After botched execution, Christa Pike wakes up shackled to a bed - The Militant

3 days agoJames FitzGeraldEmergency call records have revealed the confusion that developed among prison staff and emergency call handlers after the execution of convicted murderer Christa Pike went wrong last month in Tennessee. Pike, 50, who killed Colleen Slemmer alongside her then-boyfriend in 1995, was given two doses of lethal injection on 30 September. Once it became clear that she was not going to die from the dosage, she was taken to hospital. The confusion resulted in part from an apparent disconnect between prison staff, according to the AP news agency, which first obtained audio of the emergency calls. This allegedly delayed Pike's treatment. The BBC has asked the state corrections department for comment. The department has not yet stated what it thinks went wrong in the attempted execution of Pike. Pike's legal team has offered the explanation that the pentobarbital chemical, with which she was injected, probably spread under skin rather than reaching her bloodstream in a sufficient quantity to kill her. Pike has now been discharged from hospital, though in their most recent update on her health, her team cautioned that she faced a "long road to recovery".

Israeli settlers have attacked European diplomats, including a French mayor, near the Palestinian village of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank. The delegation was visiting Palestinian olive harvesters on Saturday when the Israeli attackers confronted the group. The attack comes a day after settlers assaulted a US journalist north of Ramallah. In Saturday’s incident, the settlers targeted Belgium’s consul general, French and Polish diplomats and Catholic representatives, Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot said. “A French mayor was assaulted and a Belgian vehicle damaged,” Prevot said, linking the attack to what he called Israel’s “illegal settlement policy” and pledging to push for further European Union sanctions. French mayor Bernard Baudoux, who was assaulted, told the AFP news agency that the violence suggests that “there is a tolerance on the part of the Israeli government” towards settler violence. Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah, said the settlers surrounded the diplomats’ vehicles, pelted them with stones and smashed their windows.

What researchers uncovered through lab testing and surveillance footage, prosecutors said, was a plot by his fellow graduate student to intentionally poison him.

Omar’s legal team says the search violated safeguards designed to protect constitutional rights of members of Congress. Lawyers for Democratic United States Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota have demanded the return of property seized in a federal raid of her Washington, DC home, accusing the US Department of Justice of conducting a politically motivated investigation and failing to follow judicial instructions during the search. “The political motivations behind this pre-election investigation and search are clear as day,” Omar’s lawyers wrote in a letter sent to federal prosecutors on Friday and obtained by The Associated Press news agency.