The World

10 ESSENTIAL STORIES

By Harriet Barovick, Laura Fitzpatrick, Alexandra Silver, Claire Suddath, Alyssa Fetini, Frances Romero, Kristi Oloffson and Kayla Webley Monday, May 10, 2010

    • (3 of 3)

    Ronnie Lee Gardner had 25 years on Utah's death row to think about how he would die. On April 23, he chose firing squad, a method that has been phased out in nearly every state, including Utah itself. Though a 2004 law made lethal injection the state standard, inmates sentenced before the law was passed can choose to be shot instead. Gardner, sentenced to death for killing a lawyer in 1985 during an attempted courthouse escape, is one of at least four men on Utah's death row who have selected death by firing squad, which critics call archaic. He is scheduled to die June 18, though attorneys filed a motion to put the execution on hold pending an appeal to the Utah Supreme Court.

    * | What They're Discontinuing in Japan: Most Americans long ago consigned floppy disks to the nostalgia bin, but Japan is only now following suit. Citing a lack of demand (despite selling 12 million of the tech relics in its home country last year), Sony, the world's largest manufacturer of 3.5-inch floppies, announced that it would stop making them as of March 2011. Once a personal-computing staple, the disks have been rendered obsolete by CDs, flash drives and other higher-capacity devices.

    3. 1
    4. 2
    5. 3
    6. Next Page