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San Francisco officials are deciding whether to impose a warning on ads for a favorite drink of children and a bane of public health advocates: Sugary soda pop. The "Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Warning Ordinance" would require health warnings on advertising within city limits — on billboards, walls, the sides of cabs and buses. Supporters and opponents say San Francisco would be the first place in the country to require warnings on ads for soda, which is linked to rotting teeth and obesity.

The war has been waged on several fronts for nearly a decade, and the aggressors are poised to declare victory over the wounded U.S. coal industry. After powering the Industrial Revolution and helping to turn the U.S. into the world’s top economic power, coal now seems to be drowning in what environmentalists call a “deadly cocktail” — a rabid, politically potent anti-fossil fuels movement, the rise of cheap, abundant, relatively clean domestic natural gas and an Obama administration that freely admits it wants to decrease coal use in America through a host of new rules. That near-perfect storm is taking...

School is out for the summer, but youth can still return to some area schools for free lunch in the coming months. The federally-funded Summer Food Service Program provides free lunches for children 18 and younger, with the goal of making sure low-income students who receive free or reduced-price meals during the school year still have nutritious food to eat in the summer. Summer lunch programs are open to children of any income level, from any school district. “The main reason we do it is because the economy in our area is not the greatest,” said Terry Fuller, director of...

Australians are facing the prospect of having to visit sex shops to buy cigarettes, in a bid by lobbying groups who say ‘adult only’ premises should get a monopoly on selling tobacco products.The Australian Sex Party, which has one member of parliament in Victoria, has made the claim with the Eros Association, which represents the interests of sex shops and adult venues, reports ABC.The Eros Association is encouraging all of its members to get tobacco licences, and is campaigning for laws to force all tobacco retailers to sell the products in ‘adult only’ areas where minors cannot enter.

I have disturbing news to share with you from our federal government. The USDA wants Americans to remove chocolate and marshmallows and fire from our summertime s’mores. Instead—the USDA is suggesting we load up the graham crackers with strawberries and low-fat yogurt. That’s not a s’more. That’s a fruit salad with an oversized graham cracker crouton. Over the past six years the Obama administration has waged a War of Culinary Aggression against lard-loving Americans. …

WASHINGTON -- About a decade ago, a doctor friend was lamenting the increasingly frustrating conditions of clinical practice.

More Americans are clinically obese than ever, a new study has revealed. Nearly a staggering 28 per cent of residents are now categorized as obese - making up an increasing proportion of the two-thirds of Americans who are overweight, the Gallup-Healthways poll shows. This means they are at a higher risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, dementia, deep vein thrombosis, certain cancers, and a number of other medical conditions. It comes as Mississippi has taken the crown for the fattest U.S. state for the second year running, with a whopping 35.2 per cent of residents obese (down...

Do you want water or milk with that? Servers at Davis city restaurants will soon be asking that question to customers ordering kids’ meals with beverages, under a new ordinance designed to discourage sugary soda consumption. The ordinance, passed on a unanimous 5-0 vote Tuesday night, will require any Davis restaurant that offers a meal-with-drink kids’ menu to make water or milk, not soda, the primary option. Parents can still request soda at no extra charge, but must specifically ask for it. By Sept. 1, Davis restaurants must prove compliance with the city ordinance by submitting a copy of their...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is helping fund the creation of an implantable antenna for health care, which could be used for “long-term patient monitoring.” The government has so far given $5,070 for a graduate fellowship to work on the project, which begins June 1. The project is being financed in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea to create a high frequency antenna that can be permanently implanted under a person’s skin. “Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare,” a grant for the project said. “Implantable medical devices...

Tanning salons are already under siege – they got taxed by the health law, are newly regulated by the federal government and states, and have become dermatologists’ favorite bad guy. “It’s time we started treating [tanning beds] just like they are cigarettes. They are carcinogen delivery systems,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., at a May 20 Capitol Hill briefing on the dangers of indoor tanning. “We do not allow our children to buy cigarettes, yet the tanning industry continues to target adolescent girls. And this is not unlike what we found with the tobacco industry.” In response, DeLauro is pushing...

Back in 2009, when Congress was debating the Affordable Care Act, many liberal Democrats felt it did not go far enough — that it should be even more sweeping, even more expansive, even more costly. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, one of the Senate's most liberal Democrats and a veteran of many legislative battles, urged his colleagues on the Left to go ahead and pass the bill. "The key to this is that this modest home, we can put additions onto it in the future," Harkin told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in December 2009. "But if we don't have the starter home, we're...

The National Institutes of Health is using hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on grants to study the best ways to get gay people to quit smoking and abusing drugs and alcohol. The University of Illinois at Chicago has spent over $435,000 since 2010 to carry out a “culturally targeted and individually tailored smoking cessation study” for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) smokers, according to the grant information published by the NIH. Additionally, NIH gave the University of Pittsburgh $43,120 to study tobacco and alcohol use trajectories in “sexual-minority emerging adults” and has awarded over $178,000 to Columbia University...

Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comic strips. While I normally read it for the daily laugh, today's strip did the immense public service of reminding me how silly our government can be:

The Obama administration hopes to save the bees by feeding them better. A new federal plan aims to reverse America’s declining honeybee and monarch butterfly populations by making millions of acres of federal land more bee-friendly, spending millions of dollars more on research and considering the use of fewer pesticides. While putting different type of landscapes along highways, federal housing projects and elsewhere may not sound like much in terms of action, several bee scientists told The Associated Press that this a huge move. They say it may help pollinators that are starving because so much of the American landscape...

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) says a bill will be introduced in the House that will “put a salad bar in every single school in the United States of America.” Speaking at the Religious Action Center’s “Consultation on Conscience” event last month, Ryan told the Washington D.C. audience about efforts that will help “begin to end poverty.” […] “It starts to paint the picture of the kind of system that we want,” Ryan continued. “Now, we have a lot of school districts in Ohio and across the country, 70, 80, 90 percent of the kids in the school will be Medicaid—free...

It is every parent’s worst nightmare, and according to a report on Police State Daily and the Medical Kidnapping site; for one homeschooling family in Kentucky, it has come true. On May 6, Kentucky homesteading Naugler family had their ten children taken into the custody of the state and are now fighting to regain custody and to prove their innocence. According to the family’s facebook blog page, Blessed Little Homestead, and other sources above, the police showed up, asked to see the children, and when the mother asked to see a warrant and what the charges were, the sheriff proceeded...

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a regulation for Christmas lights on Monday, deeming some holiday decorations a “substantial product hazard.”“The Consumer Product Safety Commission … is issuing a final rule to specify that seasonal and decorative lighting products that do not contain any one of three readily observable characteristics (minimum wire size, sufficient strain relief, or overcurrent protection), as addressed in a voluntary standard, are deemed a substantial product hazard under the Consumer Product Safety Act (“CPSA”),” the final rule said.The ruling applies to a variety of Christmas decorations, including “stars, wreathes, candles without shades, light sculptures, blow-molded...

Social justice looms large for many, if not most, education journalists. We care about the often substandard education of low-income children and the gap between the haves and have-nots. Take a look at the winners of the Education Writers Association awards on April 20, 2015. Most were writers who told the stories of students in poverty. Beginning this school year and going forward, measuring and describing that poverty is about to get much muddier. That’s because the main statistic used to determine poverty in a school – the number of students who receive free or reduced-priced lunches – is starting...

Head teachers are warning that schools are having to act like "mini-welfare states" in having to provide food, spare uniform and even to wash clothes and provide showers for some pupils. The National Association of Head Teachers says such welfare support is costing £43.5m from school budgets. Heads' leader Russell Hobby said it was a "hidden national scandal". A Conservative spokesman said "the number of children living in poverty has fallen by 300,000". The warning from members of the NAHT, as they gather for their annual conference in Liverpool, is that schools are having to step in with welfare support...

As National Guard troops responded to rioting in Baltimore, President Barack Obama said Tuesday that there have been too many troubling police interactions with black citizens across American in what he called "a slow-rolling crisis." But he said there was no excuse for rioters to engage in senseless violence. Obama said people in Baltimore who stole from businesses and burned buildings and cars should be treated as criminals. "They aren't protesting, they aren't making a statement, they're stealing," Obama said. Obama spoke at a White House press conference with the Japanese prime minister the day after violence broke out 40...