Tennessee has scheduled the execution of Christa Pike for Wednesday, which would be the state’s first execution of a woman in more than two hundred years. Pike, fifty, was convicted of the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a nineteen-year-old Job Corps classmate, in Knoxville. She was sentenced to death in 1996 at age twenty, making her one of the youngest women sentenced to death in the United States during the post-Furman era. Governor Bill Lee announced Monday he wouldn’t grant clemency. Pike said last week that she is “at peace.” NPR reported the execution timeline and the governor’s decision.
The last woman put to death in Tennessee was executed in the early nineteenth century. Since the Supreme Court reinstituted capital punishment with Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, eighteen women have been executed in the United States. Women account for roughly eleven percent of murder convictions but fewer than two percent of death sentences, a disparity that researchers have documented for decades without producing a clear legal standard in response. Pike’s attorneys argued that carrying out a death sentence imposed on a teenager with untreated mental illness, after a childhood marked by severe abuse and neglect, is categorically disproportionate. Governor Lee’s office, and the courts that have reviewed the case across thirty years, have found otherwise. The Nashville Banner has been tracking the full legal history.
The arguments her attorneys made in the clemency petition aren’t arguments about her guilt. She doesn’t contest what happened in Knoxville in 1995. The arguments are about what the law should do when the person who committed a crime at eighteen has spent more than half her life in a prison cell. Tennessee’s courts have reviewed that question repeatedly and haven’t changed their answer. Her attorneys say the relevant question has changed regardless: that our understanding of adolescent brain development, trauma, and untreated mental illness has shifted enough since 1996 to require a different evaluation of the sentence itself. The governor disagreed. ABC News has a full account of the case and its legal history.
She’s scheduled to die Wednesday evening. She may choose between electrocution and lethal injection.
The five British men arrested Sunday near RAF Fairford were released on police bail Monday. All five are British nationals from London in their twenties. They remain under active investigation and are subject to strict conditions on their movement and contact with others. Laurence Taylor, head of Counter Terrorism Policing, said investigators were examining every angle, “including that this may be actively committed by proxies or individuals either knowingly or unknowingly working on behalf of a foreign state.” The counterterrorism police issued a public statement Monday afternoon.
RAF Fairford has served as a staging base for American strategic bombers since the Cold War, and the US Air Force has been using it for operations against Iran this year. That’s what gives Taylor’s phrase about a “foreign state” its particular weight in this investigation. Britain hasn’t publicly named a suspected sponsor. Iran hasn’t commented. The bail conditions are strict. The investigation continues. CBS News covered the bail announcement and the current scope of the probe.
The Trump administration published new fuel economy standards Monday, significantly reducing the efficiency requirement for American passenger cars and light trucks. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s revised Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules now require light-duty vehicle fleets to average 34.9 miles per gallon by model year 2031. The Biden administration had set that target at 50.4 miles per gallon for the same year. The new rules require automakers to improve fleet-average efficiency by roughly one percent annually, compared to the two percent annual improvement the previous rules would have required. NPR reported the full regulatory detail.
The federal fuel economy program was created in 1975, in direct response to the 1973 oil embargo. The average passenger vehicle on American roads at the time was getting about thirteen miles per gallon. The program has required fleet-average improvements in every administration since, with the pace varying considerably depending on who was in the White House and how much pressure the auto industry was applying. The Consumer Federation of America estimated Monday that the rollback will cost the average driver roughly $700 in additional fuel costs over the life of a vehicle bought under the new standard. The administration says the change lowers sticker prices and reduces compliance costs for automakers. Both of those things can be true at the same time. Inside Climate News has the full analysis.
Qatar-brokered talks between the United States and Iran continued Monday despite President Trump’s rejection of Iran’s latest proposal over the weekend. Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have been meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s team in New York, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Trump called the earlier rounds “very good.” He then rejected the written proposal that followed them. He said Monday he expects negotiations to resume. Araghchi remained in New York. Spectrum News reported on the state of mediation.
Iran wants to focus the talks on the Strait of Hormuz and the American naval blockade. The United States wants nuclear concessions before any agreement is finalized. Those aren’t adjacent positions. Mediators have been trying for weeks to find a sequencing of concessions that lets both governments describe an outcome as a win. The talks haven’t collapsed. They also haven’t produced anything yet.
A diplomatic dispute broke open this week between Ukraine and South Korea after President Zelenskyy disclosed, from the United Nations General Assembly podium on September 23, that Ukraine had transferred two captured North Korean soldiers to Seoul. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung demanded an official apology, accusing Ukraine of violating a nondisclosure agreement. Seoul confirmed the soldiers had arrived, validating the transfer while objecting to how it became public. The Washington Times covered South Korea’s demand for an apology.
The two men are among thousands of North Korean troops deployed to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. Their capture in the Kursk region in early 2025, and their subsequent transfer to South Korea, was the first known case of North Korean soldiers held as prisoners of war being brought to a third country. Zelenskyy said one of the two tried to kill himself to avoid capture. South Korea’s objection isn’t about whether the transfer was appropriate. It’s about Ukraine choosing a global stage to announce it, without Seoul’s agreement, and the bilateral friction that decision has produced. Al Jazeera has the full account.
About four thousand nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston voted Thursday to authorize an open-ended strike. The tally was 2,986 in favor, 215 opposed, a margin of roughly 93 percent. No strike date has been set. The Massachusetts Nurses Association is required to give ten days’ notice before a walkout. Contract talks have been stalled since August. The nurses staged a one-day strike in July. WBUR reported the full vote count and the notice requirements.
The nurses are seeking limits on the hospital’s use of temporary nurses, wage increases, affordable health insurance options, and enforceable patient-to-nurse staffing ratios. Brigham and Women’s is a Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital, one of the leading research institutions in the country, and the dispute there reflects a tension that’s been running through American hospital care for decades. Nurses describe what happens to patients when units are understaffed. Hospitals describe what mandatory staffing minimums do to operating costs and care delivery in other departments. Both have evidence. What the 93 percent authorization vote signals is that the nurses at Brigham are prepared to sustain pressure until the contract addresses what they’re describing from inside the wards. For a closer look at what hospital care already looks like under pressure for patients, Carol Gifford’s piece on the seventeen-minute appointment is worth reading. That piece is in the Health section.
Researchers published a paper this week describing a method that may let scientists read thousands of ancient scrolls carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The scrolls come from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, a library buried under superheated ash and gas during the same eruption that destroyed Pompeii. More than a thousand papyrus manuscripts survived in the sense that they weren’t vaporized, but they were sealed into tight, brittle rolls impossible to open without destroying them. Most of them have been sitting in a collection in Naples for nearly three centuries, unread.
The new research found that lead-based ink, common in ancient writing, absorbs X-rays roughly twenty-five times more intensely than the charred papyrus surrounding it. That contrast makes it possible to read the text through sealed rolls using X-ray computed tomography, without ever unrolling them. To test the technique, Douglas Seiler, an affiliate of Berkeley SETI, sourced papyrus and reed pens from Egypt, sourced traditional lampblack ink from Japan, hired some high school students to inscribe the scrolls with lines from Star Wars, the Bible, and the 1960s science fiction series The Outer Limits, then put all of it in a furnace. The experiment worked. ScienceDaily covered the research in full.
Scholars have been trying to read the Herculaneum scrolls since excavations brought them to light in the eighteenth century. Some of what’s inside is certainly duplicated in texts we already have from other sources. But some of it almost certainly isn’t. There are works mentioned in ancient sources that no one has seen since Rome. The technique that may finally provide a path in started with a researcher burning his own scrolls in a furnace to see what happened. There are texts in that collection that no living person has read. Not because they were lost, but because no one had found a way in. That may be changing.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
