COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill is asking students and university officials across the state for help improving national legislation aimed at curbing sexual violence at colleges.

McCaskill on Tuesday continued her statewide tour at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where student advocates and survivors of sexual assault told her about challenges that sometimes prevent victims from reporting.

The U.S. Department of Education reports 76 colleges and universities are under investigation for possible violations of Title IX. The federal anti-discrimination law prohibits sexual assault, stalking and dating violence.

McCaskill’s Campus Accountability and Safety Act would impose new policy guidelines and penalties of up to $150,000 for universities’ noncompliance.

By Alex Smith, KCUR

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — If the idea of music therapy brings to mind ’60s-era folk singers warbling to bemused patients, you haven’t seen Deanna Hanson-Abromeit at work.

At Operation Breakthrough in Kansas City, the University of Kansas assistant professor sings a good morning song to Daren, a curious, if slightly cautious, infant.

The tune is a simple one, and the singer bubbles over with enthusiasm, but her musical interventions are more of a conversation than a performance.

Hanson-Abromeit is engaged with Daren’s every movement, playing to her one-person audience in a way that might put Al Green to shame.

She watches his eyes and head while making constant changes to the music’s volume and tempo, trying to engage the baby’s attention.

Before the end of the second verse, Daren breaks into a big smile.

Struggling for respect

When Hanson-Abromeit started studying music therapy in the early 1990s, she received a warning from her college adviser: Have a backup plan. At the time, music therapy was struggling for respect, and many therapists ended up working as music teachers.

But the field has changed dramatically in the past few years, and now the KU assistant professor is considered one of the leading researchers working to uncover how music can help even the smallest premature infants survive and thrive.

“When we’re born a full-term infant, we can see, but our vision is protected in a way that we don’t take on too much stimuli for our systems to organize,” Hanson-Abromeit said. “And when a baby is born prematurely, those systems haven’t yet fully developed.”

She explains that premature infants are overwhelmed with information: noise, light, new people. A neonatal intensive care unit can be especially chaotic, and the babies’ brains aren’t developed enough to handle it all. The stress puts their nervous system into fight-or-flight mode, which robs them of the energy and focus their brains and nervous systems need to help them grow.

But if music has charms to soothe a savage breast, it also can soothe a newborn’s nervous system.

“We’re really trying to help them at a very basic neurological level organize at staying calm,” Hanson-Abromeit said.

Pre-recorded music won’t do the trick. The educational value of Baby Einstein DVDs largely has been debunked. Helping infants’ brains develop requires something more subtle: the kind of attentive interaction practiced by therapists like Hanson-Abromeit.

“We can change those characteristics of the music to be less complex,” she said. “And then build that up gradually for more complexity as the baby’s neurological processes can handle that, or we help them start to develop those things.”

Increasing understanding

Among Hanson-Abromeit’s admirers is Dr. Joanne Loewy, director of the Louis Armstrong Department of Music Therapy, part of Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York.

“She’s a big brain in music therapy in many areas,” Loewy said.

An article published in the journal Pediatrics last year described a study by Loewy and colleagues that was one of the field’s big breakthroughs. Involving 11 hospitals and nearly 300 premature infants, it made clear the impact musical therapy could have.

“We were able to show that we could render other heart rates, different sleep patterns, improve caloric intake and sucking behavior, and that parent-preferred lullabies could decrease stress,” Loewy said.

For her part, Hanson-Abromeit has been striving to improve scientific understanding of music therapy.

Last year, she joined with researchers in the United Kingdom and Australia to form Music and Neuro-Developmentally At-Risk Infant, or MANDARI, to explore how music therapy affects the brain. The group had its first international conference this summer.

Formalizing the method

Hanson-Abromeit said the next step is to establish a formalized method for music interventions with premature infants. Through her clinical work and other research, she’s codifying how a therapist should respond when an infant looks away, for example, or shows an increased heart rate.

“Having some parameters in how we use the music and how, if we use the music this way, we should expect to get this outcome,” she said. “So, taking a little of the mystery out of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”

Though Hanson-Abromeit’s field has made great strides with the help of neuroscience, she believes there’s still a lot to learn from the basics of music therapy: working with the newborns themselves to make a musical connection.

And as music therapy continues to gain professional respect, Hanson-Abromeit hopes her work will help take music intervention beyond the exclusive realm of the professional therapist.

“As we learn more about how and why music works with premature infants,” she said, “it’s going to be really important to help parents learn how to read those cues and adapt the music to help manage the symptoms that their babies are experiencing, whether it’s pain or agitation or discomfort, so that then they can also build really nice memories and experiences with their infant and create attachment and bonding through positive experiences.”

MADISON, Ind. — A Kansas man has been identified as the victim of a weekend crash in Indiana.

The Indiana State Police reported the passenger killed in the crash Saturday afternoon on U.S. 421 as John Thomas Walker, 21, Arkansas City. Police say alcohol was involved.

Walker suffered fatal injuries as a result of a head-on collision when the vehicle in which he was riding crossed the centerline and struck a 2001 Dodge Ram pickup driven by Charles L. McRoberts, 37, Versailles, Ind.

Six other people suffered injuries.

The accident remains under investigation.

JOPLIN, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri woman has pleaded guilty to three felony counts in a failed attempt to have two men kidnap her daughter from the child’s father.

The Joplin Globe reports Elise Deboutez of Nevada, Missouri, pleaded guilty Monday to arranging an attempted child kidnapping, first-degree burglary and armed criminal action.

Police say Deboutez recruited two Joplin men at a party last October to kidnap her 1-year-old daughter from the girl’s father, who had been given emergency temporary custody of the child.

The father hid in a bathroom with the girl when two intruders entered his home. Two shots were fired into the room before the men fled, but nobody was hit.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — After a slow start to 2014, several wind energy projects in Kansas are under construction and more are planned once utilities have signed contracts to purchase the power they generate.

The Wichita Eagle reports the state has nearly 3,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity in 25 wind farms, and four wind farms under construction bring an additional 475 megawatts. Six other wind farms under development and approved for construction have a combined capacity for 1,800 more megawatts.

Federal wind energy tax credits expired at the end of last year, but by law developers can still qualify for the credits if their wind farms were started in 2013 and are finished by 2016.

Developers says some of the projects are on hold until utilities agreed to purchase power from them.

NEW YORK (AP) — Wal-Mart plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation’s largest private employer.

Wal-Mart tells The Associated Press that, starting January first, it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week.

The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees. A senior manager says the company will use a third-party group to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives.

The announcement comes after Wal-Mart said far more U.S. employees and their families are enrolling in its health care plans than it had expected following rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Rumors that a patient at a Kansas City hospital had Ebola were false, but they forced health officials to respond to stories that spread online.

The Kansas City Star reports a feverish man, apparently from Nigeria, was taken to Research Medical Center’s Brookside Campus on Saturday night, prompting the hospital to take precautions. Police were told hospital was under lockdown because of suspicions about the patient, and officers blocked access to the man’s apartment.

A Kansas City television station reported the apartment lockdown but didn’t mention Ebola. A local blog reported Ebola case had come to Kansas City, and a Wichita, Kansas, station’s website followed suit.

A spokeswoman for Research Medical Center says the man didn’t have Ebola and was released from the hospital on Monday.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Cleanup continues at the site of a train derailment in northeast Louisiana.

State police say the engineer and conductor were injured when a freight train hit a truck Sunday at a crossing in Mer Rouge derailing two engines and 17 cars of the 87 car train.

Troopers say crews worked throughout the night and hoped to have the line open Tuesday.

Union Pacific Railroad Co. officials said the conductor’s injuries weren’t considered life-threatening. He was being treated at a hospital in Shreveport. They say the engineer suffered minor injuries.

Mer Rouge Police Chief Mitch Stephens says the truck driver, Daniel Shackleford, of Freedom, Missouri, was unhurt. Stephens says Shackleford’s trailer got stuck on the tracks but he saw the train coming and jumped out of the truck.

Jefferson City, Mo. – Attorney General Chris Koster released the following statement:

“The circuit court’s judgment in Barrier v. Vasterling held that Missouri must recognize marriages lawfully entered into in other states. We will not appeal that judgment. Our national government is founded upon principles of federalism – a system that empowers Missouri to set policy for itself, but also obligates us to honor contracts entered into in other states.

A consequence of this morning’s ruling by the United States Supreme Court is that gay marriage will soon be legal in as many as 30 states. At a time when Missouri is competing to attract the nation’s premier businesses and most talented employees, we should not demand that certain individuals surrender their marriage licenses in order to live and work among us.

Missouri’s future will be one of inclusion, not exclusion.”