Christa Gail Pike, who would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1819, was still alive and breathing Wednesday night after executioners administered two full doses of pentobarbital. Witnesses said the chamber curtains dropped twice while Pike remained conscious more than 40 minutes after the second dose. Gov. Bill Lee has ordered a comprehensive third-party review and says no rescheduled execution will happen this year.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving to eliminate 20 percent of the billets designated for generals and admirals across the Army, Navy and Air Force, doubling the 10 percent reduction he ordered last year. Some posts get axed outright, others downgraded, with the services directed to finish by January 1, 2027. Hegseth frames it as stripping out redundant headquarters layers and pushing resources closer to the troops.
The PCE price index rose 3.4 percent over the twelve months through August, under the 3.7 percent economists expected, with core PCE at three percent against a 3.3 percent consensus. Second-quarter GDP growth was revised sharply up to 2.2 percent from 1.5 percent, and consumer spending jumped. The oddity: consumer confidence just hit its lowest reading in twelve years anyway.
Acting Gov. Howie Morales declared a state of emergency September 30 as leftover moisture from Hurricane Polo swamped communities across New Mexico. Flood watches have stretched across ten states from Arizona to Missouri, with forecasters warning of rainfall rates up to two inches an hour. Polo hit Category 5 three separate times before coming ashore in Baja California.
President Trump said Washington will decide shortly whether to strike Iran or cut a deal, calling the standoff close to resolution. He also said the US is "studying" whether Tehran had a hand in the suspected plot near RAF Fairford, the British base American bombers use, and questioned the UK's release of five arrested men. Secretary of State Rubio has confirmed a "foreign actor" was involved; Iran's foreign minister flatly denies it.
Indian captain Smit Machchhar was flying Flydubai 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv when his Omani first officer allegedly knifed him and tried to crash the Boeing 737 MAX 8. Bleeding badly, Machchhar unlocked the cockpit door so passengers could storm in; they tackled the co-pilot and tied him up with headphones. The jet landed safely at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and Netanyahu called it a jihadist attack on Israelis.
Russia told NATO in a diplomatic note it would use "the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons" if the alliance tried to cut off Kaliningrad, its heavily militarized Baltic exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania. The note cited a British TV docudrama and a newspaper column, which NATO called a pretext. Secretary-General Mark Rutte says there's no immediate threat and told reporters the nuclear risk is not real.
On its fourteenth test flight, SpaceX's Starship rode a 33-engine Super Heavy booster to low Earth orbit for the first time, completed a full lap of the planet, and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites about 35 minutes in. It splashed down in the northern Pacific roughly three hours and eight minutes after liftoff from Starbase. A variant of that upper stage is slated to put NASA astronauts back on the moon.
NASA and Boeing say the Starliner capsule may return to space by the end of 2026, more than two years after its last crewed flight turned into an extended stay aboard the station. The next mission is expected to be uncrewed as engineers verify fixes to the thruster and helium leak problems. It's Boeing's shot at proving it still belongs in the commercial crew business.
Workers tearing up a busy boulevard in Tbilisi, Georgia, broke through into a cache of roughly thousand-year-old pottery buried about twenty feet beneath the modern street. Archaeologists were called in and the dig is now reshaping what's known about the medieval city's commercial quarter. The construction schedule, predictably, did not survive contact with the Middle Ages.
