Tennessee executed Christa Pike on Wednesday morning at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. She was fifty years old. The state had not put a woman to death in more than two hundred years, not since the early nineteenth century. Pike was convicted in 1996 for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a nineteen-year-old Job Corps classmate, in Knoxville. She committed the crime at eighteen. She died by lethal injection. NPR has followed the case and its legal history.
Governor Bill Lee denied her clemency petition earlier this week. The courts declined every appeal. Her attorneys had spent years arguing that executing someone for a crime committed at eighteen, after a childhood defined by documented abuse and untreated mental illness, violated the Eighth Amendment’s evolving standards of decency. The Supreme Court banned the execution of people who were under sixteen at the time of their offense in Thompson v. Oklahoma in 1988. It extended that prohibition to all juveniles in Roper v. Simmons in 2005. Pike was eighteen when she killed Slemmer, one year above the age the Roper ruling would have protected. Her attorneys argued the logic of Roper should extend to her case. Every court that heard the argument said it didn’t. The Nashville Banner tracked the full thirty-year legal history.
With Wednesday’s execution, nineteen women have been put to death under the modern death penalty since Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. The first was Velma Barfield in North Carolina in 1984. Women account for roughly eleven percent of murder convictions but fewer than two percent of death sentences. Researchers have documented that gap for decades. The legal system has not resolved it into a constitutional standard. It remains a statistical fact without a corresponding rule.
The remnants of Hurricane Polo swept into the American Southwest beginning Tuesday, flooding roads across New Mexico and Arizona and triggering mandatory evacuations along the Rio Grande after concerns developed about a dam upstream from several communities. The New Mexico Department of Transportation reported flooded highways and debris fields across the state. Officials ordered evacuations in Rincon, Salem, and Garfield before expanding those orders to include Hatch, the small farming community whose green chile harvest anchors the agricultural calendar for much of the region. NPR reported the scope of the flooding and the evacuation orders.
Polo struck Baja California Sur with 110-mile-per-hour sustained winds before tracking northeast and weakening. Pacific storms that travel far enough north and east to affect the American Southwest are not common, but they’re not unprecedented. In September 1997, the remnants of Hurricane Nora reached Arizona, flooding parts of Yuma. In 1976, Hurricane Kathleen’s remnants produced widespread flooding across the California desert. The region is not built to absorb what a decaying tropical system can deliver in a short window of time, and Tuesday’s floods were a demonstration of that.
President Trump met Tuesday with the leaders of the country’s major artificial intelligence companies and announced they had signed a voluntary accord committing to self-regulate AI development. The agreement has four main pillars: companies must implement internal controls, contract with an independent external auditor to assess those controls, establish a board-level committee to evaluate auditor findings, and share safety information with the federal government. Trump described the accord as “morally” binding and “like a constitution.” Speaker Mike Johnson, also at the event, acknowledged it is voluntary. NPR reported the full terms.
The accord includes a line noting that “over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws and regulations.” That sentence is doing most of the structural work in the agreement. Voluntary industry self-regulation in American technology history has a complicated record. Social media platforms made substantial public commitments about election integrity and misinformation beginning in 2017, and the gap between those commitments and documented outcomes became, within a few years, a subject of congressional hearings and considerable litigation. Whether voluntary compliance survives the next competitive pressure cycle is a question the AI accord defers rather than answers. Al Jazeera covered the signing and the terms.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its August inflation report Wednesday morning, the last day of the federal fiscal year and a data point the Federal Reserve has been watching closely. The Core Personal Consumption Expenditures index, the Fed’s preferred gauge because it strips out volatile food and energy prices, has run above the Fed’s 2 percent target continuously since March 2021. The August reading extends that streak. The practical consequences reach from mortgage rates to car loans to the question of when it makes sense to start drawing down savings that have been accumulating since the 1980s. For readers thinking about that last question in this environment, Glenn Suttner’s piece on why people who saved faithfully for decades can’t bring themselves to spend is worth the time. It’s in the Money section.
The Fed has raised and held rates at their current levels in an effort to bring inflation back to target. July’s Core PCE reading came in at 3.3 percent year over year, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The direction of that number, and whether August confirms or interrupts the trend, is the story behind this morning’s release. Markets and Federal Reserve officials will spend the better part of Thursday deciding what it means. The BEA publishes all PCE data at its official site.
Today is also the last day of Federal Fiscal Year 2026. The government remains open. Congress passed a continuing resolution in early September extending funding through December 11, with the House voting 370 to 48 and the Senate passing the underlying measure 90 to 6, bipartisan margins large enough to fast-track the bill before the deadline. There is no shutdown. Federal employees will report to work Thursday. This outcome, which is the ordinary, functional one, received roughly one-tenth the coverage it would have received if Congress had failed. That asymmetry in how we cover the news is worth naming: the story that proves the system worked is always harder to write than the story that proves it failed, and it is almost always less widely read. NPR covered the House vote and the provisions of the bill.
María del Carmen Abascal is eighty-seven years old and has lived in the same apartment in Madrid’s Retiro neighborhood for more than seventy years. Last week, bailiffs evicted her on a stretcher. The eviction was legal. It set off some of the largest housing demonstrations Spain has seen in years. Tens of thousands of people marched in Madrid. Protesters camped overnight in the Puerta del Sol. The Spanish government announced new tenant protection measures.
On Wednesday, her attorney announced she had reached a settlement with the company that owns the apartment. She is going home. NPR reported the resolution.
The eviction happened because the law permitted it. The settlement happened because enough people saw what that meant and decided it wasn’t right. Those two facts don’t cancel each other out. They’re the same society working out loud, which is how most things that get better actually get better.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Friday.
