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The White House said Friday it was “deeply troubled” after Alabama executed a man using nitrogen gas in a first-of-its-kind capital punishment. “The reports of Kenneth Smith and his death last night obviously is very troubling. It is very troubling to us as an administration, it is very troubling to us here at the White House,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. “The president has long said and has had deep deep concerns with how the death penalty is implemented and whether it is consistent … with our values,” she added. Smith was put to death Thursday in Alabama night...

Kenneth Eugene Smith has become the first person in history to be executed with nitrogen gas. The convicted killer, 58, had a tight gas mask placed over his nose and mouth before a stream of 100 percent nitrogen gas suffocated him inside the execution chamber at the William C. Holman prison in Atmore, Alabama. Smith was officially pronounced dead at 8:25 local time, following a 22-minute ordeal where he appeared to remain conscious for several minutes. He shook violently and pulled on the restraints on the gurney, continuing to breathe the nitrogen gas heavily until he succumbed and passed out....

Branching in the fracture of a h-BN sample. (J. Lou/Rice University) ======================================================================= A two-dimensional material with similar physical properties to graphene has now turned out to blow graphene out of the water in terms of toughness. The material is called hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and it's so resistant to cracking that scientists are gobsmacked. The finding flies in the face of the fundamental description of fracture mechanics that scientists have been using to predict and define toughness since the 1920s. "What we observed in this material is remarkable," said materials scientist Jun Lou of Rice University. "Nobody expected to see...

Attorneys for the spiritual adviser of a soon-to-be executed inmate filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that the restrictions placed upon the adviser due to the method of execution are "hostile to religion." Officials with the Alabama Department of Corrections instructed the Rev. Jeff Hood that it could be dangerous to his health when he stands by Kenneth Eugene Smith in the execution chamber, according to a report. Smith is slated to be the first inmate in Alabama to be put to death via nitrogen gas, and Hood purportedly was asked to sign a waiver recognizing the risks that could arise...

Alabama's Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the state to execute an inmate using nitrogen gas. The state's attorney general’s request for an execution warrant for Kenneth Eugene Smith was granted in a 6-2 decision by an all-Republican court. Last year, the Alabama Department of Corrections called off the execution of Smith when the people responsible for connecting two intravenous lines to him for lethal injection could not do so. While the ruling moves the state closer to becoming the first to attempt execution with nitrogen gas, there is likely to be additional legal dispute on the matter. Alabama joins Oklahoma...

After botching a series of executions by lethal injection, the State of Alabama is planning to use nitrogen gas to put condemned prisoners to death. The first execution will amount to a human experiment, because neither Alabama nor any other state has ever tried to kill people this way. Late last month, prison guards distributed the state’s new execution protocol to prisoners in solitary confinement on Alabama’s death row. One hundred and sixty men and five women await execution in Alabama. They would be secured to a gurney, their nose and mouth would be covered by a mask, and nitrogen...

Alabama may become the first state to execute a prisoner by making him breathe pure nitrogen, a death penalty method that is authorized by three states but has never been used. The office of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall asked the state Supreme Court in a court filing on Friday to set an execution date for 58-year-old death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith. The filing revealed Alabama intends to put him to death by nitrogen hypoxia. Smith was one of two men convicted in the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of a preacher’s wife. “It is a travesty that Kenneth Smith has...

A murderer who killed a preacher's wife in 1988 is set to become the first death row inmate in America to be executed with nitrogen. Alabama officials want to put Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, to death by nitrogen hypoxia - forcing him to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die. Several states have authorized the method, which is said to be painless, but it has still never been used. Critics have said authorities would be 'experimenting with a never before used method - but even Smith has said he would prefer death by nitrogen to...

@wideawake_media Greenpeace co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore, on the genocidal consequences of Net Zero: “Now they’re going into agriculture and threatening to cut off the supply of food, because food is causing global warming… Only the billionaires will be able to afford to buy food, and now all the other people will die because there’s not enough food. That’s what we’re heading for if we continue to listen to these people.” “They will cause a ruination the likes of which the Earth has never seen, because there are over eight billion of us, and four billion of us depend on nitrogen...

There is a war on food. As an absolute necessity of life, this seems like a ridiculously counterintuitive thing to do, but there you go.Why is food suddenly a bad thing? Easy peasy: Farming uses nitrogen, and nitrogen is being blamed for global warming, so of course it must be eliminated. In the name of saving the planet, huge swaths of global food production are being targeted."Rice is to blame for around 10% of global emissions of methane, a gas that over two decades, traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide," intones the AP. "Scientists say that...

Billions of people around the world face starvation if Net Zero policies ban the production of nitrogen fertiliser derived from fossil fuels. This is the stark warning from two top American scientists who say that eliminating fossil fuel-derived nitrogen fertilisers and pesticides “will result in about half the world’s population not having enough food to eat”. They add that eliminating Net Zero fertiliser will create “worldwide starvation”. In a wide-ranging paper titled ‘Challenging ‘Net Zero’ with Science‘, Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen of Princeton and MIT respectively, along with geologist Gregory Wrightstone, state that Net Zero – the...

Better management of nitrogen-rich fertilisers through alternating crops, optimising use and other measures can yield huge environmental and health benefits, but must boost food production at the same time, researchers warned Wednesday. Reducing nitrogen pollution from global croplands is a "grand challenge", the group of international researchers said in a study in Nature outlining a dozen urgently-needed reforms. The intensive use of chemical fertilisers helped fuel the four-fold expansion of the human population over the last century, and will be crucial for feeding 10 billion people by 2050.

Despite months of enormous and widespread protests from Dutch farmers, the Dutch government will be confiscating 3,000 farms and closing them down in the interests of complying with EU environmental rules to decrease nitrogen emissions by 50% by 2030.Of course, this means 3,000 farms' worth of food production will be eliminated. The Netherlands is the world's second-largest exporter of agricultural products and provides vegetables for much of Western Europe. Over half of Dutch land is used for agriculture, and that doesn't count 24,000 acres' worth of crops growing in greenhouses. What does the Dutch government think will happen to the...

The Dutch government plans to buy and close down up to 3,000 farms near environmentally sensitive areas to comply with EU nature preservation rules. The Netherlands is attempting to cut down its nitrogen pollution and will push ahead with compulsory purchases if not enough farms take up the offer voluntarily. Farmers will be offered a deal “well over” the worth of the farm, according to the government plan that is targeting the closure of 2,000 to 3,000 farms or other major polluting businesses. Earlier leaked versions of the plan put the figure at 120 per cent of the farm’s value...

Alabama told a federal judge that it could soon be ready to use a new, untried execution method called nitrogen hypoxia to carry out a death sentence. The disclosure came Monday at a court hearing over inmate Alan Miller’s request to block his scheduled Sept. 22 execution by lethal injection. Miller maintains that prison staff lost paperwork he returned in 2018 requesting nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method that the state has authorized but never used. […] Nitrogen hypoxia is a proposed execution method in which death would be caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, thereby depriving him...

ALMERE, Netherlands — Farmers in the Netherlands reduced nitrogen pollution by nearly 70% through a voluntary system. But the government says that is not enough and is demanding that they cut pollution by another 50% by 2030. Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal Caroline van der Plas, pro-farmer Dutch lawmaker: “Why would you buy out farmers or reduce livestock when you have the possibility to invest in innovation?” Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal By the Dutch government’s own estimates, 11,200 farms out of the roughly 35,000 dedicated to dairy and livestock would have to close under its policies; 17,600 farmers would have to...

In recent months the insane world-wide campaign against the emission of carbon into the atmosphere has not been going all that well for the zealots. Among other things, the Ukraine war has highlighted the fact that wind and solar electricity generators can’t really work on their own to power a modern economy. That has left places like Germany and the UK that built the most of them facing soaring energy prices and dependence on natural gas from Russia for backup. Those countries and others are in the process of being forced by reality to at least slow down on their...

Deventer, The Netherlands Hay bales in flames, manure dumped on highways, blockades at supermarket distribution centres and demonstrations on politicians' doorsteps. Dutch farmers have been generating global headlines with protests described by Prime Minister Mark Rutte as "wilfully endangering others, damaging our infrastructure and threatening people who help with the clean-up". This proud farming nation is under immense pressure to make radical changes to cut harmful emissions, and some farmers fear their livelihoods will be obliterated. "It's in our blood, I want to do this, and if we have to adapt to new situations, I want to, but we have...

Hay bales in flames, manure dumped on highways, blockades at supermarket distribution centres and demonstrations on politicians' doorsteps. Dutch farmers have been generating global headlines with protests described by Prime Minister Mark Rutte as "wilfully endangering others, damaging our infrastructure and threatening people who help with the clean-up". This proud farming nation is under immense pressure to make radical changes to cut harmful emissions, and some farmers fear their livelihoods will be obliterated. "It's in our blood, I want to do this, and if we have to adapt to new situations, I want to, but we have to be fair,...

Following earlier reports in NRC, the Ministry of Finance has released calculations by officials about the consequences of nitrogen measures. According to the newspaper, this shows that in a targeted buyout, 11,200 farms may have to stop and 17,600 farmers have to partially reduce their livestock. According to NRC, the documents show a clear political choice. The calculations would show a lower nitrogen could have been chosen for agriculture. That goal must be supplemented with the contribution of industry, aviation and other sectors...