Straw plea to save death row Briton

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has made a personal appeal to save the life of a British national on death row in the US who has only 12 days to live.

Mr Straw telephoned Georgia governer Roy Barnes and asked him to commute the sentence on Tracy Housel, who this week lost his final appeal in the US Supreme Court.

However, under Georgia's constitution, only the state's parole board can lift a death sentence. Prison authorities have set 12 March as the day Housel, 43, who was born in Bermuda and has dual nationality, is to be put to death by lethal injection.

He has spent 16 years on death row for the 1985 rape and murder of Jeanne Drew, a teenage hitchhiker.

He admits the killing but says he did not know what he was doing because of a medical condition that causes high blood sugar and violent mood swings.