NPR News: 10-01-2026 4PM EDT

0:00This message comes from DataIQ Agent Management. Most enterprises can't count their AI agents, let alone manage them. DataIQ Agent Management lets you do both from a single view. Visit dataIQ.com to learn more. Lie from NPR News, I'm Lakshmi Singh. A death row inmate in Tennessee who survived a failed execution last night is now hospitalized in critical condition. Christa Pike's attorneys say their client was afraid she'd suffer complications with lethal injections because of a blood disorder that made it difficult to get needles into her veins. An NPR is here and now today, Catherine Swaney with Member Station WPLN describes a level of confusion surrounding Pike's attempted execution. It took a really long time for them to establish IV access because there's a curtain over the window that whole time we don't know what went wrong. They pushed this enormous amount of sedative that is designed to kill somebody

1:00by a pretty broad margin. They ended up running it twice and she was still alive. She was talking at points where she should have been appearing comatose. She was lifting her head up and looking around. WPLN's Catherine Swaney reporting. Governor Bill Lee has paused all executions in a state pending a third party review, but he says he plans to uphold jury sentences. The people of Tennessee have determined that the death penalty is the appropriate penalty for the most heinous crimes in the state. The people of Tennessee make that decision and my job is to make sure them that those sentences are carried out. Pike was 20 when she was convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate. She's now 50 and has been fighting her death sentence on the grounds that her history of childhood sexual abuse and mental illness were not fully considered at the time of sentencing. President Trump is visiting Texas and Oklahoma today while Vice President J.D. Vance visits Florida in a bid to energize Republican bases in the deep red states ahead

2:00of the midterm elections in less than five weeks. He does so with national polls suggesting low public approval ratings for high energy prices inflation and the US War with Iran. The Congressional Budget Office has directly linked the war to elevated inflation, which recently prompted the Fed to hike interest rates for the first time in more than three years. Federal prosecutors have filed more charges against the man accused of planting two bombs in Washington, D.C. on the eve of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. And PR's Ryan Lucas has the latest on the case against Brian Cole, Jr. Cole was arrested in December after a nearly five year FBI investigation. Prosecutors say he built and planted two pipe bombs near the Republican and Democratic Party headquarters in Washington. The night before President Trump supporters angry about his 2020 election loss storm the US Capitol. Neither of the bombs went off. Cole has pleaded not guilty. Now prosecutors have filed a new indictment adding four additional charges bringing the

3:04total number of counts. Cole is facing to eight. He is currently scheduled to go on trial in February. Ryan Lucas and PR news, Washington. This is NPR. Mortgage rates are at their highest level in almost three years according to Freddie Mac, the average 30 year fixed rate mortgage is now almost 7.3%. NPR Stephen Bessaha reports that follows a sharp rise in bond yields. Mortgage interest rates often go up with the yield on the 10 year treasury note. And that yield has been floating around a more than two decade high. Mortgage rates are up a quarter of a percent from last week. John Diamond is an economist at Rice University. And he says the high cost of borrowing is having a bad lock in effect on the economy. People are staying put. That's going to slow down consumption growth. But hopefully that will eventually lead to lower inflation. The Federal Reserve will consider raising interest rates again later this month to fight inflation. Stephen Bessaha and PR news. A report published today shows that glaciers in Switzerland lost more than five percent

4:09of their volume this year. More from it here is Rob Schmitz. The report by the Swiss Academy of Sciences is based on data collected by the Glacier Monitoring Network at the Public University ETH Zurich. It found that following the year with exceptionally little winter snow and a summer of record-breaking temperatures, glacier thickness decreased by an average of eight to thirteen feet across monitored glaciers. Over the past five years, Switzerland, home to the most glaciers in the European Alps, has lost nearly twenty percent of its total glacier volume. Several of the country's smaller glaciers have now completely and permanently disappeared, while remaining glaciers continue to retreat at an accelerated pace. Rob Schmitz and PR news. I'm Lakshmi Singh and PR News in Washington. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.