Foreign News
Kenneth Eugene Smith faces first nitrogen execution in US after losing last-minute appeals
An Alabama death row inmate is expected to become the first person in the US to be executed with nitrogen gas, after losing last-minute appeals.
The US Supreme Court and a lower appeals court declined to block what Kenneth Eugene Smith’s lawyers called a “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Opponents say using nitrogen could cause unnecessary suffering, and a leak could harm people present in the room.
Smith, 58, was convicted in 1989 of murdering Elizabeth Sennett.
Alabama has 30 hours to carry out the execution, which involves pumping nitrogen gas through a mask, from Thursday at 0600 GMT (0100 ET).
He told the BBC earlier this week that the wait felt like torture.
Smith would be the first person to be put to death by this method in the US and, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, anywhere in the world.
Lawyers for the inmate, who has been on death row since 1996, told the BBC on Wednesday night that they were lodging another appeal to the nation’s top court in the hope of a last minute reprieve.
Breathing pure nitrogen without oxygen causes the cells to break down and leads to death. Alabama said in a court filing that they expect him to lose consciousness within seconds and die in a matter of minutes. But its use has been denounced by some medical professionals, who warn it could cause a range of catastrophic mishaps, ranging from violent convulsions to survival in a vegetative state.
Alabama and two other US states have approved the use of nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative method of execution because the drugs used in lethal injections have become more difficult to find, contributing to a fall in the number of executions nationally.
Alabama already tried to execute Smith by lethal injection two years ago but were unable to raise a vein before the state’s death warrant expired.
Smith was one of two men convicted of murdering 45-year-old Sennett in a $1,000 (£790) killing-for-hire in March 1988. She was beaten with a fireplace implement and stabbed in the chest and neck, and her death was staged to look like a home invasion and burglary.
Her husband Charles Sennett, a debt-ridden preacher, had orchestrated the scheme to collect insurance money. He killed himself as investigators closed in. Smith’s fellow hitman, John Forrest Parker, was executed in 2010.
At his trial Smith admitted to being present when the victim was killed, but said he did not take part in the attack.
The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights has said gassing Smith could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and called for a halt. Smith’s lawyers lodged a challenge with the Supreme Court, arguing that putting convicts through multiple execution attempts violates the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects against “cruel and unusual” punishment.
On Wednesday, the justices declined to hear the appeal and denied his request to halt the execution. No justice publicly dissented from the ruling.
Smith also made a separate legal challenge to the lower 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, where he contested the legality of Alabama’s nitrogen gas protocol. But that court also rejected the inmate’s request for an injunction in a ruling on Wednesday evening.
Smith’s lawyers said they would again appeal to the Supreme Court.
His legal team argue the nitrogen gas method is “recently released and untested”, leaving him at risk of choking on his own vomit.
State Attorney General Steve Marshall previously called it “perhaps the most humane method of execution ever devised”.
Smith’s spiritual adviser, Reverend Jeff Hood, will be present in the room when the execution happens. He told the BBC he believes he will be in danger if the nitrogen leaks.
On Wednesday, prison officials escorted Rev Hood for a “walk-through” of the execution chamber, as required by Alabama’s execution protocol.
He told the BBC afterwards that he saw oxygen-level meters unplugged on a ledge inside the room, which he described as “unbelievably disturbing, it feels like you are at the centre of evil”.
“I asked ‘what’s the safety plan?’ and they said they didn’t want to get into it, they couldn’t get into it,” he said. “Once again we’re back at this place of having to rely on these people who have botched three executions in the last few years, he said. “It’s absolutely a terrifying thing to think that your life hangs in the balance with these guys”.
Rev Hood said he had requested that Alabama’s Governor Kay Ivey be present in the chamber during the execution to demonstrate her confidence in its safety, but had not received a response. “We have somebody who is championing this type of execution in the governor and yet she is unwilling to get her hands dirty,” he said.
The BBC has approached Ms Ivey’s office for comment regarding this and the latest accusations over safety.
Alabama has one of the highest per capita execution rates in the US and has 165 people currently on death row.
Since 2018, the state has been responsible for three botched attempts at lethal injection in which the condemned inmates survived.
The failures led to an internal review that largely placed blame on the prisoners themselves.
(BBC)
Three buses have exploded in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, in what Israeli police say is a suspected terror attack.
Devices in two other buses failed to explode, they said, adding that “large police forces are at the scenes, searching for suspects”.
Transport Minister Miri Regev paused all buses, trains and light rail trains in the country so that checks for explosive devices could be carried out, Israeli media reports said.
Footage on social media shows at least one bus on fire in a parking lot, with a large plume of smoke rising above.
There have been no reports of casualties at this stage, police said.
President Trump has launched a fresh attack on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling him a “dictator” and deepening the rift between the two leaders.
His latest salvo came after Zelensky, reacting to US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia from which Kyiv was excluded, said the US president was “living in a disinformation space” governed by Moscow.
“Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a country left,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
The “dictator” slur quickly prompted criticism from European leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said “it is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelensky his democratic legitimacy”.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made it clear he backed Zelensky in a phone call to the Ukrainian president. A Downing Street spokesperson said Sir Keir “expressed his support for President Zelensky as Ukraine’s democratically elected leader”. It was “perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during war time as the UK did during World War Two,” the spokesperson added.
Zelensky’s five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 and elections are suspended.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also criticised Trump’s use of the word “dictator” while German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the comments “absurd”. “If you look at the real world instead of just firing off a tweet, then you know who in Europe has to live in the conditions of a dictatorship: people in Russia, people in Belarus,” she told broadcaster ZDF.
A White House official said Trump’s latest post was in direct response to Zelensky’s “disinformation” comments.
“I love Ukraine,” Trump continued, “but Zelensky has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.” In the meantime, the US was “successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia,” he said.
On Tuesday US and Russian officials held their first high-level, face-to-face talks since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The former prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, told the BBC that Russia was “popping champagne right now” in response to Trump’s comments.
“Volodymyr Zelensky is a completely legitimate president,” he said. “We cannot hold elections under martial law.”
The war of words began with comments made by Trump on Tuesday at a news conference at Mar-A-Lago in Florida, when he blamed Ukraine for the war.
Trump was asked by BBC News what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed, to which he replied: “I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat, well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily.”
“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump added.
Trump did not mention that President Vladimir Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.
Then on Wednesday, Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv: “We are seeing a lot of disinformation and it’s coming from Russia. With all due respect to President Donald Trump as a leader… he is living in this disinformation space.”
He added that he believed “the United States helped Putin to break out of years of isolation”.
Later in the day, the Ukrainian leader said the world faced the choice to be “with Putin or with peace” and announced he would be meeting Washington’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, on Thursday.
Earlier, Zelensky also rejected Trump’s attempts to access Ukraine’s rare minerals, saying no security guarantees were offered in exchange.
Trump has attempted to make an issue out of Zelensky’s popularity, claiming the Ukrainian president had only a 4% approval rating. But BBC Verify reports that polling conducted this month found 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted the president.
In Wednesday’s explosive Truth Social post, Trump also took aim at Europe, saying the war in Ukraine is “far more important to Europe than it is to us”. “We have a big, beautiful ocean as a separation,” he said.
Europe had “failed to bring peace” in the region, he added.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin also spoke to reporters, saying he would meet Trump “with pleasure”.
For its part, the EU said it would place further sanctions on Russia.
The new sanctions target Russian aluminium and dozens of vessels suspected of illegally transporting oil. They would also disconnect more Russian banks from the global Swift payment system and ban more Russian media outlets from broadcasting in Europe.
[BBC]
Australian authorities are euthanising about 90 false killer whales which survived a mass stranding on a remote beach in Tasmania.
A team of experts at the site said complex conditions have made it impossible to save them.
They are part of a pod of 157 whales that had beached near Arthur River, in the island’s north west. The rest had died shortly after the stranding.
Tasmania has seen a series of mass whale strandings in recent years – including the country’s worst-ever in 2020 – but false killer whales haven’t mass stranded there in over 50 years.
False killer whales are technically one of world’s largest dolphin species, like their orca namesakes. They can grow up to 6m (19ft) and weigh 1.5 tonnes.
Authorities on Wednesday said the pod had been stranded at the site for 24 to 48 hours, and the surviving animals were already under extreme stress.
Local resident Jocelyn Flint told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she had travelled to the site on Wednesday morning after her son noticed the pod while out shark fishing overnight.
“There are babies… There’s just families of them. Their eyes are open, they’re looking at me, like ‘help’.”
“It’s just absolutely horrific.”
The site – about 300km (186 miles) from the city of Launceston – is extremely difficult to access and transport any rescue equipment to, marine biologist Kris Carlyon told media.
“This is possibly the trickiest location I’ve seen in 16 years of doing this role in Tasmania,” he said.
“We’re talking a very rough, steep, single lane road into the site. We can get four-wheel drives in there, but not a lot else.”
Rough conditions meant returning the animals to the sea at the location they stranded was impossible, so an expert team tried to relocate two and refloat them, but were unsuccessful.
“The animals just can’t get past the break to get out. They just keep turning around and coming back towards the beach,” said Shelley Graham, from Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service.
With conditions for the next two days forecast to be similar, expert wildlife veterinarians made the “tough” and “confronting” decision to euthanise the remaining whales.
“The longer these animals are out stranded, the longer they are suffering. All alternative options have been unsuccessful, euthanasia is always a last resort,” Dr Carlyon said.
That grim task – which involves shooting the animals – is expected to begin on Wednesday but continue on Thursday.
Authorities are still working out how to dispose of the carcasses. The site has important cultural heritage for Aboriginal people so a department spokesperson earlier suggested “it may be a case of… letting nature run its course”.
Authorities have asked members of the public to avoid the site, with bushfires burning nearby and limited road access.
More than 80% of Australian whale strandings take place in Tasmania – often on its west coast.
Around 40 pilot whales were stranded further south at Macquarie Harbour in 2020 and about 350 of them died despite rescue efforts. Another 200 became standed in the same harbour in 2022.
Whales are highly social mammals and are well known for stranding in groups because they travel in large, close-knit communities which rely on constant communication.
There are a range of theories for why beachings occur. Some experts say the animals can become disoriented after following fish they hunt to the shore.
Others believe that one individual can mistakenly lead whole groups to shore.
[BBC]
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