By GEOFF MULVIHILL and MICHAEL CASEY, Associated Prses

President Donald Trump’s administration now says that SNAP food aid for November will be reduced less than originally announced, the latest in a political and legal saga that impacts how about 1 in 8 Americans can buy groceries.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a court filing late Wednesday that it caught an error in its earlier plan to reduce the maximum benefit by half and said that beneficiaries would instead get up to 65% of their usual assistance.

But some people will see deeper cuts, with some receiving no benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program for November. If the government shutdown continues into December, there’s not a plan for funding at all.

The benefit cards could be loaded as soon as Friday in Louisiana and will take longer in most states.

A volunteer reaches for a box of tomatoes during a food distribution at the San Antonio Food Ban for SNAP recipients and other households affected by the federal shutdown, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Administration says the cuts won’t be as deep — after a series of twists and turns

What the nation’s nearly 42 million people who receive the food aid can expect has been in flux for weeks.

The Trump administration said last month that it would not pay benefits at all for November because of the federal shutdown. Last week, two judges ordered the government to pay at least partial benefits using an emergency fund. On Monday, the administration said it would not use additional money — but that the required fund had enough to cover half the usual benefits for November.

The next day, Trump appeared to threaten not to pay the benefit s at all unless Democrats in Congress agreed to reopen the government. His press secretary later said that the partial benefits were being paid for November — and that it is future payments that are at risk if the shutdown continues.

Late Wednesday, the USDA, which runs the program, said in a filing in federal court in Rhode Island that it had done further analysis and found that the maximum benefit will be 65% of the usual amount.

Speaking at the Greater Boston Food Bank in Massachusetts Thursday morning, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said the Trump administration is sending mixed messages: “Come on. You know, you’re going to partially fund food for Americans? You’re going let people starve?”

Volunteers help load vehicles during a food distribution at the San Antonio Food Bank for SNAP recipients and other households affected by the federal sutdown, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

The benefit reduction math means most households will see cuts of more than 35%

While SNAP reductions like this have never come into play, there is a decades-old federal regulation for how they should be carried out.

Under the formula, benefits are reduced by 35% for households receiving the maximum amount. And households of the same size would have benefits reduced by the same dollar amount. For a family of three, the benefit would be reduced by $275. For a person living alone, it would drop by $105, according to an analysis by Ben Molin, who runs SNAP Screener, a website about benefits.

That means that the lowest-income families would be impacted the least. An analysis by the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that in the 12 months that ended in September 2024, just over one-third of beneficiaries received the maximum amount.

There’s another wrinkle, which applies only to households with one or two people: Their minimum benefit would be $16. Some bigger households are in line to receive nothing for November.

Carmel Scaife, a former day care owner in Milwaukee who hasn’t been able to work since receiving multiple severe injuries in a car accident seven years ago, said she normally receives $130 a month from SNAP. She said that despite bargain hunting, that’s not nearly enough for a month’s worth of groceries.

Scaife, 56, said that any cuts to her benefit will mean she’ll need to further tap her Social Security income for groceries. “That’ll take away from the bills that I pay,” she said. “But that’s the only way I can survive.”

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When cards will be recharged depends on the state

States are working through the math and systems updates to get partial payments out to beneficiaries.

Louisiana officials have said they could start rolling by Friday, Connecticut and North Carolina by next week. And for some states, it’s unclear. Alabama’s Department of Human Resources said this week that it’s unclear how long it will take. “This will be a cumbersome process, including revised eligibility systems, state notification procedures, and ultimately delayed benefits,” Alabama’s Department of Human Resources said in statement this week.

The USDA warned in a court filing earlier in the week that it could take some states months to get the partial benefits onto debit cards used for the program.

Most states have increased funding for food banks and some have launched programs to provide direct state-funded benefits to SNAP recipients.

Cities and nonprofits ask judge to force full funding

Lawyers for the USDA and the cities and nonprofit groups that sued to keep funding rolling in November were expected to make their cases at a hearing on a request for a judge to require full SNAP funding for the month.

The groups said in a court filing in federal court in Rhode Island that partial benefits would not “adequately remedy the harm.”

The government said it’s using other funding to make sure child nutrition programs can keep running through the shutdown.

“It cannot be arbitrary and capricious for USDA to decline to raid an entirely different program, to the tune of billions of dollars,” the agency said in a filing, “in the mere hope that Congress will fix the ensuing deficit through the general appropriations process.”

Associated Press reporters Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut; and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this article.

By LAURAN NEERGAARD

Doctor after doctor misdiagnosed or shrugged off Ruth Wilson’s rashes, swelling, fevers and severe pain for six years. She saved her life by begging for one more test in an emergency room about to send her home, again, without answers.

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That last-ditch test found the Massachusetts woman’s kidneys were failing. The culprit? Her immune system had been attacking her own body all that time and nobody caught it.

“I just wish there was a better way that patients could get that diagnosis without having to go through all of the pain and all of, like, the dismissiveness and the gaslighting,” she said.

Wilson has lupus, nicknamed the disease of 1,000 faces for its variety of symptoms — and her journey offers a snapshot of the dark side of the immune system. Lupus is one of a rogues’ gallery of autoimmune diseases that affect as many as 50 million Americans and millions more worldwide – hard to treat, on the rise and one of medicine’s biggest mysteries.

Now, building on discoveries from cancer research and the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists are decoding the biology behind these debilitating illnesses. They’re uncovering pathways that lead to different autoimmune diseases and connections between seemingly unrelated ones – in hopes of attacking the causes, not just the symptoms.

It’s a daunting task. That friendly fire ravages nerves in multiple sclerosis, inflames joints in rheumatoid arthritis, dries out the eyes and mouth in Sjögren’s disease, destroys insulin production in Type 1 diabetes, weakens muscles in myositis and myasthenia gravis — and in lupus, it can cause body-wide havoc.

The list goes on: A new count from the National Institutes of Health tallied 140 autoimmune conditions, many rare but altogether a leading cause of chronic disease that’s often invisible.

“You look normal. People see you and they don’t think you have this horrible disease,” said Wilson, 43, who balances her illness with volunteering to help educate the public and even doctors about life with lupus.

Ruth Wilson, who balances her lupus illness with volunteering to help other patients, puts on makeup as she gets ready for the Walk with Us to Cure Lupus fundraising event, Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

While there’s still an enormous amount to learn, recent steps have some specialists daring to wonder if just maybe, ways to cure or prevent at least some of these diseases are getting closer.

In dozens of clinical trials, scientists are harnessing some of patients’ own immune cells to wipe out wayward ones that fuel lupus and a growing list of other diseases. It’s called CAR-T therapy and early results with these “living drugs” are promising. The first lupus patient was treated in Germany in March 2021 and remains in drug-free remission, the researchers said last month.

And a drug named teplizumab can delay the start of Type 1 diabetes symptoms in people destined to get sick, buying some time before they’ll need insulin. Citing that “tantalizing evidence,” the NIH’s new five-year plan for autoimmune research — if it gets funded — urges pursuing similar windows to intervene in other simmering diseases.

“This is probably the most exciting time that we’ve ever had to be in autoimmunity,” said Dr. Amit Saxena, a rheumatologist at NYU Langone Health.

Inside job

Your immune system has multiple overlapping ways to detect and attack bacteria, viruses or other bad actors. That includes teaching key soldiers — T cells and antibody-producing B cells — how to distinguish what’s foreign from what’s “you.”

It’s a delicate balancing act, especially considering germs sometimes adapt features similar to human molecules so they can confuse and sneak past immune defenses. And while the immune system has built-in safeguards to curtail any misbehaving cells, autoimmune diseases set in when the system gets off-kilter.

A tattoo reading “Never Stop Fighting” decorates the arm of Ruth Wilson, as she receives her monthly lupus-focused IV treatment at UMass Memorial Medical Center, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025, in Worcester, Mass. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Numerous genes involved in different immune functions can make people susceptible to common autoimmune diseases. That means if one family member is sick, others may be at increased risk. Such genes can include variants that once protected our ancestors from long-ago threats including the Black Death but that today can translate into a hyperactive immune system.

But “genes are not everything,” said Dr. Mariana Kaplan of NIH’s National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Studies show if one identical twin develops an autoimmune disease, the other isn’t guaranteed to get sick. Non-genetic factors that trigger an immune response play a big role, such as infections, certain medicines, smoking, pollutants. In lupus, even a bad sunburn is suspect.

“At some point there is a second or third hit and the immune system says, ‘That’s it, I can’t handle any more of these insults,’” said Kaplan, who directs systemic autoimmunity research.

And women are more likely to get autoimmune diseases than men, maybe because of estrogen or their extra X chromosome. That’s especially evident in lupus; women account for 90% of cases, often young ones like Wilson.

Fainting spells and body-wide rashes began in her 20s and intensified with two pregnancies. Youngsters in tow, she saw a variety of doctors for fevers, swelling, joint and back pain until that fateful ER visit when she requested a urine test.

Months of grueling treatment saved her kidneys. But over a decade later, the Littleton, Massachusetts, woman still lives with daily pain from lupus. Deep fatigue and brain fog — difficulty with concentrating, short-term recall, multitasking — wax and wane.

Therapies have improved in recent years, from high-dose steroids and drugs that broadly suppress the immune system to include additional options that focus on specific molecules. Wilson gets a monthly lupus-targeted IV treatment and takes about six daily medicines to calm her overactive immune system and related symptoms.

Worse are what are called flares, when symptoms abruptly and markedly worsen. For Wilson, they bring sudden high fevers, legs too swollen to walk, more intense pain, lasting days to a week. They impact her job at a medical lab and time with her husband, teen son and college-age daughter.

Ruth Wilson, who has lupus, takes a nap after the onset of a migraine and fatigue, as too much sunshine is one of her triggers, while at the beach with family, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025, in South Yarmouth, Mass. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

“It’s not a bad life, it’s just a bad day,” she tells herself to get through.

Kaplan, the NIH scientist, has a biological explanation for the daily slog: The same inflammatory proteins that cause aches and fatigue during a cold or flu continually course through the bodies of patients with systemic autoimmune diseases like lupus.

Hunting the root causes

“These are my babies,” said Dr. Justin Kwong, a research fellow in Kaplan’s lab at NIH, as he carefully examines cells in an incubator.

Kwong is performing something so tricky it’s not done in many laboratories: He’s growing batches of neutrophils, the body’s most common white blood cells.

They are first responders that race to the site of an injury or infection, and Kaplan suspects they’re among the earliest immune cells to run amok and trigger certain autoimmune diseases.

How? Some types of neutrophils spew out their insides to form sticky spider-web like structures that trap and kill germs. The neutrophils die in the process.

But patients with lupus and some other diseases harbor abnormal neutrophils that form too many webs, Kaplan said. Her team is investigating if other immune defenses mistakenly sense the resulting debris as foreign, sparking a chain reaction.

Ruth Wilson, whose lupus took six years to diagnose, receives her monthly lupus-focused IV treatment at UMass Memorial Medical Center, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025, in Worcester, Mass. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

“We think that’s a fundamental initial process,” Kaplan said. “We’re trying to find why it happens, why it happens more often in women, and can we come up with strategies to stop this without harming the way we defend ourselves from infections.”

Another common feature: Patients with a number of autoimmune diseases, especially women, often suffer heart attacks and strokes at unusually young ages. Kaplan’s research suggests those aptly named NETS, or neutrophil extracellular traps, may be key — by damaging blood vessels and spurring hardened arteries typically seen in older people.

But neutrophils don’t live long outside the body and testing mature ones from lupus patients’ blood won’t show how they went awry — something Kwong’s baby neutrophils may aid.

Teasing apart patient differences

Whatever triggers it, lupus has bafflingly varied symptoms and treatments that can keep some patients symptom-free but not others.

That suggests “lupus is not a single disease,” Kaplan said. “What we call lupus probably represents many different conditions that have some common factors.”

How to subtype lupus isn’t clear. But another disease, rheumatoid arthritis, may offer clues. Perhaps best recognized by painfully disfigured fingers, RA can attack any joint and even some organs, sometimes scarring lungs.

Like with lupus, RA treatment is trial-and-error and scientists are exploring different underlying factors to explain why. In one study, an international team used tiny samples of patients’ joint tissue to identify six inflammatory subtypes of RA based on patterns of cells, how they clustered and their activity.

It “changed how we think about the disease,” said Northwestern University rheumatology chief Harris Perlman, one of the coauthors. Now researchers are comparing cells in joint tissue before and after patients start a new drug to see if they could help guide treatment choices, he said.

Living with lupus

Wilson learned to wear sunscreen and a big hat outdoors and how to ration her energy in hopes of avoiding flares. When her kids were old enough for school, she returned, too, getting degrees that led to laboratory research and data science jobs — and a better understanding of her own disease and its treatments.

Ruth Wilson, who has lupus and is sensitive to the sun, stands at the water’s edge while at the beach with family, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2025, in South Yarmouth, Mass. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

One day her then-rheumatologist asked if she’d answer some medical students’ questions. Wilson remembers many knew “what lupus looks like in a textbook” but not the patient perspective.

“I realized, my god, I need to start talking about this.”

What that looks like now: One evening last February, Wilson bubbled with nerves and excitement at finally meeting some members of her online lupus support group. At UMass Chan Medical School, Wilson greeted the two women and two men with hugs. They shared symptoms and treatments — and rueful stories of well-meaning relatives urging them to just get more sleep to combat the lupus fatigue that rest can’t conquer.

A month later, Wilson traveled to Washington for a meeting organized by the Lupus Research Alliance, where she urged scientists and drug company researchers to heed patient reports of changes in their everyday lives, such as whether a new therapy helps brain fog.

Drug studies that measure physical symptoms and blood markers are “only capturing half the story,” she said. “If a treatment allows me to think clearly, to engage in my life, to be the person I know I am beneath all of this, then that is just as important as reducing inflammation.”

Ruth Wilson looks for a parking spot as she arrives for her monthly lupus-focused IV treatment at UMass Memorial Medical Center, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025, in Worcester, Mass. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

While her doctor isn’t recommending experimental treatments yet, Wilson recently joined the Lupus Landmark Study that will track biological samples from 3,500 patients to better understand disease variations. Whenever a flare strikes Wilson pricks her finger for a blood sample to share.

“It’s important for me to also be a voice for patients because I think of myself and how lonely I was at the very beginning,” Wilson said. For a long time, “I never wanted to talk about it. Especially my kids, I wanted them to know that I was going to be OK. And so you put on your makeup and your lipstick and your three shades of eye corrector and you go on.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By CAROLYN THOMPSON

Slime, that gooey, sticky and often-homemade plaything, was enshrined into the National Toy Hall of Fame on Thursday along with perennial bestselling games Battleship and Trivial Pursuit.

Each year, the Hall of Fame recognizes toys that have inspired creative play across generations, culling its finalists from among thousands of nominees sent in online. Voting by the public and a panel of experts decides which playthings will be inducted.

In this photo provided by The Strong National Museum of Play on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025, shows the games that will be inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame for 2025 in Rochester, N.Y. (Evyn Morgan/The Strong National Museum of Play via AP)

Milton Bradley’s Battleship, a strategy game that challenges players to strike an opponent’s warships, and Trivial Pursuit, which tests players’ knowledge in categories like geography and sports, have each sold more than 100 million copies over several decades, according to the Hall of Fame.

Battleship started as a pencil-and-paper game in the 1930s, but it was Milton Bradley’s 1967 plastic edition with fold-up stations and model ships that became a hit with the public. Its popularity crested when Universal Pictures and Hasbro, which now owns Milton Bradley, released the 2012 movie, “Battleship,” loosely based on the game. Battleship was also among the first board games to be computerized in 1979, according to the Hall of Fame, and now there are numerous, electronic versions.

Trivial Pursuit lets players compete alone or in teams as they maneuver around a board answering trivia questions in exchange for wedges in a game piece. Canadian journalists Chris Haney and Scott Abbott came up with the game in 1979 and eventually sold the rights to Hasbro. Frequently updated, specialty versions have emerged for young players, baby boomers and other segments and an online daily quiz keeps players engaged, chief curator Chris Bensch said.

FILE – A Trivial Pursuit game is displayed at the Toy Fair in New York’s Javits Center, Oct. 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

Slime’s appeal is more about squish than skill.

It was introduced commercially in 1976 and has been manufactured under various brand names, but it is even more accessible as a do-it-yourself project. The internet offers a variety of recipes using ingredients like baking soda, glue and contact lens solution.

“Though slime continues to carry icky connotations to slugs and swamps — all part of the fun for some — the toy offers meaningful play,” curator Michelle Parnett-Dwyer said, adding that it’s also used for stress relief and building motor skills.

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The honorees will be on permanent display at the Hall of Fame inside The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

This year’s inductees were voted in over other nominees including the games Catan and Connect Four, the Spirograph drawing device, the “Star Wars” lightsaber, Furby and Tickle Me Elmo. They also beat out classics including scooters, cornhole and snow.

CHICAGO (AP) — Text messages sent by a Border Patrol agent appear to show he bragged to colleagues about his shooting skills after wounding a woman charged with assaulting a federal officer in Chicago.

Agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez five times on Oct. 4 after authorities say she and another driver rammed vehicles into an SUV Exum was driving on the city’s Southwest Side.

The messages were presented as evidence in federal court Wednesday. Martinez, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen, and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, 21, are charged with assault on a federal officer using a deadly or dangerous weapon.

In the text, agent Exum wrote that he had “an amendment to add to” his story. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” the text read.

The shooting occurred as President Donald Trump’s escalation of federal law enforcement continued in cities across the U.S.

On Oct. 5, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged the shooting, saying in a statement that agents “were rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.” When agents exited their vehicle, “a suspect tried to run them over, forcing the officers to fire defensively,” the statement continued.

No officers were seriously injured.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the woman shot was armed with a semiautomatic weapon. Martinez was treated at a hospital and released before being taken into FBI custody.

When questioned Wednesday by Chris Parente, an attorney for Martinez, Exum testified that he’s a firearms instructor “and I take pride in my shooting skills,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Defense attorneys also are concerned about the destruction of evidence after the SUV driven by Exum was later driven from Chicago to the agent’s station in Maine and parked in a garage, Exum said.

The SUV suffered scratches, dents and scuff marks when it was sideswiped, the agent said. Photos were taken of the damage. The scuff marks had been buffed in Maine, Exum said.

Martinez alleges that the Border Patrol vehicle swerved and sideswiped her vehicle, according to court documents.

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Federal immigration agents in the Chicago area have been accused of unnecessary force, including the use of pepper balls, tear gas and other tactics against people protesting federal immigration policies and the detention of immigrants.

The aggressive tactics have prompted resident backlash and lawsuits.

Another federal judge said Thursday she will order federal agents in Chicago to restrict using force against peaceful protesters and news media outlets, saying current practices violate their constitutional rights.

U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis’s ruling, which is expected to be appealed by the Trump administration, refines an earlier temporary order that required agents to wear badges and banned them from using certain riot-control techniques, such as tear gas, against peaceful protesters and journalists.