DEATH PENALTY. PRODI CALLS ON LAUREATES TO BACK GLOBAL MORATORIUM

Romano Prodi, the Italian Prime Minister, is hoping Nobel Peace Prize winners will attend a meeting supporting a European Union initiative to ban the death penalty worldwide.
In a letter posted on his government's Web site, Mr Prodi invited 55 Nobel Laureates, including the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, former archbishop of Cape Town, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, to the September 28 gathering in New York of countries that have pledged to back the proposed UN moratorium on capital punishment. Italy and Portugal, which holds the EU's rotating presidency through December, will present the resolution this month. In June, more than 40 Nobel Prize winners said they supported the moratorium. "It would be an extraordinary testimony of a common pledge to fully realize universal human rights," Mr Prodi said in the letter.
His government is leading the EU effort seeking the UN resolution.