Prohibition of salty, yeast-based condiment in Victoria’s prisons remains after convicted murderer claimed it denied him right to ‘enjoy his culture’

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A murderer who claimed a refusal to allow him Vegemite in prison is a breach of his human rights as an Australian has failed to overturn the ban on the polarising spread.

Andre McKechnie sued Victoria’s corrections department after he was refused the salty, yeast-based condiment in prison.

New account from Pike’s lawyer suggests team was racked by doubts even before pentobarbital began to flow

The Tennessee execution team tasked with setting an intravenous line in the arms of the death row prisoner Christa Pike through which she could be injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital repeatedly warned that her vein might be “blowing”, before they went ahead with the procedure, her lawyer has revealed.

Members of the intravenous (IV) team used up to 10 needles as they sought to establish a line through which Pike could be killed with a massive dose of the sedative. About 20 minutes into the attempt, they began discussing among themselves whether the prisoner’s vein “might be blowing”.

Prisoners look after a kinkajou, zebu and ostrich at Monroe County detention center in the Florida Keys. It is the only correctional facility in the world with its own zoo

At the Monroe County detention center on Stock Island in the Florida Keys, most of the prisoners do the type of work you’d typically imagine people doing in jail. Preparing meals in the kitchens, cleaning the common areas, working in the laundry, and so on.

But for about five prisoners at a time the work looks a little more exotic. They’re working in the jail’s on-site zoo, taking care of animals including a capybara, a kinkajou, a zebu and an ostrich.

Investigation suggests American company Axon still supplies Israel with Taser weapons despite evidence they have been used to torture prisoners

The soldiers drag the man into a section of the prison known as Hell’s Wing, a metaphor for its notoriety for acts of brutality. Shoving him violently into a corner, they take a step back before one of them draws his weapon and fires two rubber bullets at his body. The man, a double amputee, collapses to the floor.

After tying him up tightly, the soldiers continue their assault until one of them pulls a stun gun from its holster. The soldier approaches the man, brandishing the gun, before applying it to his body, engulfing him in an electric shock.

President Nayib Bukele’s campaign of mass arrest has been marked by allegations of torture and killing. Four years on, 120,000 people are still in prison

At midnight on a Monday in December 2021, dozens of soldiers and police officers stormed into the home of Sandra Carolina Velasco Mena. They were looking for her 22-year-old son, Jefferson Alexánder Hernández Velasco.

“They wanted to arrest young people,” Sandra says. “Two of the policemen said it was because they were short of three people in their quota.”

Disgraced music mogul moved to Pennsylvania prison after reports of perks and fight injuries at New Jersey lockup

Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was convicted of prostitution-related crimes, has been moved to a federal prison in Pennsylvania after reports that the disgraced music producer was living the high life and was injured in a fight at his New Jersey lockup, according to reports.

The US Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is transferring Combs, 56, from FCI Fort Dix to FCI Allenwood Low, a low-security facility south of Williamsport and about 155 miles (250km) west of New York City, a person familiar with the matter said to the Associated Press. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity.

Australia’s highest court says Queensland drug trafficker extracting and storing eggs is not ‘assisted reproductive technology’

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A 36-year-old woman has won an appeal in Australia’s highest court about her right to freeze her eggs while behind bars.

Rachel Smith is serving a 10-year prison term in Queensland for trafficking in a dangerous drug.

Pike’s lawyers said she is back in same prison she’s lived in for last 30 years and will continue to receive medical care

Christa Pike has been discharged from the hospital after surviving Tennessee’s botched 30 September attempt to execute her by lethal injection and is back in prison, her lawyers said on Saturday.

Pike, 50, returned to the Deborah K Johnson rehabilitation center, where she has been imprisoned for the last three decades, her attorneys, Stephen Ferrell, Luke Ihnen, Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason, said in a statement.

Flowers, tried six times over 1996 murders of four people, faced execution before supreme court tossed his conviction

Curtis Flowers, a Black man who spent more than 22 years in prison and was on death row in Mississippi before the US supreme court threw out his conviction and death sentence, has died. He was 56.

Flowers’ family confirmed that he died on Wednesday at his home in Mississippi, attorney Rob McDuff told the Associated Press on Thursday.

Recovery marks a dramatic turnaround for Pike, who remains in hospital after a botched execution in Tennessee

Christa Pike is “up and walking” in hospital, her lawyer said, just more than a week after she survived two lethal injections during a botched execution in Tennessee.

The recovery marks a dramatic turnaround after Pike was declared brain dead on Monday, before waking up and beginning to speak on Tuesday. Her ordeal has shocked many in the US and overseas and galvanized critics of the death penalty.

I was sentenced to three years in jail for insulting government institutions. Now I am free, I will carry on fighting for the women I met in prison

‘Why don’t you just drive your tuk-tuk and do your work?” the judge asked me after videos from my social media accounts were shown during my court hearing. I had spoken on TikTok and Facebook about issues in Somalia that concerned me: forced evictions in the capital, Mogadishu, high fuel prices and nepotism in government.

I had described how, when I applied for work in hospitals and government departments, I was told on three occasions that I’d have to give a sexual favour in return.

The human rights activist was severely beaten by security forces and denied medical care. In an interview with the Guardian, she discusses her shifting sense of identity and being a mother in jail

The human rights activist Narges Mohammadi has described being beaten so severely by Iranian security agents that she required two brain scans, before being held in solitary confinement for two months despite her grave injuries.

In an interview with the Guardian, the 54-year-old Nobel peace prize laureate said that during her arrest in December, security agents “inflicted extremely severe blows to my head and body.

Ex-lawyer for woman Tennessee attempted to execute says defense filings said she was at risk for ‘exactly what happened’

A former lawyer for Christa Pike says he was not surprised that Tennessee botched its attempt to execute her because attorneys had warned that problems accessing her veins could make the procedure dangerous and potentially cruel.

James Crowson, who represented Pike during part of her post-conviction appeals, said he had followed the case from afar before the failed execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on 30 September.

Frank Strada leaving position as state launches independent investigation into what went wrong

Tennessee’s top prison official is stepping down in the aftermath of the failed execution of death row prisoner Christa Pike, the state’s governor Bill Lee announced Saturday.

Frank Strada, the department of correction commissioner, will leave his position later in October as the state launches an independent investigation into what went wrong during Wednesday’s botched execution of Pike, according to Lee.

Frank Strada facing mounting questions after Pike survives injection with lethal drugs in Tennessee

Tennessee’s prison chief is under fire for the failed execution of Christa Pike, which lawyers say was the fifth “botched” execution under his leadership across two states since 2022.

Frank Strada, the commissioner of the Tennessee department of correction, has faced mounting questions about the state’s highly secretive death penalty protocols since Wednesday evening when Pike became the first death row prisoner in the US to to be injected with lethal drugs and survive.

A trio of shows at Michigan’s Grand Rapids Art Museum humanizes people who are incarcerated and celebrates the resilience of creativity

With nearly 2 million people behind bars, America is the global leader in incarceration. When you look at it per capita, we have the highest rate of incarceration of any independent democracy and rank fourth overall in the world, just behind El Salvador, Cuba and Turkmenistan.

Despite these troubling numbers, mass imprisonment is largely invisible. “Our carceral system is something we as a society try to separate out from the everyday,” observes Terra Warren, an associate curator at Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan, who alongside curator Jennifer Wcisel brings audiences three solo shows from artists Julie Green, Gary Tyler and Ray Materson. They collectively aim to make us examine more closely just what prisons are doing to our society – and how art can prove transformative to those incarcerated.

Photographer Alexandre Bagdassarian spent eight months following the daily lives of children in a prison system criticised for the long time spent in cells

The cells of the children were difficult places for me to photograph because they are impersonal and intimate at the same time. Once inside, you quickly find yourself going in circles, with nowhere to go. Your gaze settles on the very few elements that make up the space: a window, cell bars, a rudimentary bed, a plank serving as a desk, and sometimes a book or a few drawings.

Sometimes, due to staff shortages, a young person may spend as much as 23 hours a day in their cell. This and the low levels of access to educational and sports activities have been criticised by Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture.

The cell windows directly overlook the prison yard, a mandatory one-hour stop each day