University of idaho

Seven in ten children from families on universal credit are not eligible for free school meals, a report warns today. Tight-fisted ministers have rejected calls to extend provision to more pupils. In England, children whose families claim universal credit are only entitled to free school meals if their earnings are less than £7,400 a year after tax. This threshold has been frozen at the same level since it was introduced in 2018. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this means 1.7million pupils in England whose families are entitled to universal credit are not eligible for free lunches, worth about £460 per pupil per year. The report found that the salary cut-off means that parents earning near the £7,400 income cap are being discouraged from earning a little more as it would mean losing their access to free meals. The Mirror is campaigning for more children to get free school meals For a single parent with two school-aged children, this “cliff edge” means … [Read more...] about Barmy rule that means parents on Universal Credit better off if they cut hours at work

The great hope of every health care reformer is that better care will mean cheaper care. The three leading Democrats running for president have all put this idea at the center of their plans. Rudy Giuliani, the first Republican candidate to offer some health care ideas, has talked about it, too. The theory goes like this: By practicing preventive medicine, doctors can keep many people from getting sick in the first place. Those who do end up with a chronic illness will be closely tracked so that fewer of them develop complications. These steps will result in less illness, which in turn will require less health care. With the savings, the country can then lower its medical bills or provide health insurance for the 40-odd million people who lack it — or maybe even both. As Hillary Clinton recently told The Atlantic, it’s possible to “save money and improve quality and cover everybody.” The would-be reformers have hit on something important here. The current health care system … [Read more...] about Free Lunch on Health? Think Again

On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.” Bush’s Woodridge … [Read more...] about What It Takes to Make a Student

Back in the 1980s , two young Harvard professors trying to reinvigorate the Democratic Party would meet at the Wursthaus restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., to have lunch and argue with each other. They must have made for an entertaining sight, one of them bearish and the other less than five feet tall, debating each other in a dark Harvard Square dive. The argument, in a nutshell, came to this. The smaller man — Robert Reich, a future secretary of labor — argued for something that he called “industrial policy.” Since the government couldn’t avoid having a big influence on the economy, he said, it should at least do so in a way that promoted fast-growing industries and invested in worthy public projects. The bearish professor was Lawrence H. Summers, who was then the youngest person to have received tenure in the modern history of Harvard University. He loved to tackle big, broad questions, and, by his lights, industrial policy amounted to another version of the governmental meddling … [Read more...] about Larry Summers’s Evolution

Healer to the stars Mosaraf Ali is facing a High Court lawsuit from a former patient who claims that the treatment he received at Ali's clinic resulted in the amputation of both legs. Despite having helped Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, to stop smoking, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson to quit cocaine and Geri Halliwell to lose weight, Ali's credentials are under question. Ali combines Eastern therapies with more traditional forms of healthcare. He uses the title "doctor" but the General Medical Council (GMC), which registers doctors in this country, claims he isn't registered with it and says it's a courtesy title, which anyone with medical or academic qualifications - which Ali has - can use. This isn't the only recent scandal regarding alternative or complementary medicine. Last month £800,000 was awarded to Dawn Page who suffered brain injury following a "six pints of water a day" detox diet on the advice of a nutritional therapist. And earlier in the year PhD student Ling Wang died … [Read more...] about Stay safe if you go alternative

Everything is more expensive these days—even tap water. U.S. water utility prices have been rising faster than general inflation , driven in large part by a need to replace and update aging infrastructure. New regulations to remove "forever chemicals" from drinking water will surely drive costs even higher. Although these investments are needed, low-income households can struggle to afford this essential service. That concern propelled Congress to introduce the first federal Low Income Household Water Assistance Program (LIHWAP) in 2020. Administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), LIHWAP was an emergency measure to aid a nation reeling from COVID-19. The program is set to expire at the end of this year, and some in Congress are calling to make LIHWAP a permanent, ongoing program. Before making LIHWAP a permanent part of America's alphabet soup of anti-poverty programs, we ought to consider a simpler approach to water assistance: allowing … [Read more...] about Helping People Pay Their Sky-High Water Bills Is a SNAP

An emerging treatment for a common hospital-acquired infection could be (slightly) less gross in the future. Researchers have found that delivering a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) in a pill—a poop pill, basically—is no worse than a similar procedure done with a colonoscopy. Neither option may sound particularly enticing, but FMTs are wildly effective at treating a very nasty infection called Clostridium difficile. One of the first controlled clinical trials for FMTs in 2013 ended early because the patients who received the treatment were doing so much better than patients who didn't. In the new study, almost 90 percent of adults treated with the capsules were cured. "It's absolutely insane. We just don't see kind of efficacy with drugs," Dr. Dina Kao told Newsweek . Kao is one of the authors of the paper and a gastroenterologist at the University of Alberta. Kao and her colleagues published the findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday. C. … [Read more...] about Fecal Transplants Can Be Given Through a Pill

Research on the microbiome continues to prove the age-old claim that "you are what you eat." Countless studies suggest the trillions of tiny bugs that make their home in a person's gut have some influence on nearly every aspect of health, especially the likelihood of becoming severely overweight and developing obesity-related conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. A new study published June 8 in Nature suggests altering the makeup of gut microbes could be an effective way to address weight and related problems. Though plenty of researchers have made this claim before, this is the first study to specifically identify the mechanism by which changes in a person's gut microbes influences the likelihood for developing obesity and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that include high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist and abnormal cholesterol levels. In studies on mice, researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine found that … [Read more...] about Altered Gut Microbiome Linked to Obesity

Tech & Science Environmental Health Your skin is teeming with microbes. Millions of them. From the perspective of these tiny organisms, the surface of your body is their living, breathing habitat. This living layer is part of what's called the human microbiome—the collective genomes of all the "foreign" microorganisms that live in the human body—and research on it has exploded in recent years. But within microbiome research is a brand-new field that is just beginning to understand a stunning fact: Your microbiome extends beyond yourself, into the air around you. It hovers in a cloud around your body and leaves bits of itself on surfaces wherever you go. In short, you have an aura, except it isn't made of purplish light; it's your personal cloud of dead skin cells, fungus and many, many microbes. And researchers are learning to be able to identify you by it. "You know the dirty kid from Peanuts? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like that," says James Meadow, a data … [Read more...] about Auras Are Real, and Yours Looks Like Pig-Pen’s

World Donald Trump North Korea Kim Jong Un Nuclear In the long view of history, North Korea getting a nuclear-tipped intercontinental missile in 2017 is the rough equivalent of an army showing up for World War II riding horses and shooting muskets. Nukes are so last century. War is changing, driven by cyberweapons, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots. Weapons of mass destruction are dumb, soon to be whipped by smart weapons of pinpoint disruption—which nations can use without risking annihilation of the human race. If the U.S. is innovative and forward-thinking, it can develop technology that ensures no ill-behaving government could ever get a nuke off the ground. Then we might be able to relax and return to laughing at Kim Jong Un for looking like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man topped by a small furry mammal. This is the argument in a new book , Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules of War , by international law … [Read more...] about Trump Can Destroy N. Korea’s Nukes Without a Land War