Global

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Alzheimer's and dementia can be triggered by
small silent strokes caused by high blood pressure, but "birthdays are
dangerous" and can be fatal for elderly people, warned a World
Federation of Neurology former president.
   "We can begin preventing some dementia by preventing strokes.
That's the big news," said Dr. Vladimir Hachinski, a clinical
neurological sciences professor at Canada's Western University.
   "The cutting edge, the big thing about Alzheimer’s disease, is that
with Alzheimer’s disease, pathology is very common -- a lot of people
have [Alzheimer’s] pathology -- but you need a trigger. And the
trigger is stroke," Dr. Hachinski said in an interview.
   "It doesn't necessary have to be clinical stroke.  There are little
silent strokes.
   "So the big news is that you can prevent the Alzheimer’s pathology
from becoming dementia by treating the risk factors and preventing
stroke."
   Dr. Hachinski specializes in stroke, vascular dementia and

Four weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that “nothing he has done since the inauguration allays fears that he is in effect a Putin puppet.” The liberal pundit concluded with a matter-of-fact reference to “the Trump-Putin axis.”

Fredrik S. Heffermehl

Trump – Putin could rescue the world – and win the Nobel Peace Prize

Donald Trump has promised to repair America´s infrastructure and to lower taxes. We all know this is undoable, and yet – it could be done. Trump has one way to raise the required funds, and create a safer world in the bargain: talk with Russia on a global initiative for co-operation and disarmament, then get China to join. Astronomic funds would become available to meet the needs of nations and citizens everywhere. Seeing the advantages ought to get all other nations on board. All nations, all weapons, big and small; the paradox is that this will prove easier than step-by-step approaches.

Open Guantanamo to human rights inspectors. Open its files to the public. Subpoena the witnesses to its horrors. Open the courts to its prisoners and try them or set them free. Open the gates to the people of Cuba and give them their land back. And impeach U.S. presidents numbered 43 through 45.

This April 4th will be 100 years since the U.S. Senate voted to declare war on Germany and 50 since Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war on Vietnam (49 since he was killed on that speech’s first anniversary).

When Tierna Oxenreider of Reynoldsburg told her parents she wanted to take up a sport that allowed her to use a sword, her parents let her chase her dreams like any loving mom and dad would do.

And while they were surprised their daughter was eager to embrace a mano-a-mano sport, what was more startling was how old Tierna was when this combatant epiphany struck her.

She was just four at the time. “I want to do a sword sport,” she told her parents.

Eight years later, after her parents decided the sport of fencing was a perfect fit, the now 12-year-old Tierna has become one of the top-3 fencers nationally in her age group. She’s scheduled to compete at her fifth Arnold Classic where she’s won seven gold medals. In 2015 she won the North American Cup Tournament for her age group.

Family and coaches alike say Tierna is mature, humble and beyond determined. The future could be golden for this pre-teen who has set her sights on the ultimate fencing prize.

“That’s my goal right now, to compete in the Olympics eight years from now,” says Tierna, who incredibly is a first-generation fencer.

Liberals are supposed to be antiwar, right? I went to college in the 1960s, when students nationwide were rising up in opposition to the Vietnam War. I was a Young Republican back then and supported the war through sheer ignorance and dislike of the sanctimoniousness of the protesters, some of whom were surely making their way to Canada to live in exile on daddy’s money while I was on a bus going to Fort Leonard Wood for basic combat training. I can’t even claim that I had some grudging respect for the antiwar crowd because I didn’t, but I did believe that at least some of them who were not being motivated by being personally afraid of getting hurt were actually sincere in their opposition to the awful things that were happening in Southeast Asia.

The performances and much of the music in Richard Strauss’ Salome are the most melodramatic of any opera I’ve ever experienced. But this is to be expected since, as that old expression goes, “consider the source”: The New Testament. However, as with Mel Gibson’s dark, despicably dreary, sadistic 2004 The Passion of the Christ, the operatic version of John the Baptist’s (Icelandic baritone Tomas Tomasson plays the prophet called here Jochanaan) disastrous encounter with Salome (New Hampshire soprano Patricia Racette) is derived from brief Biblical passages.

enator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would do well to embrace our early American hero Pocahontas. She might even thank Donald Trump for making the link.

With his signature sneering, leering sexism and racism, Trump refers to the Massachusetts senator with the name of this real-life historic figure as if it were a put-down.

But Pocahontas is a true American icon. Unlike Trump, she was greatly loved by her people, and her character was impeccable. She was deeply admired in England, where she travelled with her husband and young son and then tragically passed away, having barely turned twenty.

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Dwight Eisenhower gave the world some extraordinary rhetoric — indeed, his words have the sting of ironic shrapnel, considering how little they have influenced the direction of the country and the world in the last six decades.

“These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953,” he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors nearly 64 years ago. “This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?”