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Two Million People Expected on New Year's Eve in Times Square

New York Police Department Counterterrorism Bureau members stand in Times Square to provide security ahead of New Year's Eve celebrations in Manhattan, New York, U.S. December 28, 2017. REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
New York Police Department Counterterrorism Bureau members stand in Times Square to provide security ahead of New Year's Eve celebrations in Manhattan, New York, U.S. December 28, 2017. REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
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Two Million People Expected on New Year's Eve in Times Square

New York Police Department Counterterrorism Bureau members stand in Times Square to provide security ahead of New Year's Eve celebrations in Manhattan, New York, U.S. December 28, 2017. REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
New York Police Department Counterterrorism Bureau members stand in Times Square to provide security ahead of New Year's Eve celebrations in Manhattan, New York, U.S. December 28, 2017. REUTERS/Amr Alfiky

The New York Police Department is providing officers with specialized training to stop any suicide bombers at Sunday’s New Year’s Eve celebration when up to 2 million people will flood the streets of Times Square, officials said on Thursday.

The stepped-up training is in response to an attempted bombing in a Times Square subway station walkway on Dec. 11. It comes on top of increasingly stringent security for the city’s New Year’s Eve celebration in the years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The New York Police Department will also deploy observation teams trained to spot snipers, increase the number of explosive-detecting dogs and position more officers throughout the area this year.

Police have said they will incorporate lessons learned from what they have labeled as three terrorist attacks in the city in the past 15 months, in addition to their ongoing analysis of all attacks worldwide.

That intelligence will form part of the massive security operation for the “ball drop” celebration, a tradition that dates to 1907 and is now televised around the world.

“You will see an increase in heavy weapons, bomb squad personnel, radiological detection teams, and our technology to include over 1,000 cameras in and around the area of Times Square for the event,” the NYPD’s chief of counterterrorism, James Waters, told a news conference, two days before the event.

Officers involved in the New Year’s Eve security operation will receive a tactical bulletin and a training video on suicide bombers that they will be able to review on their department-issued phones starting Friday.

Sunday is expected to be the coldest New Year’s Eve in the US financial capital for 55 years. The National Weather Service warned that temperatures could fall to 14 degrees Fahrenheit (-10 Celsius) at midnight on December 31, the coldest since 1962.

Mariah Carey, pop singer Nick Jonas and the former Fifth Harmony vocalist Camila Cabello are set to provide the entertainment at this year’s Times Square New Year’s Eve party.

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Varieties

Blood Tests Allow 30-year Estimates of Women's Cardio Risks, New Study Says

A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
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Blood Tests Allow 30-year Estimates of Women's Cardio Risks, New Study Says

A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
A woman jogs in a park in Saint-Sebastien-sur-Loire near Nantes, France January 19, 2024. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights

Women’s heart disease risks and their need to start taking preventive medications should be evaluated when they are in their 30s rather than well after menopause as is now the practice, said researchers who published a study on Saturday.

Presenting the findings at the European Society of Cardiology annual meeting in London, they said the study showed for the first time that simple blood tests make it possible to estimate a woman’s risk of cardiovascular disease over the next three decades.

"This is good for patients first and foremost, but it is also important information for (manufacturers of) cholesterol lowering drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs, and lipoprotein(a)lowering drugs - the implications for therapy are broad," said study leader Dr. Paul Ridker of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Reuters reported.

Current guidelines “suggest to physicians that women should generally not be considered for preventive therapies until their 60s and 70s. These new data... clearly demonstrate that our guidelines need to change,” Ridker said. “We must move beyond discussions of 5 or 10 year risk."

The 27,939 participants in the long-term Women’s Health Initiative study had blood tests between 1992 and 1995 for low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C or “bad cholesterol”), which are already a part of routine care.

They also had tests for high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) - a marker of blood vessel inflammation - and lipoprotein(a), a genetically determined type of fat.

Compared to risks in women with the lowest levels of each marker, risks for major cardiovascular events like heart attacks or strokes over the next 30 years were 36% higher in women with the highest levels of LDL-C, 70% higher in women with the highest levels of hsCRP, and 33% higher in those with the highest levels of lipoprotein(a).

Women in whom all three markers were in the highest range were 2.6 times more likely to have a major cardiovascular event and 3.7 times more likely to have a stroke over the next three decades, according to a report of the study in The New England Journal of Medicine published to coincide with the presentation at the meeting.

“The three biomarkers are fully independent of each other and tell us about different biologic issues each individual woman faces,” Ridker said.

“The therapies we might use in response to an elevation in each biomarker are markedly different, and physicians can now specifically target the individual person’s biologic problem.”

While drugs that lower LDL-C and hsCRP are widely available - including statins and certain pills for high blood pressure and heart failure - drugs that reduce lipoprotein(a) levels are still in development by companies, including Novartis , Amgen , Eli Lilly and London-based Silence Therapeutics.

In some cases, lifestyle changes such as exercising and quitting smoking can be helpful.

Most of the women in the study were white Americans, but the findings would likely “have even greater impact among Black and Hispanic women for whom there is even a higher prevalence of undetected and untreated inflammation,” Ridker said.

“This is a global problem,” he added. “We need universal screening for hsCRP ... and for lipoprotein(a), just as we already have universal screening for cholesterol.”