We see children all around us who are overwight.  As infants chubby babies are cute but there comes a time when baby fat should dissappear.  If it doesn’t or the child continues to put on pounds the parents need to take steps NOW.

“A new study finds striking evidence that children who are obese or have high cholesterol show early warning signs of heart disease.”

“The study, presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association conference in New Orleans, found that the thickness of artery walls of children and teenagers who are obese or have high cholesterol resembled the thickness of artery walls of an average 45-year-old.”
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It’s amazing to read about the vultures in Washington.  Not only do banks, mortgage companies and car manufacturers have their hands out, now lobbyists do to!

“Of the initial $350 billion that Congress freed up, out of the $700 billion in bailout money contained in the law that passed last month, the Treasury Department has committed all but $60 billion. The shrinking pie — and the growing uncertainty over who qualifies — has thrown Washington’s legal and lobbying establishment into a mad scramble.”
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It was the earliest a President-elect and out-going President have ever met.  Perhaps it’s because there is so much to talk over and have details filled in. 

“The struggling auto industry was thrust into the middle of a political standoff between the White House and Democrats on Monday as President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush in a meeting at the White House to support immediate emergency aid.”
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WOW.  If there were ever a time when the differences between the North and South of America were clear it was on election day this year.  The South used to be a central player in the political game.  Now it looks like an outsider.

“One reason for that is that the South is no longer a solid voting bloc. Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.”
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There is a case in Virginia that sounds like they Dennis DeLano on the job.  The Norfolk Four are innocent is the claim.  At this point there are even 30 retired F.B.I. agents who agree and have asked Virginia’s governor to pardon the four men who were originally convicted in a 1997 rape and murder case.

“”After careful review of the evidence we have arrived at one unequivocal conclusion: The Norfolk Four are innocent,” said Jay Cochran, a former assistant director of the F.B.I. and former special agent who served at the bureau for 27 years. “We believe a tragic mistake has occurred in the case of these four Navy men, and we are calling on Governor Kaine to grant them immediate pardons.””

“The former agents join a long list of unusual supporters, including four former Virginia attorneys general; 12 former state and federal judges and prosecutors; and a past president of the Virginia Bar Association, who have called for the men to be pardoned.”
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There are some really bright spots in the current economic crisis for those of us living in the WNY area.  For one thing we are not being hit nearly as hard by the mortgage slide as other areas.  Be thankful you don’t live in California, Florida, Nevada or Arizona.  One town in California, Mountain House, has the distinction of being the most “underwater community in America.”

“Because of plunging home values, almost 90 percent of homeowners here owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, according to figures released Monday. That is the highest percentage in the country. The average homeowner in Mountain House is “underwater,” as it is known, by $122,000.”
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Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) — President-elect Barack Obama will reverse U.S. family planning and AIDS prevention strategies that have long linked global funding to anti-abortion and abstinence education, a public-health adviser said.

Public health policies of President George W. Bush’s $45- billion PEPFAR program have brought AIDS drugs to almost 3 million people in poor countries such as Rwanda and Uganda, more than under any other president. Still, requirements that health workers emphasize abstinence from sex and monogamy over condom use have set back sexually transmitted disease prevention and family planning globally, said Susan F. Wood, co-chairman of Obama’s advisory committee for women’s health.

“We have been going in the wrong direction and we need to turn it around and be promoting prevention and family-planning services and strengthening public health,” said Wood, a research professor at George Washington University School of Public Health in Washington.

Bush on his first day in office in January 2001 reinstated the so-called Mexico City Policy — known as the global gag rule to critics — that bars U.S. family-planning assistance for organizations that use funding from any other source to provide counseling and referral for abortion; lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country; or perform abortions except in certain cases. Those exceptions are a threat to the woman’s life, rape or incest.

Obama “is committed to looking at all this and changing the policies so that family-planning services — both in the U.S. and the developing world — reflect what works, what helps prevent unintended pregnancy, reduce maternal and infant mortality, prevent the spread of disease,” Wood said.

Gag Rule

Wood resigned as the top U.S. regulator for women’s health in 2005 in protest of the Food and Drug Administration’s delay in clearing over-the-counter sales of the “morning after” emergency contraceptive. Sale of the pill, called Plan B, without a prescription was held up for more than two years, after FDA staff recommended its approval in 2003.

Critics of the FDA have named Wood as among candidates they would like Obama to consider for the agency’s next commissioner.

“A lot of the family-planning associations in Africa refused the terms of the gag rule and they lost funding, they lost technical assistance and they lost contraceptives,” said Wendy Turnbull, a senior policy research analyst with Population Action International in Washington.

On the basis of that policy, Bush halted support for the United Nations Population Fund in 2002, saying it supported “coercive” abortion programs in China — an allegation the New York-based agency has denied. The directive cost UNFPA more than $200 million in lost funding, said William Ryan, a Bangkok-based spokesman for the agency.

Condom Use

Restrictions on education about condom use have hamstrung effective promotion, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has had some condom information pulled from its Web Site, said Gill Greer, director general of the International Planned Pregnancy Federation in London.

“The U.S. administration has certainly succeeded in demonizing condoms rather than showing that they can be part of prevention of both unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections,” she said in a telephone interview. “I’ve always joked that the whole world should vote in the U.S. election because the whole world is so affected.”

Under President Bush, the U.S. has provided more money to fight AIDS than during any other administration. Seven years ago, before the Bush program began with about $15 billion, only about 200,000 people in poor nations got treatment, and few of them were in Africa.

Abstinence Success

The emphasis on abstinence and fidelity, “has been shown to have demonstrable success in Africa,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association in Washington. “It would be more than unfortunate if that policy was changed.”

Both Republicans and Democrats have indicated support for the focus on abstinence and education that goes along with PEPFAR, which has also been shown to reduce the spread of HIV in countries such as Uganda, Huber said.

“If the president-elect wants to be science-based in foreign sex-education policies, it would be wisest to continue this way because it’s shown to be effective,” she said.

Calls to the office of Mark Dybul, coordinator for the Bush AIDS treatment program, weren’t returned.

Prevention Quest

Without a vaccine, AIDS advocates are looking for ways to slow the spread of the HIV virus that currently infects about 33 million people worldwide. Treatment, even with cheaper versions of HIV drugs, is beyond the means of many patients in Africa, where about 24 million infected people live.

“I am not denying that someone with AIDS in Africa being given anti-retroviral therapy is bad,” said Adel Mahmoud, a former head of Merck & Co. vaccines and professor in the department of molecular biology at Princeton University. “But when the data says for every person we put on anti-retroviral therapy in Africa there are six new infections and we are doing nothing about it, it’s absolutely mind boggling. Prevention is really the solution.”

Wood said that, in recent years, the U.S. government has influenced and “tightly vetted” international organizations to reflect its own policies.

Obama will bring “back a sense of balance and perspective and the use of good science and good medicine in these positions, and not just this narrow, political ideology,” she said.

Written by reporter John Lauerman and Jason Gale

Mr. Tricoli has the courage and push to get things happening in Amherst.  In this time where people are losing jobs, places are closing, we need a man of FDR caliber.  A man who isn’t afraid to buck the state or our federal government to get a big piece of the pie.  A pie which would help us with possibly our home problems, our job problems .  We no longer need patsies to stand up to Republican blowhards.  We need men with strong feelings for the people of Amherst who have never been afraid to show it.

Tom W.

Will the victory of Barack Obama have any impact on the middle east situation?  Apparantly it already has.  Both Iraqi and American officials said obstacles to a security agreement appeared to be fading.

“Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month.”

“Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. “If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama.””
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One year after Muslim leaders wrote a letter to Pope Benedict XVI after he offended many Muslims with a sermon that contained an anti-Islam quote, leaders of both faiths are meeting to change negativity and suspicion between them. 

“Catholic and Muslim leaders worked on Thursday to deflate suspicion between their two faiths, pledging at a high-level seminar here to work together to condemn terrorism, protect religious freedom and fight poverty.”
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