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ST. LOUIS (AP) — Nearly 1,600 death row inmates have been put to death in the U.S. since 1977, but an execution scheduled for Tuesday in Missouri would be the first of an openly transgender woman.

Amber McLaughlin, 49, is set to die for stalking a former girlfriend and stabbing her to death nearly 20 years ago. With no legal appeals planned, McLaughlin’s fate rests with Republican Gov. Mike Parson, who is weighing a clemency request.

A database for the anti-execution Death Penalty Information Center shows 1,558 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the mid-1970s. All but 17 of them were men, and the center said there are no known previous cases in which an openly transgender inmate was executed.

A clemency petition cited McLaughlin’s traumatic childhood and mental health issues, which the jury never heard at her trial. A foster parent rubbed feces in her face when she was a toddler and her adoptive father used a stun gun on her, according to the petition, which also cited severe depression resulting in multiple suicide attempts, both as a child and as an adult.

The petition also included reports citing a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, a condition causing anguish and other symptoms as a result of a disparity between a person’s gender identity and their assigned sex at birth. But McLaughlin’s sexual identity is “not the main focus” of the clemency request, said her attorney, Larry Komp.

In 2003, long before transitioning, McLaughlin was in a relationship with Beverly Guenther. After they stopped dating, McLaughlin would appear at the suburban St. Louis office where Guenther worked, sometimes hiding inside the building, according to court records. Guenther obtained a restraining order and police officers occasionally escorted her to her car after work.

Guenther’s neighbors called police on the night of Nov. 20, 2003, when she failed to return home. Officers went to the office building, where they found a broken knife handle near her car and a trail of blood. A day later, McLaughlin led police to a location near the Mississippi River in St. Louis where the body had been dumped.

McLaughlin was convicted of first-degree murder in 2006. A judge sentenced McLaughlin to death after a jury deadlocked on the sentence. Komp said Missouri and Indiana are the only states that allow a judge, rather than a jury, to sentence someone to death.

A court in 2016 ordered a new sentencing hearing, but a federal appeals court panel reinstated the death penalty in 2021.

McLaughlin began transitioning about three years ago, recalled Jessica Hicklin. Hicklin, 43, sued the Missouri Department of Corrections, challenging a policy that prohibited hormone therapy for inmates who weren’t receiving it before being incarcerated. She won the lawsuit in 2018 and became a mentor to other transgender inmates, including McLaughlin.

Hicklin, who spent 26 years in prison for a drug-related killing before being released a year ago, described McLaughlin as a painfully shy person who came out of her shell after deciding to transition.

“She always had a smile and a dad joke,” Hicklin said. “If you ever talked to her, it was always with the dad jokes.”

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has estimated there are 3,200 transgender inmates in the nation’s prisons and jails.

Perhaps the best-known case of a transgender prisoner seeking hormone therapy was that of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who served seven years in federal prison for leaking government documents to Wikileaks until President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in 2017. The Army agreed to pay for hormone treatments for Manning in 2015.

McLaughlin has not had hormone treatments, Komp said.

The U.S. Department of Justice wrote in a 2015 court filing that state prison officials must treat an inmate’s gender identity condition just as they would treat other medical or mental health conditions, regardless of when the diagnosis occurred.

The only woman ever executed in Missouri was Bonnie B. Heady, who was put to death on Dec. 18, 1953, for kidnapping and killing a 6-year-old boy. Heady was executed in the gas chamber alongside the other kidnapper and killer, Carl Austin Hall.

Nationally, 18 people were executed in 2022, including two in Missouri. Kevin Johnson was put to death in November for the ambush killing of a Kirkwood, Missouri, police officer. Carman Deck was executed in May for killing James and Zelma Long during a robbery at their home in De Soto, Missouri.

Another Missouri inmate, Leonard Taylor, is scheduled to die Feb. 7. He was convicted of killing his girlfriend and her three young children.

Ukraine’s army on Tuesday alleged another devastating attack on Russian troops had taken put.

The General Workers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said close to 500 Russian troops were both killed or wounded in a strike in the vicinity of Chulakivka, a city in Ukraine’s southern Kherson area, on New Year’s Eve.

Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian armed forces in the south, informed Ukrainian television: “This is a single of our achievements in this path of the entrance.” 

“There will be extra because we determine the enemy’s spots,” she stated of the alleged strike.

CNN are unable to validate the Ukrainian declare. Moscow has not publicly commented on the Chulakivka claim. 

Even so, a greatly browse Russian war blogger recognised as “Operation Z” said in a Telegram submit on Tuesday “there is no f***ing denying” that Ukraine is now focusing on barracks and other Russian troop strongholds with HIMARS, a reference to Superior Mobility Artillery Rocket Units. He bundled Chulakivka in his record of hits on Russian troops he claimed had taken place in December.

It will come soon after each Russian and Ukrainian authorities acknowledged a strike that took place just immediately after midnight on New Year’s Day at a vocational college housing Russian conscripts in Makiivka, in the Donetsk location.

The Russian Protection Ministry states 89 servicemen ended up killed in the New Year’s Day strike, which would make it 1 of the deadliest one episodes of the war for Moscow’s forces.

Russian troops released a missile attack on an infrastructure facility in Zaporizhzhia city.

Ukraine’s devastating New Yr strike on an army barracks in the Russian-occupied city of Makiivka has develop into a big headache and embarrassment for the Kremlin, as general public anger mounts and the blame video game intensifies.

 What’s the hottest?

 In the early hrs of Wednesday early morning, Russian authorities reported 89 troops ended up now known to have been killed when their momentary deployment point in the Donetsk region was ruined by a Ukrainian strike carried out applying U.S.-provided Himars rocket devices.

 “The amount of our useless comrades has long gone up,” Lieutenant Standard Sergei Sevryukov explained in a online video statement released by the Russian defense ministry.

 The Kremlin experienced formerly claimed 63 troops ended up killed in the assault – the largest decline of lifetime from a single strike documented by Moscow considering the fact that the start out of the invasion in February.

 Can we have confidence in these figures?

 Of program not, it is Russia. Ukraine, as properly as Russian resources think the serious demise toll is nearer to 400.

 Still the reality the Kremlin has officially acknowledged 89 offers an indicator of the seriousness of the scandal unfolding around the strike.

 Why is there such a blame match more than the incident?

 From the perspective of the Russian army, it should under no circumstances have happened – hundreds of freshly-mobilized troops were being packed alongside one another in a creating inside vary of Ukrainian Himars rockets.

 There are also stories that the servicemen have been quartered in an unprotected making which was destroyed due to the fact munitions ended up saved on the premises and detonated in the strike.

 That appears to be like a actually dumb transfer.

 It is. But this is the Russian army we’re talking about and the whole reinvasion of Ukraine has been littered with quite dumb conclusions by its commanders.

 Russian war correspondents, who have received affect in the latest months, accused the country’s major commanders of deadly incompetence.

 Have they admitted they had been at fault?

 No. Sevryukov claimed a fee was underway to investigate what allowed Ukraine to have out this sort of a lethal strike, but that the primary motive was “already obvious”.

 “The key motive for what has happened was the turning on and substantial use by staff of cell telephones in achieve of enemy weapons opposite to the ban,” he claimed.

 Is cellular telephone use a possible clarification?

 Absolutely. Given that the early times of the war, the lax use of cellular phones by troops has permitted both sides to pinpoint the place of the enemy. Regretably for Russia, its troops surface to have not learned lessons from it.

 So, the troops that have been killed are to blame?

 That would be an unfair conclusion. In the long run, their commanders are liable for guaranteeing self-control and the adherence of stability actions.

 They had been also accountable for the determination to house them all with each other in an unprotected setting up in just vary of Ukrainian rockets.

 The US-based mostly Institute for the Study of War predicted Russia’s protection ministry would test to “deflect the blame for its poor operational stability” onto nearby officials and mobilized staff.

 Why will not they choose accountability?

 Because the backlash in Russia to the strike has been immense and there are calls for people accountable to be held criminally accountable.

 The Telegram account of the influential Russian war correspondent Rybar, which has all over a million followers, explained it was “criminally naive” for the army to shop ammunition up coming to sleeping quarters.

 Lawmaker Sergei Mironov stated “all the greater authorities who did not give the correct level of stability” really should experience prison expenses.

 And referring to Ukraine’s ability to monitor Russian troops within just range of its forces, professional-Kremlin journalist and deputy speaker of the Moscow Town Duma, Andrey Medvedev, reported: “Ten months into the war, it is hazardous and felony to contemplate the enemy a fool who does not see just about anything.”

 Grief has also spilled on to the street of Russia and in a uncommon general public commemoration, some 200 people collected in the metropolis of Samara – where some of the victims came from – to commemorate the dead.

 Mourners laid bouquets at a metropolis monument, an Orthodox priest recited a prayer for the dead, and troopers fired a gun salute.

 Is any of the anger directed at Russian President Vladmir Putin?

 Not still. So considerably, he has held tranquil and picked out not to comment publicly on the attack and some have identified as for him to escalate the war further more.

 A minor-known group, dubbed Soldiers’ Widows of Russia, urged Putin to announce normal mobilization.

Russian troops shelled a person of the settlements in Kutsurub community, Mykolaiv area, on Tuesday.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — UFC president Dana White was seen on video released by TMZ slapping his wife, Anne, while the two were on vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, last month.

White told TMZ in an interview Tuesday he was “embarrassed” and concerned for how his three children were affected.

“You’ve heard me say for years, ‘There’s never ever an excuse for a guy to put his hands on a woman,’ and now here I am on TMZ talking about it,” White told the website.

UFC spokesman Chris Costello said neither the organization nor White would issue a statement to The Associated Press. Costello referred to White’s comments to TMZ.

The video shows the couple arguing before Anne White slaps her husband, who slaps back before others intervene.

“Dana and I have been married for almost 30 years,” Anne White said in a statement to TMZ. “To say this is out of character for him is an understatement — nothing like this has ever happened before. Unfortunately, we were both drinking too much on New Year’s Eve and things got out of control on both sides. We’ve talked this through as a family and apologized to each other. I just hope people will respect our privacy for the sake of our kids.”

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Ukrainian forces have currently killed about 108,910 Russian troops in Ukraine among February 24, 2022 and January 4, 2023, together with 720 in the previous working day by itself.