Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has questions about Kellyanne Conway's sale of her business to a judicial activist group while she was serving in the White House and advising the former president on a Supreme Court nominee.
Politico reported that previously unreported financial documents that government ethics experts reviewed that Leonard Leo, a former vice president of the Federalist Society and ally of far-right Supreme Court justices. Leo was apparently working with Conway through one of his dark money groups to help her with the sale of the company, which is valued between $1 million and $5 million.
The watchdog group Accountable.US said that Conway scored at least $2.5 million in the deal.
Conway was also one of those who promoted Leo's supreme court picks to the president at the time.
“This is further evidence of the troubling role that Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society played in driving Donald Trump’s judicial selection process,” Durbin said in a statement.
Vanity Fair noted that lobbying from Conway likely wasn't even needed, citing legal expert Paul Whelan, who told Politico that Trump already made a “clear and high-profile commitment” to using Federalist Society-approved names to fill Supreme Court vacancies.
"But the dealings between Leo and Conway do raise significant ethical and legal concerns — and provide a window into his efforts to swing the judiciary to the right," the report said.
According to Politico, the transaction "could have violated federal ethics laws that prevent executive branch employees from using their positions to obtain benefits or private personal gain."
Conway hasn't responded to questions about the sale and the timing.
Conway was employed by the White House from Jan. 20, 2017 to Aug. 31, 2020.
Former CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien had some harsh words for her former colleagues who have remained silent as CEO Chris Licht has tarnished their network's reputation.
O'Brien on Sunday night made the comments in response to a report from The Atlantic's Tim Alberta that revealed a Licht henchman demanded that CNN's graphics department take down a chyron that referenced Trump being found liable by a jury for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll during last month's town hall event.
Even though sources told Alberta they were shocked and dismayed by this decision, O'Brien argued that this wasn't good enough and that they needed to go public with their concerns.
"And yet not a single one said anything -- on the record, out loud, using their name," she wrote on Twitter. "They're shocked! They're shaken! But they are also cowards, let's be honest about that. When their boss was supporting pure journalistic malpractice what did they say -- out loud?"
There has been some public criticism from some CNN employees about the Trump town hall, including from media reporter Oliver Darcy and Christiane Amanpour, but so far there has been no broad public revolt by CNN employees.
The Trump town hall has drawn criticism in particular because CNN filled the studio audience with diehard MAGA fans who cheered on the former president even when he mocked and demeaned the woman he was found liable for sexually abusing.
Figuring out how to enhance a person’s mental capabilities has been of considerable interest to psychology and neuroscience researchers like mefor decades. From improving attention in high-stakes environments, like air traffic management, to reviving memory in people with dementia, the ability to improve cognitive function can have far-reaching consequences. New research suggests that brain stimulation could help achieve the goal of boosting mental function.
During this procedure, people wear an elastic cap embedded with electrodes that deliver weak electrical currents oscillating at specific frequencies to their scalp. By applying these controlled currents to specific brain regions, it is possible to alter brain activity by nudging neurons to fire rhythmically.
Another type of transcranial electric stimulation, tDCS, applies a direct electrical current to the brain.
Why would rhythmically firing neurons be beneficial? Research suggests that brain cells communicate effectively when they coordinate the rhythm of their firing. Critically, these rhythmic patterns of brain activity show marked abnormalities during neuropsychiatric illnesses. The purpose of tACS is to externally induce rhythmic brain activity that promotes healthy mental function, particularly when the brain might not be able to produce these rhythms on its own.
However, tACS is a relatively new technology, and how it works is still unclear. Whether it can strengthen or revive brain rhythms to change mental function has been a topic of considerable debate in the field of brain stimulation. While some studies find evidence of changes in brain activity and mental function with tACS, others suggest that the currents typically used in people might be too weak to have a direct effect.
When faced with conflicting data in the scientific literature, it can be helpful to conduct a type of study called a meta-analysis that quantifies how consistent the evidence is across several studies. A previous meta-analysis conducted in 2016 found promising evidence for the use of tACS in changing mental function. However, the number of studies has more than doubled since then. The design of tACS technologies has also become increasingly sophisticated.
We set out to perform a new meta-analysis of studies using tACS to change mental function. To our knowledge, this work is the largest and most comprehensive meta-analysis yet on this topic, consisting of over 100 published studies with a combined total of more than 2,800 human participants.
After compiling over 300 measures of mental function across all the studies, we observed consistent and immediate improvement in mental function with tACS. When we examined specific cognitive functions, such as memory and attention, we observed that tACS produced the strongest improvements in executive function, or the ability to adapt in the face of new, surprising or conflicting information.
We also observed improvements in the ability to pay attention and to memorize information for both short and long periods of time. Together, these results suggest that tACS could particularly improve specific kinds of mental function, at least in the short term.
To examine the effectiveness of tACS for those particularly vulnerable to changes in mental function, we examined the data from studies that included older adults and people with neuropsychiatric conditions. In both populations, we observed reliable evidence for improvements in cognitive function with tACS.
Interestingly, we also found that a specialized type of tACS that can target two brain regions at the same time and manipulate how they communicate with each other can both enhance or reduce cognitive function. This bidirectional effect on mental function could be particularly useful in the clinic. For example, some psychiatric conditions like depression may involve a reduced ability to process rewards, while others like bipolar disorder may involve a highly active reward processing system. If tACS can change mental function in either direction, researchers may be able to develop flexible and targeted designs that cater to specific clinical needs.
Developments in the field of tACS are bringing researchers closer to being able to safely enhance mental function in a noninvasive way that doesn’t require medication. Current statistical evidence across the literature suggests that tACS holds promise, and improving its design could help it produce stronger, long-lasting changes in mental function.
Opioid drugs such as morphine and fentanyl are like the two-faced Roman god Janus: The kindly face delivers pain relief to millions of sufferers, while the grim face drives an opioid abuse and overdose crisis that claimed nearly 70,000 lives in the U.S. in 2020 alone.
Scientists like me who study pain and opioids have been seeking a way to separate these two seemingly inseparable faces of opioids. Researchers are trying to design drugs that deliver effective pain relief without the risk of side effects, including addiction and overdose.
One possible path to achieving that goal lies in understanding the molecular pathways opioids use to carry out their effects in your body.
How do opioids work?
The opioid system in your body is a set of neurotransmitters your brain naturally produces that enable communication between neurons and activate protein receptors. These neurotransmitters include small proteinlike molecules like enkephalins and endorphins. These molecules regulate a tremendous number of functions in your body, including pain, pleasure, memory, the movements of your digestive system and more.
Opioid neurotransmitters activate receptors that are located in a lot of places in your body, including pain centers in your spinal cord and brain, reward and pleasure centers in your brain, and throughout the neurons in your gut. Normally, opioid neurotransmitters are released in only small quantities in these exact locations, so your body can use this system in a balanced way to regulate itself.
The opioids your body produces and opioid drugs bind to the same receptors.
The problem comes when you take an opioid drug like morphine or fentanyl, especially at high doses for a long time. These drugs travel through the bloodstream and can activate every opioid receptor in your body. You’ll get pain relief through the pain centers in your spinal cord and brain. But you’ll also get a euphoric high when those drugs hit your brain’s reward and pleasure centers, and that could lead to addiction with repeated use. When the drug hits your gut, you may develop constipation, along with other common opioid side effects.
Targeting opioid signal transduction
How can scientists design opioid drugs that won’t cause side effects?
One approach my research team and I take is to understand how cells respond when they receive the message from an opioid neurotransmitter. Neuroscientists call this process opioid receptor signal transduction. Just as neurotransmitters are a communication network within your brain, each neuron also has a communication network that connects receptors to proteins within the neuron. When these connections are made, they trigger specific effects like pain relief. So, after a natural opioid neurotransmitter or a synthetic opioid drug activates an opioid receptor, it activates proteins within the cell that carry out the effects of the neurotransmitter or the drug.
Cells communicate with one another in multiple ways.
Opioid signal transduction is complex, and scientists are just starting to figure out how it works. However, one thing is clear: Not every protein involved in this process does the same thing. Some are more important for pain relief, while some are more important for side effects like respiratory depression, or the decrease in breathing rate that makes overdoses fatal.
So what if we target the “good” signals like pain relief, and avoid the “bad” signals that lead to addiction and death? Researchers are tackling this idea in different ways. In fact, in 2020 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first opioid drug based on this idea, oliceridine, as a painkiller with fewer respiratory side effects.
However, relying on just one drug has downsides. That drug might not work well for all people or for all types of pain. It could also have other side effects that show up only later on. Plenty of options are needed to treat all patients in need.
My research team is targeting a protein called Heat shock protein 90, or Hsp90, which has many functions inside each cell. Hsp90 has been a hot target in the cancer field for years, with researchers developing Hsp90 inhibitors as a treatment for many cancer types.
Our work shows that manipulating opioid signaling through Hsp90 offers a path forward to improve opioid drugs. Taking an Hsp90 inhibitor that targets the spinal cord along with an opioid drug could improve the pain relief the opioid provides while decreasing its side effects. With improved pain relief, you can take less opioid and reduce your risk of addiction. We are currently developing a new generation of Hsp90 inhibitors that could help realize this goal.
There may be many paths to developing an improved opioid drug without the burdensome side effects of current drugs like morphine and fentanyl. Separating the kindly and grim faces of the opioid Janus could help provide pain relief we need without addiction and overdose.
