Ever since January, when the Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Hospira elected to stop making a key ingredient in the lethal injection cocktail used by several US states to execute death-row inmates, the United States has been searching for alternative suppliers. As of Friday, obtaining the drug from the European Union will become much more difficult. According to a report published Monday in the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, a new European Union regulation set to go into effect at the end of this week will prohibit the export of some barbituric acids unless a special permit has been issued. Among those chemicals on...