3 dead after 5 family members are shot

3 dead after 5 family members are shot

downey, calif.

Five members of the same family were shot and three of them died Wednesday in connected attacks at a business and residence in a Los Angeles suburb, police said.

The shootings occurred at a business called United States Fire Protection Services and at a nearby home, where family members of the owner live, said Downey police Lt. Dean Milligan.

A woman was found dead at the home, and a man and a woman were killed at the business, he said. Two other shooting victims, including a 13-year-old boy, were in critical but stable condition at hospitals.

It was unclear how all the victims were related.

Email: White House was told about attack

washington

Two hours after the U.S. Consulate came under attack in Benghazi, Libya, the White House was told that a militant group was claiming responsibility for the violence that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

A State Department email sent to intelligence officials and the White House situation room said the Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter, and also called for an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli.

The document may fuel Republican efforts to show that the White House knew it was a terrorist attack, even as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was saying — five days afterward — that it appeared to be a protest gone awry.

Study: Aspirin may treat colon cancer

new york

Aspirin, one of the world’s oldest and cheapest drugs, has shown remarkable promise in treating colon cancer in people with mutations in a gene that’s thought to play a role in the disease.

Among patients with the mutations, those who regularly took aspirin lived longer than those who didn’t, a major study found. Five years after their cancers were diagnosed, 97 percent of the aspirin users were still alive versus 74 percent of those not taking the drug.

Aspirin seemed to make no difference in patients who did not have the mutations.

UN Security Council backs Syria truce

beirut

The U.N. Security Council gave unanimous backing Wednesday to a four-day truce proposed by the international mediator for Syria to mark a major Muslim holiday after he warned that the failure of yet another cease-fire plan would only worsen the fighting.

Yet even this modest effort — the international community’s only plan for scaling back the violence — appears to be doomed.

Previous cease-fire missions have failed, in part because neither Syrian President Bashar Assad nor rebels trying to topple him had an incentive to end their bloody war of attrition.

Embryos made with 2 women, 1 man

new york

Scientists in Oregon have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a provocative technique that could someday be used to prevent babies from inheriting certain rare incurable diseases.

The researchers at Oregon Health & Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce children, and it is not clear when or even if this technique will be put to use. But it has already stirred a debate over its risks and ethics in Britain, where scientists did similar work a few years ago.

Associated Press