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States reconsider religious exemptions for vaccinations in child care

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

Matt Volz | KFF Health News (TNS)More than half the children who attend Munchkin Land Daycare near Billings, Montana, have special needs or compromised immune systems. The kids, who range in age from 4 months to 9 years, have conditions that include fetal alcohol syndrome, cystic fibrosis, and Down syndrome, according to owner Sheryl Hutzenbiler.“These families came to me knowing we could offer them a safe and healthy environment,” Hutzenbiler said. Part of ensuring that healthy environment is having a strong vaccination policy, she said, especially for those who are immunocompromised or too young to receive the full slate of childhood vaccines.So, when officials at Montana’s health department revived a proposal that would allow people to claim religious exemptions from immunization requirements at child care facilities, Hutzenbiler was both dismayed and relieved. Dismayed, because allowing more children to claim exemptions could compromise the community immunity levels necessary to...

Will the Fed raise interest rates one more time this year? Some economists aren’t convinced

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

Lane Gillespie | Bankrate.com (TNS)Consumers and investors were spared from a 12th rate hike when Federal Reserve officials voted in November to keep their benchmark borrowing rate steady.Don’t take the pause as an indication that officials are ready to sound the all-clear on their firefight against inflation.Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s main message after the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) November rate decision was that officials are not yet sure they’ve raised interest rates enough to quell inflation. That’s even as the Fed’s key borrowing benchmark sits at a 22-year high of 5.25%-5.5%.In economic projections last updated in September, officials indicated to Fed watchers that one more increase is on the table for this year. If approved, the move would bring the Fed’s key benchmark interest rate to a new 22-year high of 5.5%-5.75%. It could also possibly be the last rate hike. Just one official sees rates rising higher than that next year, those projections show.Those project...

A lighter lasagna that still packs a cheesy punch

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

Suddenly, we are experiencing cooler weather; holiday season is around the corner and more substantial dishes start landing on my dinner table. Lasagna was always one of those dishes but over the past couple of years it began to feel a bit too rich with all that cheese. Everything changed, though, when I made this Chicken and Mushroom Lasagna recipe, which I adapted from Gourmet magazine. It certainly satisfies any lingering lasagna cravings without having to take a nap after the meal.The flavor reminded me of a pizza I ate in a small Italian restaurant in Mill Valley years ago. Chicken was an uncommon item on pizza back then, and my husband and I were immediately hooked. For months after that, we ate it almost weekly.This lasagna has the same delicious combination of chicken and mushrooms along with a cheesy white sauce that gives this dish a luscious flavor. Like a traditional lasagna, there are a few steps, but you can double the recipe for another meal or two and even freeze it....

US childhood vaccination exemptions reach their highest level ever

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

By MIKE STOBBE (AP Medical Writer)NEW YORK (AP) — The proportion of U.S. kindergartners exempted from school vaccination requirements has hit its highest level ever, 3%, U.S. health officials said Thursday.More parents are questioning routine childhood vaccinations that they used to automatically accept, an effect of the political schism that emerged during the pandemic around COVID-19 vaccines, experts say.Even though more kids were given exemptions, the national vaccination rate held steady: 93% of kindergarteners got their required shots for the 2022-2023 school year, the same as the year before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Thursday. The rate was 95% in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.“The bad news is that it’s gone down since the pandemic and still hasn’t rebounded,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a University of Colorado pediatric infectious diseases specialist. “The good news is that the vast majority...

Donald Trump’s lawyers ask ‘directed verdict’ ending civil fraud trial in the ex-president’s favor

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and JENNIFER PELTZ (Associated Press)NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump’s lawyers made a longshot bid Thursday to put an immediate end to the New York civil fraud trial that threatens his real estate empire, arguing that state lawyers had failed to prove that the former president intended to dupe banks, insurers and others by inflating his wealth on financial statements.Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Arthur Engoron to clear the 2024 Republican front-runner, his namesake company and other defendants of wrongdoing at the halfway point in the trial of state Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit.“There’s no victim. There’s no complainant. There’s no injury. All of that is established now by the evidence,” Trump lawyer Christopher Kise said. He argued that state lawyers had failed to meet “any legal standard” to prove allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records.State lawyer Kevin...

‘The monsters and opioids had her.’ N.S. minister describes daughter’s addiction

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

HALIFAX — The scourge that is Canada’s opioid addiction crisis was laid bare in the Nova Scotia legislature this week as politicians of every stripe rose to share personal stories about their struggles with this notorious class of drugs.As members of the house of assembly prepared late Wednesday to vote on a bill aimed at holding opioid manufacturers more accountable for their actions, Progressive Conservative John White described how he became addicted to opioid painkillers in 2005 after he was struck by a drunk driver.“I was in my own world,” he told a hushed legislature. “I’d rub my face, and it felt like somebody else’s face. Nothing around me mattered to me.” The member for Glace Bay-Dominion, a hardscrabble riding in eastern Cape Breton, recalled the moment he told his doctor he wanted to end his drug dependence.“I remember lying in bed in a fetal position, and I didn’t know if I was going to see the morning,” he said...

Emhoff visits New York’s Cornell University as he seeks to reassure Jewish community after threats

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, met with students and administrators at Cornell University on Thursday to offer support to the school’s Jewish community after threats of violence amid Israel’s war against Hamas.Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of a nationally elected U.S. leader, met with the university president, chief of police and other administrators, and hosted a roundtable with Jewish students in the same kosher dining hall that was forced to closed due to the threats.A Cornell junior was a arrested last month for allegedly leaving threatening messages on a Greek life website unaffiliated with the school in Ithaca, New York. They included posts calling for the deaths of Jewish people and threatening to “shoot up 104 west,” a university dining hall that caters predominantly to kosher diets and is next to the Cornell Jewish Center. The White House said students shared with Emhoff “their personal experiences and reactions to the threats ...

Bo Hines, who lost a close 2022 election in North Carolina, announces another Congress run

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

MOCKSVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina congressional candidate who narrowly lost in the state’s only U.S. House swing district in 2022 is running in 2024 for a seat in another part of the state. Republican Bo Hines on Thursday filed candidacy papers with federal elections officials and released a video for his bid in the 6th Congressional District. The district covers all or part of a half-dozen Piedmont-area counties, including portions of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Concord. The 6th District is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning, but a redistricting map enacted last month by the GOP-controlled General Assembly retooled its lines so that the district now leans Republican, according to past election results.Hines, 28, ran in the current Raleigh-area 13th District in 2022, but lost in the general election to Democrat Wiley Nickel by 3 percentage points. Hines, a business owner who grew up in Charlotte, played college football and went to Wake Forest Univ...

Powell reinforces Fed’s cautious approach toward further interest rate hikes

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell suggested Thursday that the Fed is in no hurry to further raise its benchmark interest rate, given evidence that inflation pressures are continuing to ease at a gradual pace. At the same time, in a panel discussion at the International Monetary Fund, Powell did not rule out another rate hike to help reduce inflation to the Fed’s 2% target level. “We are not confident,” he said, that the Fed’s benchmark rate is high enough to steadily reduce inflation to its 2% target.Powell added: “We know that ongoing progress toward our 2% goal is not assured. Inflation has given us a few head fakes.”He noted, for example, that inflation had declined for five straight months during 2021 before reversing later that year and heading higher.Powell said that “if it becomes appropriate” to raise rates further, “we will not hesitate to do so” but said that for now it isn’t ”appropriate” to increase the Fed’s benchmark ra...

123 migrants found trapped in a trailer in central Mexico

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:48:07 GMT

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Authorities found 123 Central and South American migrants trapped in a trailer in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico’s immigration agency said Thursday. Officials from the state attorney general’s office found the migrants in Matehuala, a city on the border of Nuevo Leon, on Wednesday after a local reported hearing cries for help from a locked trailer box.The majority of migrants rescued were from the Central American nations of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as four from Ecuador and one Cuban, according to Mexico’s National Immigration Institute. Among them were 34 children.The immigration agency did not say how the migrants came to be stuck there nor where they were heading, but such groups of migrants typically hope to reach the United States.The same day police in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas arrested three alleged human smugglers after finding 11 Guatemalan migrants trapped i...