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medal of the Sochi Olympics on Tuesday, winning from the front in a rainy and snowy giant slalom.
• Wearing bib No. 1, Maze skied through the gates cleanly to defend her big first-run lead and finish 0.07 seconds ahead of Anna Fenninger of Austria.
• Maze celebrated by belly-flopping onto the snow and pretending to swim the breaststroke.
• Defending champion Viktoria Rebensburg of Germany was third, trailing 0.27 behind Maze's two-run time of 2 minutes, 36.87 seconds.
• American teenager Mikaela Shiffrin placed fifth in her Olympic debut, missing a medal by just 0.23 seconds.
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• BRUSSELS (AP) -- There's one big reason why the United States has a dearth of execution drugs so acute that some states are considering solutions such as firing squads and gas chambers: Europe's fierce hostility to capital punishment.
• The phenomenon started nine years ago when the EU banned the export of products used for execution, citing its goal to be the "leading institutional actor and largest donor to the fight against the death penalty." But beefed up European rules mean the results are being most strongly felt in the United States now, with shortages becoming chronic and gruesome executions making headlines.
• In Ohio last month, Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die after a previously untested mix of chemicals began flowing into his body, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney. On Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson's last words were: "I feel my whole body burning."
• The dilemma again grabbed national attention this week when an Oklahoma pharmacy agreed Monday to refrain from supplying an execution drug to the Missouri Department of Corrections for an upcoming lethal injection. Death row inmate Michael Taylor's had argued in a lawsuit that recent executions involving the drug pentobarbital would likely cause "inhumane pain" -- and, ahead of a hearing set for Tuesday, The Apothecary Shoppe said it would not provide the drug.
• EU nations are notorious for disagreeing on just about everything when it comes to common policy, but they all strongly -- and proudly -- agree on one thing: abolishing capital punishment.
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