Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee has halted all remaining executions this year, after a death row prisoner survived two lethal injections on Wednesday night. According to her lawyers, Christa Pike was still breathing after she was strapped to a gurney and injected with two syringes of pentobarbital, in a botched execution that spanned more than two hours. Witnesses say Pike described a burning spot in her arm that felt like it was going to burst; she smiled and laughed, then gasped repeatedly and began snoring, but continuing to breathe. She was later taken to a hospital. Her lawyers say no one has informed them about her condition. Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said, “This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era. There is no precedent.”

Pike was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder she committed when she was 18. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in 200 years. Wednesday night’s execution went forward only after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay by an appeals court, which paused her execution to consider whether her sentencing had fully weighed evidence that she had been raped and sexually abused as a child.

Ahead of the botched execution, Pike’s lawyers had argued a single-dose lethal injection could be tantamount to torture due to Pike’s small veins and history of sexual trauma. They said, “We take no pleasure in being right, but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”

The Pentagon has announced a new four-star military command dedicated to the rapid adoption of killer robots and other autonomous weapons. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the announcement during his “State of the Force” address on Wednesday at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “Today, at my direction, we are announcing the creation of Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom, a new four-star combatant command with service-like authorities built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the joint force in the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history. Drone warfare supercharged by SI-enabled targeting is the biggest battlefield revolution in generations.”

Amnesty International has called for a ban on killer robots, writing, “The replacement of troops with machines makes the decision to go to war easier — and through illegal transfers and battlefield capture, these weapons will fall into hands of others.”

Meanwhile, Secretary Hegseth confirmed the military will cut 20% of its generals and admirals. This comes after he consistently blocked promotions for several high-ranking Black and female officers. Hegseth declared, “We are no longer the woke department.” He also singled out reporters in the auditorium, calling them “anti-American losers in our media” and accusing them of “treason” for reporting critically on the Pentagon. And Hegseth announced a new Pentagon project on the future of warfare led by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Trump donor and weapons entrepreneur Palmer Luckey and trillionaire Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, which receives billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the Pentagon to let him review its secret legal justification for lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific before he decides whether to release it. The Pentagon has been bombing boats for allegedly carrying drugs, even as it provides no evidence they had engaged in narcotrafficking. Since last fall, the Pentagon has claimed 70 boat strikes, killing more than 200 people. Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, responded, “The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of civilians. Today’s order is a huge step in the right direction of ensuring that the government does not get to summarily execute people based on secret law.”

A FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was diverted to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday after one of the pilots allegedly tried to stab his co-pilot in the cockpit and sent the jet plunging more than ​17,000 feet in less than two minutes. The passengers and crew got into the cockpit and subdued the alleged attacker. The plane later landed safely in Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attacker may have tried to crash the plane, which was carrying mostly Israeli passengers. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the incident an attempted terrorist attack on Israelis. But the motive remains unclear. This is one of the passengers who helped subdue the attacker.

Yaniy Hayun: “We pulled the assailant out. I pulled him out. After I pulled him out, we took control of the plane. I pulled up the yoke. I straightened the plane out a bit and then the pilot. I saw two unmanned yokes with no pilots, and I’ve watched this TV program, 'Flight Investigation,' and I knew I had to pull.”

Palestinians are holding mass funeral services in Gaza City today for 105 people whose remains were recovered from the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli strikes. Among the dead are 60 children. The funeral follows Israeli attacks on homes and vehicles Wednesday that wounded dozens and killed eight Palestinians, including journalist Muhammad Abdel Aziz al-Najjar. He’s at least the 263rd Palestinian media worker to be killed by Israel since October 2023.

This comes as Israel’s severe restrictions on medicine, fuel and humanitarian goods has left Gaza’s health sector on the brink of collapse. Sharif Matar is head of pediatrics at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, which is operating at minimum capacity, with some departments forced to shut down to conserve electricity.

Dr. Sharif Matar: “At the moment, we’re unable to operate all of the ventilators or reopen the intensive care unit at Al-Rantisi Hospital with its staff and equipment. Last night, unfortunately, a one-and-a-half-month-old baby died because intensive care was unavailable.”

In Massachusetts, members of the group Cambridge for Palestine delivered an open letter Wednesday calling on Cambridge city officials to divest public money from companies they say are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The letter was signed by nearly 2,000 people, including Jewish residents, who urged city councillors not to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism and pointed to Israel’s continued deadly strikes on Gaza despite the U.S.-brokered so-called ceasefire. Cambridge for Palestine says an investigation uncovered $28 million of city investments in weapons and surveillance companies that are directly complicit in Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians. This is Ayah Al-Zubi, a democratic socialist and the youngest city councillor in Cambridge’s history.

Ayah Al-Zubi: “We are out here today because we are getting ready to launch our divestment campaign to the City Council, where hopefully we will call on the city to divest some of their financial funding out of companies that are invested in the genocide of Palestinians. … Cambridge has a history of standing up against abhorrent human rights abuses. We stood up against apartheid South Africa back in the late 1970s. We divested from Polaroid in its human rights abuses in apartheid South Africa. And three years later, after the stand that we took, Massachusetts also divested pension money out of South Africa.”

In Wisconsin, an immigration judge has ruled that the president of the state’s largest mosque can be deported. Salah Sarsour was arrested by immigration agents in March and held for more than 80 days in an Indiana jail. Sarsour came to the U.S. in 1993 and has been a legal resident of Milwaukee for over 32 years. He grew up in the occupied West Bank and was detained by ICE agents back in March. Democracy Now! spoke with Salah Sarsour in July. He said his time in ICE detention brought back bad memories of his childhood, when he lived under Israeli military occupation.

Salah Sarsour: “I never thought in my life that I will see such facility in the United States here with all this kind of bad treatment. So, immediately, as I mentioned, it brought me this memories, what I went through as a child when they arrested me from my house, when the Israeli soldiers came and arrested me and make me go through two years, at least, in prison for one reason: that I’m a Palestinian. That’s all.”

The Justice Department has indicted 10 foreign nationals in Minnesota on charges of voter fraud. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges on Wednesday, saying the 10 immigrants illegally cast ballots in elections dating back to 2022. That would represent about 0.00012% of the combined 8.5 million ballots cast by Minnesotans in those elections. Attorney General Blanche also announced he’d filed a judicial misconduct complaint against several federal judges in Minnesota who criticized Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s deadly immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities last winter.

Attorney General Todd Blanche: “There’s an obvious bias against the Department of Homeland Security and immigration authorities in Minnesota. These judges are commenting publicly on pending and impending cases and making political statements on matters that are currently or just recently been before them, many of which are still on appeal.”

Blanche was citing interviews the judges gave to the New York Times in September, including these remarks by Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee who served as a chief U.S. district judge in Minnesota during ICE’s winter surge.

Judge Patrick Schiltz: “What happened in our court, especially in January through March of this year, was pretty much unprecedented in the history of the United States, at least going back to the Civil War, and it created a grave threat to the rule of law.”

In a statement, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison condemned the Justice Department’s complaint against federal judges as “a desperate and dangerous attack on American judicial independence.” He added, “Trump and his allies have bullied immigrants, refugees, and the trans community, and now they’re turning their attacks toward a co-equal branch of government.”