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22 N. Korean drifters executed after return home: source SEOUL, Feb. 17 (Yonhap) -- A group of 22 North Koreans who had been returned home after their boats drifted into South Korean waters were all immediately executed by North Korean authorities, a source here said Sunday. Two fishing boats carrying the 22 North Koreans, including 14 women and three teenagers, drifted into the western waters off South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island on Feb. 8 and were sent back home after South Korean interrogators found they had no intention to defect, the National Intelligence Service said in a press release on Saturday....

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14, 2008 – The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is sound and can work, but the challenge lies in executing that strategy and sustaining success over time, a Defense Department official told Congress today. James Shinn, assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in response to two recent reports that contend the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan needs to be fundamentally changed. Shinn described the strategy in Afghanistan as one of clearing, holding and building. The coalition has done very well in the clearing aspect of the strategy, he said,...

Three Japanese prisoners executed Three death row prisoners have been executed in Japan, the authorities have announced. The justice ministry identified the men as convicted murderers Masahiko Matsubara, 63, Takashi Mochida, 65, and Keishi Nago, 37. They were hanged at separate prisons in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka. Human rights groups are critical of the secrecy surrounding executions in Japan, one of the few industrialised countries to retain the death penalty. Relatives are told only after the hangings have taken place and this is just the second time the names of those executed have been publicly announced. The first was in...

Five Hanged in Evin January 30, 2008 AFP Tehran -- Iran hanged five convicted murderers in Tehran's Evin prison on Wednesday, the Fars news agency reported, as curbs were imposed on executions being carried out in public. A man identified only by his first name of Faraz was hanged for killing his girlfriend Andia in February 2004. "This morning Faraz begged Andia's father to forgive him, but the father reminded him of how he had murdered his daughter and refused to pardon him," Fars said in the report. Ramezan, 29, was executed for stabbing his brother's wife to death after...

Iran hangs 13 on single day: reports Wed Jan 2, 12:21 PM ET Iran hanged 13 convicted criminals on Wednesday, including the mother of two young children who had been found guilty of murdering her husband after discovering he was having an affair, reports said. Raheleh Zamani, who reportedly chopped her husband's body into pieces, was hanged alongside seven men convicted of murder, in a mass execution at Tehran's Evin prison, the Iranian Student Correspondents' Association (ISCA) reported. Three drug traffickers were also hanged on Wednesday in public in a square in the central city of Qom and another two...

This news bulletin just in from our victorious comrades on the Northern Front !!

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) has learned that Makvan Mouloodzadeh, a 21-year old Iranian citizen of Kurdish origin from the city of Paveh, in the Western province of Kermanshah, has been sentenced by the government to execution. Makvan has been convicted of multiple counts of anal rape and sentenced to execution for crimes allegedly committed when he was 13 years old. IGLHRC calls for an international response to stop this scheduled execution. Imposing the death penalty for crimes committed by juveniles is prohibited under international law as well as by the Iranian legal system. In addition,...

When Junny Rios-Martinez's cell phone rang Thursday afternoon, he and his wife were in their car, getting the family together on their way to witness the execution of their son's killer scheduled for that night. According to state records, on April 18, 1991, a schoolmate of Junny reported the boy got into a U-Haul truck with a man. Days later, Junny's body was found in a footlocker. Authorities said he'd been raped and asphyxiated.

The wife of executed killer Michael Richard filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday accusing Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Presiding Judge Sharon Keller of causing the inmate's Sept. 25 lethal injection. Marsha Richard of Houston claims Keller had no authority to prevent what would have been a successful appeal to stay her husband's execution. The lawsuit says Keller violated Michael Richard's due process rights when she ordered the court clerk's office to close promptly at 5 p.m. on Sept. 25 before his lawyers could file an appeal. Houston attorney David Dow had asked for more time after having computer problems. The...

Billy Ray Hamilton, who killed three people with a sawed-off shotgun inside Fran's Market in Fresno more than a quarter-century ago, has died in prison. We have to ask the same question asked by the parents of one of his victims: Why did Hamilton spend 27 years on death row? His prison stay lasted more than one and a half times as long as his youngest victim's entire life. His victims were Douglas White, 18, Josephine Rocha, 17, and Bryon Schletewitz, 27. We support the death penalty. At the same time, we believe those sentenced to death must have every...

A state court judge is set to toss out California's new process for executing condemned inmates. State prison officials revised the lethal injection process in May. A federal judge temporarily halted executions in the state after finding that prison officials were inadequately trained and equipped to administer the three-drug cocktail during executions. Marin County Superior Court Judge Lynn O'Malley Taylor says prison officials bungled when they failed to treat the revised execution method as a new state regulation. That would have required public comment and the approval of the Office of Administrative Law. Taylor's ruling is tentative. Government lawyers will...

MOBILE, Ala.—A federal appeals court Wednesday granted a stay of execution for a terminally ill convicted killer who claimed his cancer medication would counteract with lethal injection drugs and inflict unnecessary pain. Daniel Lee Siebert, 53, was facing the death penalty Thursday for strangling two women and two young boys in 1986. He has been on Alabama's death row for more than 20 years and has terminal pancreatic cancer. In granting the stay, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta reversed an order by U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller in Montgomery. The panel noted...

Iran Hangs Nine in Teheran Execution October 18, 2007 AFP Khaleej Times Online TEHERAN -- Iran hanged nine people convicted of murder, including a woman, at Evin prison in Teheran in the latest of a growing number of executions in the Islamic republic, a newspaper reported on Thursday. The woman, identified only as Fakhteh C., and the eight others were hanged on Wednesday after being found guilty of various murders, the Teheran Emrouz newspaper reported. It said that some raped their victims before killing them. Separately, two Kurdish militants who belonged to an outlawed party seeking Kurdish autonomy in Iran...

Huntsville, Texas (AP) -- The nation's busiest death penalty state executed another inmate Tuesday night, hours after the Supreme Court said it would review whether the lethal injection method most states use is cruel and unusual. Michael Richard, 49, was put to death for the 1986 shooting of Marguerite Lucille Dixon, a 53-year-old nurse and mother of seven. Richard had been released from his second prison term eight weeks before Dixon was raped and killed inside her home. Asked if he'd like to make a final statement, Richard said, "I'd like my family to take care of each other. I...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to consider the constitutionality of lethal injections in a case that could affect the way inmates are executed around the country. The high court will hear a challenge from two inmates on death row in Kentucky — Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr. — who sued Kentucky in 2004, claiming lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Baze has been scheduled for execution Tuesday night, but the Kentucky Supreme Court halted the proceedings earlier this month. The U.S. Supreme Court has previously made it easier for death row inmates to...

Thursday December 6 10:40 PM ET Iraqi National Executed in Okla. By ROCHELLE HINES, Associated Press Writer McALESTER, Okla. (AP) - An Iraqi national who stabbed his wife and her uncle to death in 1992 was executed Thursday. Sahib Al-Mosawi, 53, was sentenced to death in 1994. He did not request a clemency hearing and had no appeals pending. He was executed by injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He met his wife and her family at a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia after they left Iraq in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War (news - web sites). Their marriage ...

Tennessee's electric chair is to be used to execute a prisoner despite warnings from the chair's designer the voltage is too low. Daryl Keith Holton, 45, is scheduled to die at 1 a.m. Wednesday in Nashville for the 1997 killings of his three young sons and his ex-wife's 4-year-old daughter, USA Today reported Tuesday. It would be Tennesse's first execution by electric chair in 47 years. Holton chose the chair rather than lethal injection, as was his right under state law, despite warnings the chair's voltage is too low from modifications made in the 1990s, the newspaper said. Fred Leuchter,...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A drifter set to die this week for killing an Amarillo woman is the first of five convicted killers scheduled for lethal injection this month in the nation's busiest capital punishment state. Tony Roach, 30, from Greenville, S.C., faces execution Wednesday for strangling 37-year-old Ronnie Dawn Hewitt after breaking in her apartment nine years ago. His punishment would bring to 24 the number of executions in Texas this year, equaling the total for all of last year. Four men were executed last month, including two last week. A third set to die last week, Kenneth Foster, received...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Gov. Rick Perry, in a rare and uncharacteristic move Thursday, spared the life of condemned prisoner Kenneth Foster, hours before he was to be executed for his role in a San Antonio robbery-shooting. The halt to Thursday's execution marked only the second time since Texas resumed carrying out executions in 1982 that the parole board voted to stop an execution this close to punishment time. And in that case, in 2004, Perry rejected the board's recommendation and the prisoner was executed. But this time, Perry agreed with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles' equally unusual recommendation...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Kenneth Foster has never killed anyone. But the 30-year-old Texan still faces execution this week, despite protests at home and abroad, for his complicity in a drug-fueled murder. Foster was arrested in August 1996 with three other young black men, all of whom were said to be high on marijuana, following the deadly shooting of Michael LaHood, 25, in the southern Texan city of San Antonio. Foster was driving the car being used by his three passengers, including Mauriceo Brown, to rob passers-by. Brown got into an altercation with LaHood, who was white, when he started to...