Cheers and jeers from around the news:

• Cheers to anyone who made the courageous decision to quit smoking in 2009. It’s now Saturday morning, and you are three days into your new smoke-free life.

If you are young, you have made one of the biggest and best decisions of your life. This, of course, is not as obvious at the moment as you wrestle with that urge to pick up a pack of cigarettes.

Few decisions are so win/win. You will save countless thousands of dollars over the course of your life, you will enjoy better health for years to come, you will remain physically active far longer, and you will almost certainly live longer.

There are, of course, few long-term investments that come without risk, as the stock market has proven in 2008. But quitting the nicotine habit is one of them.

• Jeers to National Public Radio for laying off the reporter assigned to cover how Americans are getting by during the recession. Ketzel Levine, a 31-year employee of NPR, started a series in September on how Americans were weathering the economic crisis.

“American Moxie: How We Get By” began airing in December, reporting on the ways people were adapting to the crisis.

“My idea was to look at how we adjust, how we change, what we have to dig deep and find in order to do what it takes to get by,” she said.

Now, due to its own financial problems, NPR has eliminated Levine’s job.

While many businesses are laying off employees, including many newspapers, cutting the reporter covering the recession just seems like the wrong place to start.

• Cheers to the town of Norway for its practice of plowing snow into the middle of Main Street. While this may seem like a nutty idea to some, it works well, and more towns with wide streets should try it.

Snow on Main Street is plowed toward the middle. Later, when the storm subsides, crews come along, with front-end loaders and trucks, and remove the piles.

The advantage: Parking areas and sidewalks are left clear of snow. The disadvantage: It becomes temporarily impossible to cross some intersections. Cars must travel to the end of Main Street, make U-turns and return to their cross street.

Even this problem, however, can be solved by simply plowing through the intersections.

It’s hard to beat the easier parking, cleaner sidewalks and quicker removal of snow mounds. If you’ve ever lived in a town that uses this system, you know it works.

• Jeers to the city of Auburn for launching the process to redesign the rotary from Washington Street to Western Avenue to address traffic congestion that has resulted in only 17 accidents in a two-year span.

The city is relying on a 2000 study – that’s now nine years ago, folks – about accidents that happened between 1996 and 1998, more than a decade ago. Most of the accidents along this section are so-called fender-benders caused by drivers crossing lanes.

If that’s the major problem, perhaps the city would do well to install more visible signs about the hectic traffic pattern ahead and see if that works, before spending untold millions on a project conceived using outdated data.

Or, as the 2000 study suggested, put up a couple of stop signs or a traffic signal at Western Avenue to control the traffic flow, which would be a considerably cheaper and faster solution.