­by Marvin Ramirez

Bass player Óscar Danilo Murillo at pianist Gullermo Guillen’s funerals. (photo by Marvin J. Ramirez)

Óscar Danilo Murillo was known, not only for his good bass playing in the San Francisco Latino music world, but for his tenderly character and simplicity as a human being, for which he was loved by most who knew him. He died appr­oximate on Sunday, Dec. 20. He was 55 years old.

“He was someone who you can say, was never bitter, who lived a happy life,” said an unidentified man at the Driscoll’s Valencia Street Mortuary, where many of his musician friends came to pay their respect and to say good-bye during his two-day funeral services.

Known as El Poderoso (The Powerful), possibly after his short height and the strong sound his bass guitar projected, Mr. Murillo was well-known by most musicians who played Salsa and tropical music during nearly the last three decades in the Bay Area.

In music, the bass guitar is the instrument that is followed by the rest of the instruments; it is the sound that one can hear a mile away making building structures vibrate.

Mr. Murillo long music career spans back in Nicaragua, since the age of 16. Born in Managua, Nicaragua, on Sept. 25, 1954, he started playing rock music in the early 70 in the old Managua, before an earthquake destroyed the Nicaraguan capital to the ground on Dec. 23, 1972.

As many Managuans who fl ed the destruction of their city and who lost their homes, it is believed that Mr. Murillo, who worked for 12 years at Priority Parking in Downtown San Francisco, stayed in Managua a few years before leaving for Costa Rica, in search of new horizons in the music fi eld, since this country had become the mecca in entertainment for most Nicaraguans after the  earthquake.

However, in 1979, he joined the popular group, Los Ramblers in Nicaragua, which took him to represent Nicaragua in Cuba’s festivals on July 1980. He returned to Cuba in 1981 to play at the Festival de Varadero.

At the time, Los Ramblers musical success was taking off, and they were invited to play in San Francisco in 1983, according to a band member, and it was during this tour that the members of the group, including Mr. Murillo, who was from Barrio Santo Domingo in Managua, decided to stay in the City by the Bay, which became their domicile up to this day.

The family of Oscar Danilo Murillo at the funeral house. (photo by Marvin J. Ramirez)

“He (Murillo) was an individual of good manners… a peaceful man who got along with everyone,” said Arturo Ibarra, the musical director of Los Ramblers.

Among the groups he played and recorded with, include, La Fórmula Infi nita, en San Francisco, Los Dandis, Los Gatos, in Costa Rica, Los Ramblers, with whom he recorded in Cuba the famous Calos Mejía Godoy’s song Alforja Campesina, Orquesta Borínquen and Sonora USA, Los Clarks in Nicaragua; and played with Macondo in Nicaragua, Orquesta de Roberto Lechuga and Orquesta Candente in San Francisco, Llama Viva in Nicaragua, Grupo Mestizo in San Francisco, Orquesta Marianao, Sol y Ritmo y Ana Daisy, in San Francisco, and Los Galos.

To his daugher Johana Lissette Murillo, who is blind, the loss is like losing more of her sight, but she has plenty to remember of him.

“He as the only one who took me to see Walt Disney movies,” when she was about 7 years old, before she lost her sight at age 16, said his daughter Johana Lissette to El Reportero.

She clearly remembers the sweet moments she spent with her dad, especially when he took her to watch the movie Bambi. Last time she was with Mr. Murillo was in May, in Los Angeles, when he came to visit her; and she was waiting to be united with him again the following weekend to spend this year’s Christmas with him. But this was not possible.

According to Johana Lissette, he might have died of asphyxia, after using an inhaler prescribed by the doctor, who prohibited him to drink alcohol when using the medicine.

­After he didn’t showed up for work on Monday, his boss Antonio came to the house where he lived, and knocked at the door. But he only heard Mr. Murilo’s dog barking, said Johana Lissette. It was then that he called the police, so entering into the house through a another unit. Mr. Murillo was found dead on the floor. It is believed that he had been dead for two days. It is unknown if there was an autopsy performed.

Mr. Murillo is survived by his father Braulio Murillo, 82, who lives in Nicaragua; his mother Rosa Argentina Prado Castro, 80; two brothers, Omar Murillo, 51, and Héctor Prado, 36, two children, Danilo Murillo, 33, and Johana Lissette Murillo Wheelock, 36; and two grandchildren, Mauricio Emmanuel, 18 month-old, and Sofía Damilu, two-month-old.

The staff of El Reportero, but especially, its editor, Marvin Ramirez, send their most sincere condolence the grieving family.

­

by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Even when women at high-risk of breast cancer are well-informed about the risks and benefits of using the drug tamoxifeno for prevention, only 6 percent said they were likely to take it.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center created a decision aid designed to inform women about the risks and benefits associated with tamoxifeno, a drug that was first used to stop breast cancer from returning and has recently been shown to prevent breast cancer in the first place.

The U-M decision aid gave objective information about tamoxifeno and was tailored to each woman’s health history. The study targeted women who were at high risk of developing breast cancer within the next five years; 632 women participated.

“Tailored information is critical because the risks and make benefits vary across women. This is one of the most detailed tailored decision aids to address breast cancer chemoprevention. The information about the risks and benefits of tamoxifeno was tailored to each woman’s health history. That means, when women read this decision aid, they learned about how the drug was likely to affect them given their age, race, breast cancer history and medical history,” says lead author Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D., associate professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School and a research investigator at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System.

After viewing the decision aid, 41 percent of women could correctly answer six questions about the risks and benefits of tamoxiXX1feno, while 63 percent correctly answered at least five of the six questions.

Despite this understanding, only 29 percent of women said they were likely to seek out more information about tamoxifeno, and only 29 percent said they would ask their doctor about it. A scant 6 percent of women said they were likely to take tamoxifeno.

Three months later, the researchers found that fewer than 1 percent of participants had started taking tamoxifeno, and fewer than 6 percent had either talked to their doctor or sought more information.

Results of the study appear online in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.

“For any given woman, there is not a right or wrong answer in regards to whether she should take tamoxifeno to prevent a first diagnosis of breast cancer.

The goal of decision aids is to explain the risks and benefits in a clear way so that the woman is able to weigh these factors and make an informed decision about what is best for her,” Fagerlin says.

While as many as 10 million women could be eligible to take tamoxifeno to prevent breast cancer, few choose to do so.

Side effects were the biggest concern about tamoxifeno cited in this study, with 80 percent of the participants worried about this. The side effects of tamoxifeno include hormonal symptoms, including hot flashes, and sexual problems, as well as rare incidences of endometrial cancer, blood clots or cataracts.

“Experts have be­moaned the dearth of women taking these pills, worried that word has not gotten out about tamoxifeno’s ability to prevent breast cancer in high risk women.

Our study shows that even when the word does get out, most women are too concerned about the pill’s side effects to want to take it,” says senior author Peter Ubel M.D., professor of internal medicine and director of the Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine at U-M.

by the El Reportero’s news services

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Iran has mounted a concerted and successful diplomatic outreach towards Latin America designed to counter U.S. interests and offset the pressure it is facing over its alleged nuclear enrichment ambitions. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a controversial figure both at home and abroad, has found a welcome in capitals from La Paz to Caracas that he cannot be sure of anywhere else.

The promise of Iranian investment has helped to bolster its political initiatives, yet there remains a large gap between the hype surrounding its promise of broad anti-imperialist cooperation and the reality of funds left unspent and projects unimplemented. Tehran’s major challenge is to effect a coherent long-term strategy towards Latin America that goes beyond the opportunism of its recent contacts. The close personal relationship between Venezeula’s President Hugo Chávez and Ahmadinejad has made Caracas the most important port of call for Iran. Yet it is Brazil’s biggame diplomacy that may, in the long-term, offer Tehran the best opportunities to leverage its political and economic clout.

Rebels kidnap Colombian governor

On 21 December the governor of the southern province of Caquetá was kidnapped from his home by gunmen dressed in military uniforms, in an attack the authorities believe was carried out by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrilla group.

This would be the Farc’s fi rst major stunt since early 2009 and arguably its most high profile kidnapping since 2002. The stunt is a bold show of strength intended to demonstrate that the rebel group is not a spent force ahead of important congressional and presidential elections in March and May next year. The attack, in the context of increased activity by the group in the latter part of 2009, appears to indicate that it has come out of a strategic withdrawal following its disastrous year in 2008.

Venezuela: Campaign to Revoke Obama´s Nobel

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) shapes from Tuesday a world campaign to claim the revocation of the Nobel Peace Prize that was bestowed upon Barack Obama because he is considered to be a warmonger.

was founded in 1901 andAccording to the party, which has more that seven million members, the first African American Head of the White House is far from deserving the prize that has been bestowed upon 95 people and 20 organizations.

We believe there should be a review of the acknowledgement. It is a duty of the progressive countries to request it, assured leader of the PSUV Jacqueline Faria when she announced the initiative.

According to Faria, the Commission of Foreign Affairs of the bloc has the mission to promote the crusade.

The justification of the war in Afghanistan, the sending of new occupying troops to that Central Asian nation and the installation of military stations in Colombia and Panama constitute arguments to demand the annulment of the Nobel Prize.

Obama´s stance at the Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen, where he acted as a strategist but a war one, should be added to that.

Faria recalled the North American plan of imposing an exclusive pact in the meeting that was meant to save the planet, which was a proposal with a lack of concrete actions to move forward in the mitigation of the release of pollutant gases to the atmosphere that are responsible for the increase of global temperature.

Obama has broken his promises of peace and change, she said.

Among the guests that are different from Obama are the indigenous Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu (1992), Kenyan environmentalist and politician Wangari Maathai (2004), former President of the United States James Carter (2002) and former US Vice President Al Gore (2007).

­(Latin News and Prensa Latina contributed to this report).

by Malkia Cyril, y co-autores

A major new report on higher education has found that Hispanics and African Americans are completing college at rates far below those of their white counterparts.

The study also revealed that rates of non-white and low-income students receiving bachelor’s degrees have seen little increase over the past 30 years. The analysis was released by the Access to Success (A2S) Initiative, a project run by the heads of the 24 U.S. college and university systems with support from The Education Trust, a national organization that works to promote academic achievement.

A2S was formed in 2007 with goals of increasing the number of college-educated adults and ensuring that their institutions of higher education graduated more students of color and those from families in the lowest- income brackets.

Their report, “Charting a Path,” culls data from a baseline survey of their member institutions, which according to A2S educate nearly 40 percent of undergraduates at four-year colleges and universities nationwide. Survey results clearly show that non-white and low-income young adults are having far more difficulty receiving their degrees than are white students. While 36 percent of white young adults are attaining a bachelor’s degree, the rate is only 20 percent for blacks and 12 percent for Latinos.

Once in college, students of color are much less likely than their white counterparts to graduate. An estimated six in ten white students earn bachelor’s degrees within six years, compared with only about four in ten students of color.

The report also found that the gaps separating Latino and African-American students from their white peers are wider today than in 1975. Thirty years ago, 24 percent of white young adults attained a bachelor’s degree, a figure more than double that of blacks (11 percent) and two and a half times that of Latinos (9 percent). at rate (20 percent), with Latinos at one-third (12 percent). Latinos have seen only a 3 percent growth in degree attainment over the last 30-plus years.

The differences between high- and low-income students are even more apparent.

In 1975, 38 percent of high-income young adults attained a bachelor’s degree, compared to 7 percent of their low-income classmates. Today, a staggering 76 percent of high-income young adults are receiving a four-year degree, contrasted to only 10 percent of those from low-income families.

A2S participants claim these disparities cannot be corrected until policymakers have access to data that better reflect the attendees and graduates of colleges and universities. According to A2S, unlike in their study, transfer and part-time students aren’t included in federal data collections, nor is the progress of low-income students tracked through college.

However, these previously uncounted students account for two-thirds of students in the A2S Initiative and a similar percentage of higher education enrollments nationwide.

“Students who aren’t counted don’t count when policies are debated and decisions are made,” said Jennifer Engle, assistant director of higher education at The Education Trust and coauthor of the report. “By measuring results for such nontraditional groups as low-income, transfer and part-time students, the A2S metrics provide an unprecedented view of how well institutions are serving their entire undergraduate enrollment, not just a select few.”

Each of the A2S participant-institutions sets its own progress goals for increasing graduation rates among targeted communities, but the organization is working collectively to achieve the goal of halving by 2015 the gaps in college-going and college-completion that separate low-income and non-white students from the others.

“Closing the achievement gap is not just a competitiveness issue for our nation. It is also the civil rights issue of our day,” said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland.

A2S hopes to pressure national leaders on the issue by invoking the struggling economy and promises made by President Obama. A press release announcing the survey results states, “President Obama seta goal for America to regain the global lead in college-degree attainment by 2020. In no small measure, our success in meeting this goal — and in helping our once-vital economy rebound to generate more job opportunities for all Americans — will depend on higher education leaders taking responsibility for making colleges work better for all of the students they serve.” Hispanic Link.

Details of the study can be found at: ­http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/publcations/files/NASH-EdTrust.BaselineReport.pdf.