Florida Python Hunt Captures 68 Invasive Snakes

It's a wrap—the 2013 Python Challenge has nabbed 68 invasive Burmese pythons in Florida, organizers say. And experts are surprised so many of the elusive giants were caught.

Nearly 1,600 people from 38 states—most of them inexperienced hunters—registered for the chance to track down one of the animals, many of which descend from snakes that either escaped or were dumped into the wild.

Since being introduced, these Asian behemoths have flourished in Florida's swamps while also squeezing out local populations of the state's native mammals, especially in the Everglades. (See Everglades pictures.)

To highlight the python problem, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and its partners launched the 2013 Python Challenge, which encouraged registered participants to catch as many pythons as they could between January 12 and February 10 in state wildlife-management areas within the Everglades.

The commission gave cash prizes to those who harvested the most and longest pythons.

Frank Mazzotti, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida and scientific leader for the challenge, said before the hunt that he would consider a harvest of 70 animals a success—and 68 is close enough to say the event met its goals.

It's unknown just how many Burmese pythons live in Florida, but catching 68 snakes is an "exceptional" number, added Kenneth Krysko, senior herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

Snakes in the Grass

Finding 68 snakes is impressive, experts say, since it's so hard to find pythons. For one, it's been unusually warm lately in Florida, which means the reptiles—which normally sun themselves to regulate their body temperature—are staying in the brush, making them harder to detect, Krysko said.

On top of that, Burmese pythons are notoriously hard to locate, experts say.

The animals are so well camouflaged that people can stand right next to one and not notice it. "It's rare that you get to see them stretched out—most of the time they're blending in," said Cheryl Millett, a biologist at the Nature Conservancy, a Python Challenge partner.

What's more, the reptiles are ambush hunters, which means they spend much of their time lying in wait in dense vegetation, not moving, she said.

That's why Millett gave the hunters some tips, such as looking along the water's edge, where the snakes like to hang out, and also simply listening for "something big moving through the vegetation."

Even so, catching 68 snakes is "actually is a little more than I expected," said Millett.

No Walk in the Park

Ruben Ramirez, founder of the company Florida Python Hunters, won two prizes in the competition: First place for the most snakes captured—18—and second place for the largest python, which he said was close to 11 feet (3.4 meters) long. The biggest Burmese python caught in Florida, nabbed in 2012, measured 17.7 feet (5.4 meters).

"They're there, but they're not as easy to find as people think," said Ramirez. "You're not going to be stumbling over pythons in Miami." (Related blog post: "What It's Like to Be a Florida Python Hunter.")

All participants, some of whom had never hunted a python before, were trained to identify the difference between a Burmese python and Florida's native snakes, said Millett. No native snakes were accidentally killed, she said.

Hunters were also told to kill the snakes by either putting a bolt or a bullet through their heads, or decapitating them-all humane methods that result "in immediate loss of consciousness and destruction of the brain," according to the Python Challenge website.

Ramirez added that some of the first-time or amateur hunters had different expectations. "I think they were expecting to walk down a canal and see a 10-foot [3-meter], 15-foot [4.5-meter] Burmese python. They thought it'd be a walk in the park."

Stopping the Spread

Completely removing these snakes from the wild isn't easy, and some scientists see the Python Challenge as helping to achieve part of that goal. (Read an opposing view on the Python Challenge: "Opinion: Florida's Great Snake Hunt Is a Cheap Stunt.")

"You're talking about 68 more animals removed from the population that shouldn't be there—that's 68 more mouths that aren't being fed," said the Florida museum's Krysko. (Read about giant Burmese python meals that went bust.)

"I support any kind of event or program that not only informs the general public about introduced species, but also gets the public involved in removing these nonnative animals that don't belong there."

The Nature Conservancy's Millett said the challenge had two positive outcomes: boosting knowledge for both science and the public.

People who didn't want to hunt or touch the snakes could still help, she said, by reporting sightings of exotic species to 888-IVE-GOT-1, through free IveGot1 apps, or www.ivegot1.org.

Millett runs a public-private Nature Conservancy partnership called Python Patrol that the Florida wildlife commission will take on in the fall. The program focuses not only on eradicating invasive pythons but on preventing the snake from moving to ecologically sensitive areas, such as Key West.

Necropsies on the captured snakes will reveal what pythons are eating, and location data from the hunters will help scientists figure out where the snakes are living—valuable data for researchers working to stop their spread.

"This is the most [number of] pythons that have been caught in this short of a period of time in such an extensive area," said the University of Florida's Mazzotti.

"It's an unprecedented sample, and we're going to get a lot of information out of that."

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Former Navy SEAL on Coming Out of Shadows

It used to be that Navy SEALs didn't just operate in the shadows. They trained in them too. Their whole story stayed shrouded in mystery. Their secret missions stayed secret to the rest of us.

But when they got Osama Bin Laden, snatched back an American cargo ship taken by pirates and rescued two air workers held hostage in Somalia, then suddenly, it seemed that SEALs were headline-makers.

Add to that some SEALs wrote books about SEAL adventures and even acted in a movie about the SEAL experience using live ammunition when they made "Act of Valor." They can't quite be called "the military unit that no one ever talked about" any longer.

Watch the full story on "Nightline" TONIGHT at 12:35 a.m. ET

Rorke Denver played Lt. Commander Rorke in "Act of Valor," a film that used dozens of SEALs and went on to gross $80 million at the box office. Now, with the help of a writer, Denver is doing some pretty decent storytelling in a new book, "Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior."

He agrees that with SEALs like him telling their stories that these guys are out in the open like never before.

"We are, at this moment in our history, when the heat is on, the missions are getting press and coverage," Denver said.

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When asked if it was a good thing, he said, "time will tell."

"We are in the public eye and I think that mythology is something that people are hugely, hugely interested in and they have an appetite for it," Denver said. "So for us with the movie and then also with 'Damn Few' I had an opportunity, I feel, to authentically represent and hopefully do it from an honorable point of view and accurately do so."

It's mostly his own story Denver tells in "Damn Few," how he joined the SEALs after college -- they didn't want him at first.

"I put in my first application and they said no, and I am glad it went that way. I think the community really values resiliency and toughness and focus and a 'never quit' attitude. For me, when they said no I thought, that ain't going to cut it."

Denver didn't quit. He reapplied and went on to survive the SEALs brutal Hell Week and training, joined the team and deployed all over the world, including the deadly Al Anbar province in Iraq when the war there was at its hottest. His family waited for him to return stateside.

"The families, I feel, are the ones who pay the price of our choices," Denver said. "But I didn't appreciate how much I was asking my family to bear and experience it with me. They really are every bit a part of our experience and frankly they are the ones who are back home and praying and believing that you are going to come home."

But even his family didn't quite know what Denver did at work every day.

"I never ask questions about what he does," said his wife, Tracy.

But "Act of Valor" was revealing in that way, and Denver's wife watched the film.

"For me it was incredibly eye-opening to actually see a submarine mission or running around in the jungle, jumping out of a plane, shooting his weapons," she said. "For me, it was like, oh, so this is what you are doing when you are away. I appreciated it actually."

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President’s Day, by George

Did you enjoy that relaxing three-day weekend? Caught up on sleep, maybe sneaked in a movie or a few errands?

That’s no thanks to Rep. Frank Wolf
(R-Va.), who’s playing the role of the Grinch Who Wants to Steal Presidents’ Day.

Wolf recently reintroduced a bill that would do away with the congressionally established Monday holiday (it’s set for the third Monday of the month) and instead designate it as Feb. 22 — George Washington’s actual birthday. This year, that date falls on a Friday, which means we’d still have a three-day weekend. But that won’t happen every year.

Wolf thinks that by celebrating on an arbitrary Monday, the American people are missing out on the chance to truly remember the life and legacy of our first president (who, like Wolf, hails from the Commonwealth).

He bemoaned many schoolkids’ ignorance on the subject. “Congress has unwittingly contributed to this lack of historical understanding by relegating Washington’s Birthday to the third Monday of February to take advantage of a three-day weekend,” Wolf said in a statement entered into the Congressional Record. “We need to change the focus from celebrating sales at the mall to celebrating the significance of President Washington’s birth to the birth of our nation.”

Wolf even trotted out endorsements of the idea from presidential scholar and author
David McCullough
and from Jim Rees, the executive director of Mount Vernon.

But what would happen to all those great Presidents’ Day deals on mattresses?

New blood

As key members of Team Obama move on, a new study finds that President Obama is beginning his second term with fewer than a third of the senior staff members who made up his original team — a level of turnover that’s pretty typical among modern second terms.

The report from the Brookings Institution shows that 71 percent of Obama’s “A-team” has left, compared with 78 percent for Ronald Reagan, 74 percent for Bill Clinton and 63 percent for George W. Bush.

The paper also examines the importance of senior staff to the president and the toll that turnover takes: “a loss of institutional memory, time lost hiring and orienting a successor, the disappearance of unique networking contacts.”

Most companies in the private sector would consider the typical White House turnover rates “unthinkable.”

But there’s a silver lining here, the author suggests. Second-term hiring affords the White House the chance to bring in new blood and fresh ideas. And it could assuage “disgruntled” constituencies by hiring from their ranks. “Repaying political debts could advance the president’s efforts to pursue a vigorous legislative agenda,” they write.

And finally, a bit of advice: in Obama’s second term, the paper assesses the president’s agenda and suggests that Team Obama recruit from Capitol Hill, which could “provide necessary expertise for the legislative battles that lie ahead. ”

Out of Africa, and back in

Democratic National Committee Executive Director
Patrick Gaspard
, former political director in the Obama White House, appears to be the administration’s pick to be the next ambassador to South Africa.

Gaspard, a major player in New York City politics — he was a campaign staffer for former mayor David Dinkins, for example — was a top operative of the Service Employees International Union and a political organizer.

He also was actively involved in organizing efforts in the 1980s and ’90s to topple South Africa’s apartheid regime. While in the White House, Gaspard, a Haitian American, was also a key player in U.S. relief efforts in Haiti after a powerful earthquake devastated the country three years ago.

Although he grew up in New York City, Gaspard was born in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after his Haitian-born parents moved there for his father’s teaching job. The family moved to New York when he was 3.

Kerry on

Another longtime aide to Secretary of State John F. Kerry is taking a senior post at the State Department. David McKean is to be director of policy planning, a plum position created in 1947 by George F. Kennan and held in later years by foreign policy heavy hitters such as Paul H. Nitze, Mort Halperin and Richard N. Haass.

McKean became the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s staff director when Kerry took over the committee in 2009 and was his Senate office chief of staff from 1999 to 2008. He left the committee in early 2011.

McKean was also CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston and has written three books on U.S. political history.

Last April, McKean become a senior adviser to then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, assessing State Department operations. Ought to come in handy as Kerry takes over. And his long relationship with Kerry should enable him to provide candid advice — a valuable commodity in this town.

With Emily Heil

The blog: washingtonpost.com/
intheloop. Twitter: @InTheLoopWP.

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Cricket: Injured Jayawardene out of Bangladesh series

COLOMBO: Former Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardene has been ruled out of the forthcoming home series against Bangladesh because of a finger injury.

Jayawardene, 35, who is Sri Lanka's highest run-getter in Tests, dislocated a finger in his left hand while fielding during a domestic first-class match in Colombo on Sunday.

Scans of the injury have been sent to Australia for further analysis, Sri Lanka Cricket said in a statement, adding that the batsman could be out of action for four to six weeks.

Bangladesh are due to play two Tests, three one-dayers and one Twenty20 international during their month-long tour of Sri Lanka in March.

Jayawardene, who resigned as captain after the recent Australian tour, has scored 10,806 runs in 138 Tests at an average of 49.56 with 31 centuries.

He also has 10,892 one-day runs from 391 matches with 15 hundreds, and 1,293 runs in 46 Twenty20 internationals.

All-rounder Angelo Mathews replaced Jayawardene as Test and one-day captain, while Dinesh Chandimal will lead in Twenty20 matches.

- AFP/de

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Akhilesh Yadav presents deficit budget for Uttar Pradesh

LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday presented a Rs 23,913 crore deficit budget for the state for 2013-14 at Rs 2,21,201.19 crore.

The budget tabled in the assembly showed a 10% increase from the last year's size of Rs 2,00,110.61 crore.

While no new tax has been imposed in the budget, the fiscal deficit has been estimated at Rs 23,913 crore -- 2.9% of the gross domestic product (GDP).

The government has estimated revenue receipts at Rs 2,15,919.82 crore and revenue savings at Rs 9,856.01 crore for the next financial year.

After deducting from the consolidated fund, the actual deficit would be Rs 5,281.37 crore, Yadav said in his address.

After adjusting Rs 3,550 crore from the PLA (personal ledger account), the net deficit is of Rs 1,731.7 crore.

While the opening balance is at Rs 2,957.9 crore, the expected closing balance has been shown at a surplus of Rs 1,226.53 crore.

Earlier, the BSP members staged a walk-out from the House.

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Confirmed: Dogs Sneak Food When People Aren't Looking

Many dog owners will swear their pups are up to something when out of view of watchful eyes. Shoes go missing, couches have mysterious teeth marks, and food disappears. They seem to disregard the word "no."

Now, a new study suggests dogs might understand people even better than we thought. (Related: "Animal Minds.")

The research shows that domestic dogs, when told not to snatch a piece of food, are more likely to disobey the command in a dark room than in a lit room.

This suggests that man's best friend is capable of understanding a human's point of view, said study leader Juliane Kaminski, a psychologist at the U.K.'s University of Portmouth.

"The one thing we can say is that dogs really have specialized skills in reading human communication," she said. "This is special in dogs." (Read "How to Build a Dog.")

Sneaky Canines

Kaminski and colleagues recruited 84 dogs, all of which were more than a year old, motivated by food, and comfortable with both strangers and dark rooms.

The team then set up experiments in which a person commanded a dog not to take a piece of food on the floor and repeated the commands in a room with different lighting scenarios ranging from fully lit to fully dark.

They found that the dogs were four times as likely to steal the food—and steal it more quickly—when the room was dark. (Take our dog quiz.)

"We were thinking what affected the dog was whether they saw the human, but seeing the human or not didn't affect the behavior," said Kaminski, whose study was published recently in the journal Animal Cognition.

Instead, she said, the dog's behavior depended on whether the food was in the light or not, suggesting that the dog made its decision based on whether the human could see them approaching the food.

"In a general sense, [Kaminski] and other researchers are interested in whether the dog has a theory of mind," said Alexandra Horowitz, head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard University, who was not involved in the new study.

Something that all normal adult humans have, theory of mind is "an understanding that others have different perspective, knowledge, feelings than we do," said Horowitz, also the author of Inside of a Dog.

Smarter Than We Think

While research has previously been focused on our closer relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—interest in dog cognition is increasing, thanks in part to owners wanting to know what their dogs are thinking. (Pictures: How smart are these animals?)

"The study of dog cognition suddenly began about 15 years ago," Horowitz said.

Part of the reason for that, said Brian Hare, director of the Duke Canine Cognition Lab and author of The Genius of Dogs, is that "science thought dogs were unremarkable."

But "dogs have a genius—years ago we didn't know what that was," said Hare, who was not involved in the new research. (See pictures of the the evolution of dogs, from wolf to woof.)

Many of the new dog studies are variations on research done with chimpanzees, bonobos, and even young children. Animal-cognition researchers are looking into dogs' ability to imitate, solve problems, or navigate social environments.

So just how much does your dog understand? It's much more than you—and science—probably thought.

Selectively bred as companions for thousands of years, dogs are especially attuned to human emotions—and, study leader Kaminski said, are better at reading human cues than even our closest mammalian relatives.

"There has been a physiological change in dogs because of domestication," Duke's Hare added. "Dogs want to bond with us in ways other species don't." (Related: "Dogs' Brains Reorganized by Breeding.")

While research reveals more and more insight into the minds of our furry best friends, Kaminski said, "We still don't know just how smart they are."

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Obama's Speech on Guns Doesn't Stop Ill. Killing

A Chicago teenager was shot and killed Friday only hours after her sister attended President Obama's speech on the city's rampant gun violence.
Janay McFarlane, 18, was killed while walking with a friend during a visit to her dad, Herbert McFarlane, in North Chicago.

"All this gun violence going on, you never think it would be your child," he told ABC's Chicago station WLS. "This is the hardest thing for me in my life."

Herbert McFarlane told WLS that the loss of Janay is especially hard because she leaves behind a 3-month old son, who likes to wear an "I love Mommy" shirt. The shooting occurred in Lake County, a northern suburb miles from the epicenter of the gun violence on the city's South Side.

"I'm in Lake County to get away from violence and now it happened in Lake County where I moved to," he told WLS.

McFarlane and her child spent time both in Lake County and on the South Side where her mother lives.

Janay Proudmommie Mcfarlane/Facebook

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Only hours before McFarlane was shot and killed, President Obama returned to his hometown to speak on the South Side at a Hyde Park high school. McFarlane's sister, Destini Warren, 14, sat behind the president during the speech.

More than 500 people were shot and killed here last year, and this year the situation has worsened with the most deadly January the city has seen in over a decade. The shooting death of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year old who performed in Washington, D.C. at events connected to the president's inauguration last month, garnered national attention.

"Too many of our children are being taken away from us," Obama said in Hyde Park, with McFarlane's sister in the audience.

"Last year there were 443 murders with a firearm on the streets of this city, and 65 of those victims were 18 and under," he said. "So that's the equivalent of a Newtown every four months." He was referring to Newtown, Conn., where 20 first graders were gunned down by Adam Lanza along with seven adults.

Only hours later in Chicago, another 18-year old was shot and killed.

"I felt like someone took a knife and stabbed me in the heart, and a piece of my heart I will never get back," Angela Blakely, Janay McFarlane's mother, told WLS.

North Chicago Police on Sunday reportedly questioned two people in connection to McFarlane's death. Her family said McFarlane was an unintended target of the shooting.

Messages left by ABC News with the North Chicago Police Department and the Lake County Coroner's Office went unreturned Monday.

Another Chicago teenager, Frances Colon, was also shot and killed Friday just hours after she had told her father that she saw President Obama's helicopter fly over her neighborhood.

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Congressional staffers often travel on tabs of foreign governments

About a dozen congressional staffers flew business class on a trip to China last summer and stayed at luxury hotels while touring the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and receiving a “briefing on ancient artifacts and dynasties” at the Shanghai Museum.

The all-expenses-paid visit came courtesy of China. The Chinese government hosted a day of meetings with officials in Beijing followed by eight days packed with outings to destinations often frequented by tourists along with a stop at a missile frigate and two others related to national security — the official theme of the trip.

More and more foreign governments are sponsoring such excursions for lawmakers and their staffs, though an overhaul of ethics rules adopted by Congress five years ago banned them from going on most other types of free trips. This overseas travel is often arranged by lobbyists for foreign governments, though lobbyists were barred from organizing other types of congressional trips out of concern that the trips could be used to buy favor.

The overseas travel is covered by an exemption Congress granted itself for trips deemed to be cultural exchanges.

A Washington Post examination of congressional disclosures revealed the extent of this congressional travel for the first time, finding that Hill staffers had reported taking 803 such trips in the six years ending in 2011. Lawmakers themselves are increasingly participating, disclosing 21 trips in 2011, more than double the figure in prior years.

The number of congressional trips could be far higher, because only lawmakers and senior congressional staff members are required to disclose the travel. A former senior aide on a congressional committee said that junior staffers were usually sent on the trips because they rarely had the chance to take official trips paid for by the U.S. government.

Some Hill employees have gone on repeated trips to the same country, and others chain them together, traveling directly from one expenses-paid visit to another.

China is by far the biggest sponsor of these trips, with senior staffers reporting more than 200 trips there over the six-year period, according to The Post’s review of 130,000 pages of disclosures collected by the Web site Legi­Storm. Taiwan accounts for an additional 100 trips.

But other regions of the world are also well represented.

On a trip to Jordan, for instance, congressional staffers stayed at the Four Seasons in Amman, where they received an audience with the king. The group also visited the Dead Sea and the famed mosaics in Madaba and spent two days at the ancient cities of Petra and Jerash, according to an itinerary for the trip.

In Switzerland, staffers took a helicopter ride through the Alps to Monte Bre, hiking up the mountain for coffee at a summit cafe overlooking a lake, according to another itinerary.

Organizers of the trips say they’re an important way for U.S. government staff members to learn about the world with no cost to taxpayers. The trips are supposed to include visits to historical and cultural sites, including those frequented by tourists, to foster international understanding.

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Assange sees freedom in Australia senate seat

SYDNEY: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange believes winning a seat in Australia's upper house would extricate him from his prolonged asylum inside Ecuador's London embassy, a report said Monday.

In an interview published on Australian website The Conversation, Assange outlined a scenario that would set him free to return to home.

If he takes a senate seat in the September 14 elections, "the US Department of Justice won't want to spark an international diplomatic row", The Conversation paraphrased Assange as saying.

"It will drop its grand jury espionage investigation. The Cameron government will follow suit," it added.

If Britain failed to back off "the political costs of the current standoff will be higher still", Assange said.

He added that sex crime allegations against him in Sweden were "falling apart".

A new WikiLeaks Party is to be launched soon with a 10-member national council and field candidates for the senate. Queensland-born Assange is expected to stand in Victoria state.

He has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June, after claiming asylum in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden. Britain has refused to grant him safe passage out of the country.

The former computer hacker fears Sweden will allow him to be extradited to the United States to be questioned over the WikiLeaks release of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

Despite the swirl of allegations against him, Assange is a popular figure in Australia.

WikiLeaks angered the United States in 2010 by publishing hundreds of thousands of classified documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a huge cache of US diplomatic cables that embarrassed governments worldwide.

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa called on Europe on Sunday to find a snap diplomatic solution for Assange.

"It's a diplomatic situation for which a solution must be found... as quickly as possible," Correa said shortly after declaring victory in presidential elections.

"There can't be a problem due to asylum, it's neocolonialism," he said, reiterating Quito's demands -- safe passage or questioning of Assange by a Swedish judicial official in London.

-AFP/gn

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Supreme Court stays execution of Veerappan's aides till Wednesday

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has stayed the execution of Veerappan's aides till Wednesday.

The apex court said though the petition filed by an advocate on behalf of the convicts is not maintainable, the case of 4 condemned prisoners were similar to the case of other death row convicts pending consideration of the Supreme Court.

SC's decision came after the defence advocate informed the court that he has now got authorization from all 4 convicts as well as their families.
Four aides of sandalwood smuggler Veerappan had moved the Supreme Court against the execution of their death penalty in connection with a landmine blast that had killed 22 policemen in Karnataka nearly 20 years ago.

Veerappan's elder brother Gnanaprakash, Simon, Meesekar Madaiah and Bilavendran were awarded death sentence in 2004 in connection with a landmine blast at Palar in Karnataka in 1993 in which 22 police personnel were killed.

Their mercy petition was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee on February 13.

On Saturday, the apex court had refused urgent hearing on the plea of four aides of sandalwood smuggler Veerappan seeking stay of execution of their death penalty.

The matter was mentioned before Chief Justice of India Altamas Kabir but he did not give a hearing to it, said a staff from his office when contacted.

Senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, who had mentioned the matter at the CJI's residence, said the Chief Justice did not hear the matter on Saturday evening on the ground that there was no proof that execution will take place on Sunday as was being feared.

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