NASHVILLE — Christa Pike was unconscious, intubated, and on a ventilator in a Nashville hospital as of Thursday evening, a day after surviving a botched execution attempt, her lawyers said in a court filing.
Ms. Pike, 50, was critically ill, they wrote in the Friday filing in Davidson County Chancery Court, and both of her arms were swollen, burned and blistered when she arrived at the hospital.
Her condition, some legal experts said, raises questions about whether the state could try to execute her again if she is not fully cognizant or capable of understanding what is happening. Pike, convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate, is believed to be the first person to have survived after receiving drugs during a lethal injection attempt in the modern era of capital punishment.
The disclosure is the most detailed update on Pike’s health since she survived two rounds of pentobarbital, the drug used as part of Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol, on Wednesday evening.
“Hospital staff are working to save Ms. Pike’s life and to clear the pentobarbital from her system,” the lawyers wrote. In a separate statement, they said she was also receiving treatment for “significant injuries to both arms.”
In a statement, Luke Ihnen, who represents Pike through the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, said that “we are working closely with those closest to Christa to respect her wishes, safeguard her privacy and protect her rights as a patient during this extraordinarily difficult time.”
The disclosure about Pike’s condition was part of an emergency filing in which her lawyers asked a Nashville judge to order the preservation of state prison records related to her attempted execution. The records were, they wrote, evidence of “incompetent and reckless actions.”
The Tennessee Department of Correction declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. A spokeswoman for the Tennessee Attorney General, Jonathan Skrmetti, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, paused all executions through the end of the year and ordered an investigation into what went wrong Wednesday. But Lee is in the final months of his term.
The front-runner to replace him, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, said in a statement she would try to execute Pike again.
“This process has only extended the pain for the family of Colleen Slemmer,” she said. “Their family and the families of other victims deserve swift justice.”
Pike’s lawyers have asked Mr. Lee to grant her clemency and allow her to serve the rest of her life in prison, condemning what they have called a cruel and torturous execution attempt.
Two decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities as a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The court has also barred the execution of people who lack a “rational understanding” of the reason they are to be put to death.
“If you don’t understand you’re about to die, and do not understand you’re about to die because the state believes you have committed murder, then you may not be executed,” said Christopher Slobogin, the director of the Criminal Justice Program at Vanderbilt University.
Pike’s medical condition also presents a difficult scenario for the medical staff working to save her life: If she recovers, Tennessee might try to kill her again.
“Professionals in healthcare are faced with difficult moral situations all the time — this is a particularly challenging one,” said Jeff Khan, the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. “I also think that they know that their job is to do the best they can for the patient in front of them and not to think about that.”
KYIV, Ukraine — For months, Ukrainian officials have warned people to brace for what could be their hardest winter at war. Russia, they said, would use its ever more powerful weapons to try to cripple the country’s power grid. The first big strike was expected later this fall, with the first bite of cold.
Russia did not wait that long. Before dawn on Wednesday, missiles and drones slammed into a large thermal power plant and other energy facilities, shaking the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, with explosions. By morning, several neighborhoods were without power and water.
The attack, Ukrainian officials said, marked the opening salvo of a new campaign to plunge Ukrainian cities into cold and darkness, with the ultimate goal of breaking people’s morale and crippling the war effort. Russia has waged similar campaigns each year, with mixed results, but it is approaching this winter armed with stocks of ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones that Ukraine has struggled to intercept.
The scale of Russia’s ambition to freeze Ukrainians into submission is evident in a document that the Ukrainian energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, showed to European partners in Paris two weeks ago, according to two people familiar with his presentation.
Shmyhal, the people said, described the document as an intercepted Russian plan to cause the energy system to collapse through methodical attacks. The plan, a copy of which the New York Times obtained, describes a campaign of strikes using up to 1,000 missiles, drones, and bombs. They would target a wide range of facilities, including electrical substations, hydroelectric and thermal power plants, and boiler houses.
Most alarming, the document says that Russia intends to force Ukraine’s three operating nuclear plants — the backbone of its power infrastructure — to shut down by firing missiles at the electrical switchyards that connect them to the grid. The switchyards sit less than a mile from the reactors.
The plan also says that Moscow will target Ukraine’s water system, including pumping stations and wastewater treatment facilities, with dozens of ballistic missiles and glide bombs. Russia has never attacked such sites on a large scale before. Ukrainian officials have privately expressed concern that the country has limited backup plans should it face severe water disruptions.
Residents on Volodymyrska Hill in Kyiv, Ukraine. As winter nears, Ukrainian officials warn Russia may target key infrastructure to deprive cities of heat, power, and water.Jedrzej Nowicki
The ultimate goal is to cut off major Ukrainian cities from power, heat and water, which could set off a humanitarian crisis. Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa are highlighted as top targets, with plans to cut electricity supplies in those cities by 90%, reduce heating supplies by up to 90% and severely disrupt the sewage system.
The New York Times had no way to independently authenticate the document, which is dated from August and written in Russian. But President Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly stated that his forces will wage an extensive campaign this winter to knock out Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, framing it as retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries.
Shmyhal spoke in vague terms about the document to the Ukrainian media a week ago, saying, “Our partners, like us, were struck by its cynicism, by this cold, terrorist calculation of how to destroy our energy sector.”
Whether Russia will follow through on the strategy laid out in the document — and whether it will succeed if it does so — remains to be seen.
Ukraine has spent the past several months preparing for the winter, building protective structures above critical facilities, such as substations that carry electricity across the country. Civilians, most of whom endured severe power and heating cuts last winter, have stocked up on batteries and small gas-powered heaters.
Ukrainian authorities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to repair power plants and substations, as well as to install smaller energy facilities like gas-powered turbines that are harder to strike. Ukraine has also invested in strengthening the grid to withstand cold-weather demand and reroute power when attacks knock out transmission lines.
Energy experts caution that these measures can at best cushion the expected blow, not stop it. Olena Pavlenko, head of DiXi Group, a Ukrainian energy think tank, said that four winters of war had left the country’s power grid so weakened that getting through another would be like “running a marathon with only one lung.”
Memories of last winter, by far the hardest of the war so far, in part because of particularly bitter temperatures, still loom large for Ukrainians and explain their dread of another Russian strike campaign.
As Russia repeatedly hit power and heating plants, Kyiv residents regularly endured a dozen hours or more without electricity each day, according to data shared by DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company and the capital’s electricity distributor.
Olha Skorokhod, 41, a resident of central Kyiv, said that last January she had to bathe her daughter Zoriana, 3, in cold water after losing heat for two weeks.Jedrzej Nowicki
Olha Skorokhod, a resident of central Kyiv, said she lost heat for two weeks last January as temperatures outside fell well below freezing. She had to wash her 3-year-old daughter, Zoriana, in cold water, and worried that she might get sick as a result. Changing the child’s clothes was an ordeal as the cold nipped at her bare skin. At one point, Skorokhod tried to warm the apartment by heating bricks on a small gas stove. It barely made a difference.
In high-rises across the capital, residents on the top floors often had no water because the pumps lost power. To get to their apartments, they had to climb flight after flight of stairs because the elevators were out of service. Even when the power returned for a few hours, some avoided the elevators, afraid of getting trapped during a sudden outage.
To avoid a repeat this winter, power crews have been hard at work. On Monday, a repair team from DTEK was busy replacing an old transformer with a new one near Kyiv. They lifted the old unit off a pole and replaced it with a new transformer in a protective casing.
“There’s old equipment that simply can’t handle the load anymore,” said the crew leader, Eduard Kashkov, 57. “Some of the equipment is as old as I am.”
Last winter showed that local equipment can fail when power returns after an outage and large numbers of people plug in at once to charge batteries, Kashkov said. The new transformer, he added, was built to handle the surge in consumption.
Speaking to parliament in August, Shmyhal expressed confidence that Ukraine would enter the winter well prepared. The country had about 15 gigawatts of available capacity, he said, and he expected it to grow to more than 21 gigawatts by year end. That would be enough to cover peak demand, which reached about 18 gigawatts last winter.
But his projections did not account for attacks like Wednesday’s, which can undo months of repairs. Maria Tsaturian, an energy analyst at the research group Ukraine Facility Platform, said it could take only a few attacks to knock out the five gigawatts that Ukraine had restored in recent months. She pointed to the power outages after Wednesday’s strike as evidence of the grid’s fragility.
Russia’s intercepted plan appears designed to collapse Ukraine’s already weakened grid.
It lays out three stages of attacks. The first would knock out substations near Ukraine’s western borders, which import electricity from Europe. The second would take out hydroelectric power plants. The third would force Ukraine’s three operating nuclear plants offline. (A fourth nuclear plant, near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, was captured by Russian forces early in the war and is not operating.)
The goal of the attacks, the document says, is to eliminate nearly 15 gigawatts of generating capacity — as much as Ukraine had at the end of the summer.
President Donald Trump is expected to name spy chief Jay Clayton as his new top adviser on artificial intelligence, according to three people familiar with the decision, a move that cements the administration’s handling of the new technology as a matter of national security.
Clayton, a former U.S. attorney and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, was confirmed as the leader the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in July. He is expected to continue to hold that role, one of the people said. All three individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a personnel move that has yet to be publicly announced.
CBS News first reported that Trump was expected to choose Clayton for the position.
The appointment comes as the Trump administration recalibrates its approach to AI. The previous czar, the investor David Sacks, promoted a policy aimed at allowing the technology to develop as fast as possible. But in the months since Sacks left his post in March, officials have increasingly been grappling with cybersecurity threats posed by the latest generation of models and the danger posed by AI agents going rogue online. Sacks has continued to influence thinking within the administration as an informal adviser outside of the government and as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sacks and Clayton have a close relationship, according to one of the people briefed on the upcoming announcement.
A White House official said any personnel moves would be announced by the president. “Any reporting until then is baseless speculation,” the official said.
The administration has resisted calls in recent weeks by some in the industry and on Capitol Hill to slow down the pace of development and adopt new regulations. But on Tuesday it convened tech executives for a White House lunch that culminated in the leading AI companies signing a promise to develop new systems safely and bring in outside oversight firms. The following day, a Federal Trade Commission official said the panel had opened an investigation into AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Joel Thayer, a senior adviser for technology at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank, said the developments showed how the administration’s handling of AI companies was “maturing.”
“These guys are under watch,” Thayer said. “The government has a spotlight on them.”
The industry executives’ pledge is voluntary and amounts to what Trump called “self-policing.” But it won the backing of figures who have bitterly clashed over how serious of a risk AI poses. Sacks, who attended the lunch, endorsed it. So did Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who resigned last month, saying the technology could wipe out humanity and triggering a wave of panic in Washington.
The agreement means Clayton will step into his new role at a time of relative calm.
“Super intelligence is a national security issue,” Clayton said in a CNBC interview the day after the lunch, using Trump’s preferred name for AI. “That was something that was recognized yesterday by not just the industry leaders, but everybody in the room. The commitment there to the American people, and the safety and security of the American people was palpable throughout the meeting.”
Trump nominated Clayton, a loyal ally and regular golf partner of the president’s, to lead the intelligence office in June. Many Senate Democrats initially said they supported the choice. But he refused in his confirmation hearing to say definitively that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, and the final vote fell along party lines.
The AI role will not require Senate confirmation.
The shifting thinking that led to Clayton’s appointment began months ago, when Anthropic said it had developed a new model called Mythos that it deemed too dangerous to publicly release. The company said it had new abilities to find vulnerabilities in computer code and help hackers exploit them.
Officials scrambled to understand the risks to government systems and critical sectors of the economy. Driven by alarm among banking industry leaders, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent played a key role in shaping the administration’s response. Last week, Trump batted down reports that Bessent was in line to be the new AI czar.
In May, the White House settled on issuing an executive order calling on leading AI companies to voluntarily share their latest systems with the government ahead of their release, giving federal experts a chance to weigh security risks. Despite no longer holding an official government position, Sacks continued to wield influence and made a last-minute call to Trump that caused the order to be delayed and revised.
But even after the order was signed in June, new dangers continued to emerge. The following month, ChatGPT maker OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of agents created by its systems had broken free and breached another AI company. Other firms said they had suffered similar breakouts.
Then came Coxon’s resignation in September, which reignited a long-simmering debate in AI circles about whether a sufficiently powerful version of the technology would bring about humanity’s downfall.
Trump dismissed the fears a “hoax” in fiery social media posts. But he later said he would name a new czar and create an “AI Force.” The White House has not detailed what the force will do, but in an interview with Time magazine published this week, Trump described it as “a group of very smart people that understand it, who will be advising me.”
WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added a disappointing 29,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up last month, the government reported Friday, a month before voters go to the polls in pivotal midterm elections at a time of discontent over the high cost of living and the state of the economy.
Hiring dropped from a revised 133,000 in August, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rate rose to a still-low 4.2% from 4.1% in August.
Economists had expected September payrolls to come in around 90,000.
Labor Department revisions also shaved 60,000 jobs off combined July and August payrolls.
The new hiring data could draw the Federal Reserve’s attention back to hiring and jobs, given that one of the central bank’s two mandates is to seek maximum employment. Many Fed officials have said in recent weeks that they are primarily focused on their other mission, which is combating inflation. With the job market looking a bit weaker, the Fed may be more inclined to keep its key rate unchanged when it meets next month, rather than raise it.
Average hourly wages were up just 3% last month from a year earlier, the smallest year-over-year gain since May 2021. “In this data, there is no sign that the labor market is stoking inflation,” said Luke Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust.
Still, the unemployment rate remains low and inflation has been above the central bank’s 2% target for more than five years, so the Fed’s concern about elevated prices is still front and center.
Federal, state, and local governments cut 17,000 jobs last month. Professional and business services companies, which provide administrative and technical expertise, trimmed 9,000 jobs.
Healthcare companies created 17,000 jobs in September, but that was barely half the 33,000 they’ve added, on average, each month for the past year. Bradley Saunders, an economist at Capital Economics, wrote that the slowdown in healthcare hiring might reflect the Trump administration’s revocation of work authorizations for 350,000 Haitians.
Construction companies added 11,000 jobs and manufacturers 9,000.
Unemployment rose partly because 485,000 people entered the workforce and not all of them found jobs right away.
The U.S. job market has proven resilient in the face of a series of shocks — trade wars, persistent inflation, high interest rates, and a conflict with Iran that has driven energy prices higher. Friday’s jobs report is the last one that will come out before the Nov. 3 elections that will determine whether President Donald Trump’s Republicans maintain full control of Congress.
Futures for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite added to their gains after the data was released on growing hopes that the Fed will hold off on a rate hike. Treasury yields moved lower.
Yet what makes Wall Street happy differs starkly with what brings joy on Main Street.
The U.S. job market has recovered from a dismal 2025, but most Americans are still unsettled about the state of the economy and the high cost of living.
U.S. consumer confidence dropped this month to the lowest level in more than a decade, according to an index published by the Conference Board. One reason: More than 28% of respondents told the business think tank that they expect fewer jobs to be available in six months, double the 14% who expect more.
The online jobs site Glassdoor reports that its employee confidence index, based on how workers view prospects for their own companies, dropped last month to the lowest level in records going back to the beginning of 2016, a period that includes a pandemic. It was the index’s third record low this year.
“Employee confidence has been continuously grinding downward over the last year as workers grow increasingly anxious about everything from layoffs to AI,’’ said Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao.
The public’s misgivings about jobs partly reflect an odd feature of the current labor market: Employers aren’t laying off many workers, but they aren’t hiring many either. A Labor Department measure of gross hiring — before subtracting those who quit or lose their jobs — has been stuck in a rut for more than two years.
So economists describe a “low-hire, low-fire” job market in which those who have jobs are mostly secure, but jobseekers struggle to find work.
“People know that being laid off is unusually costly right now,” said Glassdoor’s Zhao. “They hear from their friends how long they’ve been out of work and had such a difficult time finding a job. That does make layoffs even more scary than usual.”
In that chilly environment, fewer workers are willing to quit their jobs. “They often feel stuck,” Zhao said. “Workers aren’t finding there’s opportunity on the open market to find a better job — one that pays more or offers better work-life balance.’’
Employers — businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits — have added an average 68,000 jobs a month so far this year. That’s a big improvement on the 9,700 average new jobs created every month in 2025, the weakest hiring outside a recession since 2002.
At one time, 68,000 jobs a month would have been mediocre at best. But the United States doesn’t need as many jobs as it once did to keep unemployment from rising. Because of baby boomer retirements and Trump’s immigration crackdown, there are fewer people competing for work, and the break-even point could now be as low as zero jobs a month, down from 150,000 a year or two ago.
“I think this is roughly where we’re going to stay,” said Tilley at Wilmington Trust. ”I expect job growth to remain in this 25,000 to 75,000 band as we go along.”
Anne D’Innocenzio and Christopher Rugaber contributed to this article.
The Kennedy Center Honors will take place Dec. 7 at the Capital One Arena, the center announced Friday, breaking tradition by holding the tribute ceremony off-campus as a battle rages over its closure.
Most other details about the honors — namely, who will receive the awards and who will broadcast the show — remain a mystery, months after they would ordinarily be public.
A Kennedy Center spokesperson said these will be announced at a later date.
The annual black-tie gala and television broadcast is the center’s flagship program and usually its largest fundraising event. It generally takes place on a weekend in December, during which five honorees are recognized by the American government for their contributions to the arts. They traditionally received medallions, met the president at the White House and gave speeches during a dinner at the State Department before attending a star-studded Sunday ceremony in the Kennedy Center’s Opera House.
The honorees — which have included Leonard Bernstein, Queen Latifah, George Clooney, Led Zeppelin, Gladys Knight, Billy Crystal, and the Grateful Dead, to name a few of the almost 270 honorees since its inception in 1978 — are usually announced in midsummer.
Last year, amid turmoil from President Donald Trump’s takeover of the center and remake of its board, the announcement came late, in mid-August. The year before, it arrived in July along with both the broadcast and ceremony date.
It is October, and there’s no other word on the details.
We don’t know who is in the 49th class of honorees or what kind of crowd will greet them: The program’s venue, Capital One Arena, which can hold roughly 20,000 people at max capacity, dwarfs the 2,347 seats of the center’s Opera House.
We don’t know who will broadcast it. During a board meeting last year, Trump floated the idea of having networks bid to air the show, which has been broadcast on CBS since its debut. (Last year’s remained on CBS.)
Finally, we don’t know who would host it. Trump, who avoided the honors in his first term, famously played the role himself at last year’s ceremony, something a president had never before done. He also said he was “about 98 percent involved” in picking the honorees — Michael Crawford, Gloria Gaynor, Kiss, Sylvester Stallone, and George Strait — which are generally chosen by committee.
Asked for details this week, the White House referred us to the Kennedy Center, which provided the announcement.
The center had maintained that the honors, along with the Mark Twain Prize, would continue somewhere off-site during the building’s two-year closure for repairs.
“It will definitely go forward,” Richard Grenell told WTOP in February, before he departed as president of the Kennedy Center. At the time, he predicted “it will probably just be in a smaller venue, which just means ticket demand will be even higher.”
That full closure hasn’t started yet, according to the center. Instead, the main building is closed temporarily, leaders say, while they check on the building’s safety. Those checks could take another week or two, according to a Wednesday staff email reviewed by the Washington Post.
But “this is an assessment timeline,” the email read, “not a reopening date.”
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian aerial attacks forced the partial closure Friday of three bridges over the Dnipro River in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital’s mayor said, in Moscow’s latest effort to disrupt life in the city.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s top diplomat said officials have received separate proposals for a partial truce with Russia from the United States, India, Turkey, and Egypt. The proposals envision halting attacks on energy infrastructure, which have caused fuel shortages in Russia and power outages in Ukraine, and on Black Sea shipping needed to get vital grain exports to world markets.
The Russian strikes forcing the full or partial closure of three of Kyiv’s six road bridges caused traffic logjams and appeared to be a new tactic in its campaign to torment the city’s residents. Previously, Russia has hit apartment blocks, supermarket warehouses, gas stations, and data centers, among other targets, in an escalation of attacks.
Oleksandr Pihalo, a Kyiv resident, said traffic was “jammed solid” and it took him 45 minutes to cover 2 ½ miles. “It’s a total mess on the road today,” he told the Associated Press.
One of the three bridges was hit again on Friday afternoon, Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said.
Civilians “are bearing the brunt of this war,” the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said in Geneva on Friday.
“The war in Ukraine is a human rights catastrophe that is growing and intensifying by the week, causing unfathomable pain to civilians,” he said. “Across Ukraine, people are living in constant dread.”
While the aerial war has intensified in recent months, fighting along the roughly 770-mile front line snaking through northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine has been virtually deadlocked. Russia invaded its neighbor more than 4 ½ years ago, and there are no concrete signs that a peace settlement might be possible.
However, Ukraine has this year made some progress against Russia’s bigger army, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Russian forces lost control over almost 116 square miles of Ukraine between March and September, the Washington-based think tank said in a report late Thursday. Also, it said that the Russian military suffered over 46,000 casualties in September, the highest monthly number this year. It did not say how many Ukrainian troops were killed or wounded.
Zelensky says sanctions can stop Russian drones and missiles
Russia fired more than 100 drones at Ukraine overnight, striking Kyiv and eight other regions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Almost half of the drones were the jet-powered type that are especially hard to stop, he said.
A drone hit a high-rise apartment block in Kyiv, killing one person, he said. At least four people were reported wounded elsewhere.
Zelensky repeated his appeal for foreign countries to close loopholes in international sanctions on Russia and to add more restrictions on its trade. He said Russia’s drones and missiles are “critically dependent” on foreign components.
“Every Russian drone can actually be stopped right at the production line,” Zelensky said in a post on X.
Ukraine has also bombarded Russia with the long-range drones and missiles it now produces, aiming at military manufacturing plants and oil refineries.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Friday that its air defenses overnight downed 646 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, occupied Crimea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
One person was wounded in Russia’s southwestern Volgograd region, Gov. Andrei Bocharov said. The attack targeted “industrial infrastructure,” he said, without providing details.
Ukraine is ready for a truce on energy strikes and the Black Sea
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the partial truce proposals presented to Kyiv by four countries were the first time India has offered to play a role.
India is trying to balance its ties with Russia against its growing partnerships with the United States and other Western powers. A new U.S. sanctions package on Russia could impose up to 100% tariffs on New Delhi as a major importer of Russian oil.
Sybiha said Kyiv is ready to accept a ceasefire if it stops Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid — as well as Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries — and on cargo vessels exporting grain and other farm products through the Black Sea.
“We are ready for an energy and Black Sea ceasefire, but only in that combination. Energy and a ceasefire in the Black Sea,” Sybiha told reporters Thursday, in comments embargoed until Friday.
He repeated Ukraine’s offer of an unconditional ceasefire on the front line. But Moscow has rejected a ceasefire, saying a comprehensive peace deal must be agreed rather than a temporary truce.
Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said Friday that Ukraine attacked four Russian oil refineries overnight, but air defenses fended off the attacks and key equipment wasn’t damaged.
The government and companies have worked hard to improve protection of refineries, he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin decreed in August that the state can temporarily seize control of critical infrastructure facilities if private owners fail to protect them or rebuild them after Ukrainian strikes.
It wasn’t possible to verify either side’s claims.
Russia is stockpiling ballistic missiles, Ukraine says
Sybiha said Ukraine is requesting some 300 Patriot missiles from partner countries because intelligence services estimate that Russia is holding 600 ballistic missiles in reserve and can produce up to 140 ballistic missiles per month.
The U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems can effectively defend against ballistic missiles, which fly fast and drop steeply, but they are in short supply due to the Iran war.
Ukraine needs more funding and quickly, foreign minister says
Ukraine urgently needs funding in order to contract future drone production, so there are no gaps in supply at the beginning of next year, Sybiha said.
Kyiv faces a projected budget deficit of roughly $27 billion this year, although the European Union has promised to help meet its financial requirements.
The European Commission announced Friday it had disbursed €2.9 billion ($3.3 billion) to Ukraine in its latest batch of financing. Zelensky said the amount would help Ukraine’s financial stability and strengthen its defense.
WASHINGTON — The Group of Seven wealthy democracies said Friday that they plan to release 100 million barrels of oil and fuel products in the coming weeks, starting with “substantial” amounts of diesel after the fuel recently hit record high prices in the United States.
President Donald Trump said the diesel release would happen “immediately,” echoing a G7 promise to start “immediately” with a “frontloaded substantial release” of diesel within the next 20 days and the rest over four months.
Trump and his Republican Party face pressure to address surging prices ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, and Trump announced the action Friday on social media. The president’s approval ratings on the economy hit a new low, according to an AP-NORC poll, as the Iran war and his trade battles have increased U.S. prices for oil and other goods.
Gas prices in the U.S. and abroad have soared during the eight-month-long war, a cost Trump has repeatedly said is worth it for making sure Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons. The national average for a gallon of diesel in the U.S. was $6.37 on Friday, according to AAA, after hitting a record $6.52 on Sept. 22. Diesel prices have hit records in Europe, too.
The release of diesel in Europe might mean less exports of diesel from the U.S., which could lower prices by 25-50 cents per gallon after a few weeks, said Michael Lynch, distinguished fellow at Energy Policy Research Foundation, a non-partisan research institution focused on energy and economics.
Macron says the decision should bring down prices
France holds the rotating presidency of the G7 group and made the announcement in a statement released after videoconference talks that Macron presided over. The G7 countries are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S., plus EU representation.
The release follows on from a March announcement that International Energy Agency member countries would release 426 million barrels of oil and products to stabilize the oil market. European Union countries committed about 92 million barrels, a promise weighted toward refined products made from crude such as diesel.
“This common decision and this unity should bring down prices,” Macron said. “The volumes we’re releasing should also add liquidity to the market and bring down prices.”
In addition to the rise in the price of the crude oil from which diesel is made, other factors include the decision by Russia to ban exports due to Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries. Europe does not import Russian diesel, but other buyers of Russian diesel such as Turkey and Latin American countries must now compete with Europe for available barrels.
Meanwhile, refined product shipments from the Persian Gulf producers have fallen due to war damage and blocked export routes.
The statement pushed U.S. oil prices down 2% but “the impact was lessened by lack of clarity on an important question,” said Pavel Molchanov, investment strategy analyst at Raymond James. Is the 100 million barrels in addition to the amount already agreed in March, or “is this the final portion of the existing pledge?” he said.
The G7 says export bans are off the table
Some Republicans in the U.S. had called for Trump to ban U.S. exports of diesel to try to bring domestic prices down. But the G7 statement said the group agreed not to limit energy exports to each other. Oil market analysts warn a U.S. export ban could lower prices in the short term but eventually backfire by reducing supplies of gasoline since diesel output can’t be lowered without also cutting overall refinery production.
Asked about a potential U.S. export ban on Friday, Trump said “we were never going to do it.”
“We’re not going to be doing the export ban,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We’re going to be doing what we’re supposed to do.” He added that Europe is making “a major world contribution, and so are we.”
Experts say there are risks in the strategy
The emergency release could also be a short-term fix with the potential to do long-term harm, said Jim Krane, energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute.
“Draining stocks will reduce retail fuel prices for a while, at the cost of leaving Europe with less emergency cover,” Krane said. “At some point in the future Europe and the rest of the G7 will have to refill their strategic reserves. Normally they try to do this when prices are low. Nobody knows when that will happen. It’s a risk.”
With two wars raging that involve attacks on refineries and exports, “it’s not the best time to be frittering away your emergency stocks — especially when there is no visibility on future prices or peace agreements,” Krane said.
Trump had a conversation overnight with Macron about the need to address rising fuel prices and the availability of petroleum products, according to the French Embassy in the U.S. Macron on Friday then chaired the videoconference of G7 leaders to discuss the issue.
Besides his call with Macron, Trump on Friday called in to the meeting with the G7 leaders to negotiate the release of the European diesel stockpiles, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Trump on Thursday embarked on what he said would be a 32-day marathon of rallies to try to bolster his party’s chances for keeping control of the U.S. House and Senate in the November elections. The president has grown increasingly frustrated with what he sees as a disconnect between his achievements and the public’s view of his work. This week he gave himself an A-plus for his work on the economy but said “we’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion.”
NEW DELHI — The Indian pilot who was attacked during a FlyDubai flight this week said Friday that he opened the cockpit door despite grievous injuries, allowing passengers and crew members to overpower the copilot who had assailed him.
“I was fighting for my life,” Capt. Smit Machchhar said on a video call from his hospital bed with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, in his first public remarks since the attack. Video of their conversation was released by the Indian government.
“I was so badly hurt that I had fallen to the ground,” Machchhar said. “But I knew I had to act,” he added. “I could feel the aircraft was going down.”
The attack, on a flight from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Tel Aviv, Israel, carrying about 170 passengers, sent the aircraft into a terrifying plunge. Israeli officials have said the copilot appeared to have tried to crash the plane after stabbing Machchhar, although investigators are still trying to understand the assailant’s motives and how the attack unfolded. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the copilot had undergone “Islamist radical indoctrination” but did not elaborate.
Passengers were able to overpower the attacker, while two people aboard with flying experience helped land the plane in Saudi Arabia.
Machchhar, who said he had 17 years of flying experience, including 11 as a captain, said he knew instinctively what was happening to the aircraft, even as he lay injured on the cockpit floor. The Boeing 737 Max 8 he was flying plummeted more than 16,000 feet in 30 seconds during the attack.
Machchhar told Modi that he recalled telling himself: “Smit, this is the last push, just do it. The door is right there.”
“I was doing it to save myself,” he said, “but I also knew I couldn’t let all of them die.”
Machchhar, who was hospitalized in Saudi Arabia then transferred to the UAE, told Modi that he was receiving good medical care.
The episode has made him a hero in India.
“Your courage and presence of mind — you made a decision within a fraction of a second, and saved so many lives,” Modi told the captain during their conversation. “You have made the entire country proud.”
Modi’s office put out the video of the split-screen conversation on a day of nationwide protests in India, including in the capital, New Delhi. Protesters are demanding the resignation of the country’s chief election officer for trying to rig voter rolls in the favor of Modi’s party.
Machchhar grew up in Mumbai and entered aviation almost by accident after attending a seminar on flying. He later became a captain and a trainer of aspiring pilots. In a podcast interview last year, he described flying as something he felt “blessed” to do and emphasized the importance of pilots being rested and prepared to perform under pressure.
NEW YORK — The woman who accused members of a Cornell University fraternity of gang rape was “failed” by people obligated to protect her, including campus police and the county prosecutor, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Friday.
Hochul said at a news conference that she decided to appoint Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to take over the case after learning “troubling details” about how authorities have handled the woman’s claims thus far, including that the district attorney closed the case without having anyone interview the accuser or anyone else involved in the alleged attack.
“In what world does the district attorney not even interview her, or anyone else involved, or even request the full transcript?” Hochul said. “This woman, this young woman, had already endured something that is utterly unspeakable. And then at every turn, she was failed by people and institutions with an obligation to protect her.”
She also assailed the Cornell University Police Department for not fully conveying the woman’s story to prosecutors.
“After this young woman came forward, she spoke to the police. She sat for hours and told them exactly what happened to her. And according to new reports, she could not have been clearer that she was 100% confident that she had been raped,” the Democratic governor said. ”Yet, shockingly, those words never made it into the account that the Cornell police sent to prosecutors.”
James is brought in
Hochul said Thursday that she appointed James to oversee the case because she had lost faith in the local district attorney’s ability to handle it.
James didn’t say how long her investigation might take, but she said it would take some time and wouldn’t be rushed, as every New Yorker “deserves to know that when they report a crime, it will be investigated fully and fairly, that they will be seen and heard.”
“We will review the facts, gather evidence, interview witnesses and, if warranted, pursue prosecutions,” James said. “I know that you want answers. I do too. A comprehensive investigation of this nature takes time, but my office is committed to seeing it through.”
The investigation initially was closed without charges in 2024.
Last month, the woman filed a lawsuit and Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten reopened the investigation. He has since been bombarded by criticism that he abandoned the original investigation too quickly.
Van Houten has defended his decision not to prosecute, maintaining that a sworn statement by the woman prepared by police didn’t include the woman’s allegations that she was drugged against her will, incapacitated beyond the ability to consent and forced into sex.
He didn’t respond Thursday or Friday to messages seeking comment.
The attorney general will determine whether there is enough evidence to press charges, Hochul said.
“The young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued,” she said in a statement Thursday.
The case’s impact extends beyond Cornell
The case has roiled the Ivy League school and raised questions about its response and the larger issue of how sexual assaults are handled on college campuses.
The woman, identified only as Jane Doe in court documents, told campus police in November of 2024 that she was sexually assaulted, then discussed it with the university’s internal investigators as part of Cornell’s disciplinary process.
The lawsuit against seven fraternity brothers, the university, the Chi Phi fraternity and others alleges that she was plied with drugs and alcohol, then subjected to sexual acts by a group of men while she was partially or entirely incapacitated. One of the men sent a social media message to other fraternity members alerting them to what was happening and inviting people to take part, according to the lawsuit.
Lawyers for two of the men she is suing have denied they participated in a sexual assault. One said his client didn’t touch the woman. Attempts to reach the other men or their representatives for comment have been unsuccessful.
Officials say New York’s sexual assault laws need updating
Hochul also threw her support behind proposals to change an element of New York law that has long made it more difficult to prosecute people who have engaged in sex with someone who voluntarily became intoxicated to the point where their ability to consent was compromised.
Under the law, rape charges generally need to involve force or a clear refusal of sex, unless the victim is physically helpless due to being unconscious, or mentally incapacitated due to being drugged without their consent. New York is one of 19 states with such laws.
“If someone is too intoxicated to consent, it should not matter whether they chose to use drugs or alcohol. Voluntary intoxication is not a license for sexual assault or gang rape, period,” the governor said.
New York governors have turned to attorneys general to oversee important cases in the past.
In 2018, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointed then-Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas as a special prosecutor to investigate Eric Schneiderman, who resigned as New York attorney general after women accused him of violent slapping, choking and other abuse.
In 2021, James oversaw a non-criminal investigation into sexual harassment allegations against then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, leading to his resignation. Cuomo initially tried to choose who would lead the investigation into the allegations. He then allowed James to choose two independent attorneys to lead it instead.
James’ office also handles other criminal work and has the power under state law to investigate every death involving law enforcement in the state. But, typically, she can’t initiate criminal investigations without a referral from a local district attorney, the governor or a state agency, or an appointment like the one Hochul made Thursday.
Almost every day in September, Iranian media outlets have published reports of explosions “heard from the sea,” an ominous sign that military activity is taking place in the Strait of Hormuz.
But the reports left mysterious just who was carrying out the attacks.
It turns out it was Iran itself.
Confidential data shared with the New York Times by a Western security official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters shows that Iran has been launching dozens of drones and missiles at commercial ships in the strait each week, largely out of the public eye, though it has often failed to strike its targets.
And on Wednesday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for the first time appeared to confirm it was behind the near-daily sounds of explosions heard from Iran’s southern coast, saying it was striking targets in the Strait of Hormuz every 24 hours.
“We prevent them from passing, but for some time now, America has not responded,” a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Guard said in a state news interview.
The aggression shows that even as oil exports from the Middle East have rebounded in recent weeks, shipping through the waterway remains risky, as Iran jostles to keep control of one of its biggest sources of leverage.
“Negotiations aren’t going anywhere. Neither side is really budging. So it’s a standoff,” said Gregory Brew, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group. He said that the violence in the strait “speaks to the position that both sides are in: Neither is looking to aggressively escalate the conflict.” But both, he said, want to control the waterway.
Since the beginning of August, Iran has launched about 30 drone attacks and 10 anti-ship missile attacks per week against commercial ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, according to the data shared with the Times by the Western security official. At least four commercial ships have been hit by Iran in the past 10 days, the official said.
A tally of reports by a monitoring group run by the British navy show that since Sept. 10, at least 13 ships, most of them oil tankers, had been struck by projectiles or debris from projectiles. (Those reports may be incomplete because they are based on voluntary reports by ship crews.) While the reports do not specify who was responsible for the attacks, maritime experts say the details suggest many were Iranian.
Motorcyclists pass a billboard depicting President Donald Trump underwater amid explosions, with the words “Great Victory! Strait of Hormuz,” in Tehran, Iran, on Aug. 24.Vahid Salemi
The attacks in the strait have kept up even as crude oil exports from the Middle East have gotten closer to prewar levels. Part of that turnaround, analysts say, is because of a U.S. military operation aimed at protecting the vessels from the attacks, an effort that appears to have encouraged more shipments from big exporting countries, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Those ships pass through Oman’s territorial waters in a U.S. Navy-guided route, with the support of U.S. fighter jets and attack helicopters to help ward off strikes. Some ships also turn their transponders off to help pass through the strait undetected.
But analysts say U.S. military protection requires significant resources and will be hard to maintain indefinitely. And a big part of the regional increase in exports, according to Kpler, a cargo tracking group, is from export routes that circumvent the Strait of Hormuz altogether.
Just because more ships and oil are moving than seen earlier in the war “doesn’t mean we’re seeing a normalization of flows,” said Ana Subasic, a trade risk analyst at Kpler.
U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, declined to comment on Iranian attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz in September. The Pentagon has not announced any strikes on Iran or Iranian vessels since early that month.
Ian Ralby, president of the maritime governance nonprofit group Auxilium Worldwide, said the fact that Washington has appeared not to respond militarily against Iran for its shipping attacks may be a function of the Trump administration’s seeking an off-ramp to the conflict now in its seventh month.
Brew, the Iran analyst, said that with the rise in oil exports, the administration may think it has less to gain from retaliatory strikes.
Ever since the United States and Israel attacked in February and started the war, Iran has used its ability to throttle shipping through Hormuz, a key route for oil and gas exports, disrupting the global economy.
The United States has imposed a naval blockade and tougher sanctions on Iran in retaliation, putting the country under further pressure, as President Donald Trump has sought to pivot the war from a military campaign to one focused on strangling its economy.
