Recovery marks a dramatic turnaround for Pike, who remains in hospital after a botched execution in Tennessee

Christa Pike is “up and walking” in hospital, her lawyer said, just more than a week after she survived two lethal injections during a botched execution in Tennessee.

The recovery marks a dramatic turnaround after Pike was declared brain dead on Monday, before waking up and beginning to speak on Tuesday. Her ordeal has shocked many in the US and overseas and galvanized critics of the death penalty.

Attorneys say Pike was set to be taken off life support before she woke up, as judge orders officials to preserve evidence

Christa Pike awoke “angry and confused” after surviving two lethal injections, her attorneys said on Wednesday, as a judge ordered Tennessee state officials to preserve all evidence related to the failed execution.

Pike, 50, was taken to hospital unconscious but alive from Tennessee’s execution chamber last Wednesday after two supposedly lethal doses of the barbiturate pentobarbital.

NAACP files lawsuit after head of DoJ’s civil rights division says she hopes to send election monitors to polls

The Trump administration has been sued over its plans to deploy “a historic number” of election monitors to polling stations during next month’s midterm elections.

The bid “stands to jeopardize” the elections and could “interfere with the right of voters to participate in the election free from intimidation”, according to the NAACP, which filed a lawsuit against Harmeet Dhillon, head of the justice department’s civil rights division, who has said she hopes to send 1,000 monitors to midterm polling sites in November.

The deadly outbreak in Pennsylvania is its largest in more than three decades, and confirmed cases in New York are up

The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, declared a state of emergency on Monday in response to a dramatic spike in measles cases in the state.

Hochul’s administration said the emergency declaration was in response to a “growing number of measles cases across rural areas of New York and neighboring states”, including Pennsylvania, which has been grappling with a deadly outbreak that is its largest in more than three decades.

Medical transport plane flying from Bermuda to Boston crashed off coast of Massachusetts early Saturday

Six people are presumed dead after the US Coast Guard on Sunday suspended its search for survivors of a medical transport plane crash off the coast of Massachusetts early the previous day.

The aircraft, which was flying from Bermuda to Boston, lost contact with ground authorities at about 2am on Saturday, and the Coast Guard located a debris field near the island of Nantucket later that day.