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How death penalty opponents share the blame for botched executions

“Botched” is a perfectly fine word for golf, cooking, or home repair. It seems inadequate for the taking of a life, even the life of Christa Pike, a heinous murderer. In 1996, a jury found Pike guilty of the torture and murder of her Jobs Corps classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Pike was sentenced to death. In the 30 years since, her case has gone through at least seven major rounds of appeal and judicial review, including four petitions to the Supreme Court. All were rejected. This doesn’t even include the many more attempts to reopen or reverse her sentence that went nowhere. She is ...

The night Linden Avenue stopped feeling safe

The Evans family threw a Halloween party every year in their backyard on Linden Avenue. Neighbor Jeannine Fisher told WPXI, the local NBC affiliate, that she remembers “tons of people and kids” there. She also remembers the first time she met Idris Evans: He helped carry her groceries from down the street to her house. It’s the kind of street where that still happens. It’s also the kind of street where people don’t think much about whether the kitchen window is open on a warm September night. Just after midnight on Sept. 24, police say someone came through that ...

Dear Annie: Employee out of office, boss out of line

Dear Annie: I recently returned from a lovely two-week vacation to Europe with my husband. It’s rare that we get a trip like this, so we were looking forward to it, and it did not disappoint! I set clear expectations with my team at work beforehand that I’d be fully off work. Everyone respected that — except my boss, who texted me not once but twice with inconsequential questions he could have easily directed to anyone else on my team. This happened last year, too, which I chalked up to a fluke at the time, but now I’m wondering if it’s a pattern. I’m incredibly ...

How older adults can prevent low sodium levels

DEAR DR. ROACH: I’m a 79-year-old woman who’s trying her best to stay strong physically with daily exercise, eating right, and successfully living independently after the death of my husband. Other than taking one 20-mg benazepril tablet daily for high blood pressure, I’m in pretty good health. Recently, several friends who are close to my age have been diagnosed with low blood sodium levels. One landed in the ICU for several days, while others had problems with falls, swollen ankles and legs, slurred speech, and difficulty thinking and problem-solving, among other symptoms. ...

Latin America’s many trumps

Latin America is turning right, and it’s a vindication for President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In some ways, the Cold War never really ended in the Western hemisphere: Socialism has haunted the nations of Central and South America long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the same Cuban regime the Soviet Union propped up for decades remains in power to this day. The hard left thought it had cemented control over Venezuela, too, thanks to Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro — until American forces snatched Maduro right out of his bed back in January and took ...

The central question of power in America

Behind this election’s dominant issue of affordability lies the record concentration of wealth at the top of America. The richest 0.001% of Americans — a handful of extraordinarily wealthy men — now control more of the nation’s wealth than at any time in modern history. To be sure, wealth is not a zero-sum game in which the riches of those at the top necessarily come at the expense of everyone else. But power is a zero-sum game, because the more of it that is held by some people, the less of it is held by others. Wealth cannot be separated from power. Great wealth becomes ...