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First Lady Michelle Obama is coming to the Nickelodeon network. The First Lady will be appearing in the January 16th episode of iCarly.
Ron Paul is talking to the framers about selling Raw Milk.To be trueful I never knew you could buy Raw Milk.
U.S. Roman Catholic bishops vowed Monday to defend their religious liberty in the face of growing acceptance of gay marriage and what they called attempts by secularists to marginalize faith.
Bishop William Lori, leader of a new national religious liberty committee, condemned federal and state policies that he said interfered with the church’s ability to provide social services, from health care to immigrant support to international aid.
In Illinois, government officials stopped working with Catholic Charities on adoptions and foster-care placements after 40 years because the agency refused to recognize a new civil union law. Illinois bishops had sued the state but on Monday said they would stop the legal fight and no longer provide state-funded services.
In New York, the bishops, along with Orthodox Jewish leaders and others, have complained that the religious exception in this year’s law allowing gay marriage is too weak to be effective.
On the federal level, the bishops have been pressing the Health and Human Services Department during its public comment period for a broader religious exception to part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul that mandates private insurers pay for contraception.
“We should not be obliged to provide services or other initiatives that are contrary to our conscience,” said Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, Conn. “We don’t need the government forcing our hand.”
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the bishops are not just reacting to Obama’s policies, but to a broader society in a “drive to neuter religion” and “push religion back into the sacristy.”
“That’s a cultural issue that the church has been concerned about forever, not just in the United States,” Dolan said.
But Dolan said he discussed the church’s concerns with Obama when the two men met last week in the Oval Office. The archbishop said Obama was “extraordinarily friendly” and “very ardent” in reassuring Dolan that the administration would look into the problems.
“I left there feeling a bit more at peace with this issue than when I entered,” Dolan said.
Religious freedom was the main focus at the fall meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has public sessions through Tuesday.
The new religious liberty committee that church leaders formed met for the first time. Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the conference, will oversee that work, which will include hiring a lobbyist and another attorney.
Picarello had worked for seven years at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a public-interest law firm based in Washington, and also served on an advisory committee for Obama’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
Bishops hope to persuade federal lawmakers to retain the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed in 1996, and launched a new website called Marriageuniqueforareason.org. Obama has said his administration would no longer defend the law, calling it “counter to the Constitution.” Bishops said it was wrong to describe their religious convictions as discrimination.
“The church has nothing against compromise, but we can’t compromise principle,” Dolan said.
The bishops are confronting the Health and Human Services Department on another front. The government agency recently decided not to renew a contract held since 2006 by the bishops’ refugee services office to help victims of human trafficking.
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing to stop the agency from making grants to groups who “impose religiously based restrictions on reproductive health services” for human trafficking victims. The women are often raped and forced into prostitution by their captors.
The bishops’ conference has called the decision biased against Catholic beliefs. Agency officials vehemently deny any bias and say the sole criteria for evaluating potential grantees was which group could best serve the victims. Administration officials note that the vast network of Catholic social service nonprofits, including the bishops’ conference, receives hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding in amounts that have increased in the last couple of years.
From the outside, Holly Finn certainly looks fertile.
With shoulder-length dark hair, smooth skin and a slim but curvaceous figure, the San Francisco-area writer could be any young mom with a baby on her hip.
But at 43, Finn says, her ovaries know better — and she would have, too, if not for what she believes is society’s widespread ignorance about infertility.
“I really feel that there are important pieces of information that don’t get passed along,” says Finn, who has now tried for four years to conceive through in-vitro fertilization. “I actually think it’s quite a brutal dishonesty.”
Most women aren’t taught — and don’t learn — basic facts about fertility and aging, says Finn, author of the e-book “The Baby Chase.” Instead, celeb moms the likes of Salma Hayek (a baby girl at 41), Marcia Cross (twins at 44) and Mariah Carey (twins at 41) make being an older mom look easy — and glamorous.
“It’s not that we’re stupid,” she says. “It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”
As proof, she points to a new survey conducted on behalf of RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, and presented at the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s recent annual meeting.
The poll of 1,000 women ages 25 to 35 who had talked to doctors about fertility found that participants could correctly answer seven out of 10 basic questions less than half the time. The Fertility IQ 2011 Survey found that women were wrong most often about how long it takes to get pregnant — and about how much fertility declines at various ages.
“We were not at all surprised,” says Barbara Collura, executive director of RESOLVE. “This is what we experience every day.”
Most women simply don’t realize that at 30, a healthy woman has about a 20 percent chance of conceiving and by the time she reaches 40, her odds drop to about 5 percent per month, Collura said.
Instead, many of those surveyed thought that a 30-year-old woman would have a 70 percent chance of conceiving and that a 40-year-old’s chances could approach 60 percent.
They also believed that a 20-year-old woman might get pregnant in less than two months of unprotected sex, rather than the five months that is the average.
“It’s basic biology and basic knowledge of how age impacts your fertility if you’re a woman,” says Collura.
But most women aren’t getting those basics until it’s too late, said Dr. William Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver and two other locations.
“It’s basic biology and basic knowledge of how age impacts your fertility if you’re a woman,” says Collura.
But most women aren’t getting those basics until it’s too late, said Dr. William Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver and two other locations.
“They don’t even come in for fertility treatment until they’re literally in their 40s,” he said. “Some come in and they have run out of time.”
In a country where sex education focuses primarily on avoiding pregnancy and preventing sexually transmitted diseases, most women believe that having a baby is inevitably easy.
But that neglects the reality that infertility affects some 7.3 million women in the United States, or 12 percent of the child-bearing female population, and about 1 in 8 couples, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After about age 35, fertility plummets, Schoolcraft said.
So when women decide they want to get pregnant and can’t, they’re stunned. Some of the shock is because of advances in health and beauty that allow women to look — and feel — younger, even as their reproductive systems march on.
“People kind of think now at 40 what they used to think at 30,” Schoolcraft said. “People do yoga and they run and they do all these healthy things. They assume that means ‘I’m not aging.’ But their eggs don’t know that.”
Part of the disconnect is because of advances in infertility treatment, which have helped boost the rates of births among women in their 40s, even as rates have dropped for younger moms. Between 2008 and 2009, births in women aged 20 to 24 reached a record low, falling 7 percent. At the same time, the rates for women aged 40 to 44 jumped 3 percent and births to women older than 50 climbed 5 percent.
Those numbers are exemplified by a series of high-profile births in older celebrities, including icons such as Kelly Preston (son at 48), Holly Hunter (twins at 47) and Jane Seymour (twins at 44.)
Children on board call parents to say driver was swerving and falling asleep
PHILADELPHIA — Former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier has liver cancer and is under hospice care.
The 67-year-old boxer was diagnosed four or five weeks ago, Frazier’s personal and business manager said Saturday. Leslie Wolff told The Associated Press that doctors have not yet told Frazier how long he has to live.
“We have medical experts looking into the all the options that are out there,” Wolff said. “There are very few. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop looking.”
Wolff, who has been Frazier’s manager for seven years, said the boxer had been in out and out of the hospital since early October and receiving hospice treatment the last week.
“We appreciate every prayer we can get,” Wolff said. “I’ve got everybody praying for him. We”ll just keep our fingers crossed and hope for a miracle.”
Frazier’s illness was first reported by the New York Post, citing an unidentified. source.
Frazier was the first man to beat Muhammad Ali, knocking him down and taking a decision in the so-called Fight of the Century in 1971. He would go on to lose two more fights to Ali, including the epic “Thrilla in Manila” bout.
Frazier was bitter for many years about the way Ali treated him then. More recently, he said he had forgiven Ali for repeatedly taunting him.
“Smokin’ Joe” was a small yet ferocious fighter who smothered his opponents with punches, including a devastating left hook he used to end many of his fights early.
It was the left hook that dropped Ali in the 15th round of their “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in 1971 to seal a win in a bout in which each fighter earned an unheard of $2.5 million.
While that fight is celebrated in boxing lore, Ali and Frazier put on an even better show in their third fight, held in a sweltering arena in Manila as part of Ali’s world tour of fights in 1975. Nearly blinded by Ali’s punches, Frazier still wanted to go out for the 15th round, but was held back by trainer Eddie Futch.
Frazier won the heavyweight title in 1970 by stopping Jimmy Ellis in the fifth round of their fight at Madison Square Garden. He defended it successfully four times before George Foreman knocked him down six times in the first two rounds to take the title from him in 1973.
Frazier would never be heavyweight champion again.
In recent years, Frazier had been doing regular autograph appearances, including one in Las Vegas the weekend of a Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight in September.