Most women exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke in China

HONG KONG (Reuters) – Nearly two-thirds of women of reproductive age in China are exposed to second-hand tobacco smoke at home and over half are exposed in the workplace, which raises the risk of complications in pregnancy, including stillbirths and infant death.

The findings, released by the World Health Organisation on Tuesday, are from a tobacco survey conducted in China in 2010 by the centers for disease control and prevention in China, the United States and the WHO.

Around 100,000 people die from exposure to second-hand smoke in China each year, in addition to an estimated 1 million people who die from direct tobacco consumption.

Women in rural areas of China were more affected, with almost 3 in every 4 exposed to second-hand smoke at home, compared to just over half in urban areas.

“There is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke. Creating 100 percent smoke-free environments is the only way to protect people from the harmful effects of second-hand tobacco smoke,” said Michael O’Leary, WHO representative in China.

“Tobacco use and second-hand smoke exposure in reproductive-aged women can cause adverse reproductive health outcomes, such as pregnancy complications, fetal growth restriction, preterm delivery, stillbirths, and infant death.”

About a quarter of China’s 1.3 billion people are smokers, or about as many people as there are in the United States. But the country is gradually becoming more aware of this public health problem.

The Ministry of Health warned in May that more than 3 million Chinese would die of smoking-related illnesses annually by 2050 if nothing is done to curb this habit.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn, Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The Romney message: It’s no longer just the economy, stupid

Romney reflected his in TelePrompter at a Virginia rally (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

ENGLEWOOD, Colo.—Four years ago, Mitt Romney was criticized as a man without a message, a presidential candidate straight from the heart of corporate America who was good at making lists and delivering PowerPoint presentations but not so great at explaining exactly why he should be the next president.

His initial slogan in 2008—"True Strength for America's Future"—was vague. And his push to focus on "innovation and transformation"—which advisers back then initially claimed as his chief focus—fell flat. To make up ground, Romney moved to the right, running away from his record as a moderate—a push that earned him a reputation as a phony that doomed his first bid for the Republican nomination.

But as Romney nears the end of his second campaign for the White House, there has been no mistaking the core argument for his candidacy. Speaking this weekend to a crowd of 17,000 people in this battleground district in a swing state, Romney used the word "change" no less than a dozen times—arguing that, if elected, he would bring "real change" and "big change."

"The question of this election comes down to this: do you want more of the same or do you want real change?" Romney said, speaking against the backdrop of an enormous sign that read "Real Change on Day One."

"President Obama promised change, but he could not deliver it," Romney said. "I promise change, and I have a record of achieving it."

To hear Romney on the stump over the past few weeks has been to experience a flashback of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign. At virtually every stop, the Republican presidential nominee has spoken of the need for a "new beginning" and of the "movement" he's leading toward the White House. He's transformed a stump speech that four years ago was heavy on lists of talking points on at least a dozen policies into something not unlike a motivational speech. Romney has become a storyteller, talking about the people he's met on his long road to the presidency or the people he's helped in his personal life. He tries to sell voters on his vision of the future, describing the election as a quest for "American greatness" and the desire for a "better tomorrow."

"Obama had his moment, and he's offered 'more of the same,'" Stuart Stevens, Romney's chief strategist, told Yahoo News, using a phrase that James Carville made famous as one of the three core messages of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign: "It's the economy, stupid"; "change versus more of the same"; and "don't forget health care."

The Romney campaign has in essence landed on the same message: the economy, change, and don't forget Obamacare.

"This is our moment," Stevens said," and we think people want something different than the last four years."

Romney's embrace of the "change" argument seems to have driven his rise in the polls in recent weeks, but it comes after months of what many Republicans criticized as a muddled message. For much of 2012, his campaign focused almost exclusively on the economy—arguing it would be the ultimate deciding factor of the election. Asked about other issues, including subjects like abortion or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Romney often would often use the question to pivot back to his argument that he would be the best-positioned candidate to create jobs and get the economy back on track. Romney strayed from his economic message only a few times—mostly in the Republican primary when he fought off challenges from Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich by arguing that he had been a "severely conservative" governor of Massachusetts.

But in keeping his focus on the economy, Romney downplayed what many considered his biggest strength in the race—his experience as a corporate turnaround artist at Bain Capital. The move allowed the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies to turn Romney's Bain experience into one of his greatest vulnerabilities, casting the candidate as a coldblooded corporate type willing to ship American jobs overseas if it was better for the bottom line.

The attacks sent Romney's favorability numbers plummeting—and prompted anxiety within the campaign that he might not recover. Romney aides continue to defend the campaign's slow response, insisting it simply didn't have the money to run ads responding to the attacks.

But many insiders also point fingers to the candidate, himself, who was initially reluctant to talk about his Bain experience or defend himself against Democratic attacks on his personal wealth.

"Believe it or not, Mitt actually is a modest guy," a longtime Romney adviser tells Yahoo News. "He doesn't like talking about his money. And I think he thought the Bain stuff would blow over. He thought it was a silly issue compared to 23 million unemployed and all of the other negatives of the Obama economy. … I think a lot of us did. He was wrong, and we were wrong."

Yet on stage in recent weeks, Romney seems to have finally found his voice on the issue, delivering a simple and straightforward explanation of his resume.

"I built a business, and turned around another," Romney said at an appearance outside Milwaukee last week. "I helped put an Olympics back on track. And with a Democratic legislature, I helped turn my state from deficit to surplus, from job losses to job growth, and from higher taxes to higher take-home pay. This is why I am running for president. I know how to change the course the nation is on, how to get us to a balanced budget and how to build jobs and rising take-home pay."

A longtime Republican consultant close to the Romney campaign privately questioned why the candidate wasn't making this "simpler argument" earlier in the campaign. "If the Romney people have been seeing out there in the past few days would have shown up over the summer, this race might not be so close," the consultant, who declined to be named, told Yahoo News.

But other Romney aides argue that the candidate first needed to show his "real" side to voters--something his campaign could not afford to do until after the Republican convention.

"The message that works so well does so in part because the electorate finally has a sense of who he really is. Now that they do, the message and the messenger are integrated," Tom Rath, a New Hampshire political consultant and a longtime Romney adviser, told Yahoo News.  "It is a great message, one that we always believed could win, but one that could only work when the voters felt they knew him well enough to make it credible."

In recent weeks, Romney has sounded a centrist tone, vowing to work with lawmakers "on both sides of the aisle who care more about country than politics." Obama is too politically radioactive to overcome the partisan gridlock of Washington," Romney regularly says.

"He will be unable to work with the people in Congress," he says. "He has ignored them, attacked them, blamed them. … The president was right when he said he can't change Washington from the inside. … You can take him at his word."

Stuart Stevens insists Romney's latest message isn't much different than speeches he gave early in his campaign—though Stevens acknowledges the phrase "change" wasn't as prominent.

"Campaigns aren't static, otherwise no one would listen to you," Stevens told Yahoo News. But, he added, Obama gave Romney an opportunity to play the "change" card by not presenting a clearer picture of what he would do with a second term.

"That was a huge opportunity for us," Stevens said. "It allowed us to present the contrast between us and them … In a campaign, you have different moments to say different things.

Inside the campaign, aides view Romney as an agent of change not unlike Obama four years ago. They admit Romney will never inspire crowds like Obama did in '08, but in an argument Romney hopes will decide the election, they contend he can deliver on the change Obama promised to bring to Washington.

"Change is not a message that Barack Obama invented," Stevens said. "It's a message that he co-opted … and a message he didn't deliver on. And Mitt Romney can."

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Bomb shakes Damascus, opposition holds unity talks

AMMAN (Reuters) – A bomb exploded near army and security compounds in Damascus, Syrian television reported, and fractured opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad began unity talks abroad to win international respect and arms supplies.

The 50-kilogram (110-pound) bomb, near a large hotel in a heavily guarded district, was described by state media as an attack by “terrorists” – the government’s term for insurgents in the 19-month-old uprising against Assad.

Opposition activists said Sunday’s blast appeared to be the work of the Ahfad al-Rasoul (Grandsons of the Prophet) Brigade, an Islamist militant unit that attacked military and intelligence targets several times in the last two months.

The mainly Sunni rebels have carried out a series of bombings targeting government and military buildings in Damascus this year, extending the war into the seat of Assad’s power.

The Syrian conflict has aggravated divisions in the Islamic world, with Shi’ite Iran supporting Assad — whose Alawite faith derives from Shi’ite Islam — and U.S.-allied Sunni nations such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar backing his foes.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights, an activist monitoring group, said government forces had killed 179 people on Sunday. It said most of the dead were civilians killed in shelling of Damascus suburbs and included 14 women and 20 children. The rest were rebels killed in battles in the capital and the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo.

Opposition campaigners said the Syrian army shelled rebel positions inside a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus on Sunday, killing at least 20 people. They said the Yarmouk camp had become the latest battleground in the war.

In northern Idlib, opposition sources said rebels were forced to halt an offensive to take a big air base because of a shortage of ammunition, a problem that has dogged their campaign to cement a hold on the north by eliminating Assad’s devastating edge in firepower.

Islamist insurgents had launched the attack on the Taftanaz military airport at dawn on Saturday, using rocket launchers and at least three tanks captured from the military.

The Syrian government restricts journalists’ access in Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from the ground.

The Jaafar bin Tayyar Division, a rebel unit in Deir al-Zor, said its fighters had taken control of the al-Ward oilfield near the Iraqi border on Sunday, after overrunning a loyalist outpost that had 40 militiamen defending it.

Rebel commanders, former Syrian officials and the Syrian head of an oil services company familiar with oil production in the area said the fields, mostly not operational, had been under de facto rebel control for months.

FEARS OF WIDER CONFLAGRATION

The conflict began with peaceful protest rallies that morphed into armed revolt when Assad, whose family has ruled Syria since 1971, tried to stamp them out with military might. About 32,000 people have been killed, wide swathes of the major Arab state have been wrecked and the civil war threatens to widen into a regional sectarian conflagration.

The opposition talks that began in Qatar marked the first concerted attempt to meld feuding, disparate groups based abroad and coordinate strategy with rebels fighting in Syria.

Divisions between Islamists and secularists as well as between those inside Syria and opposition figures based abroad have foiled prior attempts to forge a united opposition and deterred Western powers from intervening militarily.

Analysts were skeptical the planned four days of opposition talks in the Qatari capital Doha would bring immediate results.

They aim to broaden the Syrian National Council (SNC), the largest of the overseas-based opposition groups, from some 300 members to 400, to pave the way for talks in Doha on Thursday including other anti-Assad factions to crystallise a coalition.

“The main aim is to expand the council to include more of the social and political components. There will be new forces in the SNC,” Abdulbaset Sieda, current leader of the Syrian National Council, told reporters in Doha ahead of the meeting.

The meetings would also elect a new executive committee and leader for the SNC, he said.

A Qatar-based security analyst, who asked not to be named, said the meetings would bring a small step forward, at most. “The Syrian National Council is just too divided,” he said.

In Cairo, the international mediator on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, called on Sunday for world powers to issue a U.N. Security Council resolution based on a deal they reached in June to set up a transitional Syrian government.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the same news conference, dismissed the need for a resolution and said others were stoking violence by backing rebels. His comments highlighted the impasse over Syria’s civil war.

Russia and China, both permanent council members, have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad’s government for the violence. The other three permanent members are the United States, Britain and France.

(Additional reporting by Rania el Gamal and Regan Doherty in Qatar, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Stephen Powell)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The app's the thing as Shakespeare goes digital

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Surgery seems best for heart disease in diabetics

LOS ANGELES (AP) — New research shows that people with diabetes and several clogged heart arteries fare better with bypass surgery instead of having stents placed to prop open their blood vessels.

Doctors compared the treatments in a study of 1,900 diabetics and looked five years later to see how many had suffered a heart attack, stroke or death. Only 19 percent of the bypass group had, versus 27 percent of those given stents.

People like this represent about one-fourth of all heart disease patients.

Results were discussed Sunday at an American Heart Association conference and published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Will it all come down to Ohio? Both campaigns focus on the state

How to Avoid Political and Election Talk on Facebook and Twitter http://t.co/a6m2Oid8

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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DA seeks rehearing in Anna Nicole Smith drug case

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Prosecutors refusing to accept an appellate court‘s ruling in the Anna Nicole Smith case asked the court on Friday to change its decision and allow her former boyfriend and manager to be retried.

California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled last month that Howard K. Stern could not be retried without violating the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy. Attorneys in the office of District Attorney Steve Cooley filed a 19-page motion for rehearing that contends the court misinterpreted the law.

The court said a trial judge erred in dismissing conspiracy convictions against Stern and Smith’s psychiatrist, Dr. Khristine Eroshevich, in a case that partially revolved around obtaining prescription drugs for the celebrity model under false names. The defendants were not charged with causing her death.

Superior Court Judge Robert Perry found it was not unusual in the celebrity world Smith inhabited for fake names to be used to protect privacy. The appellate court sent the case back to Perry but gave no guidance on what the judge should do next.

The motion filed Friday asked that the court modify its ruling so that Stern can be retried, or to grant a rehearing on the issue.

The defendants’ nine-week trial was the final act of the long-running drama centering on the blond beauty’s troubled life, which was documented on reality TV, in tabloids and in trial testimony. The defendants were acquitted of most charges, and the judge suggested prosecutors had chosen the wrong case in which to make its point about prescription drug abuse.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Israel’s Neuronix offers new Alzheimer’s treatment

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel-based Neuronix, which has developed a non-invasive medical device to help to treat Alzheimer’s disease, expects the system to be approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration in late 2014.

The device, which combines electromagnetic stimulation with computer-based cognitive training, is already approved for use in Europe, Israel and several Asian countries. In Singapore it is approved for clinical trial use and the application for registration of the product is still under evaluation.

“You stimulate the brain on a biological level as well as on a cognitive level,” Neuronix CEO Eyal Baror told Reuters, saying this double approach created longer-lasting benefits.

The device, which consists of a chair containing an electronic system and software in the back and a coil placed at the head, has been tested on mild to moderate Alzheimer’s patients who suffer from dementia but are not totally dependent.

The system is in trials at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre. Patients are treated for one hour a day, five days a week over six weeks.

“We see improvement lasting for 9-12 months and the good thing is that patients can return and undergo treatment again,” Baror said. “If out of 10 years the patients have left to live we can keep them at home in a relatively mild state of the disease for three, four, five years, it’s a lot.”

According to Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the hospital’s Berenson-Allen Centre for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation, brain stimulation – or transcranial magnetic stimulation – involves a very low current applied to a specific part of the brain and is approved by the FDA for treatment of a variety of ailments and diagnostic applications.

“The application in Alzheimer’s disease and in combination with cognitive training is novel,” Pascual-Leono said in a phone interview from Boston.

About 20 percent of patients experience a mild headache but there are no long-term negative effects, he said.

Pascual-Leone, who is principal investigator in the Harvard trial, said that of 12 patients in the study, six received the real treatment and all showed cognitive improvement. Their improvement was significantly more than the average seen in patients taking just medication, he said.

The study’s results will be submitted for publication in the coming weeks and a follow-up study on 30 patients is planned.

Neuronix received European approval several months ago and has installations in the UK and Germany. In Israel, a few dozen patients are being treated with the device.

The U.S. trials are expected to run till the end of 2013. Neuronix is also running a trial in Israel for pre-Alzheimer’s patients.

The company expects to sell half a dozen systems in the second half of 2012 and three dozen in 2013. In Israel, the treatment costs $ 6,000.

“Our target for becoming profitable is in parallel to entering the U.S. market around 2015,” Baror said.

Neuronix has raised $ 8 million from private individuals as well as in grants from the Israeli Chief Scientist’s Office and is exploring options to raise more money in the coming year, including the possibility of going public.

(This version of the October 24 story corrects paragraph two that company corrects to say that in Singapore, device is approved for clinical trial use and its application for registration of the product is under evaluation, not that device is approved for commercial use.)

(Reporting by Tova Cohen; editing by Stephen Nisbet)

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Campaigning for victory, Romney speeches shift

NEWINGTON, N.H. (AP) — From an airport runway on a cold New Hampshire morning, Mitt Romney faced 2,000 supporters and delivered the same speech he had given the day before — three times on the day before, actually.

Romney told his supporters on Saturday, "I won't just represent one party, I'll represent one nation."

His stump speech is a carefully crafted 15 minutes that opens a window into campaign strategy. For the Republican nominee, it's an evolving tool that has shifted sharply in recent weeks to appeal to the political center.

Let there be no doubt that Romney, who once described himself as "severely conservative," is aggressively courting the narrow slice of undecided voters — largely women and moderates — who have yet to settle on a candidate.

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