Go Red : Great Time for Your Heart Makeover
by Roberta Nubile

Although heart disease is often thought of as a men’s disease, this number-one cause of death in the U.S. kills more women than men each year. The good news is that many of the risk factors are preventable. One of the champions of educating women, the American Heart Association, marks its tenth anniversary this year. Its “Go Red for Women” initiative helps more women take charge of their health.

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Two very different-aged women talk about body image and the physical changes that every woman experiences.

Body Image? Ha! My Real Body Rocks
—And Rolls
by Cindy Hill

How come no one walks into our factories, corporate offices, college campuses and malls, and pulls the 45-year-old men and women into separate cubbies, and tells us what will happen to us, the way they did in 5th grade when they talked about puberty? If only they did. If only we were warned. Continue Reading...

Mother Nature : The Ultimate “Frenemy”
by Courtney Triola

Mother Nature is the reason we lovely ladies are able to make a family. But her monthly gift to females can be one bumpy road to travel. And while boys may not have an exact equivalent to this bloody dynamo, they go through a lot of changes, and feel many of the same feelings. Welcome to puberty! Continue Reading...

Photo: Stephen Mease

The Landscape of Beauty : On Being Distinct
by Patricia Fontaine

One of the perks of having a distinctively birthmarked face, in my case a Port Wine Stain, is that people remember me. Couple that with living in Vermont, in towns and communities that keep their bank tellers and post-office workers, and it makes for a nice sense of home.

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OneCare Vermont:
How Accountable, How Affordable, Will It Be?
by Katharine Hikel, M.D.

Under the Affordable Care Act — "Obamacare" — Vermont’s Fletcher Allen Healthcare and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health have organized a massive new, for-profit Accountable Care Organization (ACO). ACOs are intended to manage Medicare, the federal government’s health insurance program, for the biggest health-care population to come down the pike: retiring baby boomers. The Governor and U.S. Rep. Peter Welch announced on Jan. 21 that the Vermont ACO had just been approved.

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Vermont Women Shape International War Crimes Law
by Allison Teague

Two Vermont judges, the Honorable Justice Shireen Avis Fisher and the Honorable Justice Patricia Whalen, have been breaking boundaries for decades, shaping laws in Vermont and internationally. Both began their careers during a time when there were no women in the Vermont judiciary. The appointment of Vermont’s first woman state judge, Linda Levitt, by Gov. Richard Snelling took place in 1984; it took until 2010 to see Christina Reiss appointed as Vermont’s first Federal Court judge.

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When Will Enough Be Enough?
by Sue Gillis

December 14, 2012, my brother called. In anguish, he told me he had just heard that Sandy Hook Elementary, the school my niece and nephew had attended, not a mile from his home, was the scene of horror.

All he knew then was that several children and some adults had been shot. The narrow country roads quickly filled with police cars, fire trucks, many ambulances and panicked families, all rushing to the school. It was 9:20 a.m. on a sunny Friday morning. Children had just been dropped off to attend what everyone assumed would be a normal school day. Instead Sandy Hook became the scene of the worst school massacre in our country.

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Connecting the Dots in Hell
by Rickey Gard Diamond

Canadian diplomat, Robert Fowler, spoke on NPR last month about his “Season in Hell.” That’s what he titled his book about his capture by Al Qaeda in 2008, one of the few Westerners to survive such an encounter. He remarked: “This is the most focused group of individuals I have ever met.” They despised the idea of individual freedom, or of democratic government, and the equality of the sexes, he said, because they believe these ideas wrongly displace God’s role in human lives.

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