News Digest

Friday, August 17, 2007 10:47 AM PDT

IDAHO - State poised to move

inmates from troubled, Texas prison

BOISE (AP) — Idaho Department of Correction Director Brent Reinke says he intends to move 56 Idaho inmates from a troubled Texas prison and into a newer, cleaner penitentiary near the Texas-Mexico border by the end of September.

Reinke also told Gov. C.L. ‘’Butch’’ Otter and other top state officials on Thursday that the department plans to send another 280 Idaho prisoners to the Val Verde Correctional Facility, in Del Rio, Texas, and to a private prison in western Oklahoma over the next six months to ease overcrowding in Idaho.

THE NATION

ADVERTISEMENT

Home construction falls to the slowest pace in more than a decade

WASHINGTON (AP) — Construction of new homes fell in July to the lowest level in 101/2 years, and analysts said there is no end in sight to the deepening housing slump.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that construction of new homes and apartments dropped by 6.1 percent in July from the June pace to an annual rate of 1.38 million units. That was down 20.9 percent from the pace of activity a year ago and represented the slowest construction pace since January 1997.

Army says stress of war on soldiers’ marriages, personal lives boosts suicides

WASHINGTON (AP) — Repeated and ever-longer war-zone tours are putting increasing pressure on military families, the Army said Thursday, helping push soldier suicides to a record rate.

There were 99 Army suicides last year — nearly half of them soldiers who hadn’t reached their 25th birthdays, about a third of them serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, told a Pentagon press conference that the primary reason for suicide is “failed intimate relationships, failed marriages.’’

She said that although the military is worried about the stress caused by repeat deployments and tours of duty that have been stretched to 15 months, it has not found a direct relationship between suicides and combat or deployments.