Despite severe injuries to her arms from the insertion of intravenous lines during the attempted execution last Wednesday, Pike, 50, is “still handcuffed and shackled” to her hospital bed while she remains under medical care

International News via Reuters:

Convicted killer Christa Pike, who survived Tennessee’s effort to execute her by lethal injection last week, foiling the state’s first attempt to put a woman to death in two centuries, has regained consciousness and is speaking, her lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.

Despite severe injuries to her arms from the insertion of intravenous lines during the attempted execution last Wednesday, Pike, 50, is “still handcuffed and shackled” to her hospital bed while she remains under medical care, her team of public defense attorneys wrote.

“Her prognosis remains unclear, but at a minimum we expect a long recovery,” the lawyers’ statement said, adding that a court hearing on Pike’s case was scheduled for Wednesday in Davidson County Chancery Court.

Pike, sentenced to death for her role as a teenager in the torture-murder of a 19-year-old schoolmate Colleen Slemmer three decades ago, survived the botched execution attempt on the night of September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the state capital. She has been hospitalized since then.

Her lawyers said on Friday that their client remained unconscious, critically ill and hooked to a ventilator to breathe, as doctors labored to clear the drug pentobarbital from her system.

“Against all odds, Christa Pike is conscious, speaking and continues to receive critical medical care,” they wrote on Tuesday.

Pike’s petition for clemency, denied last week by Governor Bill Lee, argued that her death sentence had failed to properly account for Pike’s own childhood trauma as the victim of sexual abuse, neglect and untreated mental illness.

Pike went from being the first woman Tennessee had tried to put to death since the early 19th century to becoming the first person in the United States known to have survived after execution drugs were administered.

Death penalty opponents said the incident exposed the inherent barbarity of executions. It also highlighted the difficulties of carrying out lethal injections while respecting constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment.

‘NONE OF IT WAS NORMAL’

Pike’s attorneys and journalists who witnessed the execution attempt described it as roughly 2-1/2 hours of disarray and prolonged distress for her as Department of Correction personnel struggled to administer two doses of pentobarbital intravenously.

“None of it was normal,” Catherine Sweeney, a reporter for Nashville public broadcaster WPLN, recounted. “It went really poorly.”

Pike was heard gasping, crying, whimpering and breathing loudly through much of the procedure, at one point saying, “my arm feels like it’s about to burst open.”

The bungled attempt to establish intravenous lines left both of Pike’s arms “swollen, burned and blistered,” the apparent result of the pentobarbital, a highly alkaline and caustic substance, seeping into the tissues under her skin, her lawyers said in court filings.

The lawyers accused state officials of having shrugged off prior warnings from Pike’s doctors that her small veins and a blood disorder called thrombocytosis would make placing IV lines especially difficult.    

In the midst of the procedure, Pike’s lawyers filed an emergency court motion seeking to halt the procedure. By then, prison officials had ceased their execution efforts and called an ambulance, according to court records.

The night of the execution attempt, the Department of Correction defended its handling of the situation, saying it had “followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol.” But agency commissioner Frank Strada has resigned and will leave his post this month, the governor announced on Saturday. 

Lee had previously ordered a suspension of any scheduled executions for the rest of the year and a third-party review of what happened in Pike’s case.

Two days before Pike was due to meet her fate, Lee rejected a petition seeking to commute her death penalty to a life prison term without the possibility of parole. 

Pike was 18 in January 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a third companion lured Slemmer into a wooded area on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville and killed her.

The gruesome nature of the slaying, which involved Shipp carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim’s chest and Pike bashing Slemmer in the head with a chunk of asphalt, then taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, drew intense media coverage at the time. Trial testimony indicated that Pike viewed Slemmer as a rival for her boyfriend’s affections.

Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted of first-degree murder. Pike was sentenced to death, while Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Their co-defendant, Shadolla Peterson, who was 18 at the time of the murder and had acted as a lookout for the other two, testified for the prosecution and received probation.

Reporting by Ismail Shakil and Daphne Psaledakis; editing by Michelle Nichols, Rosalba O’Brien and Nia Williams

Brent futures rose 26 cents, or 0.3%, to settle at $100.58 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude rose one cent to settle at $89.44

International News via Reuters:

Oil prices were little changed on Tuesday after recovering earlier losses, as the market weighed increases in Middle Eastern crude exports and a planned Group of Seven release of emergency diesel and crude stockpiles against supply concerns related to attacks by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis.

Brent futures rose 26 cents, or 0.3%, to settle at $100.58 a barrel, while US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude rose one cent to settle at $89.44.

Around 12 million barrels per day of crude oil and 2 million bpd of refined products — volumes needed to dampen price pressure — have left the Middle East on tankers in the last seven to 10 days, the CEO of commodity trading giant Vitol said on Tuesday.

Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said on Tuesday that oil pumped through the East-West Pipeline, which runs to the kingdom’s Red Sea export hub of Yanbu, had reached 5.8 million barrels as of Tuesday morning.

Oil price declines, however, have been limited by the possibility of further Middle East supply disruptions.

Saudi Arabia’s airports in Jazan and Najran were targeted in two attacks on Monday evening, injuring three people and causing limited damage, the Saudi aviation authority said, as hostilities between the kingdom and Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis escalated.

The attacks occurred as Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces pressed a major offensive to retake territory from the Houthis, after weeks of rebel advances, with Riyadh stepping up airstrikes in support of the campaign.

Separately, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine said on Tuesday that the latest intelligence suggested Russia was preparing a “massive attack.” 

Russia was the world’s third-biggest crude oil producer behind the US and Saudi Arabia in 2025, according to US energy data. Sanctions designed to keep Russian energy out of global markets have helped support oil prices since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. A deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war could allow Russia to export more energy.

In the US, meanwhile, the National Hurricane Center said there was a 100% chance a cyclone could form over the next seven days in the Gulf of Mexico. A storm in the US Gulf could boost oil prices by shutting oil and natural gas production and damaging other energy infrastructure.

OIL STOCKS AROUND THE WORLD

The International Energy Agency will meet next week to work out the details of a diesel stock release as market confusion grows over how many barrels Europe and the US plan to make available to address shortages and record-high prices, sources said.

The surge in diesel prices has turned the fuel, which underpins trucking, agriculture and industry, into a global political and economic concern. The wars in Iran and Ukraine have curtailed exports and damaged refineries, helping drive the rise in prices.

Under pressure from US President Donald Trump, the Group of Seven major economies agreed on Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil from emergency reserves and pledged to refrain from imposing energy export restrictions.

With the war in Iran disrupting the flow of Middle East oil supplies, the US Energy Information Administration projected on Tuesday that world petroleum production would drop from a record 106.3 million bpd in 2025 to 101.1 million bpd in 2026, and world oil demand will drop from a record 104.4 million bpd in 2025 to 102.4 million bpd in 2026.

In 2027, however, EIA projected world oil supply and demand would rise back to record highs of 109.6 million bpd of production and 104.6 million bpd of consumption.

In the US, meanwhile, the oil market was watching for weekly storage reports from the American Petroleum Institute trade group on Tuesday and the EIA on Wednesday.

Analysts estimated energy firms added 1.7 million barrels of crude to US storage during the week ended October 2. 

If correct, it would mark the first time since August that crude stocks increased for three weeks in a row and compare with an increase of 3.7 million barrels in the same week last year and an average increase of 1.7 million barrels over the past five years (2021 to 2025). [EIA/S] [API/S]

Reporting by Scott DiSavino in New York and Alex Lawler in London; Additional reporting by Sumit Saha in Bengaluru and Emily Chow in Singapore; Editing by Joe Bavier, Paul Simao, Susan Fenton and Cynthia Osterman

Police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse violent groups on the fringes of marches in Paris, Strasbourg, Rennes and Toulouse, among other cities

International News via Reuters:

Demonstrations swept across France on Tuesday as teachers and parents took to the streets with high school pupils on the biggest day of what Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu described as the most violent student demonstrations in decades.   

Police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse violent groups on the fringes of marches in Paris, Strasbourg, Rennes and Toulouse, among other cities. The marches drew more than 250,000 people in dozens of cities, the interior ministry said, though organisers said 450,000 had participated.  

The protests, in which a teenager lost a hand on Monday, were the latest manifestation of public anger in a country where support for populist parties on the far right and far left has surged ahead of a presidential election in the spring.

The government is under pressure to tame public debt amid weak growth, and has struggled with basic tasks such as passing a budget since President Emmanuel Macron’s allies lost their majority in a 2024 parliamentary vote.

Lecornu told lawmakers at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had so far been injured in clashes, “the heaviest toll in decades paid by the school system”. His office said more than 700 police officers were also hurt.

Macron has convened Lecornu and other senior ministers at an emergency meeting on Tuesday, broadcaster BFM reported. 

US President Donald Trump said the protests were evidence of “out of control” migration in France. “This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country,” he posted on Truth Social. 

The students’ demands do not concern religion or immigration, but focus instead on understaffing and lack of funding. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party has not linked the protests to France’s migration policy. Lecornu’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

In Marseille and Nantes, protesters held up handmade signs bearing phrases such as “The state has killed national education”. In Toulouse, parents linked arms at the front of a march through the city.

Paris police said clashes in the capital resulted from some 300 people, most hooded or masked, facing off against security forces, and that the protest generally unfolded without major incident elsewhere. Several storefronts were damaged.

The Interior Ministry said 488 people had been arrested and 48 security personnel were injured on Tuesday.

MAINTENANCE COMPLAINTS

The student protests began in September in the deprived suburbs of Paris before spreading nationwide.

Students complain about schools facing basic maintenance problems, from water leaks to rat infestations.

“There is such a gap between the elites and us,” said Hugo Vetzel, a recent high-school graduate in Strasbourg.  

The High School Students Union said more than half of France’s high schools were blockaded or had closed for the day. Some local education authorities have tried to move classes online.

Rights groups, students and parent groups have accused authorities of using disproportionate force against minors. The government says the protest movement has been hijacked by outsiders and in some places deteriorated into urban violence. 

More than 1,800 people are being prosecuted for unspecified crimes, including 1,483 minors, the justice ministry said on Monday.

“They want to divide the young people into good and bad protesters,” said Omar Slaouti, a high-school teacher in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris. “If there were no trash cans on fire, the government would not have stepped back and become aware of the issues at stake.”

PRIME MINISTER PROMISES A RESPONSE

Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students’ leading demands. Those include ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. school day and the need for longer lunch breaks.

The government will also look at repairs needed to ageing school buildings, said Lecornu, who demanded ministers send in their first proposals by the end of October. 

Parent Emilie Lhomme said at a protest outside the Helene Boucher school in Paris that the government’s words were not enough: “That’s all fine and dandy, but that’s not what’s going to change the daily lives of our children,” she said.

Finding spare cash to implement educational reforms will be difficult.

The government is under pressure to try to narrow a ballooning budget deficit as investor concerns about France’s growing debt, weak growth and reluctance to rein in spending push the cost of borrowing higher. The yield on France’s 10-year bonds briefly hit a 24-year high of over 5% last week.

The surge in French borrowing costs has started to spill into the broader euro area, with the sliding euro currency the latest alarm bell for policy makers. Finance Minister Roland Lescure said on Tuesday there was no need for the European Central Bank to step in.

Le Pen, the far-right euro-sceptic populist leading the presidential race ahead of next spring’s election, set out plans to slash public spending if elected, seeking to establish her fiscal credibility as the bond market crisis deepens.

French spending on education has lagged inflation and the country’s students are trailing their OECD peers in overall performance, data from the PISA 2025 assessment shows.

Reporting by Tilman Blasshofer in Strasbourg, Cecile Mantovani in Lyon, Lucien Libert, Juliette Jabkhiro, Elizabeth Pineau and Dominique Vidalon in Paris, Layli Foroudi in Argenteuil, Inti Landauro and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Brussels, and Dimitri Rhodes in Gdansk; Writing by Richard Lough and Makini Brice; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Peter Graff, Aidan Lewis

Sanchez said on Monday he was bringing forward an election previously scheduled for 2027 because failing to garner enough support for his proposals to address a housing crisis made him realise he needed more seats in parliament

International News via Reuters:

Spain’s government on Tuesday approved two housing decrees whose rejection by parliament last week prompted Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to call a snap election.

The measures, which include rent caps, a temporary ban on evictions and limits on corporate purchases of residential property, were “based on plain common sense”, Sanchez said in a press conference, arguing that opinion surveys showed the public was broadly in favour of intervention in the property market.

“They protect the most vulnerable and, in some way, begin to bring order to what is currently a deeply dysfunctional market that does not operate according to the logic of supply and demand because of rampant speculation,” he said.

Sanchez said on Monday he was bringing forward an election previously scheduled for 2027 because failing to garner enough support for his proposals to address a housing crisis made him realise he needed more seats in parliament.

Calling the election, on November 29, has allowed Sanchez to bring in the new rules with the support of a smaller caretaker body.

The measures will come into effect temporarily when the decree is published in the official state gazette but must then be sent for approval by the caretaker lawmakers who remain in place after parliament was dissolved, Sanchez said.

The standing body of 69 members, when including lower house speaker Francina Armengol from Sanchez’s Socialist Party, has a slim majority in favour of the measures, according to state broadcaster TVE.

A second decree proposing the automatic renewal of rental contracts would only come into effect if approved by the reduced legislature since the government did not have a majority to validate it, Sanchez said.

The interventionist measures will only serve to drive away the investment needed to increase supply, said Carolina Roca, president of the Association of Property Developers of Madrid.

“The legal uncertainty inherent in both decrees will result in a sharp slowdown in the limited investment secured to date in the construction of affordable housing,” she said.

The attempted eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid triggered nationwide protests including calls for a general strike before the election, which Sanchez said his government would respect.

Reporting by Charlie Devereux, Victoria Waldersee and Mireia Merino; Additional reporting by Corina Pons; Editing by Andrei Khalip, Timothy Heritage and Alison Williams