Texas

Supreme Court halts execution over drug injection

The U.S. Supreme Court halted the execution Wednesday of a condemned inmate who was part of a lawsuit that challenged one of the drugs used to carry out the death sentence.

Kevin Lee Zimmerman won his reprieve about 20 minutes before he could have been put to death for a fatal stabbing and robbery at a Beaumont motel in 1987.

In a brief order, Justice Antonin Scalia stopped the punishment pending an additional order from him or the court.

“I’m disappointed,” Zimmerman told a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman, Michelle Lyons. “I was ready to go. The stay only means 18 more months of this crap.”

The lawsuit had allowed another inmate, Billy Frank Vickers, to avoid the death chamber Tuesday. Rejection of the lawsuit Wednesday by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for Zimmerman’s execution until the Supreme Court order was issued.

New York City

Pulitzer Prize-winner, journalist Robert Bartley dies

Robert Bartley, the former editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal and a leading voice in conservative thought in American politics, died Wednesday of cancer at a New York City hospital. He was 66.

Bartley, who was credited by many with turning the Journal’s editorial page into a bulletin board for the political right, won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1980. He guided editorial opinion at the journal for more than 30 years, becoming editor emeritus in January 2003. He continued to write his weekly “Thinking Things Over” column until shortly before his death.

Bartley’s pages upheld the ideas of “free markets and free people” with an agenda that included individual initiative, limited government, decentralization, less regulation and lower taxes.

He supplied the initial platform for supply-side economics during the Reagan administration and also nurtured the notion of giving parents greater choice in choosing schools for their children, both public and private.

San Francisco

New mayor named

Gavin Newsom, soon to become San Francisco’s youngest mayor in more than a century, will need all the help he can get to unify a city burdened with chronic problems and polarized by a surprisingly close election.

The 36-year-old Democrat not only will have to run the city with a shrinking budget, he will also have to get his ideas past the Board of Supervisors, which is led by the man he just defeated in Tuesday’s election.

Newsom, a wealthy businessman, city supervisor and protege of outgoing Mayor Willie Brown, benefited from the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote effort in Tuesday’s race against Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez, the Board of Supervisors president whose anti-establishment campaign stoked voter anger over Brown’s autocratic style. Brown was prevented by term limits from running again.

Newsom beat Gonzalez 53 percent to 47 percent.