Invisible Immigrants, Old and Left With ‘Nobody to Talk To’

They gather five days a week at a mall called the Hub, sitting on concrete planters and sipping thermoses of chai. These elderly immigrants from India are members of an all-male group called The 100 Years Living Club. They talk about crime in nearby Oakland, the cheapest flights to Delhi and how to deal with recalcitrant daughters-in-law.

Together, they fend off the well of loneliness and isolation that so often accompany the move to this country late in life from distant places, some culturally light years away.

“If I don’t come here, I have sealed lips, nobody to talk to,” said Devendra Singh, a 79-year-old widower.

In this country of twittering youth, Mr. Singh and his friends form a gathering force: the elderly, who now make up America’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million — or about 11 percent of the country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050.

In California, one in nearly three seniors is now foreign born, according to a 2007 census survey.
Many are aging parents of naturalized American citizens, reuniting with their families. Yet experts say that America’s ethnic elderly are among the most isolated people in America.

Seventy percent of recent older immigrants speak little or no English. Most do not drive. Some studies suggest depression and psychological problems are widespread, the result of language barriers, a lack of social connections and values that sometimes conflict with the dominant American culture, including those of their assimilated children.

But their problems can go unnoticed because they often do not seek help. “There is a feeling that problems are very personal, and within the family,” said Gwen Yeo, the co-director of the Geriatric Education Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Blue Chip, White Cotton: What Underwear Says About the Economy

For one answer to the nation's most pressing economic question -- when will the recession end? -- just take a peek inside the American man's underwear drawer.

There may be some new pairs there, judging by recent reports from retailers
and analysts, and that could mean better days ahead for everyone.

Here's the theory, briefly: Sales of men's underwear typically are
stable because they rank as a necessity. But during times of severe financial
strain, men will try to stretch the time between buying new pairs, causing
underwear sales to dip.

"It's a prolonged purchase," said Marshal Cohen, senior analyst with the
consumer research firm NPD Group. "It's like trying to drive your car an extra
10,000 miles."

The annual RMV low license plate number lottery takes to the airwaves this year. Registrar Rachel Kaprielian will spin the drum to determine who will win one of 169 low number license plates in a live broadcast at 8 p.m., Tuesday, September 8 on WBZ radio’s “Niteside” program with host Dan Rea.

A record 6,634 people applied for the 169 sought after license plates, this year including 7A, 3333, V36 and 66X.

Winners' names will be announced during the drawing on WBZ AM 1030. A list of lottery winners will be posted on the RMV website the next day.

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Kennedy's final voyage

Are you the one person out there who didn't spend Saturday watching the services? Oh, and Friday night, too?

It truly was an astonishing who's who, all gathered in ...... Mission Hill (eeeek).

A partial list of the attendees, courtesy of the Associated Press:

President Barack Obama
First Lady Michelle Obama
Vice President Joe Biden and wife Jill Biden
Former President George W. Bush and wife Laura Bush
Former President Bill Clinton
Former President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn Carter
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Former Vice President Al Gore
Former Vice President Walter Mondale
Former Vice President Dan Quayle
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah
Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
CIA Director Leon Panetta
Attorney General Eric Holder
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
Energy Secretary Steven Chu
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
Former Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D
Gov. Deval Patrick, D-Mass.
Former acting Gov. Jane Swift, R-Mass.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.
Former Gov. Michael Dukakis, D-Mass.
Gov. Jon Corzine, D-N.J.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif.
Boston Mayor Tom Menino
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.
Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass.
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill.
Rev. Jesse Jackson
Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass.
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., and wife Elizabeth Edwards
Former Rep. Martin Meehan, now chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell
Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen
Sarah Brown, wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Shaun Woodward, secretary of state for Northern Ireland
Martin McGuinness, deputy first minister of Northern Ireland
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley
Joan Kennedy, ex-wife of Sen. Kennedy
Actor Jack Nicholson
Singer Tony Bennett
Basketball player Bill Russell
Massachusetts Treasurer Timothy Cahill
Tenor Placido Domingo
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma
J. Keith Motley, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Boston
Former Massachusetts Senate President Robert Travaglini
Massachusetts Transportation Secretary James Aloisi
Steve Grossman, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
University of Massachusetts President Jack Wilson
Charles Stith, director of the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University
Israel's consul-general in Boston Nadav Tamir
Boston Red Sox owner John Henry
Boston Red Sox president Larry Lucchino
Boston Red Sox chairman and co-owner Tom Werner
Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich
Executive Director of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate Peter Meade
Civil rights advocate Hubie Jones
John Walsh, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party
Rev. Eugene Rivers
Boston City Council President Michael Ross
Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo
Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray
Former Massachusetts Senate President William Bulger

Low-carb diet linked to plaque buildup

Low-carbohydrate diets have helped some people lose weight quickly, but the diets’ long-term effects on cardiovascular health have been uncertain.

Cardiologist Dr. Anthony Rosenzweig of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and his colleagues tested three diets in mice genetically engineered for studying human heart disease. The mice were fed standard high-carb mouse chow, a typical Western diet with moderate amounts of carbs and protein, and a low carb-high protein diet.

After 12 weeks, mice on the low carb-high protein diet gained weight, but less than the other mice. There were no differences in cholesterol levels among the mice, but the mice on the low carb-high protein diet accumulated more plaque in their coronary arteries, called atherosclerosis, than mice on the other two diets. They also had lower levels of cells needed to repair and regrow new blood vessels, which the authors say may be linked to their arteries’ plaque buildup.

BOTTOM LINE: Mice fed a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet accumulated more plaque in their coronary arteries and had fewer cells needed for healthy blood vessels than mice fed other diets.

CAUTIONS: Similar changes might not occur in humans.

WHAT’S NEXT: Better ways to detect cells that repair blood vessels will help assess how they might be affected by diet.

WHERE TO FIND IT: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Aug. 24

Junipero Serra needs just one more miracle

To be named a saint, the founder of California's missions has to be credited with a final marvel. One possibility: an artist who is still alive after losing a third of her skull in 14 brain surgeries.

In Zambia, photos of childbirth spark controversy

An editor sent officials photos that her newspaper received of a woman giving birth to a stillborn child outside a hospital during a nurses strike. The editor could face jail, accused of distributing porn.

The photograph is a testament to human suffering, so sad you can't look at it twice. Or it's shocking pornography. In Zambia, that's a matter of very contentious debate.

A woman lies on the ground in the image, midway through delivering a baby. The infant, born feet first, is dead from suffocation, the head not yet out of the womb.

The photograph was one of three taken in June by the woman's husband outside a hospital in Lusaka, the capital, during a prolonged nurses strike. The mother had already been turned away by two clinics and couldn't get care at the hospital.

When the news editor of the independent Zambian daily the Post, Chansa Kabwela, looked at the photograph of the dead child, she wanted to cry.

The paper decided all three photos were too shocking to be published, so Kabwela sent them to Zambia's vice president, health minister, secretary to the Cabinet and two women's advocacy organizations. For that, the 29-year-old editor was charged with circulating pornography and faces up to five years in prison if convicted. Her trial was to resume today and is expected to end Sept. 8.

One is the loveliest color

Commitment? Art project? OCD?

Five New Yorkers who wear only one color all day, every day (and it’s not black).

I think I could be the gray girl. that's about it.

I'm sorry, but this is hilarious

Behold: Hester Prynne in the age of network television. The scarlet letter, or something like it, emblazoned on the chest. The private sin dragged forth for public judgment. The hours in the stocks. And the media.
Oh, the media.
"I cheated. This is my punishment." Thus read the hand-lettered, chest-to-knee-length sign worn by a man sporting jeans, a baby-blue short-sleeved dress shirt and a hangdog face as he stood on the side of the eight-lane Leesburg Pike near Tysons Corner on Wednesday morning. Thursday morning, he was back.

"A Fashionable Fall" -- courtesy of the GW Hatchet

I just had to share this, because it so exemplifies the college I went to. I STILL don't buy clothes this expensive, and I'm five years out of school with a really good job!! A $350 dress to go out? For a college student?

See what I was up against........

Read the article here.

US inspects Boston's language instruction; Schools neglected English learners

The US Department of Justice has launched an inquiry into Boston’s failure to provide necessary language instruction to thousands of students who speak limited English, a violation of federal law that has the district scrambling to hire teachers and expand programs for this fall.

The federal scrutiny began after Boston schools revealed earlier this year during a routine state review that 42 percent of its nearly 11,000 English language learners were not receiving the help they are legally entitled to, according to documents provided to the Globe under a public records request.

The same review found that school officials, by their own admission, were encouraging parents to decline the services, because their programs were full, or were not adequately explaining the options to parents, many of whom do not speak English.

Boston is the latest Massachusetts district targeted by federal regulators for denying equal education opportunities to English language learners, one of the state’s fastest-growing student groups and a population that has generally posted some of the lowest MCAS scores and high dropout rates.

It was not clear yesterday whether the Justice Department is pursuing a settlement agreement with Boston or has launched a formal investigation.

The state required the Globe to file a public records request last week to obtain hundreds of pages of documents, including the federal letters, which arrived this week.

The growth in the number of English language learners this decade has challenged districts statewide, including Boston, where the group makes up almost a fifth of the city’s 56,000 students. Many programs were thrown into disarray, advocates say, after voters in 2002 abolished widespread use of bilingual education, which allows students to learn subjects in their native tongue until they master English.

The new law stresses teaching all subjects in English for nonnative speakers, using a student’s native language only sparingly. But in making the switch, many districts have failed to provide appropriate staffing, training, and programs, either because of funding shortages or misunderstanding of the legal requirements, advocates said.

The problem of underserved children could run even deeper in Boston than current statistics reflect, according to the state review. There may actually be more English language learners than the district has identified because many elementary schools improperly evaluate students, conducting tests only in speaking and listening.

Earlier this year, the district opened a newcomers academy for recently settled immigrant students who did not attend schools in their home countries for several years.
Some advocates said the investment was long overdue.

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer.

When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around.

That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us — ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair's landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse.

The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can't even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming — our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.

And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous. A series of recalls involving contaminated foods this year — including an outbreak of salmonella from tainted peanuts that killed at least eight people and sickened 600 — has consumers rightly worried about the safety of their meals. A food system — from seed to 7‑Eleven — that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America's obesity epidemic.

At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. "The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us," says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy — demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 — but the earth can no longer deliver.

Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs — and bland taste.

Are other countries health systems really so scary?

(By Newsweek's Katie Connolly)

The New York Times reported yesterday on the thousands of people lining up for a free health clinic in L.A. Many came for routine medical care, like breast exams, TB tests, and pap smears.

Reading this report reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Karen Davis, president of The Commonwealth Fund. The Fund conducts a range of comparative analyses of First World health-care systems. Their findings are often surprising, and usually provide striking illustrations of the inadequacies of the American system.

I discussed with Davis the difficulties many Americans have with accessing primary care compared with international peers. Davis believes the problems can be accounted for, in large measure, by the type of physicians available to Americans.

"We have about the same number of doctors per capita as other countries, but a higher proportion of our doctors are specialists," she says. This shortage has led to a squeeze on other services, and a yawning gap in after-hours and weekend care.

In a 2008 survey, the Fund reports that 18 percent of Americans end up in the emergency room for a condition that could have been treated by their primary physician, if available. In Germany, only 7 percent of people end up in that predicament, and in the Netherlands it's 8 percent. Only Canada performed worse than the U.S. on this measure.

Similarly, only 40 percent of American primary-care physicians said they have arrangements for taking care of patients on nights and weekends, a much lower proportion than in other countries.

Read more here.

FINALLY THIS MOVIE IS HERE!

Also watch the review of the Dolphin documentary, "The Cove." I know, in advance, that I will nto be able to go see it. But it's an important documentary about mistreatment of dolphins in Japan, where boats herd these intelligent animals into coves, upon which they're captured for sale to Sea World etc., or simply killed if they're not successfully sold. This will no doubt be an important documentary.

New York Times: A mover and a shaker

IN building the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge charity bikeathon into one of the top “thons” in the nation, Billy Starr, 58, has learned the importance of locking in donations up front.

He makes every cyclist sign a contract committing to a minimum donation — this year’s range is $500 to $4,200, depending on how far you ride — and requires a credit card to guarantee the gift.

“You sign six times — I repeat, six times — that you will pay us the minimum and once you register, you owe us the money, even if you change your mind tomorrow about biking,” he said. “This is not about your good intentions, we need you to make a commitment. I’m looking for a client with stick. Stick is what it’s about.”

As if on cue, his public relations director stuck her head in his office, dropping off a hot tea from Dunkin’ Donuts for a reporter, which Mr. Starr immediately grabbed. “Stick,” he said, pointing to the Pan-Mass logo on the cup.

“We’re on every Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup in New England for the next few weeks. First time on a Dunkin’ Donuts cup! This is awesome, doors open. This is how we build credibility.”

In 1980, Mr. Starr, who lost his mother to cancer when he was 23, organized a bikeathon with a few dozen friends that raised $10,000. In the years since, he has built it into a premier charity event, a weekend spectacle that attracts 5,000 cyclists, 3,000 volunteers and last year raised $35 million for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

And while you might not guess it from glancing at him (he works in shorts and sandals) or his modest headquarters (in an industrial park here), Mr. Starr is one of the nation’s savviest fund-raisers, for which he was paid $460,000 last year.

“It is a lot,” he said, “but I earn it.” To date, he has raised $240 million for cancer research. And though the 30th bikeathon, going on this weekend, is projected for the first time to raise less than the prior year because of the economy, he still expects to hit $30 million. He has taken a 1960s invention, the fitness “thon” for charity, and made it into a lifelong career.

Click here to read more about Starr's "secrets to success."

Grim times for the elderly in Iraq

Aging Iraqis traditionally lived with relatives, but as conditions in the nation have worsened, a new phenomenon has popped up: the old folks' home.

They are old men and women who have lived through the monarchy, Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led invasion and religion-fueled civil warfare.

Now, they putter about in a house on the Tigris River, passing the time on cots with pink sheets, in whitewashed rooms, with the faint smell of sweat mixing with the odor of sewage from the waters outside their windows.

The guests of the Mercy Home for the Elderly, a residence for indigent senior citizens, come from across Iraq and include Sunnis, Shiites and Christians.

Funded by prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Hussein Sadr, the two-story stone building, opened in November 2006, houses 43 men and women who have nowhere else to go.

The elderly in Iraq traditionally lived with relatives, but as conditions worsened in recent years, some families abandoned their parents, a brother or sister. Some were sent to Mercy by their kin; others were brought here by a hospital or the police after they showed up penniless on the doorstep of a mosque.

Manager Hadi Hamid Taie says his guests are mostly victims of the violence and economic hard times that followed the American-led invasion six years ago. He believes their families would never have sent them to Mercy before the war.

"This phenomenon is new," Taie says. "According to our religion, it is not permitted to abandon your parents. On the contrary, Islam requires that you take special care of them."

Recapping PMC weekend

See more video here!
http://www.necn.com/Boston/Health/2009/08/02/PMC-2009-Inspirational/1249247867.html