Young men who smoke are more likely to have a stroke before age 50 than their peers who avoid tobacco, a small study suggests.

Smoking has long been linked to an increased risk of stroke in older adults, but research to date examining this connection in younger adults has mainly focused on women. For the current study, researchers examined data on 615 men who had a stroke before age 50 and compared their smoking habits to a control group of 530 similar men who didn’t have a history of stroke.

Overall, current smokers were 88 percent more likely to have a stroke than men who never smoked, the study found.

Light smokers who had fewer than 11 cigarettes a day were 46 percent more likely to have a stroke. Heavy smokers with a two pack-a-day habit, or more, were over five times more likely to have a stroke.

‘Simple takeaway’

“The simple takeaway is the more you smoke, the more you stroke,” said lead study author Janina Markidan of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Smoking causes inflammation in blood vessels that increases the risk of blood clots forming, which in turn increases the risk of stroke, Markidan said by email.

“Although reducing the number of cigarettes smoked can reduce your risk of stroke, quitting is still the best choice for smokers,” Markidan added.

For the study, researchers focused on what’s known as an ischemic stroke, the most common kind, which occurs when a clot blocks an artery carrying blood to the brain.

Study has limitations

Among the stroke cases included in the study, 239 men had never smoked and 108 were former smokers. Another 103 men smoked less than 11 cigarettes daily, while 97 men smoked between 11 and 20 cigarettes a day and 40 men smoked 21 to 39 cigarettes daily.

An additional 28 men who had strokes smoked more than 40 cigarettes, or two packs, a day.

Most of the men who had strokes in the study were between 35 and 49 years old.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how smoking habits might directly influence the potential for a stroke in younger men.

Another limitation is that researchers lacked data on other tobacco products participants used in addition to cigarettes, which might influence their risk of stroke, researchers note in the journal Stroke.

Results hold true for younger smokers

The study team also lacked data on other factors that can independently influence the risk of stroke such as alcohol consumption or exercise habits.

Even so, the results suggest the link between smoking and strokes that is well established for older adults also holds true for younger smokers, said Allan Hackshaw, a researcher at University College London in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“It shows that smoking has a serious impact even when people are younger,” Hackshaw said by email. “Because treatments for stroke are much better now (fewer die from it straight away), many people who suffer one can have long-lasting consequences and physical disabilities at an age when they are usually expected to be working and physically active/fit.” 
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From: MeNeedIt

Mexico on Thursday indicated time was running out to see whether NAFTA nations could agree a new deal in the short term while Canada struck a upbeat tone, saying top-level talks this week had achieved a great deal.

Major differences remain between the three members of the North American Free Trade Agreement after more than eight months of largely slow-moving negotiations launched at the insistence of Washington, which wants major changes to the 1994 pact.

A source close to the talks said U.S. officials have told Canada and Mexico that May 17 or 18 is the deadline for a text that could be dealt with by the current U.S. Congress. A second source confirmed that those dates had been discussed.

Need solutions before elections

Mexico’s Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said he expected to learn by the end of Friday whether a new deal was possible in the short term.

“I think we will be finding out through the day and tomorrow … if we really have what it takes to be able to land these things in the short run,” Guajardo told Reuters.

Top-level talks between the three members this week hit an obstacle as the United States and Mexico sought to settle differences over the key issue of automobiles.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer wants a quick agreement to avoid running into complications caused by a Mexican presidential election on July 1 and U.S. midterm Congressional elections in November.

‘Getting closer’

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said the three nations had “made a lot of progress since Monday … we are definitely getting closer to the final objective.”

Freeland, speaking to reporters after meetings with senior U.S. legislators on Capitol Hill, sidestepped questions as to when an agreement might be reached.

Guajardo told Reuters that “we have suitcases for two weeks if necessary.”

U.S. President Donald Trump regularly threatens to walk away from NAFTA, underscoring uncertainty over the pact. Business executives complain that the lack of clarity is hitting investment.

Mexico has launched a counterproposal to U.S. demands to toughen automotive industry content rules and boost wages. U.S. President Donald Trump blames cheaper wages in Mexico for manufacturing job losses in the United States.

Many major issues remain

Many other major issues crucial to a deal are still unresolved, including U.S. demands for a five-year sunset clause, and elimination of settlement panels for trade disputes.

After meeting with Lighthizer on Thursday, Guajardo told reporters that the talks were not just covering autos.

“You cannot think that in a process of negotiations we’re going to solve one item without reviewing the overall balance of the agreement,” he said. “We’re going over all the items. It’s very important to stress that.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Cannes opened its doors on Monday for a festival that will show the new “Star Wars” spinoff but welcome fewer stellar names than usual.

Critics have said a jury including Cate Blanchett, Kristen Stewart and Lea Seydoux has more A-list acting talent than the films — many from lesser-known European, Asian and African filmmakers — vying for the Palme d’Or.

“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” will be the only Hollywood blockbuster screened during the fortnight, and even that will have already premiered in Los Angeles.

Netflix, which brought a raft of A-listers last year, is boycotting Cannes due to French rules that would stop it streaming movies for three years after a cinema release.

This will also be the first festival in years without Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul once famous on the Riviera for his lavish parties, but now the subject of sexual assault allegations that have shaken the global film industry.

Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.

Festival director Thierry Fremaux denied that the lack of U.S. movies indicated Cannes was losing its appeal in Hollywood, where studios increasingly release big films late in the year to get visibility in the run-up to the Oscars, which are awarded in late winter.

“You should never judge on one year,” he told a news conference, while adding that the perhaps the famously harsh press corp at Cannes — where movies are often booed during media screenings — might be “scaring certain productions” away.

Hollywood Reporter critic Scott Roxborough said Cannes remained “the number one film festival for quality cinema worldwide” and that its selection of less commercial movies showed “Cannes is going back to its roots.”

“It’s the only place really you can have an unknown film … that within a hour of being shown everybody is talking about it … within a day, a week, it’s the biggest name in arthouse cinema,” he told Reuters.

There are 21 films in the main competition and dozens more vying for other prizes and screening out of competition. Here are a handful of the most hotly anticipated:

Everybody Knows (Todos lo Saben)

The festival opens with this Spanish-language family drama starring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. The writer-director is the Iranian Asghar Farhadi who won foreign language Oscars for “A Separation” and “The Salesman”, taut character-driven realist movies that explore the divisions imposed by social class and national boundaries. “Everybody Knows” is competing for the Palme d’Or.

The House That Jack Built

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier returns after being ejected from the festival in 2011 for telling a news conference he was a Nazi who sympathized with Adolf Hitler — comments he later said were taken out of context.

Matt Dillon stars as a serial killer of women. “We experience the story from Jack’s point of view, while he postulates each murder as an artwork in itself,” according to notes in the festival’s program.

Hollywood Reporter critic Roxborough said the film, screening out of competition, is one of his top-three must-sees, calling it: “a movie that could almost be seen as an answer to the MeToo movement, in a really nasty way.”

BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee returns to Cannes almost 30 years after “Do the Right Thing” was tipped for, but failed to get, the Palme d’Or.  [“He said he was robbed, I agree with him],” said Roxborough.

“BlacKkKlansman,” the true story of an African-American police officer who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan, stars John David Washington (son of Denzel) and Adam Driver.

Lee says the story, set in the 1970s, is more relevant than ever in President Donald Trump’s America.

“Agent Orange refused to repudiate the Klan, the alt-right and the Nazis,” he told Hollywood Reporter. “‘There’s good people on both sides.’ That’s going to be on his gravestone.”

In competition for the Palme d’Or, “BlacKkKlansman” will open in U.S. cinemas on Aug. 10, one day before the anniversary of the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed by a car driven into the crowd.

The Man who Killed Don Quixote

Terry Gilliam’s two-decade struggle to make this film has entered movie folklore. An initial version, starring Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, was dumped after a series of calamities meant shooting had to stop.

Finally finished, it remains to be seen if this version, with “Brazil” star Jonathan Pryce as the Spanish knight who tilts at windmills, can be shown at Cannes due to a last-minute legal challenge from a movie producer who says he has the rights over it.

“It’s taken him so long to make this movie I think we all owe it to the man to go and check it out,” said Roxborough of the film that should, but may not, close the festival, out of competition, on May 19.

A Paris court on Monday heard an application for an injunction on showing the film, but will not rule until Wednesday.

Leto (The Summer)/ 3 Faces

Two films in the main competition will screen without the presence of their directors – both prevented from traveling by national authorities in their home countries.

Leto, about the Leningrad rock music scene in the latter years of the Soviet Union, is directed by Kirill Serebrennikov who is under house arrest pending a fraud case his supporters say is part of a government crackdown on artistic freedoms.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested in 2010 and banned from making films, but has continued to work, to international acclaim. Like his 2015 film “Taxi,” “3 Faces” features Panahi playing himself on screen.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 8 to May 19.
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From: MeNeedIt

Microsoft is launching a $25 million initiative to use artificial intelligence to build better technology for people with disabilities.

CEO Satya Nadella announced the new “AI for Accessibility” effort as he kicked off Microsoft’s annual conference for software developers. The Build conference in Seattle features sessions on cloud computing, artificial intelligence, internet-connected devices and virtual reality. It comes as Microsoft faces off with Amazon and Google to offer internet-connected services to businesses and organizations.

The conference and the new initiative offer Microsoft an opportunity to emphasize its philosophy of building AI for social good. The focus could help counter some of the ethical concerns that have risen over AI and other fast-developing technology, including the potential that software formulas can perpetuate or even amplify gender and racial biases.

The five-year accessibility initiative will include seed grants for startups, nonprofit organizations and academic researchers, as well as deeper investments and expertise from Microsoft researchers.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company hopes to empower people by accelerating the development of AI tools that provide them with more opportunities for independence and employment.

“It may be an accessibility need relating to vision or deafness or to something like autism or dyslexia,” Smith said in an interview. “There are about a billion people on the planet who have some kind of disability, either permanent or temporary.”

Those people already have “huge potential,” he said, but “technology can help them accomplish even more.”

Microsoft has already experimented with its own accessibility tools, such as a “Seeing AI” free smartphone app using computer vision and narration to help people navigate if they’re blind or have low vision. Nadella introduced the app at a previous Build conference. Microsoft’s translation tool also provides deaf users with real-time captioning of conversations.

“People with disabilities are often overlooked when it comes technology advances but Microsoft sees this as a key area to address concerns over the technology and compete against Google, Amazon and IBM,” said Nick McQuire, an analyst at CCS Insight.

Smith acknowledged that other firms, especially Apple and Google, have also spent years doing important work on accessibility. He said Microsoft’s accessibility fund builds on the model of the company’s AI for Earth initiative, which launched last year to jumpstart projects combating climate change and other environmental problems.

The idea, Smith said, is to get more startups excited about building tools for people with disabilities — both for the social good and for their large market potential.

Other announcements at the Build conference include partnerships with drone company DJI and chipmaker Qualcomm. More than 6,000 people are registered to attend, most of them developers who build apps for Microsoft’s products.

Facebook had its F8 developers’ gathering last week. Google’s I/O conference begins Tuesday. Apple’s takes place in early June.

This is the second consecutive year that Microsoft has held its conference in Seattle, not far from its Redmond, Washington, headquarters.
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From: MeNeedIt

Those fashion exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art always have a high bling quotient. This time, though, the bling comes from an unlikely source: the Vatican.

The latest Met show focuses on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on fashion. It features plenty of big-ticket designer items from labels like Versace and Dolce & Gabbana. But the Vatican plays a starring role.

Curator Andrew Bolton brought back 42 items from the Sistine Chapel, including tiaras encrusted with thousands of diamonds, and massive papal cloaks with golden embroidery so fine they took some 16 years to produce.

The exhibit will be launched as usual by the celebrity-studded Met Gala on Monday night. Will the celebrity bling be any match for the Vatican bling?
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From: MeNeedIt

A new phone app could be a “game-changer” in the fight against child marriage in Bangladesh, where more than half of all girls are married before they are 18, children’s charity Plan International said on Monday.

The impoverished South Asian nation has one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage, according to UNICEF, despite laws that ban girls under 18 and men under 21 from marrying.

The mobile app being rolled out by Plan and the Bangladesh government aims to prevent it by allowing matchmakers, priests and officers who register marriages to verify the bride and groom’s ages through a digital database.

“If we could get the people involved in the initial stages of marriage on side as well, then there would be no one to solemnize, no one to register and no one to arrange a marriage for a child,” said Soumya Guha, a director at Plan Bangladesh.

“The app could be the game-changer that we need,” he said, adding that it stopped 3,750 underage marriages during a six-month trial.

Campaigners say girls who marry young often drop out of school and face a greater risk of rape, domestic abuse and forced pregnancies, which may put their lives in danger.

The app, which has an offline text messaging version for rural areas, gives the user access to a database that stores a unique identification number linked to the three documents.

When one of the numbers is entered, it shows “proceed” if the person is of legal age and a red “warning!” if not.

All marriages in Bangladesh must be legally registered within 30 days of the ceremony, but many are not.

A hard copy of a birth certificate, school leaving document or national identity card works as age proof, but often parents who want to marry off their children often forge them.

The charity is training 100,000 officiants about the ill effects of child marriage and how to use the app, which it hopes to roll out nationally by August.

“I believe this app will help us achieve the commitment by our honorable prime minister to eliminate child marriage before 2041,” Muhammad Abdul Halim, a director general at the prime minister’s office, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

However, Supreme Court lawyer Sara Hossain said more needed to be done to educate girls about their right to consent and plug legal loopholes.

“People might just avoid the registration because it is not required for validity of marriage and there is only a minor penalty for not registering. It’s not a big thing,” Hossain told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We would be mistaken to think that something like this will be a magic bullet solution.”
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From: MeNeedIt

The first vaccine campaign against cholera in Yemen has started, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, a year and a half after an epidemic was triggered by war and a health and sanitation crisis.

There have since been more than one million suspected cases of cholera in Yemen, and 2,275 recorded deaths, the WHO says.

The disease is spread by faeces in sewage contaminating water or food, and it can kill because patients quickly lose fluids through vomiting and diarrhea. Caught early it can be treated with oral rehydration salts.

The oral vaccination campaign, which began in four districts in Aden on Sunday targeting 350,000 people, coincides with the rainy season, which health workers fear could spread the disease further.

“The first four districts are being targeted… and then the campaign will move towards all the areas at risk in the country, covering at least four million people,” Lorenzo Pizzoli, WHO cholera expert, said in a tweet posted on Sunday.

Yemen’s war, a proxy conflict between Iran-aligned Houthis and the internationally recognised government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by a Saudi-led alliance, has killed more than 10,000 people since 2015.

It has also displaced more than 2 million and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, including the health system whose workers have not been paid.

Nevio Zagaria, the WHO representative in Yemen, told Reuters in April that some 1.4 million vaccine doses had been shipped via Nairobi, out of 4.4 million planned.

“The rainy season is starting, so we need to use the window of opportunity to start a vaccination campaign,” he said at the time.

In July 2017, the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision – which manages a global stockpile — earmarked one million cholera vaccines for Yemen. But the WHO and local authorities together to scrap a vaccination plan on logistical and technical grounds.

Some senior Houthi health officials have been known to object to vaccinations, delaying the campaign, aid workers say.
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From: MeNeedIt

When it comes to blockbusters, bigger and bolder is Hollywood’s focus for this summer as the studios count on new and improved sequels to make up for last year’s lackluster box office season. VOA’s Penelope Poulou has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

Originating from Mexico, Chihuahua’s are one of the smallest dog breeds. And on Saturday, 128 competed in the “Running of the Chihuahuas” to celebrate the Cinco de Mayo holiday. From Washington, VOA’s Jill Craig has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

A new invention is a result of a joint effort by artists and scientists. Computerized art robots can memorize artist’s strokes and effects and reproduce them as needed. They can perform at the artist’s direction, cover large surfaces and make precision painting easier and quicker. Old masters often used their students to help paint a large canvas and ease the tediousness of repetitive strokes. As VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports, that work too can now be taken over by robots.
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From: MeNeedIt

The first railroad appeared in the United States back in 1828. Located entirely in the state of Maryland, it was only 25 kilometers long. Today, American trains look very different — modern, fast and comfortable. VOA’s Maxim Moskalkov follows the evolution of rail travel in the U.S.
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From: MeNeedIt

Digital civil rights groups are writing to Congress next week to ask for help persuading internet giants Google and Amazon to reverse decisions they made that will make it harder for people to get around censorship controls worldwide.

At issue is the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between governments, such as Russia, Iran and China, and internet and messaging communications technology like Telegram and Signal, which are used to communicate outside of censors’ oversight.

In this case, encrypted messaging apps, such as Telegram and Signal, have been using a digital disguise known as “domain fronting.”

​Disguising the final destination

As the encrypted message moves through networks, it appears to be going to an innocuous destination, such as google.com by routing through a Google server, rather than its true destination.

If a government acts against the domain google.com, it conceivably shuts down access to all services offered by the internet giant for everyone in the country.

Russia crackdown

Russia did just that in mid-April when it sought to crack down on Telegram.

But hackers can also use this disguise to mask malware, according to ZDNet. 

In recent weeks, first Google and then Amazon Web Services said they would close the loopholes that allowed apps to use the disguise.

“No customer ever wants to find that someone else is masquerading as their innocent, ordinary domain,” said Amazon in a press release announcing better domain protections. Neither Google or Amazon responded for a request to comment.

Companies vote against being a disguise

Matthew Rosenfield, a co-author of the Signal protocol, said that “the idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you’d have to block the rest of the internet as well. In the end, the rest of the internet didn’t like that plan.” 

Amazon sent Signal an email telling it that its use of circumvention was against Amazon’s terms of service. In Middle East countries, such as Egypt, Oman and Qatar, Signal disguised itself as Souq.com, Amazon’s Arabic e-commerce platform.

​Letter to Congress

The letter being sent to Congress will remind members of their stated support for encrypted communication tools and call on them to contact the technology giants to change their decision, according to sources.

Access Now, a digital-rights organization based in New York, identified about a dozen “human rights enabling technologies” that rely on domain fronting using Google.

Peter Micek, general counsel of Access Now, said in a statement that Google and Amazon have an obligation “to meet their human rights responsibilities and protect users at risk.”

“The market leaders that have the resources to fight for human rights must be just that — leaders,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt