When Brittany, a 41-year-old single mom in Tennessee, recently underwent a recertification process for benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, she was told that because of her income she no longer qualified for the $500 a month she had been getting for herself and her two children. It didn’t make sense to Brittany, who asked to go by her first name because of privacy concerns: She makes $16 an hour as a medical assistant. Between the cost of rent, gas and groceries, she worries how she will manage Christmas for her kids. “If there wasn’t breakfast and lunch available at school, we probably would be hungry some of that time throughout the month,” she said.

Brittany’s children receive free school meals, which have always helped schools and families meet children’s nutritional needs and overall health. As the effects of H.R. 1, which included the largest cuts to SNAP in history, continue to hit households amid an affordability crisis, those school meals are increasingly a lifeline. And those vital programs are under threat as well.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 1.5 million children have lost access to SNAP since H.R. 1 was signed into law. As the school year began, families were paying more for groceries on top of increased costs for school supplies, and schools, many facing cuts to resources, have been working to close gaps. But the effects of SNAP cuts are stretching beyond homes and into schools, where teachers are noticing hunger affecting students’ ability to learn.

Kolbe Ricks, a teacher and coach at a Texas school where more than 90% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, said every teacher she knows has a snack drawer, because if kids aren’t fed, they can’t learn.

“Cuts to SNAP hurt school meals,” said Erin Hysom, a senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research & Action Center. “The cuts to SNAP will not only increase hunger in homes, but they’ll also increase hunger in the classroom.”

Ebony Webster, a mom and an educator in Colorado, doesn’t qualify for SNAP benefits. But, she said, “I don’t make enough to buy school food” for her three children. Colorado’s recent expansion of its school breakfast and lunch program, Healthy School Meals for All, could not come at a better time for her family. “I am grateful as a mom that my kids can get breakfast and lunch for free,” she said.

In the classroom, she has noticed students asking for more food, or for leftovers of a friend’s meal. Sometimes the free school meals are the only ones students get, she said. Webster is a board member of the Southeast Food Coalition, which partners with the nonprofit group Hunger Free Colorado. With SNAP access decreasing, she has seen an increase in community need for food pantries. “The lines are longer, the big groups are bigger, because there’s a need and it’s worse now than before,” she said.

Kolbe Ricks, a teacher and coach at a Texas school where more than 90% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, said every teacher she knows has a snack drawer, because if kids aren’t fed, they can’t learn. “So when kids come to class hungry, we have to feed them, if we want them, one, to just be taken care of as humans, but two, if we want them to actually be ready to learn,” she said.

Using an Amazon wish list, Ricks’ family, friends and wider community helped her supply snacks for her students this year. She never says no, but students have to ask, just to make sure it’s not a free-for-all where food ends up going to waste. The box, which she estimated had about $200 to $300 worth of snacks, was completely wiped out within the first nine weeks of school. The school and its parent-teacher association have partnered with a local organization to set up events offering to distribute free fruit and vegetables. At the first, people were lined up before it opened, and the food was gone in about 30 minutes.

“I just wish people realize how harmful it is to further marginalize people that are already struggling with resources,” Ricks said. “You don’t need to know the details of their story, like this kid that didn’t eat for two days because their family couldn’t buy groceries — you shouldn’t have to hear that in order to want to help people.”

When schools pass policies that provide healthy school meals for all, teachers report better classroom behavior, fewer visits to the school nurse, and improved attendance and math and reading scores.

In Baltimore, Cindy Camp cares for her 91-year-old mother and her 9-, 11- and 14-year-old grandchildren while their mother faces health challenges. The grandchildren get free lunch at school, and the family sometimes visits its food resource center. “They love to go there and they get the off-brand green beans,” Camp said. “Sometimes I use the dry milk. Sometimes the off-brand macaroni and cheese has come in handy.”

“Without SNAP, we would not make it at all,” Camp said.

For families with children in school, the cuts and increased barriers to accessing SNAP benefits create a twofold struggle: Losing SNAP benefits increases hunger at home, and the cuts can also affect a school’s ability to feed children. According to Hysom, children who live in households that receive SNAP benefits are automatically eligible for free school meals. A process known as “direct certification” links eligible children to free school meals without the need for a separate application. This removes the paperwork burden for both schools and families, Hysom explained, and lessens stigma and shame.

“So when children fall off SNAP rosters, first and foremost, their direct link to free school meals is severed,” Hysom said. “Eligible children will fall through the cracks.”

As more children lose SNAP access and aren’t directly certified, that in turn has an impact on a school’s overall ability to implement the Community Eligibility Provision, which lets schools serving families with low incomes offer free breakfast and lunch to all students at no charge. Offering all students free school meals is the most efficient way to operate a school nutrition program, Hysom said, and when a school adopts a CEP, or a state passes a school-meals-for-all policy, participation in school meals increases.

A report from the School Nutrition Association found that school districts that must charge for meals report increased school meal debt and more students going hungry. Loss of free school meals would also create a significant cost burden to families, according to the Center for American Progress, deepening an already existing crisis.

Amy Evans, a Title I reading intervention assistant in Illinois, said her school still qualifies under the Community Eligibility Provision. But her school is still seeing the impact of the reduction in SNAP benefits for families. “It just affects everything,” Evans said. “Because if you lose your eligibility for SNAP, then you lose your eligibility for school meals, then you lose eligibility for registration and sports fees and all of those other things that people could qualify for.”

It’s a crisis, but not one without solutions, according to experts. When schools pass policies that provide healthy school meals for all, teachers report better classroom behavior, fewer visits to the school nurse, and improved attendance and math and reading scores, said Hysom. “We know the solution to ending school day hunger,” she said. “It’s offering all children free school meals. The way they do that is repealing the SNAP cuts and passing the Universal School Meals Program Act.”

What’s perhaps most concerning is that this is only the “tip of the iceberg,” according to Hysom. There are already reports of schools losing the Community Eligibility Provision in Kentucky, Florida, Texas and other states. The fallout of this crisis is still unfolding, hurting schools and families alike. “The negative effects of these SNAP cuts are going to be felt by children and in schools for years to come,” Hysom said.

The post SNAP cuts are hurting schools too — and the crisis is growing appeared first on MS NOW.

Before I walked into Milwaukee County Stadium in 1982, I had never been to a professional sporting event. I was 9 years old, and I can vividly recall being overwhelmed by the lights and the number of people there. The first-place Milwaukee Brewers were playing the Oakland A’s, and Rickey Henderson tied the record for most stolen bases in a season. The Brewers would go on to play in the World Series that year, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in an epic seven-game series, and even though we didn’t get to celebrate a championship, I imagined a full life of cheering on a winning team.

It was the last time the Brewers would make the playoffs for 26 years. During that time, I grew hardened, believing I would die before I ever saw the Brewers return to the World Series. Bad personnel moves and a payroll that couldn’t match the league’s top-tier teams made winning seem like mere folly. Fans showed up at the games to cheer on the racing sausages more than the actual players on the field.

Yet when the Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays open the World Series on Friday, both teams’ highest-paid players will earn salaries rivaling the price of the animatronic bird that Kelly Clarkson so desperately desired. Neither franchise spends like a superpower. Neither plays in a media capital. And neither got here by doing what most of baseball has decided is the only way to win.

It would be tempting to cast these two teams as rebels against the analytics nerds, a pair of stubborn traditionalists sticking it to the spreadsheet. It would also be wrong.

The Brewers won a franchise-record 103 games, then swept the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers — a hedge fund masquerading as a baseball team — in the National League Championship Series. Milwaukee is making its first World Series appearance since 1982. The Rays, meanwhile, went 98-64 for the best record in the American League. They did it on a payroll that ranks 25th in baseball and in what is arguably the sport’s toughest division.

It would be tempting to cast these two teams as rebels against the analytics nerds, a pair of stubborn traditionalists sticking it to the spreadsheet. It would also be wrong. The Rays are perhaps the most analytically obsessive organization in professional sports. They treat roster construction the way a quant treats arbitrage. The Brewers’ pitching staff finished second in baseball in strikeouts, because Milwaukee believes in velocity and spin rate as devoutly as anyone in Silicon Valley believes in disruption. Nobody here is burning copies of “Moneyball.”

What these teams have figured out is subtler and more interesting. Analytics is a tool, not a philosophy. And the data, read honestly, keeps pointing back to things your Little League coach told you for free.

Look at how they score. Milwaukee and Tampa Bay finished first and second in the league in batting average. Both were top five in stolen bases. Both were top seven in ERA. The Brewers were tied for second-to-last in home runs, yet they finished second in all of baseball in runs scored. That last fact should be impossible in the modern game, where the prevailing theory holds that you swing as hard as you can, accept the strikeouts and wait for the three-run homer. Milwaukee kept putting the ball in play, taking the extra base and making the defense prove it could make a throw.

This is the real lesson of “Moneyball,” which was never entirely about on-base percentage. It was about finding what the market undervalues. In 2002, that was walks. In 2026, after a generation of front offices poured money into training hitters to focus on exit velocity and launch angles, the undervalued asset turns out to be the player who makes contact. Or the one who can play three positions. Or who goes first-to-third on a single. When every team bids up the same skill, the bargain bin overflows with fundamentals.

Call it situational hitting, tight defense and multidimensional players. Not long ago, that was just called “baseball.” It is also, not incidentally, more fun to watch. A ball in play is a play. A strikeout, a walk or a solo homer is an event the other eight fielders watch like spectators.

Contrast this with the New York Yankees, who have spent roughly the GDP of Lithuania assembling a lineup of lumbering sluggers. Their approach is built on the assumption that baseball is a home run derby with occasional defensive interruptions. It produces impressive highlight reels and October collapses in roughly equal measure.

Call it situational hitting, tight defense and multidimensional players. Not long ago, that was just called “baseball.” It is also, not incidentally, more fun to watch.

A lesson here extends well beyond the diamond. American institutions have spent the last decade optimizing for the home run. In politics, the cable news haymaker, the floor speech engineered for clips, the fundraising email written in all caps are all big swings meant to circumvent the actual work of legislating. Both parties have come to treat governing as something staffers do between appearances: passing a budget on time, staffing an agency competently and filling the potholes are the sacrifice bunts of public life. Nobody makes a highlight package out of them, and so nobody gets paid to do them.

But the scoreboard does not care about the highlight package. Teams that strike out 1,600 times a year still lose in October to pitchers who can deliciously locate pitches on the corners. And governments that specialize in outrage still find, eventually, that outrage does not deliver the mail. Competence is unglamorous until it becomes the only thing that matters.

The Brewers and Rays have shown that you can use every modern tool available and still respect what the old tools were for. Data told them where the inefficiencies were. Discipline let them exploit those inefficiencies. That combination is rarer than it should be, in baseball and everywhere else.

So whichever team wins, the 2026 World Series will crown a franchise that refused to confuse flash with substance. In a culture that increasingly prefers entertainment to competence, that alone qualifies as a revolutionary act, even if it looks a lot like the game your grandfather used to watch.

The post Why the Brewers-Rays World Series matchup is a revolution for Major League Baseball appeared first on MS NOW.

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Federal agents took possession of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s laptop and personal cellphone when they raided her Washington home last week. While some members of the GOP leadership team have taken potshots at the Minnesota Democrat, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., ought to stand up for her rights as a congresswoman — now.

Pay no attention to the flimsy allegations driving the Trump administration’s investigation into Omar’s immigration paperwork. (The Washington Post reported said allegations were investigated and abandoned years ago.) What we have is the executive branch raiding a member of Congress’s home because of her race and politics. And yet, Politico reported Wednesday that Johnson had not instructed the House’s top lawyer, Matthew Berry, to intervene on Omar’s behalf.

What we have is the executive branch raiding a congressmember’s home because of her race and politics.

MS NOW host Chris Hayes, who interviewed Omar for “All In” on Thursday, raised her attorneys’ claim that the Justice Department violated her rights as a member of the House. Article I, Section 6, clause 1 of the Constitution protects all members of Congress from being prosecuted for “any Speech or Debate in either House.” Supreme Court rulings and other precedents have extended that protection to almost all “legislative acts” federal lawmakers undertake when drafting laws and ruled that it shields their staffers and any documents produced as part of their official duties.

Omar said the agents who searched her home asked her to sign a document essentially waiving her rights under the speech and debate clause.

“That was obnoxious,” she said. “I just I couldn’t understand why they would think that I would sign such a thing.”

The legislative branch has an incentive to call out what happened to Omar. Lawmakers need the freedom to openly debate ideas and policies, especially those the president favors, without the threat of the chief executive jailing them for disagreeing. That’s why the House as an institution has often intervened and fought to protect its members from executive overreach — even if it means lawmakers crossing the aisle.

Federal investigators seized the phone of Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., in August 2022 as they investigated President Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Perry was one of the House Republicans most involved with Trump’s attempt to discard enough Electoral College votes to triumph after losing the 2020 election.

The House filed a motion in early 2023 to access sealed material case to ensure that Perry’s speech and debate clause rights were protected. Soon after, Berry, the House’s general counsel, filed an amicus brief arguing that the speech and debate clause applied to the contents of Perry’s phone and any “informal fact gathering” he might have been doing. Though Perry’s early involvement with Trump’s scheme to overturn the election made him a valid target for investigation, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and House Minority Whip Kathleen Clark, D-Mass., signed off on the House’s intervention. According to the rules of the House, their support wasn’t necessary, but a bipartisan front sent a powerful message to the courts.

It’s because of Perry’s case that personal phones are now considered an extension of lawmakers’ offices. Accordingly, Omar is within her rights to review the materials seized to ensure any legislative work stays out of the DOJ’s hands.

Republicans have spent four years hammering special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation, especially his subpoenas of some members’ phone records (though not the actual contents of those calls). Just last month, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee accused Smith and the Biden-era DOJ of violating the speech and debate clause in the process.

The House GOP should keep that same energy for Attorney General Todd Blanche and the seizure of Omar’s devices. But House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, a fellow Minnesotan, told Fox News that he was all for the investigation without raising any separation of powers concerns. And with a potentially rocky midterms looming, Johnson may be afraid that coming to Omar’s defense will cost him his leadership over the GOP caucus.

But no matter how useful Omar is to the GOP as a foil, Johnson should instruct Berry to ensure that Omar’s rights as a legislator are being protected. Even if Emmer and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise disagree, Johnson voting with Jeffries and Clark would be enough to set the ball rolling. While he may seem to act like a member of the White House staff, Johnson’s responsibility to protect the rights and privileges of Ilhan Omar, House representative, should supersede any misgivings he holds against Ilhan Omar, Democrat.

The post Mike Johnson needs to speak up for Ilhan Omar appeared first on MS NOW.

Journalist Bernard Goldberg criticizes President Donald Trump's perceived affinity for Vladimir Putin and his stance on the war in Ukraine, arguing that such diplomacy undermines American values and harms both nations.

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The post News Review: Housing for Teachers, Vandalism Not Helping & Lithium Mining Relief  appeared first on Portugal Resident.

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