Scientists seeking healthy seniors for Alzheimer’s study

Scientists seeking healthy seniors for Alzheimer’s study

WASHINGTON

In one of the most ambitious attempts yet to thwart Alzheimer’s disease, a major study got underway Monday to see if an experimental drug can protect healthy seniors whose brains harbor silent signs that they’re at risk.

Scientists plan to eventually scan the brains of thousands of older volunteers in the U.S., Canada and Australia to find those with a sticky build-up believed to play a key role in development of Alzheimer’s — the first time so many people without memory problems get the chance to learn the potentially troubling news.

Having lots of that gunky protein called beta-amyloid doesn’t guarantee someone will get sick. But the big question: Could intervening so early make a difference for those who do?

“We have to get them at the stage when we can save their brains,” said Dr. Reisa Sperling of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who is leading the huge effort to find out.

Bombings, other attacks in Iraq kill 40

BAGHDAD

A double bombing tore through Kurdish political party offices in northern Iraq in the deadliest of a series of attacks nationwide that killed at least 40 people, officials said. It was the second such assault in two days.

Nobody claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack. But an al-Qaida splinter group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant claimed responsibility for the previous double bombing Sunday against Kurdish offices in Jalula, northwest of Baghdad, killing 19 people.

The group said in an online statement that the bombings in Jalula were in response to the detention of Muslim women by authorities in the self-rule Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Pakistani Taliban vows more violence

karachi, pakistan

The Pakistani Taliban threatened more violence Monday after a five-hour assault on the nation’s busiest airport killed 29 people — including all 10 attackers — raising a new challenge for a U.S. ally trying to end years of fighting that has claimed thousands of lives.

With recently started peace efforts stalled, the cautious government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may be dragged closer to a decision on whether to take on the militants in earnest across a country with a long history of ambiguity when it comes to dealing with militancy.

The Taliban said the assault on the Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, was in revenge for the November killing of the militant group’s leader in a U.S. drone strike.

Police: Father killed daughter’s abuser

BIRMINGHAM, ALA.

An Alabama man accused of going on a shooting spree in a rural community was charged Monday with killing the man who molested his daughter more than a decade ago and trying to kill a stepdaughter’s boyfriend.

Sheriff’s officials in Cullman County, about 50 miles north of Birmingham, said the father was charged with murder in the shooting death of Raymond Earl Brooks, 59, a registered sex offender who was living with his parents.

The Associated Press isn’t naming the suspect to protect his daughter’s identity. The AP generally does not identify victims of sexual crimes.

Moments before Brooks was slain Sunday, a motorcycle rider believed to be the father opened fire outside a country store in the Berlin community when he saw a man who has been dating his stepdaughter, said Chief Deputy Max Bartlett.

Associated Press