The Philippines was due to execute its first convicts...

The Philippines was due to execute its first convicts in January since lifting a nearly four-year moratorium on the death penalty, Bureau of Corrections chief Dionisio Santiago said.
The two unnamed prisoners were due to be put to death by lethal injection "on the same day" in the last week of January, unless President Gloria Arroyo granted them a reprieve or Congress passed a law abolishing capital punishment. He said he had ordered the national prisons director, who had jurisdiction over some 1,000 death row convicts, to conduct "dry runs" to make sure the executions followed legal procedures.
Under public pressure following a wave of kidnappings, Arroyo declared in December 2003 that she would "no longer stand in the way of the executions scheduled by the courts for January 2004".
A moratorium on executions had been in place since March 2000, imposed by former president Joseph Estrada after pressure from the Roman Catholic Church.