Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said he hoped former President Saddam Hussein, under trial for crimes against humanity, would be executed soon.

a Vietnamese court upheld the death sentences of eight people, including two women, for trafficking heroin from neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, a court official said.

a former US soldier was arrested and charged with killing four Iraqi civilians and raping one of the female victims, US officials said.

the American Society of Anesthesiologists called on its members not to attend executions of death sentences by lethal injection, even if called to do so by a court.

Moldova's parliament unanimously supported the definitive exclusion from the country's Constitution of Paragraph 3 of Article 24 allowing the use of death penalty in exceptional cases.

Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri-al-Maliki said that courts in the country had sentenced 260 people to death in the past two years.

seven gang members were executed in eastern China for their role in the murders of 17 Chinese workers who had been kidnapped in Cambodia and held for ransom, Xinhua news agency reported.

an Iranian man convicted of repeated armed robbery and kidnapping has been hanged in a village near the southern city of Shiraz, AFP reported.

China's high courts began open hearings for death penalty cases in a long-awaited move aimed at raising the quality of justice in capital punishment cases.

Shehzad Ahmad, 29, Muhammad Ashraf, 34, Mubarik Ali, 28, and Umer Hayat, 32, were hanged in Pakistan for gang-raping a teenaged Christian girl at gunpoint in the central city of Faisalabad on November 7, 1999.

“What is the Italian government’s intention regarding the offer made by Marco Pannella for a special appointment to save Saddam from execution, and with Saddam’s life, the life of the rights and the civility which he massacred during 50 years of bloody rule?”

a federal judge halted executions in Missouri until the state makes sweeping changes to ensure that inmates do not suffer excruciating pain when they are put to death.