Cystic fibrosis patients got their ‘miracle drug’ thanks to federal research funding – new Trump administration rules may cut future miracles short by Fred D. Ledley

 

The hardest disease to care for when I was training as a pediatrician in the late 1970s was cystic fibrosis, a disease in which abnormally thick mucus secretions block the lungs’ airways and make it progressively harder to breathe.

Back then, there was no treatment for the disease itself. All we had was physical therapy to clear mucus from the lungs, and drugs to dilate the airways and aid breathing. We used high doses of antibiotics to treat chronic pneumonia – drugs that also generated dangerous antibiotic-resistant infections that not only made the disease progressively harder to treat but also posed a threat to other people. At the same time, we also had to manage co-occurring conditions, including diabetes, malnutrition and heart failure.

Worse, these efforts did not work. In 1979 the median age of death from cystic fibrosis was 15. While all young deaths are tragic, caring for children with a progressive, inevitably fatal disease that denied emerging adolescents the promise of adulthood was especially heartbreaking.

Cystic fibrosis treatment changed dramatically after 2012, when the biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals launched the drug Kalydeco (ivacaftor), followed by additional cystic fibrosis drugs Orkambi (lumacaftor/ivacaftor) in 2015, Symdeko (tezacaftor/ivacaftor) in 2018, Trikafta (elexacaftor/tezacaftor/ivacaftor) in 2019 and Alyftrek (vanzacaftor/tezacaftor/deutivacaftor) in 2024

 Now, the median survival age for a child with cystic fibrosis born today in the United States is 66 years. Mary Vought, the former wife of the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, stated that their daughter, who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, “can live likely a full life because of this miracle drug,” and that “it is very, very, very hopeful.”

Cystic fibrosis treatments are not miracles; they required decades of research funded by a combination of public and private investments. The largest contributor to this work was the National Institutes of Health, which funded much of the pivotal research required to understand the genetics and biology of the disease. Only with this knowledge was it possible to begin searching for drugs to treat cystic fibrosis.

 

Ironically, the federal funding that was so critical to developing these drugs is now threatened by policies that were initially proposed by the Office of Management and Budget. Those policies, which would increase political control over federal research grants, limit peer review and curtail research on certain topics, were temporarily blocked by Congress. But several federal agencies are still pursing portions of this agenda, including the NIH.

NIH laid the foundation for treatment

My colleagues and I examined the role that federal funding from the National Institutes of Health has played in developing cystic fibrosis treatments. We found that NIH funding supported more than 6,200 published research papers on the biology of cystic fibrosis in the 27 years before Kalydeco was approved in 2012.

Some of these publications describe celebrated milestones in understanding the biology of CFTR – the gene that causes cystic fibrosis – or the disease process. Others describe the studies necessary to replicate, refute or refine these advances and ensure the necessary scientific rigor to successfully discover and develop new drugs.

 Overall, we identified US$3.2 billion in NIH funding for basic research on cystic fibrosis from 1985 to 2012 and approximately $940 million in funding for applied research on potential drugs. This funding complemented at least $200 million in investments from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for the discovery or development of these drugs as well as undisclosed spending by Vertex to develop and commercialize these products.

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation acknowledged the essential role of the NIH in a 2025 letter to Russell Vought and other Trump administration leaders, writing that “ensuring that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is fully functional is critical for furthering our knowledge of the biology of CF and advancing CF therapeutic development.”

What will it take to produce future miracles?

Developing groundbreaking drugs requires a long-term, sustained commitment from the public, from the government and from industry.

FDA-approved drugs are typically based on 20 to 30 years of basic research in the lab and eight to nine years of human testing in the clinic. This work is supported, at least in part, by an average of $1.4 billion in NIH funding and as much as a reported $1.4 billion in industry funding per drug.

Russell Vought and his family have benefited from the commitment that scientists, advocates, legislators and industry leaders have placed into developing treatments that now offer patients with cystic fibrosis a normal life. A similar commitment can help find cures for patients who don’t respond to available drugs and to provide cures for cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia and other conditions.

This commitment to research is currently under threat from Trump administration proposals that would reduce NIH funding, research, training and global research collaboration. Protecting or expanding federal funding for basic research instead can help lead to innovative therapies for countless patients.

Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t. By Eli Hager

 

It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?

When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.

In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.

It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.

To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.

The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

 

Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen. (The reason it’s necessary to use data from a private company: The federal government has stopped tracking rates of this crime.)

ProPublica interviewed nearly 100 victims of SNAP theft, federal prosecutors, Secret Service agents, USDA officials, caseworkers and other experts to understand what’s behind this phenomenon and why more isn’t being done to stop it. The victims are almost all working people with families, or retirees, who have struggled to afford groceries in the current economy. Most didn’t learn about the crime until they were in a checkout line, only to have their benefit card declined.

 

Upon reporting the disappearance of their food assistance, victims are informed that nothing can be done under current federal law. “The only thing they said was that [my benefits] cannot be refunded unless they were lost due to a natural disaster,” said one SNAP theft victim in Ohio. “They told me they’d add my name to the list,” said another in rural Oregon. “They advised if I feel the place is sketchy, don’t run my card there,” a victim in Philadelphia said. Still another, in Virginia, added, “They even charged me $2 for a replacement card.”

Perhaps the most vexing aspect of all: The federal government knows how to prevent the vast majority of this crime in a single step. Congress just hasn’t been willing to take it.

 

SNAP theft is an old scheme applied to a new target. For years, scammers would surreptitiously install skimming devices on card readers at ATMs, gas pumps and corner stores. These devices could read the data on people’s cards as they swiped — while a pinhole camera or overlay keypad captured their PINs — all of which could be picked up later or sent via Bluetooth to someone sitting in a nearby cafe or parking lot. This pilfered data, in turn, was used to make online purchases, or it was loaded onto cloned cards to withdraw cash.

Skimming became exponentially more difficult when credit and debit card companies installed digital microchips in the 2010s and then introduced tap-to-pay. But one kind of card did not get the new chips: Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards, which people use to access SNAP and other public assistance. These still rely on the 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read.

EBT cards are not a particularly high-value target compared with bank cards. (The average monthly SNAP benefit is about $350 per household.) But funding boosts to SNAP during the pandemic temporarily increased benefit amounts, and profits could be considerable if you skimmed hundreds of people’s card information every month. Skimming teams, often run by Romanian gangs, pivoted. With cloned magnetic-stripe cards, they started buying up huge quantities of SNAP-eligible products like energy drinks and baby formula that are easy to store and resell.

“We’ve started many, many briefings saying that one of the biggest ways we’re going to fight this is to just get chips in the cards,” said Michael Peck, assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division. Among the Secret Service’s lesser-known functions is investigating many financial crimes, and Peck leads its efforts against benefit theft. He said he and his team have delivered this message on Capitol Hill both at committee meetings and to individual members of Congress.

Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints. (“Chairman Thompson is supportive of finding a fiscally responsible path forward for implementing policy that supports chip cards,” a committee aide said in a statement on his behalf. She added that “there was an appetite” for this reform among Republicans, but that Democrats weren’t willing to “find the budgetary offsets” for it.)

 The Congressional Budget Office has yet to formally score the proposal, but multiple Hill staffers said they were told the total cost would be in the range of $215 million, as compared to the $600 million-plus annual loss on theft of SNAP and other benefits.

 

The main thing Congress has done about SNAP theft is to abandon a previous effort to help victims. The federal government had, since late 2022, been replacing people’s stolen funds, just as banks are required to do if your debit card is hacked. As a result, 753,929 households were compensated.

In December 2024, a bipartisan spending agreement that included a provision to extend these reimbursements through 2028 was on the brink of becoming law. But Elon Musk, who had been named a leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, attacked the legislation more than 100 times on X, pushing to “defund everything.” (Musk did not reply to a request for comment.) Trump then sank the deal. Victims of SNAP theft can no longer get any of their benefits replaced. And with the government off the hook for losses, there is now less incentive to put money into the solution.

 

In the 22 months since, the Trump administration has gone on to strip funds for addressing EBT theft from the USDA’s annual budget requests to Congress, while cutting at least 650 of the staff of the federal Food and Nutrition Administration, the subagency that oversees SNAP. More than half of the technical experts whom the agency had hired to help it develop EBT card security guidance have been pushed out, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Many of us who were working on fraud, we’ve left the federal government entirely,” said Kym Ayodeji, who had been a data scientist in the SNAP program until she departed this spring. (FNA, the agency she worked for, is also responsible for tracking fraud committed by retailers, which is far more prevalent than that committed by beneficiaries.) Ayodeji said she and her colleagues had been working on ways to identify retailers where unusually large quantities of certain items had been purchased and addresses where purchases made with many different EBT cards were being delivered. Some of this work was indefinitely delayed by firings, early retirements, agency reorganizations and government shutdowns, she said.

 

SNAP is federally funded and supervised. Congress and the USDA traditionally mandate, and pay much of the costs for, major changes to the system, especially involving technical coordination between states. States evaluate applicants and administer the accounts of those who are approved.

That said, states are allowed to adopt chip cards on their own. California has nearly completed the transition, and Alabama and Oklahoma began rolling out new cards this year. A handful of others initiated the process in recent months — before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, starting Oct. 1, cut 50% of states’ administrative funding for SNAP, which Alabama and the others had tapped to transition to chip technology.

The rest — about 40 states — have likely missed their window, unless Congress acts. They’re also waiting for regulatory guidance on EBT card security and chip card implementation that the USDA has been claiming for nearly four years it is planning to publish. (The USDA Office of Inspector General has found that the agency’s failure to issue this has allowed the theft of at least $555 million in SNAP benefits.)

State-level SNAP administrators have also been overwhelmed with the hundreds of new requirements that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has saddled them with. For one, the law mandates that states adopt intensive new work requirements for older adults and others, resulting in voluminous additional monthly paperwork. And federal funds will be slashed even further next year if states don’t scramble to reduce their “payment error rate,” a figure that measures unintentional over- and underpayments in SNAP benefits. With all of this to juggle, many state officials told ProPublica that they’ve put chip card implementation on hold in order to implement the Trump law — one of whose ostensible goals was to reduce fraud.

 All the while, that law has cut food aid for more than 1.2 million children. The USDA’s Rollins has said that nearly 6 million people in total have been “moved off SNAP” during the current administration.

 The White House declined to respond to a detailed list of questions. A USDA spokesperson, in an emailed statement, did not refute that Rollins has focused on individual SNAP recipient fraud rather than on EBT theft, but said that finding “cracks in public statements screams politics, not fact-finding.” The spokesperson also did not address ProPublica’s reporting showing that the agency has failed to deliver solutions on EBT theft specifically. Instead, the statement pointed to the agency’s work, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, combating retailer fraud. The USDA says it has cracked down on thousands of stores that were abusing their SNAP privileges.

 Absent action from Congress or USDA leadership, it has largely been left to the Secret Service to apply an enforcement approach to what is arguably a policy problem. Agents first went after gangs like the Red Bull Crew, often by watching hours upon hours of grocery store surveillance footage. More recently, they’ve tried to get ahead of the scammers by heading to cities that have been hit by EBT theft attacks and then going store to store to check card readers for skimming devices. The agency has run more than 70 of these operations since April 2024, independent of any White House initiative.

 

Most of them are led by Peck, the assistant special agent in charge. With his form-fitting black polo tucked into cargo pants and a contoured beard, he has a flat affect even as he lists off colorful details like how the criminals sometimes ship dishwashers full of cash overseas. But he also emphasizes the vulnerability of the victims and wishes there was even more his team could do for them. “The U.S. has been fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Terror for how many years?” he said. “We are pushing hard and we’re doing all we can with the resources and abilities that we have.”

One bright morning in late June, dozens of law enforcement officers gathered in a Secret Service meeting room on the top floor of a downtown Brooklyn skyscraper, with a commanding view of the New York City skyline. In addition to unarmed Secret Service analysts in short-sleeved shirts inscribed with the field office they were joining from (Nashville, Miami, San Diego), there were agents from the USDA Office of Inspector General as well as a smattering of NYPD officers — who had guns, handcuffs and the jurisdiction to make arrests should anything go awry that day.

From a podium, Peck recapped how the multiday New York operation was going so far, including that the previous day, officers had happened upon two foreign nationals installing a skimming device, chased them down and made arrests. “Be safe, watch backs, stay fed,” he concluded.

 

Then everyone dispersed into teams of three or four. Each was given a list of dozens of stores in Brooklyn or Queens — disproportionately ethnic and dollar stores, but also some larger chains like 7-11 — that they were assigned to visit, based on data analytics showing where skimming activity was most probable.

The squad that ProPublica joined was headed to Midwood, in South Brooklyn, which is home to Orthodox Jews and immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere. As we walked around the neighborhood with these federal agents, we got plenty of confused looks and some scared ones, too.

“Hello, we’re here with the Secret Service,” one of the analysts would say upon entering each store. Then they’d ask the store manager for permission to inspect each card reader. They also handed out flyers in four languages telling the cashiers what to look out for.

When they did find a skimming device, they donned gloves and masks to handle it. After prying it off the card reader, they bagged it and tagged it, to be sent in for DNA and fingerprint testing as well as digital forensic analysis. Maybe a lead could be extracted, a connection to a larger EBT theft ring.

These missions are clearly well-intentioned, and every skimmer removed saves families from being deprived of food. Yet, plainly, conducting store-to-store checks of card readers is inefficient. Over the course of two years, the agency has spent tens of thousands of staff hours checking 69,805 point-of-sale terminals at stores, 42,972 gas pumps and 10,661 ATMs. They’ve found 637 skimming devices. And as one agent told ProPublica, “There could be a new skimmer on there tomorrow.”

 

Ultimately, it just won’t be possible to arrest one’s way out of this crisis, both federal and state law enforcement officials acknowledged. Low-level runners keep arriving from Romania and elsewhere; even if they do get caught, they’re often able to bond out of jail because they’re only facing state charges for nonviolent offenses. Then they disappear.

Funding for chip EBT cards still faces dim prospects on Capitol Hill, according to Democratic and Republican lawmakers and staffers, even with newfound support from major retailer associations and big players like Walmart. There’s a chip card provision in the Senate’s draft version of this year’s Farm Bill, but the whole package is mired in a dispute between the parties — over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to SNAP funding — that looks like it will last until well after the midterm elections. This almost doesn’t matter, given that on the House side, the Farm Bill has already passed, and it contains no funding for chip cards.

And there’s been no movement on repeated bipartisan proposals from Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and others to renew the reimbursement program for families that have had their food assistance taken.

 

Certainly, the mass distribution of any new payment technology isn’t easy. California, Alabama and Oklahoma have had to phase in their new cards gradually, allowing customers to still use the card’s magnetic stripe if the chip isn’t working everywhere yet. And they’ve tried to notify rural convenience stores and gas stations, and help corner bodegas update their card readers, so that no one is left with only a chip card in a desert of stores that still just accept magnetic stripe.

But by doing all of this and employing additional data tools, California has reduced the theft of food and cash benefits by as much as 83% in just two years, the governor’s office said. And Alabama officials claim their state hasn’t had any confirmed EBT theft cases since they began to distribute chip cards this year.

Still, chip cards aren’t the entire solution and doubtlessly, scammers will find clever ways to get around this technology. Moreover, SNAP recipients have largely been denied the basic services that banks and credit card companies use to block likely fraudulent transactions in real time. (Think of the email or text alerts you get from your bank when suspicious purchases are attempted with your card information.)

 

If states were to try this without federal help, they would have to individually pay for the additional security features. Most have gone for cheaper options like advising or requiring SNAP recipients to change their PIN regularly and to lock their card when not using it. Both are useful stopgaps but require constant diligence.

State and county SNAP caseworkers said they’ve been deeply frustrated that ever since Trump and Musk killed the reimbursement program, all they can do for victims is suggest they change their PIN more often and maybe try reporting the crime to local law enforcement. “It is a short conversation,” said Norman Vogele, a caseworker in Oregon. The date of the crime and the missing amount is recorded. “It isn’t clear why we even do that much,” he said, “as there is zero recourse.”

 

The Red Bull Crew stayed on the run for over a year, using looted food benefits to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of bulk energy drinks in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. After hundreds of hours of surveillance by the Secret Service, federal prosecutors and local authorities, all but one of the members were arrested and served sentences ranging from one to three years. They’ve all since been released, and some may have been deported.

Meanwhile, every day, SNAP theft sprees keep popping up in new corners of the country. A Secret Service official sounded gloomy about the pursuit of street-level operatives on its own, without policy change. “You can arrest them,” he said. “But essentially once you take them off the street, there’s 10 more that are doing the same thing.”

Americans' Savings Help Fuel Private Credit by Heather Gillers,

 

When Sabrina Elliott inherited some money, her son-in-law helped her invest $40,000 in a product that dangled the prospect of stock-market gains with no risk of loss.

In exchange for locking up her money for 12 years, it promised returns tied to the market's performance. One catch: The company behind the product, Aviva, could periodically lower the portion of market gains Elliott received.

That happened twice after Aviva was purchased by Athene, an insurer backed by private-asset giant Apollo Global Management. By the time the policy ended in late 2023, her annualized return had come to 3.7%.

"That's one of the downfalls of the indexed annuities," said Carlos Dias Jr., Elliott's son-in-law and a financial adviser outside Orlando, Fla. "Insurance companies can change the amount that's received from the particular index every year, every two years."

Wall Street behemoths like Apollo and Brookfield are just now starting to find ways to tap in to the vast sums of money in 401(k) accounts, pitching their alternative investments as another way for people to grow their nest eggs. But private-asset managers have already been vacuuming up the savings of American households through indexed annuities, which have surged in popularity over the past decade and helped power the rise of their private lending to risky companies.

The annuity industry recently got a black mark after Delaware Life, an insurer controlled by Dodgers owner Mark Walter, disclosed it was under federal investigation for failing to report loans to other entities he owned.

Indexed annuities are meant to appeal to older people who may be on fixed incomes and have little appetite for risk, but still want some exposure to stock-market gains. People turn over $50,000 or $100,000 worth of savings for a decade or so. Insurers guarantee that their investment return will never fall below zero, with the potential for better returns than a CD or savings account.

Exactly how much a person's money grows is based on terms the insurer can change during the life of policy, such as the share of the deposit that can earn market returns, any cap on returns and any spread subtracted from those returns.

In the first year of Elliott's policy, 60% of her money earned returns tied to the S&P 500, minus a 2.9-percentage-point spread. In the policy's seventh year, Athene lowered that share to 55%, then to 45% in the 11th year. The rest of the money grew at a fixed rate of 1%.

Elliott, a 69-year-old professor of nutrition in the Florida university system, had paid for add-ons that let her choose to parcel out payments over her lifetime or to her heirs. That reduced her annual return by about 2 percentage points.

The 3.7% annualized rate she earned over the 12-year life of her annuity beat the 1.9% she would have gotten from Treasurys. But it paled next to the annualized return of 13% on the S&P 500.

Athene, which Apollo fully took over in 2022, said in a statement that the annuity "performed exceptionally well, earning returns well in excess of similar safe yield alternatives, guaranteeing 100% principal protection, and providing optional enhanced death benefits and guaranteed lifetime income."

The company said "it is highly misleading to measure the performance of fixed indexed annuities using a scenario that pairs historically low rates with a strong bull equity market."

Products tied to the stock market are typically overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and selling them often requires a securities license. But indexed annuities can also be sold by state insurance agents, who aren't subject to the same rules on disclosing conflicts of interest or acting in a client's best interest. Indexed annuities are often among the most lucrative products these agents can sell.

American Equity, for instance, pays agents a commission of 5% to 7% of a policyholder's deposit on some 10-year indexed annuities. That is compared with around 3% for simpler annuities with fixed rates sold by the Brookfield-owned insurer.

Insurers say the higher commissions reflect the complexity of the products, which require greater explanation.

Still, consumer advocates say indexed annuities can be a magnet for misleading sales pitches. Educational materials for an indexed annuity sold by Delaware Life, for instance, show a premium of $100,000 growing to $2.7 million over the next 21 years.

But the "Momentum Growth" annuity is tied to a stock-and-crypto index established just last year. The returns advertised draw on hypothetical data based on the past 15 years -- a period that included 11 years with double-digit stock-market gains.

After the financial crisis, private-asset managers began buying up insurers to access their huge pools of policyholder premiums.

Indexed annuities were particularly attractive. Payouts follow a relatively predictable timetable, and the policies typically last about a decade, compared with about three to five years for fixed-rate annuities. That gives asset managers flexibility to put the money into riskier, less-liquid private-credit investments like collateralized loan obligations or asset-backed securities.

If their investments do poorly, the insurer can cushion against loss by lowering the caps on policyholder gains, and if their investments do well they can fatten their profits the same way, said Larry Rybka, chief executive of Valmark Financial Group, which sells life insurance, annuities and investment products. "That's why private equity likes this, because they can change the deal on the consumer," Rybka said.

Christa Pike survived 2 doses of an execution drug. How is that possible? by HANNAH SCHOENBAUM and HALLIE GOLDEN

 

Christa Pike regaining consciousness and speaking a week after receiving two doses of execution drugs in Tennessee has astonished even some medical professionals and left many people wondering: How did she survive?

Attorneys for Pike, 50, called her recovery “medically unprecedented” after she was placed on a ventilator following the bungled Sept. 30 attempt to make her the first woman put to death in Tennessee in 200 years. On Wednesday, they said Pike was confused, “speaking limitedly” and could not move her arms, one of which had a blood clot.

Pike, who was convicted in the 1995 torture and killing of classmate Colleen Slemmer, is the only person to survive after receiving lethal injection drugs during an execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Many details of the execution process remain secretive, and Tennessee officials say they are investigating what went wrong.

Still, medical experts raised a few possibilities that could explain how Pike was able to survive, including the potential drug quality and the placement of IV lines. Tennessee’s executioners had difficulties earlier this year with IV lines for another execution, leading to it being called off.

 

Only a small amount of the drug may have entered her bloodstream

The 5-gram dose of pentobarbital used in executions is many more times the amount that should put someone in a medical coma, said Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, a retired pediatric general surgeon at Ohio State University College of Medicine who has studied lethal injections.

“The fact that she woke, on one hand, says she got really little of it into her system. So that’s kind of shocking,” Groner said. “It says how badly they botched the execution.”

At high doses, the potent barbiturate should make a person lose consciousness and stop breathing.

Groner said the IV might have been placed improperly, or Pike’s veins could have been fragile and ruptured, causing the drug to seep into the surrounding tissue instead of flowing through the bloodstream. Pike’s attorneys have said she was poked with needles at least seven times in the state’s death chamber and that she has a blood disorder that makes it tough to get needles into her veins.

 

Sourcing of drugs for executions is shrouded in secrecy

Another possible problem could be the drug quality, said Michaela Almgren, a South Carolina pharmacist and educator who has consulted on several lethal injection cases.

Many major pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply drugs for lethal injections, which has raised questions about how states get them. Court orders have revealed that some states have turned to compounding pharmacies, which create custom drugs from raw ingredients and operate with less regulatory oversight.

Tennessee does not disclose its drug supplier and has not said where Pike’s supply came from. Almgren said that makes it difficult to track if a drug was prepared, tested, handled and administered properly.

That also means the public may never know exactly what happened in Pike’s case.

Pike’s attorneys asked a court to require the Tennessee Department of Correction to preserve evidence, including drug lot numbers, communications and other material from the attempted execution. A judge told prison officials on Wednesday that they must preserve “anything that was in the actual room.”

Outgoing Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has paused executions and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred.” It’s unclear whether the state will try executing Pike again.

 

Hospital treatment likely involved flushing the drug from her system

Before the execution attempt, Pike’s attorneys told courts and prison officials that she had medical conditions that could complicate a lethal injection and make it agonizing.

Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology and surgery in Atlanta who consulted as an expert for Pike’s legal team, said Pike has a blood-clotting disorder that causes her body to produce an excess of platelets. Her lawyers had argued that the condition could cause clotting at injection sites or bleeding that could affect her lungs.

State protocol calls for a second dose of pentobarbital if the first doesn’t result in death, but it doesn’t spell out what to do if an inmate survives the second injection.

The attempted execution got underway around 7:30 p.m. At some point Pike appeared to lose consciousness, but she could be heard breathing until media were escorted from the witness room at 8:53 p.m. An ambulance arrived at 9:14 p.m. and took Pike to a hospital.

 

Once there, doctors likely tried to stabilize her breathing, checked how much pentobarbital was in her system and worked to quickly flush it out, said Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City.

Pike’s lawyers said the failed attempt left her arms burned and blistered. She was unconscious and on a ventilator for several days.

“She was very fortunate that there was enough (pentobarbital) to put her into a deep sleep, but they were able to keep her breathing going and they were able to start flushing it out,” Baden said. 

 

Truth, evidence and controversy: Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion at 20 by Jamie Q. Roberts

 

In my youth, somewhere in the late 1990s, when I was a goth or a punk or something, I had a t-shirt proclaiming, “Ignorance should not reproduce”. Along with the text there was a provocative image, which included the Christian cross.

Back then, if you were an educated liberal type, who valued reasoning and evidence, the scientific method, free expression and broadly progressive social values – the kinds of values championed by civil rights movements – there was a decent chance that you felt yourself to be battling against a stuffy, illiberal Christian orthodoxy that, to a considerable extent, held the reins of power, especially in the United States.

In 1999, at a Republican primary debate, the presidential candidates were asked “what political philosopher or thinker do you most identify with?” Without missing a beat, George W. Bush said “Christ”. This was arguably the moment he became the frontrunner to become president.

Religion and power commingled. This was not only a concern in politics, but in education, where we often heard about intelligent design being taught alongside natural selection.

Rereading Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, which turned 20 this year, I’m reminded of this time. The God Delusion offers a sustained critique of religion, and Christianity, in particular. Its arguments are presented across ten chapters, the most significant being the fourth, titled “Why There Almost Certainly is No God”.

The book was a huge bestseller – it sold more than three million copies and was translated into more than 30 languages. It struck at the heart of the religious leviathan, at least for its educated, secular readership.

 

It was also immensely controversial, with many significant rebuttals being published. There were three main objections.

First, Dawkins was accused of engaging with a caricature of religious faith. Literary scholar Terry Eagleton famously accused Dawkins and others of producing “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.”

Second, he was criticised for his tone. Theologian Alister McGrath spoke of Dawkins’ “shrill, aggressive rhetoric”.

Third, Dawkins was accused of replacing one religion with another – science. The title of novelist Marilynne Robinson’s 2006 article about Dawkins’ book, Hysterical Scientism, very much conveys this. (I’ll return to this last objection at the end.)

Notably, opposition to The God Delusion took the form of intellectual debate. He wasn’t “de-platformed” – cancelled – in any significant way.

Still, Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who made his name with The Selfish Gene (1976), became one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”, along with the brilliant and polemical journalist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007), cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2006), and philosopher Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004, and Letter to a Christian Nation, 2006).

Today, Dawkins remains a controversial figure, more for this statements around questions of trans identity than his criticisms of religion. But the enduring value of The God Delusion lies in its championing of liberal values: reasoning and evidence, free speech, thinking for oneself and putting regard for truth before one’s concerns about group membership.

Bristling at censorship

In his opening chapter, “A Deeply Religious Non-Believer”, Dawkins presents different incarnations of religiosity. He contrasts those who encounter the immensity of the universe and posit the existence of a God, with atheists, like himself, who feel awe but remain secular.

“A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe,” he writes, “is common among scientists and rationalists.” He then quotes physicist Albert Einstein:

 

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

For Dawkins, this kind of religiosity deserves respect. What follows is a lengthy objection to the fact that, at the time, there was a broad taboo against criticising religion. “A widespread assumption,” Dawkins writes, “which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect.”

Naturally, Dawkins affirms that he will not follow this assumption. When I think about The God Delusion now, it is Dawkins’ bristling at censorship that most stands out in my mind, not his criticism of religion.

The origins of complexity

In the following chapters, Dawkins defines what he means by God and presents several arguments for God’s existence, including those by noteworthy philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas.

The most significant argument, for Dawkins, for the existence of God, which he tackles in Chapter Four, is “intelligent design”, which claims that the complexity we observe in natural things, such as the human eye, could only have arisen through the will of some intelligent designer.

But an easy rational objection to intelligent design is that saying God is the intelligent designer of the universe doesn’t really help, because, by the same argument, something even more intelligent than God must have designed God.

The greatest strength of The God Delusion is Dawkins’ account of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. “Darwin and his successors,” he writes, “have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings.”

According to the theory of natural selection, complexity in life arises not from chance alone. Rather, random genetic variations (the chance part) are filtered by natural selection, so the genetic variants that provide survival and reproductive advantages in particular environments persist.

Also important, although less definitive, is the chapter in which Dawkins speculates about the roots of religion. While he hesitates to say how, exactly, religion arose in Darwinian terms, he argues that religion is a by-product – a “misfiring” – of other evolved capacities, such as the inclination to intuitively assign purposes to everything, or the necessity that children believe what stern adults tell them, lest they eat something poisonous or fall off a cliff.

In the remainder of the book, Dawkins discusses whether religion is necessary as a source of morality (the answer is “no”), the questionable morals of the Bible (the so-called “Good Book”), and the negative effects that religion can have on people.

The book’s final chapter is the most poignant. It brings us to the enduring relevance of The God Delusion. “It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled,” writes Dawkins. “We have a psychological need for God – imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant – and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not.”

He then writes that religion “has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration”.

In other words, religion tells us how the world works and how to be good, it makes us feel a little better about our fleeting existence, and it inspires us to do great things.

Dawkins acknowledges that religion may well console us, but makes the cutting point: “Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true.”

 

Dawkins’ recent troubles

As I have noted, in The God Delusion Dawkins was not only battling against what he saw as the irrationality of religion, but the taboo, in many circles, against criticising religion; indeed, the success of the book indicates that many surely felt the same way.

However, times have changed since 2006. And this is demonstrated by Dawkins’ own recent troubles.

Dawkins ran afoul of the social justice world when he tweeted the following in 2021:

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

Dawkins was applying reason to the vexed issues of racial and trans identity and he was punished. Among other things, in 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew his 1996 Humanist of the Year award.

In an open letter responding to this decision, philosopher Rebecca Goldstein and psychologist Steven Pinker, both of whom had received the award, argued that seeking to “punish, dishonor, or humiliate a writer rather than engage with his words is a betrayal of humanism”.

“It has not been lost on commentators,” they observed, “that an association of ‘freethinkers’ has deemed certain thoughts unthinkable, nor that it is enforcing dogmas and catechisms by excommunicating a heretic.”

As the language of Goldstein and Pinker indicates, parts of the “woke” left, even though secular, now exhibit some of the characteristics of religious zealots. There is much more that could be said here about the alleged “God-shaped gap” in the human psyche.

Dawkins has written several books since this decision, including The Genetic Book of the Dead: a Darwinian Reverie (2024). He continues to attract controversy.

Science works

I mention all this because the great value of The God Delusion lies not in its criticism of religion, but its embrace of liberal values: reasoning and evidence, free speech, thinking for oneself.

Honestly, coming up with arguments against religion isn’t that challenging if one is so inclined. And when one tussles with a religious person, often the conversation ends up on the point that religion is more about faith than it is about reason. Religious people themselves refer to their religions as “faiths”.

The liberal values in mention have been hard-won across the centuries and they are always under siege. Sometimes this is from religion, as was the case 20 years ago. But sometimes the threat comes from the secular world: communism, fascism and even what we might call “identity politics” or “wokism” today.

Why do we care about reasoning and evidence and truth? One simple point is that when we have a regard for such things, our world gets better. This is what distinguishes science from religion.

In my favourite Dawkins moment, he was challenged at a talk by some smarty-pants in the audience to justify the scientific method – the intimation being that science is indeed just one faith among many, and is thus indistinguishable from religion.

Dawkins replied:

It works. Planes fly, cars drive, computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works, bitches.

Every dollar spent by a Texas library puts almost $5 back into the economy, study shows by Sarah Asch

 

The Texas Library Association found that library services across the state offer an economic boon to local communities.

If you walk into your local library, you can borrow a book or ask for help with a research question. You can also get help with your resume, access the internet on public computers, borrow a movie, or perhaps participate in some free public programming.

The Texas Library Association commissioned a study this summer to measure the return on investment for public dollars spent on libraries. They found that every dollar spent by local libraries generates almost $5 in statewide economic activity.

Shirley Robinson, the executive director of the Texas Library Association, said they did this by comparing what people get from libraries to what they could pay for on their own.

“Our research firm compared all of those services to comparable resources that one might be able to go and find in the open marketplace if you were needing to pay for those things,” she said. “And so that’s how that dollar figure of $4.74 for every dollar invested towards Texas libraries produces for an individual and community value.”

The study included data from a wide variety of libraries, from small rural systems to big urban ones. It also looked at how libraries impact the economy beyond the direct dollar calculation.

“When you look at things like just the overall support for jobs in the state, for example, we know that approximately 11,200 individuals are employed in our Texas public libraries. That’s absolutely an economic value for the state,” Robinson said. “And then the other significant number in this study was that there’s $3.8 billion in total economic benefit generated from libraries. So when you look at how those services help to support the community, that number becomes really significant.”

Robinson said her favorite library programs are ones designed with seniors in mind.

“Helping them to have access to digital resources that they may not have had the education or even experience within the past couple of decades in their lives,” she said. “We have a couple of programs that specifically train seniors on how to do things like use a mouse on a computer, how to get onto the internet and pay bills.”

These workshops help seniors stay socially engaged and help them participate in the economy, Robinson said.

“There is almost no aspect of our day-to-day lives now that doesn’t involve the internet or using a mobile device,” she said. “And so a lot of these programs in our public libraries are able to either put devices directly into the hands of our seniors or train them on how to use those devices when they are at home to give them greater independence.”

Robinson’s hope is that this data encourages state and local governments to spend more money on libraries, especially those that lost funding and staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic and haven’t recovered.

“I’m thinking right now of a couple of different libraries across the state that have had to cut their staffing by almost half over the last five or six years,” she said. “And that has a huge impact on the services that they’re able to provide, the number of hours that they are able to stay open. We very much would like to see those staffing levels increased and returned to what they were pre-pandemic.”

Robinson would also like to see more investment in library infrastructure.

“Many of these buildings were built in the 60s and 70s,” she said. “We’re really needing to reinvest in those buildings so that they can continue to serve the population that is growing in many parts across the state.”

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Rubio refuses to comment on Guilfoyle allegations by MATTHEW LEE

 

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday flatly refused to comment on a new report alleging that U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle engaged in improper and possibly illegal conduct before taking up her post.

Rubio told reporters that he would not discuss the allegations contained in a Wall Street Journal story that said Guilfoyle had asked a donor and supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump to pay a $100,000 credit card bill just before her confirmation hearing, promising him access to administration officials if he did.

He spoke before leaving Greece, where he delivered a speech calling for European countries to return to what he described as their civilizational roots.

Rubio said he was aware of The Wall Street Journal’s report, which was published late Wednesday, but had no idea if it was true and he would not address it.

 

“You guys walk around thinking that because some source told you something and you reported it, it’s the gospel. It’s not the gospel. It’s not the gospel for me. That’s not the way we do things,” he said at the foot of his plane as Guilfoyle, who was there to see him depart Greece, looked on.

At a joint news conference with the Greek foreign minister on Wednesday, Rubio said he would not address the allegations while visiting a foreign country, but added, “Suffice it to say our embassy here is doing a great job. Our ambassador has been a strong ambassador here.”

 

The top two Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees have called for an investigation into Guilfoyle, but Rubio would not say if he was prepared to open one.

Congressional Democrats already were looking into claims reported last month by the Wall Street Journal that Guilfoyle acted improperly while serving as the top U.S. envoy to Greece.

The Journal reported that Guilfoyle told guests at a reception that the U.S. could undermine the Greek government if it chose to, promoted the business interests of one particular Greek construction and energy company, and allowed its lobbyist into private diplomatic meetings.

Guilfoyle, a former Fox News Channel host and California prosecutor who was once engaged to Trump’s son Donald Jr., has denied any wrongdoing and Rubio has defended her before.