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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama plans to ask Congress for $12 billion over a decade to help feed schoolchildren from low-income families during the summer, the White House said Wednesday.
The request will be in the 2017 budget proposal Obama plans to send lawmakers on Feb. 9.
Nearly 22 million low-income children receive free and reduced-price meals during the school year, but just a fraction of those kids receive meals when school is out. The disparity puts those children at higher risk of hunger and poor nutrition during the summer months when school is out of session, the White House said.
Benefits under the proposed program would be loaded onto a debit card that can only be used for food at grocery stores.
A child nutrition bill the Senate approved last week would also put more money into summer feeding programs.
The Agriculture Department on Wednesday was announcing a pilot program to increase access to the National School Lunch program by reducing the paperwork their parents must file in order to participate. Under the demonstration program, states will be allowed to use Medicaid data to certify students for free and reduced-price lunches.
States must apply to participate. The department expects to approve five states to participate during the 2016-2017 school year, expanding to 20 states over the next three years.
Both proposals were unveiled as the White House sponsored a forum Wednesday on child hunger in the U.S.
FLINT, Mich. (AP) — Environmental and civil rights groups want a federal judge to order the prompt replacement of all lead pipes in Flint's water system to ensure that residents have a safe drinking supply, a demand that Gov. Rick Snyder said on Wednesday might be a long-term option but not an immediate one.
A lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks an order forcing city and state officials to remedy alleged violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, including a failure to properly treat the water for corrosion, test it for lead, notify residents of results and accurately report if the correct sample sites are being selected. Flint residents are currently unable to drink unfiltered tap water, and tests have shown high lead levels in some children's blood.
"The only way to permanently and completely fix the problem of lead in drinking water is to conduct the full replacement of the lead-containing pipes and solder in a water system," said Sarah Tallman, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. The group filed the complaint on behalf of citizens along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Concerned Pastors for Social Action and Melissa Mays, a Flint resident.
Gov. Rick Snyder's administration has estimated it could cost up to $55 million to repair what officials have estimated are 15,000 damaged lead service lines leading from water mains to homes and other buildings. The complaint says the pipes should be replaced at no cost to customers.
Snyder, speaking at a news conference in Flint, said "a lot of work is being done to even understand where the lead services lines fully are. ... The short-term issue is about recoating the pipes and that will be based on third-party experts saying the water is safe."
He announced that the state would have an increased administrative presence in Flint and called it the beginning of a long-term effort. And Flint Mayor Karen Weaver said she hired a Virginia Tech professor whose extensive testing helped bring the city's lead problems to light.
Marc Edwards will oversee all water testing done by the state and federal governments. She added that he will be "fully independent," report to her and get paid through private donations.
She also touched on the issue of residents' water bills. A spending bill pending in the state Senate includes $3 million to help the city with unpaid water bills.
"Flint residents should not have to pay for water they did not and are not using," Weaver said. "Once we have more accurate numbers from the Flint Water Department, we will revisit what is right for our citizens."
The suit names as defendants the city of Flint, state Treasurer Nick Khouri — who continues to have budget powers as the city transitions away from state management — state-appointed officials on the Flint's Receivership Transition Advisory Board and city administrator Natasha Henderson, who was hired by one of Flint's former emergency managers. They could not immediately be reached for comment.
It remains unclear how badly the pipes were damaged after the decision in 2014 to use the Flint River as the city's drinking water source without adding a chemical to control corrosion. That caused lead to leech into the water for a year and a half and contributed to the spike in child lead exposure before state and officials fully acknowledged the problem in early October.
Flint has reconnected to Detroit's water system while awaiting the completion of a new pipeline from Lake Huron.
The suit expresses doubt about whether the city can maintain optimal corrosion treatment when it switches to the new water source later this year.
Much of the blame for the emergency has been put on the state Department of Environmental Quality because staff told Flint water officials not to treat it for corrosion until after two six-month monitoring periods. But the suit also focuses on problems with the city's monitoring of lead. It alleges the city is not providing comprehensive, reliable information to identify locations with lead lines and is under-testing homes with a higher risk of lead exposure.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week issued an emergency order directing the state to take actions to protect public health and said it would begin sampling and analyzing lead levels. Michigan's interim top environmental regulator said his agency would comply but contended that many of the actions have already been undertaken and questioned the order's legality.
Snyder said in recent days that his administration has requested assistance from EPA experts. A task force he created also has recommended that an unbiased third party declare when the water is safe to drink again without a filter.
At least three other suits have been filed since the crisis was exposed in the fall. Two seek class-action status and financial compensation; another asks a judge to declare that users do not have to pay their water bills.
NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists pursuing the biological roots of schizophrenia have zeroed in on a potential factor — a normal brain process that gets kicked into overdrive. The finding could someday lead to ways to treat the disease or even prevent it.
The result — accomplished by analysis of genetics, autopsy brain tissue and laboratory mice — is "going to be a game-changer" in terms of understanding schizophrenia and offering routes for treatment and potential for prevention, said Bruce Cuthbert, acting deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the research.
An expert unconnected to the research said the study's conclusion was not yet proven, but plausible.
Almost 1 percent of the general population will have schizophrenia at some point in their lives. They may hear voices or hallucinate, talk about strange ideas, and believe others are reading their minds or plotting against them.
Nobody knows what causes the disorder, so the new result offers a possible peek into a black box. The work is reported in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature.
The finding might pertain to "a very substantial fraction of cases, maybe most cases, even," said senior author Steven McCarroll, of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The result links schizophrenia risk to a problem with a normal process that happens in adolescence and early adulthood, when disease symptoms often appear. That age range is when the brain trims back the number of specialized places on brain cells where the cells signal each other, called synapses. The new work suggests a connection to schizophrenia when this process gets out of hand, deleting too many synapses.
"It's like you have a gardener who was supposed to prune the bushes and just got overactive," Cuthbert observed. "You end up with bushes that are pruned way too much."
The result doesn't mean over-pruning causes schizophrenia on its own. It could promote the disease in combination with other factors in the brain, McCarroll said.
The work began with a genetic investigation. Previous analysis of the human DNA indicates over 100 places that influence the risk of getting schizophrenia, but detailed biological explanations for those influences are very rare. The new work identified a risk gene and found evidence for the over-pruning idea.
Drawing on DNA data from 28,799 people with schizophrenia and 35,986 people without it, the researchers found that a gene called C4 can raise a person's risk by about 30 percent over that of the general population.
The gene comes in several forms, and researchers examining brain tissue found evidence that the forms that pose the most risk of schizophrenia were also the most active in the brain. In lab mice, they found that the gene plays a key role in pruning synapses.
The study doesn't directly demonstrate that that excessive pruning of synapses plays a role in schizophrenia, but the idea makes sense, McCarroll said. It ties together previous observations, among them that schizophrenia most often develops during youth and that patients' brains show unusually few synapses, he said.
Dr. Kenneth Kendler, a schizophrenia genetics expert at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond who didn't participate in the project, said the work presents an impressive array of results. The evidence that C4 can raise schizophrenia risk is strong, he said. The proposal that it does so through excessive pruning of synapses is "plausible and interesting, but not yet fully convincing," he said.
"We don't yet know (whether) their hypothesis is completely true," Kendler said, but the work is still "a pretty big deal."
If it's true, scientist can think about finding drugs that would intervene, McCarroll said. They might be useful to give when young people show symptoms that suggest they may be on the road to developing schizophrenia, he said. And even after the diagnosis, such drugs might keep the disease from getting worse, he said.
But any such treatments are years away, he cautioned.