Breathe easy all you New Mexicans who are traveling during the first part of 2010. The Obama administration will abandon a Dec. 31 deadline for states to tighten security requirements for driver’s licenses under the 2005 Real ID law, the Washington Post reports.

Meantime, New Mexico isn’t the only state with a smaller prison population than it had a few years back. The U.S. soon may see its prison population drop for the first time in almost four decades, according to the Los Angeles Times, which lists the reasons for this trend, including states rethinking their tough-on-crime policies in the face of budget troubles. In 2007, New Mexico officials watched the state’s prison population shrink. Up until that point, New Mexico’s prison population had risen every year since the early 1980s.

Turning to New York, jurors who convicted former state Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno of fraud charges also would indict the state Legislature for negligence if they could, reports the Albany Times Union.

Moving to the Deep South, state budget cuts in recent years have gutted Georgia’s ethics panel, which now is an ethics panel in name only say some good government advocates, according to the Associated Press.

As for international news, tens of thousands of opposition supporters gathered in Qom, Iran’s main theological center, today to mourn the passing of the country’s top dissident cleric, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died late Saturday at the age of 87, reports the Los Angeles Times. Montazeri in recent months had leveraged his reputation as one of the architects of the 1979 revolution to criticize the current leaders in Iran.

In the media world, Twitter is posting a small profit for 2009 thanks to recent deals it inked with Google and Microsoft, reports BusinessWeek.