Hands Off Cain appreciates the announcement made today by Italy’s Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema who, whilst expounding the guidelines for Italy’s foreign policy, reaffirmed Italy’s commitments for the abolition of the death penalty worldwide.

five Iranian men convicted of kidnapping and rape were hanged in the southern cities of Kerman and Zahedan.

Mohammad Aslam, also known as Muawia, was sentenced to death by an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan after being found guilty of killing six Shia Muslims during an attack in 1995. He had pleaded not guilty.

a 17 year old boy was sentenced to death in Iran for murder, according to the daily ‘Etemad’.

three men were hanged in city of Qazvin, west of Tehran.

following the US Supreme Court’s decision to allow inmates to challenge lethal injection, Secretary of Hands Off Cain, Sergio D’Elia, declared: “Once again, following the abolition of the death penalty for those with mental retardation, for minors and the yearly decrease in executions, we hear news from the United States going in opposite directions to the death penalty.

US Supreme Court ruled that a death row inmate can bring a challenge under a federal civil rights law to the method of execution that uses a lethal three-chemical cocktail.

an Islamic court in the United Arab Emirates condemned a man to death by stoning and his female lover to one year in jail and 100 lashes.

Tsutomu Miyazaki, due to be hanged for killing four young girls in 1988 and 1989, proposed that the death penalty be carried out with drugs instead of the scaffold, a magazine editor who received letters from the convict said.

a court in China’s Yunnan Province executed a woman who drowned her niece.

four young Chinese men were executed in the capital Beijing for robbery and murder. Yan Shusen, Wang Jianzhong, Zhao Qian and Sun Shizhong -- all peasants in their early 20s -- were executed for robbing a van driver before killing him in 2004.