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There is a fascinating story in The Chicago Tribune that tries to determine why it is that more white voters that once supported Hillary are now supporting John McCain. The fact that both Hillary and McCain have actual experience is of no consequence. Rather than look at why 90% of blacks are supporting Barack Obama they feel it is much more important to figure out why whites are supporting the white guy.Racial prejudice and the elderly Older white voters heavily favored Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic primary season, and national polls indicate that group now...

The personality is familiar to us all: the sweet old aunt, the loving grandfather or the generous widow down the street, each of them unfailingly kind toward friends and family but given to flights of shocking prejudice when the conversation turns toward ethnic groups to which they don't belong. Often the response is a nervous laugh, a wan smile or a hasty effort to change the subject. We assume that old people are the products of less-enlightened times; they're unlikely to change; and their comments, however ugly, are largely innocuous. Now, though, in the midst of the nation's first presidential...

ARLINGTON — He opened the jacket of his suit and braced himself."Hit me," he said.What?"Go on, hit me!" he insisted, his voice a mock growl.It’s not every day one is invited — instructed — to slug a man in the stomach on his 94th birthday, but then there is only one Jack LaLanne, the godfather of American fitness.Still remarkably fit, the tireless evangelist for preventive health celebrated his birthday Friday at the Arlington Convention Center, where he spoke at a wellness conference presented by the Parker College of Chiropractic.Practicing what he preaches, LaLanne declined a slice of the cake.His wife,...

Lady Lake, Florida - EMS workers have been busy this morning at The Villages in Lady Lake, Florida. They have been responding to several people suffering from the hot conditions at the outdoor Road to Victory Rally. Governor Sarah Palin is scheduled to speak at 4:30 p.m. and hundreds of elderly residences have been gathered at the venue for several hours. Volunteers from McCain campaign have been handing out water bottles to help with the heat. The event was going to be canceled due to rain; however the concern now is the heat. The program started at 3:30 p.m. and...

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain. She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society. The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves. Her comments in a magazine interview have been condemned as "immoral" and "barbaric", but also sparked fears that they may find wider...

If you want a sense of how elderly Jewish Americans are likely to vote this November, speak to the residents of Jerusalem's Ramat Tamir retirement community. Nestled in the city's northern hills is a collection of Jewish seniors in neat, well-maintained apartments, where most of the ambient conversational buzz is in English and American-accented Hebrew. Its American residents are people who seemingly could just as easily have retired to Florida. One of the residents, 105-year-old Miriam Pollak, is believed to be the oldest American voter living abroad. With five generations of descendants, she "stopped counting" how many great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren...

AN ELDERLY widow caught with £1,300 of cocaine in her handbag told police she planned to take the drug to give her “a lift”. White-haired Betty Lily Nicholls, 77, was arrested after a tip-off that the car she was travelling in was being used to transport drugs. Exeter magistrates heard that police stopped a Ford Focus car on the M5 last November. The male driver and female passenger – Mrs Nicholls – appeared “very nervous and avoided eye contact”. When Nicholls’s handbag was searched a bag was found containing compressed white powder. Nicholls, from Bude, Cornwall, told police: “I don’t...

LAGUNA WOODS - At age 88, Loraine Barr came out as a lesbian to honor her late partner after decades of keeping the relationship a secret. Now, the Laguna Woods resident is the subject of an award-winning documentary. The film, "88 Years in the Closet," produced by Mission Viejo-based Your Story Here, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the ninth annual Big Bear Lake International Film Festival over the weekend. "It was a kick – a blast," said Barr, who traveled to the mountain resort with the filmmakers to watch the screening. "It was so much fun having...

The fact they even wrote this piece is sick. Who thinks of this stuff?

Vitamin 'may prevent memory loss' (Vitamin B12) A vitamin found in meat, fish and milk may help stave off memory loss in old age, a study has suggested. Older people with lower than average vitamin B12 levels were more than six times more likely to experience brain shrinkage, researchers concluded.

Barack Obama has problems with Jewish seniors in Florida, say two Democratic lawmakers there. Florida state Sen. Nan Rich told JTA that Obama surrogates have been “shocked” by the hostility they have encountered at condominiums in her area aimed at their candidate. Steve Geller, who serves as the Democratic minority leader in the Florida state Senate and represents parts of Broward County, said he was nearly chased out of the "condos" -- shorthand for retirement communities -- when he said he backed Obama. "I've noticed almost a mob mentality," Geller said. "I can change people's minds in a group of...

LONDON, Aug. 25 -- The daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher said Britain's "Iron Lady" is suffering from dementia, the family's first public confirmation of what has been widely rumored in Britain for several years. Thatcher's condition has deteriorated so much that she forgets that her husband, Denis Thatcher, died in 2003, her daughter said in a memoir that is to be published next month and was serialized over the weekend in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. "I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again," Carol Thatcher wrote. "Every time it finally sank in...

The daughter of British former prime minister Margaret Thatcher tells how her mother's dementia has left her struggling to remember the simplest facts in book extracts published Sunday. Carol Thatcher wrote that, on her worst days, her mother struggles to finish sentences but shows occasional glimpses of her old self, particularly when talking about her time in Downing Street. "I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100 percent cast-iron damage-proof," Carol Thatcher wrote in her memoir, "A Swim-On Part In The Goldfish Bowl", which was serialised in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. "Whereas previously you never had...

LANSING, Mich. — AARP, the national advocacy group for older Americans, is being accused of age discrimination. Bonita Brady, a 63-year-old from Michigan, says the group passed her over for a series of jobs because she was too old, despite excellent job reviews. She joined AARP in Chicago in 1996 as a health representative. She also worked for AARP in Washington before moving to the Lansing office in 2007. Brady says she lost her job in a reorganization and was passed over for nine vacancies. She sued last week in federal court in Michigan and is seeking more than $25,000.

In a move that could lead to significant changes in medical care for older men, a national task force on Monday recommended that doctors stop screening men ages 75 and older for prostate cancer because the search for the disease in this group was causing more harm than good. The guidelines, issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, represent an abrupt policy change by an influential panel that had withheld any advice regarding screening for prostate cancer, citing a lack of reliable evidence. Though the task force still has not taken a stand on the value of screening in...

When Hazel Homer was 99, more than one doctor advised that there was little to be done about her failing heart except wait for it to fail a final time. But Mrs. Homer was not interested in waiting to die of what many would call old age. Now, at 104, her heart is still ticking, thanks to a specialized pacemaker and defibrillator that synchronizes her heartbeat and can administer a slight shock to revive her if her heart falters. Her operation, a month before her 100th birthday, reflects what some doctors are hailing as a new frontier in medicine: successful...

BRADENTON - A 94-year-old man whose arrest in a prostitution sting here caused an international buzz will not be prosecuted. A judge ruled Tuesday that Frank Milio was a victim of entrapment. Milio, who has dementia, was unable to get into a care facility while his case was pending. The undercover Manatee County Sheriff's Office detective on the street corner that afternoon in November took 30 steps to go chat with Milio, who authorities say had honked his car horn at the woman to get her attention. Milio, who turned 94 this month, stopped his car in a parking lot...

...The Schwab study describes this thinking in detail: A Distress Call from Retirement Limbo: Respondents are thinking about their retirement futures and say they will need to have saved at least $500,000 to live comfortably in retirement – which is twice the median net worth of today’s Boomer pre-retirees. Additionally, only a quarter of Americans say they clearly understand Social Security and how it works. Just 11 percent of Americans say they understand Medicare very clearly. A Coming Era of Financial Self-Reliance: Looking forward, survey participants identify a need for self-reliance in retirement. Low Grades for Likely Resources: Survey participants...

Elderly people with excess amounts of the protein fetuin-A are more likely than others to develop type 2 diabetes, a new study finds. Because earlier work showed that the protein may interfere with the action of insulin, the new findings potentially implicate fetuin-A in diabetes and suggest the protein may make a good target for drug therapy. Scientists have found fetuin-A tantalizing ever since lab experiments showed it competed with insulin to bind to receptor proteins on cells. By doing so, fetuin-A seems to crowd out insulin and prevent it from making glucose available to muscle cells. “We don’t understand...

Plummeting Reimbursement Rates Have Some Doctors Looking for a Way Out By AUDREY GRAYSON ABC News Medical Unit RSS For the past four years, Dr. Heather Tipsword has owned a family practice clinic that primarily treats Medicaid and Medicare patients in Oklahoma City. As many of her friends and family were looking forward to Fourth of July celebrations this past weekend, Tipsword was anxiously looking forward to another event altogether: Congress' meeting on the Monday after the holiday weekend to discuss some kind of fix to the scheduled 10.6 percent Medicare reimbursement cut. For many doctors, low Medicare and Medicaid...

Return to the Article June 29, 2008Don't Let These Old Soldiers Just Fade AwayBy Dylan Gwinn General Douglas Mc Arthur once said to Congress, "...old soldiers never die, they just fade away." As was often the case, the General was quite correct. Too often our society revels in the accomplishments of its great men while events are happening, only to then lose sight of those accomplishments as time marches on. But, how does our society remember "old soldiers" whose accomplishments went almost un-noticed when they were happening? How will we remember men like Lt. Col. Charles "Chuck" Dryden who...

Plan for long life, without pandemic NANCY STANCILL Should doctors let people older than 85 die in a flu pandemic? A Monday news story saying a U.S. task force recommends denying lifesaving care in a pandemic or other disaster to some folks -- including healthy people above 85 -- was unsettling. They're talking about my mother, soon to be 86. My friend Karen's father, who is 92. Another friend's grandmother, 102. These people live life joyfully, with their minds and hearts intact. My mother relishes foreign travel. Karen's father loves bird watching. The 102-year-old grandmother plays a mean hand of...

Aging 2008 registration is appreciated but not required. You can check in at the door at 4pm. Leading aging scientists and public policy experts will gather at UCLA tomorrow. This is the first time that an event like this has taken place anywhere. We hope to see you there! Applying the new technologies of regenerative and genetic medicine, the engineering approach to aging promises to dramatically extend healthy human life within the next few decades. How do you and your loved ones stand to benefit from the coming biomedical revolution? Are you prepared? Is society prepared? At Aging 2008 you...

Edith Macefield died at home, just the way she wanted. The Ballard woman who captured hearts and admirers around the world when she stubbornly turned down $1 million to sell her home to make way for a commercial development died Sunday of pancreatic cancer. She was 86. "I don't want to move. I don't need the money. Money doesn't mean anything," she told the Seattle P-I in October. She continued living in the little old house in the 1400 block of Northwest 46th Street even after concrete walls rose around her, coming within a few feet of her kitchen window....

Mayme (right) and Clarence Vail are the longest married couple still living in the United States, and were photographed Thursday , July 19, 2007 at their retirement center in White Bear Lake, Mn. The couple has been married for 83 years. (Scott Takushi, Pioneer Press) (Staff)Little did Clarence Vail know when he wed his high school sweetheart in 1925 that those vows would one day make them famous. Clarence and Mayme Vail became local celebrities as their commitment surpassed the 80-year mark, making them contenders for the Guinness Book of World Records and international symbols of a healthy marriage. But...

The owners of the 300-unit Seabury Heights Apartments in Worcester, Mass., got in trouble last year when they turned on the building's air conditioning in early June. As reported in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, some of Seabury's elderly tenants complained, first to management, then to the city, about being cold. In the end, Seabury was forced to turn the heat back on because in Massachusetts, it's against the law — against the law! — for landlords to turn off their furnaces before June 15. You see where this is going. Chastened by last year's run-in with the government, Seabury...

Half a million elderly men lead lonely lives with no friends and no contact from their families, a report warned yesterday. It found that one person in five with an elderly father is no longer in touch with him. One in four claims to be too busy to maintain contact. Divorce and family break-up has left millions of men without ties to their children and with few or no family links, said the charity Help the Aged. Retirement deprives many of the company of work colleagues and others are left alone by bereavement or their own poor health Of the...

Scientists: 115-year-old's brain worked perfectly By ANRICA DEB , Associated Press WriterJune 13, 2008 Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, who died at age 115 in 2005, is seen in this May 26, 2004 photo at de Westerkim, home for the elderly, in Hoogeveen, Netherlands. Scientists say that Henrikje van Andel-Schipper's mind was probably as good as it seemed: a post-mortem analysis of her brain revealed few signs of Alzheimer's or other diseases commonly associated with a decline in mental ability in old age. "This is the first (extremely old) brain that did not have these problems," Professor Gert Holstege of Groningen University...

In a campaign dominated by the economy and the Iraq War, the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling Thursday on detainees at Guantanamo marks a forceful reminder that John McCain promises one course and Barack Obama pledges another in picking future justices. In the current controversy, McCain quickly expressed his disapproval of the opinion, while Obama issued a statement of support. It fell to outsiders to point out the broader implications in the race for the White House. "With the replacement of a single justice from the majority ... today's four dissenters could become tomorrow's majority," said Nan Aron of the Alliance...

Bob's family was horrified at the idea that his relationship with Dorothy might have become sexual. At his age, they wouldn't have thought it possible. But when Bob's son walked in and saw his dad's 82-year-old girlfriend...

Extreme lefty Senator Lautenberg changes his commercial. The original attacks "big Oil" for wanting to drill off New Jerseys Coast. I guess now with $4 gas, he realizes that the public may like that idea. Api remains a pig!!!! the original: http://www.lautenbergfornj.com/multimedia/video?id=0005

In a political season in which Barack Obama has delighted in playing the age card—see "lost his bearings," "wander around," and multiple mentions of McCain's "half-century of service," Democrats are now demonstrating that they're even willing to use an opponent's superannuation on each other. There I was in my upstate NY home this evening, innocently watching the Yankee game, when this ad by Dem Rob Andrews, targeting primary opponent Dem Frank Lautenberg, the–very–senior senator from New Jersey, appeared . . . View video here.

With Age Comes A Sense Of Peace And Calm, Study Shows ScienceDaily (May 19, 2008) — Aging brings a sense of peace and calm, according to a new study from the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Starting at about age 60, participants reported more feelings of ease and contentment than their younger counterparts. Catherine Ross and John Mirowsky, professors of sociology, have published the findings in "Age and the Balance of Emotions" in the May 19 issue of Social Science and Medicine. The findings reveal aging is associated with more positive than negative emotions, and...

Democrat Barack Obama told seniors Sunday that Republican John McCain would threaten the Social Security that they and millions like them depend on because he supports privatizing the program.Obama turned to a bedrock, pocketbook issue as he spoke to about 130 people at an assisted living facility and sought to tie the GOP's presidential nominee-in-waiting to an unpopular President Bush on an issue that motivates seniors."Let me be clear, privatizing Social Security was a bad idea when George W. Bush proposed it, it's a bad idea today," Obama said. "That's why I stood up against this plan in the Senate...

CHICAGO (AP) — Newsflash for rock stars and teenagers: It turns out everything doesn't go downhill as we age — the golden years really are golden.That's according to eye-opening research that found the happiest Americans are the oldest, and older adults are more socially active than the stereotype of the lonely senior suggests.The two go hand-in-hand — being social can help keep away the blues."The good news is that with age comes happiness," said study author Yang Yang, a University of Chicago sociologist. "Life gets better in one's perception as one ages."A certain amount of distress in old age is...

Sen. Patrick Leahy is privately indicating interest in taking over the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee from an ailing Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) if necessary, four Democratic sources said Thursday. The Vermont Democrat, third-in-line on the panel, strongly denied those claims. But all four sources said Leahy has sent several signals to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) about the move. “It’s been going on. There have been lots of whispers in Reid’s ear,” said one Democratic source. Leahy “has tried to meet with Reid several times” about Byrd’s chairmanship, according to another source.The 90-year-old Byrd has been ailing for months, after...

In the courtyard of a low-slung convalescent hospital west of USC, Gertrude Baines was inaugurated Sunday into one of the world's most exclusive sororities. She turned 114 years old. There was cake. Singing. Proclamations. Superlatives. Because only two other people in the world are 114. There is no one older. A former college maid with a fondness for hats, bacon and Scripture, Baines is the third-oldest person on Earth, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which validates claims of extreme old age. A year ago she was No. 9. It's not hard to figure out what happened in the interim.

TOKYO - Kaku Yamanaka, Japan's oldest person, has died of old age in central Japan, officials said Saturday. She was 113. Yamanaka died at a hospital where she was taken early Saturday after falling ill at a nursing home in Yatomi City in Aichi prefecture (state), an official at her nursing home said on condition of anonymity, citing policy. Born on Dec. 11, 1894, Yamanaka became Japan's oldest person when Tsuneyo Toyonaga, 113, died in February. It was not immediately clear who had become Japan's new oldest person, and Health Ministry officials were not available for comment Saturday. Yamanaka was...

SANTA ROSA - A teenager learned it is not a good idea to try to rob a former U.S. Marine at knifepoint, no matter how old he is. Santa Rosa police Sgt. Steve Bair said an 84-year-old man was walking on Fourth Street with a grocery bag in each arm when the boy approached him with a large knife at about 2 p.m. Wednesday. "Old man, give me your wallet or I'll cut you," the boy said. The man said he was a former Marine who fought in three wars and had been threatened with knives and bayonets before. The...

A senior Church of Scotland minister has questioned the wisdom of spending large amounts of money keeping older people alive. The Reverend Maxwell Craig, 76, feels funding could be better spent helping the young stay out of trouble.

A 114-year-old woman, considered the oldest person in Texas, has died at a Dallas retirement home. Arbella Perkins Ewings celebrated her birthday March 13 with a proclamation from Mayor Tom Leppert and speeches by friends and family. She blew out all 114 candles on her birthday cake. Ewings was born March 13, 1894, the fourth oldest of 12 children whose great-grandparents had been slaves in Mississippi. She married Frank Ewings in 1915, and they moved to South Dallas in 1936, where she worked as a housekeeper until the 1960s. -snip Her only surviving sibling, Annie Lee Perkins, is 103.

An 81-year-old Australian man has shot himself dead with an elaborate suicide robot built using plans he downloaded from the Internet. The Gold Coast man, who lived alone, left notes of his plans and thoughts as he struggled to come to terms with demands by interstate relatives that he move out his home and into care. He spent hours searching the Internet for a way to kill himself, downloaded what he needed and then built a complex machine that would remotely fire a gun. He set the device up in his driveway about 7 a.m. Wednesday, placed himself in front...

Two elderly women accused of killing two transient men with a car so they could collect nearly $3 million in insurance money were videotaped talking about the scheme while in FBI custody, the prosecutor said in opening statements Tuesday. "It's your fault," Olga Rutterschmidt, 75, told co-defendant Helen Golay, 77, in the tape played for the jury. "You can't have that many insurers. ... You were greedy. That's the problem." Truc Do, Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said the women befriended the two men and took out insurance policies on their lives, then drugged them and ran them over...

I have a friend whose wife has Altzheimers. She's fortunate because hers is not the mean type. She smiles all the time and giggles a lot. But she's in a nursing home. He also has bad health and had to go to the same nursing home. I almost choked when he told me it was costing them $9000 a month for the two of them. He had to move out and move in with one of his children. She's still in the nursing home. What on earth can he do? Do they have any options?

101-year-old Buster Martin. Reuters - Mar 5, 1:45 pm EST Gallery LONDON - Already Britain’s oldest employee, 101-year-old Buster Martin now aims to become the world’s oldest marathon runner by completing the London Marathon and celebrating with a pint of beer and a cigarette. Sprightly and bearded, he completed a half marathon at the weekend in five hours 13 minutes. The former Army physical training instructor works three days a week for a London plumbing firm and says he has trained for the April 13th race in his spare time. “I’ve said I’ll attempt it,” he told Reuters by telephone...

LONDON (Reuters) - Already Britain's oldest employee, 101-year-old Buster Martin now aims to become the world's oldest marathon runner by completing the London Marathon and celebrating with a pint of beer and a cigarette. Sprightly and bearded, he completed a half marathon at the weekend in five hours 13 minutes. The former Army physical training instructor works three days a week for a London plumbing firm and says he has trained for the April 13th race in his spare time. "I've said I'll attempt it," he told Reuters by telephone from his workplace at Pimlico Plumbers. "I haven't said I'll...

OCALA, Fla. -- A 77-year-old man told a deputy he roughed up his 74-year-old wife because he was upset about the high cost of gas for driving her to and from dialysis treatments, according to police. Authorities say 77-year-old Richard Close has been charged with aggravated battery and battery on a person over 65. Authorities said Richard Close was charged with aggravated battery and battery on a person over 65. Close said that his life turned upside down when doctors in Illinois placed his wife on kidney dialysis. Over the Christmas holidays, the retired mechanic said his wife of 26...

Doctors checking for broken bones after 90-year-old falls at homeWASHINGTON - Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia was hospitalized Tuesday at Walter Reed Army Medical Center after complaining of back pain after a fall at his home, his spokesman said. Byrd, 90, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the nation’s longest-serving senator, was staying in the hospital overnight for observation, said spokesman Jesse Jacobs. It was not immediately clear whether he had suffered broken bones. Jacobs said Byrd fell at his Virginia home Monday night. He came to his office Tuesday and was on the Senate floor...

Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest serving senator in American history, has been admitted overnight to Walter Reed hospital after sustaining an injury to his back this week. The 90-year-old Byrd’s injury is not life threatening, and he was admitted to the hospital for “observation,” according to his spokesman, Jesse Jacobs. The senator injured his back when he fell down Monday night in his Virginia home, but arrived in the Senate Tuesday and cast votes in the morning during debate over an Indian health measure. But he missed the chamber’s afternoon procedural vote to take up a bill aimed...

84-year-old man fatally bashes 87-year-old hospital roommate TAKAOKA, Toyama -- An 84-year-old man is being questioned over the suspicious death of his bedridden 87-year-old hospital roommate, who was found with his face brutally smashed in over the weekend, police said. Investigators believe the man attacked his roommate, Sadanobu Sawada, killing him. The 84-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was found holding the bloodstained rail from his bed, which he had removed, police said. Hospital officials said the man suffers from senile dementia and manic depression but did not have a history of violence, nor had there appeared to...