Australian Prime Minister John Howard said there was no realistic hope that Nguyen Tuong Van, a 25-year-old Australian drug-runner, could be saved from execution in Singapore.

Luis Ramirez was put to death by injection for paying for the 1998 murder of his ex-wife's boyfriend.

an Iranian woman was sentenced to execution in the Iranian capital Tehran.

the international children's charity Save the Children, criticized the case of Sukur Ali a man sentenced to death for crimes he committed when he was 14 years old.

an Italian could face execution after being arrested on drug trafficking charges in northern Thailand, police said. Stefano Pelliccia, 50, from Rome, was apprehended on October 18 at a checkpoint in Mae Sai district of the northernmost province Chiang Rai, along the Myanmar border, allegedly with 1.4 kilograms (three pounds) of pure heroin strapped to his body.

“Sentencing to death Saddam Hussein would not be the best way of presenting the new Iraq as it would not offer a solution to the past,” declared Sergio D’Elia, Secretary of Hands Off Cain, commenting on the beginning of proceedings against the former Iraqi dictator.

jurors in US death penalty cases are often excluded because of race and gender, are not shown critical evidence and tend to be conviction prone, the Death Penalty Information Center said in a report.

Hands Off Cain, together with the Transnational Radical Party and the National Association for Criminal Defence Lawyers, presented its 2005 Report - The Death Penalty Worldwide at UN Headquarters in New York.

Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalgam rejected a call by US President George W. Bush for Tripoli to spare the lives of five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death in May 2004.

President George W. Bush urged Libya to free five Bulgarian nurses sentenced to death on charges of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the HIV virus.

the Tennessee Supreme Court unanimously rejected claims that the three-drug combination used to execute killers can cause extreme pain in violation on the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

the Nagoya High Court sentenced three men to death for murdering four people in 1994, crimes that occurred when the defendants were still minors.