BAGHDAD -- A female Sunni Arab lawmaker kidnapped nearly two months ago was released on Saturday, which is hailed by the Iraqi prime minister as a "gift" for his national reconciliation plan.

Taiseer Najah al-Mashhadani, a member of the Sunni Consensus Front, was abducted with her five bodyguards on July 1 when gunmen ambushed her convoy in a Shia neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.

Less educated women face greater heart risks

NEW YORK -- Less educated women face a greater risk of developing heart disease, research from Sweden shows. This is largely because women with fewer years of schooling are more likely to have heart disease risk factors such as cigarette smoking, sedentary lifestyle, high body mass index, high blood pressure and diabetes, researchers report.

There is a well-established link between lower socioeconomic status and higher heart disease risk among men, the research team notes in the American Journal of Epidemiology. A number of causes have been proposed for the connection, including that less educated, poorer people may have unhealthier lifestyles or less access to medical care, or that they may face more on-the-job stress.

Not all women change lifestyle after cancer

NEW YORK -- Breast cancer survivors who believe certain health behaviors helped cause their disease are more likely to change those behaviors after their diagnosis, a new study shows.

The same motivation appears to hold in close relatives of cancer survivors, Drs. Carolyn Rabin and Bernadine Pinto of Miriam Hospital and Brown Medical School in Providence, Rhode Island report in the medical journal Psycho-Oncology.

"Survivors take an active problem-solving approach to preventing a future incidence of cancer; they develop their own understanding or representation of the cancer and implement preventive behavioral strategies accordingly," they write.