, their lives in prison, and their thoughts on America and its justice system. Today we hear from Abdul Awkal—a man who was scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio last week, before receiving a last-minute reprieve.

Sometimes when you wake up in your nice comfortable (or at least reasonably comfortable) bed in your nice (or at least moderately serviceable) house or apartment here in the United States of America, it is useful to take a moment to reflect upon how fortunate we all are, by comparing ourselves to those in countries that may be our geographic neighbors, but whose state of life is quite different. One good way to do this is simply by taking in this, the very first paragraph from a Washington Post story by William Booth today:

For four years, my mother had a crippling fear of death. It started during her first bout with breast cancer. While recovering from her mastectomy, she insisted on driving my father to and from work, so that if he died in a car accident she'd be there to say good-bye. Nobody in our family was allowed to drive in bad weather, lest the vehicles hydroplane and we die. Christmas traditions were banned; anything that reminded my mother of the passing of time reminded her of death. She objected to my teen sleeping habits: "Just lying there all morning, like you are dead. How do I know you are not dead?" Chastised for her morbidity, my mother would snap, "You don't understand."

The practice of public relations is to subtle, poetic language what a hammer is to a willow tree: not it. These are the PR Dummies. Defending the right to poor taste, every week.

The National Christmas Tree planted near the White House one year ago has already died because you didn't love it enough.

Last year, 24 year-old Michael Ikoli was shot and killed in the Bronx. Wednesday night, his friends held a candlelight vigil in remembrance of him outside his old apartment. At that vigil, Jonathan Lewis, 22, was shot and killed.

Good news for people who love freedom, hate terrorism, and people who do not live in Yemen and will never visit Yemen and do not appear to be from Yemen or its surrounding areas: the U.S. government is relaxing its rules for drone strikes in Yemen. When it comes to incinerating more or less inscrutable targets with unseen missile attacks like Zeus himself, why be encumbered by a bunch of bureaucratic rules?

Relax — it sounds more exciting than it is. But hey, it's still pretty cool. A 2004 photograph released to the public this week shows a coat and boots sunken in the mud near the Titanic's stern. Based on the way the clothing items are "laid out," there is good evidence this was once a person, says James Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration.

Widener University in Chester, PA has dug down deep to find tragedy within tragedy, an Inception of tragedy, for an art gallery exhibit opening this month. Here's what they came up with: There were twelve dogs on the Titanic. And nine of them died.

A judge in Alabama has ordered a 73-year-old man to remove the remains of his late wife from the front yard of the couple's home, where they have been for the past three years.

The director of the one of the world's top universities, the Institute of Political Studies in Paris (known popularly and in your French oral examens as Sciences Po), Richard Descoings, was found dead in a New York hotel room Tuesday afternoon. Police have opened an investigation into his death, because the circumstances surrounding it bear more than a passing resemblance to the opening scene of the Da Vinci code, which is to say, they are suspicious.

Since her death two days ago, little Til—the rare baby bunny trampled to death by a German camerman at her moment of fame—has become the star she was destined to be. Hundreds of news outlets have eulogized the tragic victim of the media, and new details continue to break.

A new study from the CDC finds that deaths from gastoenteritis—"inflammation of the stomach and intestines that causes vomiting and diarrhea"—more than doubled between 1999 and 2007, to more than 17,000 per year. The majority of those deaths were due to hypervirulent strains of Clostridium difficile.

"The future looked so bright for tiny Til, a baby rabbit born without ears three weeks ago," Der Spiegel reports. For little Til was born in the east German town of Limbach-Oberfrohna, and Germans are a people known for their love of adorable mutants and pathetic baby animals. Like an earless, 8-year-old Lindsay Lohan from the family Leporidae, Til was destined for stardom.

In the early morning hours of March 9, 1997, Biggie Smalls was shot and killed while sitting in a car at a stoplight in Los Angeles. Despite a profusion of theories, his murder has never been officially solved. That's fucked up.

Despite the fact that they have been bombarded since birth with public service announcements ranging from grim depictions of throat surgery to "cool" social media campaigns portraying cigarettes as a product consumed only by suckers, kids these days continue to smoke cigarettes, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, who has warned them about this a million times. Kids these days. What's wrong with kids these days?

Within an hour of the announcement of relentlessly partisan internet provocateur Andrew Breitbart's death, his most vociferous fans memorialized him in the most appropriate way possible: They launched conspiracy theories about his assassination on Twitter.

Right wing web provacateur Andrew Breitbart is dead. His own sites, Big Journalism and Big Government and Big Hollywood, are all carrying a statement from Breitbart.com president Larry Solov saying that "Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles."

As part of our ongoing project to catalog the 2012 presidential election from a metal point of view, we've been soliciting presidential endorsements from noteworthy American metal musicians. Today: GWAR.

Anthony Shadid, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of Iraq for the Washington Post, died of an asthma attack yesterday while reporting in Syria for the New York Times. He was 43 years old.