November 28, 2016


News and Views


http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/11/27/miss-minnesota-contestant-halima-aden-hijab-birkini/94521240/

Pageant contestant wears hijab for all rounds of Miss Minnesota USA
Carly Mallenbaum , USA TODAY
7:04 a.m. EST November 28, 2016

Photograph -- Halima Aden will be the first to compete in the Miss Minnesota USA contest while wearing a hijab and other modest Muslim clothing that keeps her fully covered. (Photo: Alishba Kazmi, AP)


The traditional "swimsuit competition" has seen some new interpretations this year: Miss Teen USA made waves this summer by replacing it with a round filled with workout clothes, and a Miss Minnesota USA contestant has competed this weekend in that part of the beauty pageant in a hijab and burkini.

Halima Aden, 19, is the first contestant to wear a traditional Muslim headpiece in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant. The Somali-American teenager, who lives in St. Cloud, is wearing the hijab for the entire competition, and pairing it with a full-body bathing suit and a covered-up evening dress for different rounds of the contest.

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Aden told TEGNA station KARE that wearing more modest clothing makes her feel most like herself.

“A lot of people will look at you and will fail to see your beauty because you’re covered up and they’re not used to it. So growing up, I just had to work on my people skills and give people a chance to really know me besides the clothing," she said. “Be who you are. It’s easy to feel like you have to blend in, but it takes courage to live your life with conviction and embrace the person that you are."

Aden, one of 45 contestants in the pageant that continues Sunday, is competing to represent Minnesota in the Miss USA pageant in 2017.



I’m happy to see that at least some Islamic people are emerging as well-known and talented individuals, engaging freely in American society. In a time period like this it must be threatening for people of distrusted groups to step forward in life and do business in the presence of often hostile “natives.” One young woman who had on an Islamic style bathing suit popularly called a “burkini,” on the beach at Nice, France, was detained by police. Fifteen towns in France have a ban on any religious garb on the beach.

The Burkini, rather than resembling a bathing suit at all by modern standards, covers every inch of skin, and looks more like a yoga outfit with a long, flowing head scarf and long sleeves. The ban has been overturned by the French Court. In the US and elsewhere, mainly because of ISIS on the one hand and of the Alt-Right groups on the other, ordinary citizens are becoming pretty darned paranoid, and potentially dangerous. Even as I understand certain kinds of human frailty, the hatred of other groups for instance, I still think they are pointless, deeply wrong and damaging to our whole society.

See CNN article below.


http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/europe/france-burkini-ban/

Burkini ban in Nice overturned by French court
By Lauren Said-Moorhouse, CNN
Updated 10:07 AM ET, Fri September 2, 2016

Play – CNN news video
PLAY -- Marine Le Pen: 'The burkini is a fundamentalist uniform' 02:57
Photos: Burqa, hijab, niqab: What's what?


Several towns along France's southeastern coast have implemented the bans
Critics say the order is discriminatory and unconstitutional


(CNN)A court in Nice suspended the city's burkini ban, citing insufficient grounds to justify the controversial decree.

In the ruling Thursday, judges from Nice's administrative tribunal court said the full-length swimsuit worn by some Muslim women did not pose a risk to public order on the French Riviera city's beaches.

The case was brought by the Collective Against Islamophobia -- a group of human rights activists who have been helping a number of women challenge fines. They argued that the ban is discriminatory, unconstitutional and that there has been no evidence to suggest that wearing a burkini has contributed to any acts of public disorder.

Over 30 towns -- largely situated along France's southeast coastline -- initially imposed a ban on the divisive swimwear.

The arguments for and against

Authorities in Nice had counter-claimed that the request to the ban the swimwear -- which covers the entire body apart from the face, hands and feet -- should continue in the wake of the Bastille Day terror attack, in which at least 86 people were killed.

Officials said many people in Nice were deeply traumatized by the attack and that "wearing (an) outfit ostentatiously showing religious beliefs may be interpreted as affiliation with religious fundamentalism."

Nice authorities added that the ban had been limited to the summer of 2016 in the aftermath of the horrific truck attack along the city's popular Promenade des Anglais.

However, French judges dismissed these counter claims, ruling that: "In the absence of such risks, the emotion and concerns arising from terrorist attacks, including those committed in Nice on July 14, are not sufficient to legally justify the contested ban."
Burkinis: liberating or repressive?

Play -- Burkinis: liberating or repressive? 07:10

The decision in Nice comes as other French courts determined that mayors in Villeneuve-Loubet and Cannes, among others, had no legal right to impose such dress codes. Bans in other cities also face challenges in court similar to Nice.

Meanwhile, cases in Menton and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin have now been dismissed, as the bans have been withdrawn by both municipalities.

French towns maintain ban despite court rulings

What is the feeling in France?

In France, opinion has been largely divided on the issue. Some see the ban as an infringement on religious freedom, while others says that the overt style of Islamic dress is inconsistent with France's rigorously enforced secularism.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls stood by the bans, calling the burkini a "symbol of the enslavement of women." And Marc Etienne Lansade, mayor of the seaside town of Cogolin, defended his town's position, telling CNN: "If you don't want to live the way we do, don't come.

"You have to behave in the way that people behave in the country that accepted you, and that is it."

Why are the burqa and burkini being banned?

What makes the burqa and burkini so controversial?

Fierce debate around the subject was reignited last week after photographs emerged appearing to show French police ordering a woman to remove part of her clothing on a beach in Nice.

The series of images sparked an international debate on social platforms, with many mocking what they saw as France's attempt to tell people how to dress and behave.


Opinion: France wrong on burkini ban

CNN's Sheena McKenzie and journalists Angela Dewan and Sandrine Amiel contributed to this report.



CAMPAIGN SCHOOLS – GOOD IDEA FOR BERNIE’S PARTY, TOO, TO “GROW” OUR MEMBERSHIP FROM THE LOCAL LEVEL UP

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-will-the-green-party-jill-stein-use-election-recount-donations/

How will the Green Party use election recount donations?
By REENA FLORES CBS NEWS
November 25, 2016, 5:56 PM

Play VIDEO -- Jill Stein pushing for election recount in 3 states


Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential nominee, has raised more money for an effort to recount the votes in three states, than she did during her entire presidential campaign. Online donations stacked up $5 million online in a few days, as of Friday afternoon, and she just upped the target to $6 to 7 million.

That’s enough, the party says, to fund audits in three states critical to Donald Trump’s victory: Pennsylvania, where the president-elect won by about 68,000 votes; Wisconsin, where Mr. Trump edged out Hillary Clinton by just over 27,000 votes; and Michigan, where Mr. Trump has a slight lead but where the votes are still too close to call.

How much of those millions will be used to fund the recount efforts?

Filing recount petitions in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan will run up a hefty tab, the Green Party says. In Wisconsin, where the deadline to file is Friday at 5 p.m., the price tag is estimated to be $1.1 million; in Pennsylvania, the cost to recount ballots is approximately $600,000; and in Michigan, the bill will be about $500,000.

Jill Stein recount efforts in Wisconsin: What you need to know
Additional funds, she and the party say, will be used to fund legal challenges. George Martin, a member of the Wisconsin Green Party’s coordinating council, said Friday Stein will submit appropriate paperwork for a recount in Wisconsin by the deadline.

If there is extra money in the donation fund -- or if Stein’s petition fails to pass muster with the election commissions in any of the states -- Martin promised that the money will be used to fund the Green party’s local “campaign schools,” meant to groom local candidates for public service.

“As a national party, our commitment is to build at the local level,” Martin said. “That’s where these dollars and excess dollars will go.”

On her website, however, Stein’s donation page says that any extra dollars not devoted to the recount will “go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform.”

As for the recounts, Martin said at a press conference that they are the first step to finding out “whether our electoral system is working,” emphasizing that it’s “not about the outcome -- it’s about the process.”

Martin, who said there is “no smoking gun” about voter fraud, nevertheless pointed to forensic and computer expert testimony to say there is “enough peripheral evidence to warrant that our system should be investigated.” Earlier this week, a group of election lawyers and researchers also urged Clinton to ask for a recount in the three states Stein’s campaign is currently looking at.

The Green Party official also pointed to the discrepancy in votes for Mr. Trump, according to Wisconsin exit polls (where he received 44.3 percent of the vote share) versus the official vote count (where he earned 47.9 percent).

The Wisconsin Republican party is panning the effort as “absurd and nothing more than an expensive political stunt that undermines Wisconsin’s election process.”



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jill-steins-pennsylvania-recount-efforts-what-you-need-to-know/

Jill Stein's Pennsylvania recount efforts: What you need to know
CBS NEWS
November 28, 2016, 6:08 AM

Play VIDEO -- Third-party candidate raises millions to fund vote recount
Play VIDEO -- Trump keeps watch dogs on recount effort


Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein addressed Pennsylvania supporters in a video on her website, appealing to them to pitch in on her call for a recount -- the system in Pennsylvania, she said, means “we are going to jump through some hoops.”

Stein has already filed in Wisconsin, where a statewide hand recount is expected to start near the end of the week.

But of the three states in which Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is pursuing recounts, Pennsylvania may have the highest hurdles to a recount. For one, it’s the only state in which candidates can’t file direct requests -- they can only file a legal appeal that would be decided by the court.

So instead, Stein and the Green Party plan to join a voter-initiated recount in Pennsylvania. Stein has come up with the $500,000 she needs for this effort, but as it turns out, that was the easy part.

As she points out in a video appeal on her website, Pennsylvania is “especially complicated,” in that it “is the only state in which the recount process has to be initiated by actually thousands of voters.”

Jill Stein raises $4 million for 3-state recount effort

In Pennsylvania, a statewide recount can occur if at least three voters per precinct or election district submit affadavits. There were some 9,175 election districts in Pennsylvania as of June, 2015, according to Citizens for Election Integrity (CEI), a group which advocates for accuracy in elections. In her video, Stein makes a plea for volunteers from each district to file these affadavits, and she walks through the steps necessary to file the paperwork. There’s downloading the affadavit from her website, and filling it out -- did you vote on an optical scanner or electronic touchscreen, she asks, explaining the difference between the two machines.

After all of this, she warns the volunteer voters not to sign their affadavits until they’re in the presence of a notary public. And afterwards, they’ll have to submit their affadavits to the clerk in their individual election districts.

That’s not all -- the deadline varies from district to district, Stein notes in her video. It could be Monday or it could be Tuesday, Stein says, and in some districts, “the deadline has already passed.” As she talks through all the steps, it’s evident that she knows that she’s asking for a lot, and the odds are long for a statewide recount -- over 27,000 individual voters in these precincts in every corner of Pennsylvania would have to follow these instructions perfectly, notwithstanding the districts where the deadline has already come and gone (but there aren’t many of those, she said).

There would have been an automatic recount triggered in Pennsylvania if the margin of victory had been 0.5 percent or less. In fact, though, in the three states in which Stein is pursuing recounts, Donald Trump had the largest margin of victory in Pennsylvania -- 70,638 votes (a 1.17-percentage-point difference) -- according to the results published by Pennsylvania’s secretary of state.

President-Elect Trump tweeted on the topic several times over the weekend -- he called the recount efforts “sad” and declared that “nothing will change” despite the time and money that will be spent.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has agreed to participate in the recount effort. “We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states - Michigan - well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount,” Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias wrote, adding that “we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.”

If Stein does succeed in getting a recount in Pennsylvania, it may resemble the one undertaken in 2004 in Ohio, initiated by the Green Party. The New York Times noted at the time that the statewide recount of Ohio’s 88 counties resulted in a net difference of 285 votes, meaning that George W. Bush beat John Kerry in Ohio by 118,457 votes, instead of 118,775. The recount concluded on Dec. 28, 2004, nearly two months after the election took place.



http://www.cbsnews.com/news/halima-aden-minnesotta-miss-usa-semi-finals-muslim-hijab-burkini/

Minnesota woman competes for Miss USA with hijab, burkini
CBS/AP
November 28, 2016, 11:07 AM

Photograph -- Miss Minnesota USA 2016 Bridget Jacobs, right, poses with Halima Aden, 19, from St. Cloud, the first fully-covered Muslim contestant participating in the Miss Minnesota USA competition in Burnsville, Minnesota, on November 26, 2016. MISS MINNESOTA PAGEANT/HANDOUT

BURNSVILLE, Minn. - A Muslim woman has become the first to compete in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant while fully clothed.

Halima Aden made the semifinals of the competition over the weekend while wearing a hijab. CBS Minnesota reports she also wore a full-body outfit called a burkini during the swimsuit competition.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports Aden’s swim outfit stood in contrast to those of the other 44 contestants, most of whom wore bikinis.

Before the competition, the 19-year-old Somali-American woman told CBS Minnesota she wanted to use the Miss Minnesota USA stage as an opportunity to change misconceptions about Islam.

“For a really long time I thought being different was a negative thing. But as I grew older, I started to realize we are all born to stand out, nobody is born to blend in,” Aden said. “How boring would this world be if everyone was the same?”

Aden didn’t win the contest this year. Meridith Gould of Minneapolis was crowned Miss Minnesota. She will go on to compete in the Miss USA pageant in 2017.



http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/11/trump-abandons-promise-lock-hillary-clinton

Trump Abandons Promise to Lock Up Hillary Clinton
KEVIN DRUM
NOV. 22, 2016 1:17 PM

During the 2016 election, the chant of "Lock her up" followed Donald Trump everywhere he went. And he reveled in it. He promised on national TV to do exactly that, and during the final days of the campaign—after James Comey released his calamitous letter—he practically spoke about nothing else. Hillary Clinton was the most corrupt person ever in history, and when he became president he'd make sure she spent the rest of her natural days behind bars.

His fans loved it. But apparently they're going to be disappointed:

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump essentially said: "never mind," signaling that he does not intend to pursue investigations into his rival's use of a private email server or the financial operations at the Clinton family's global foundation.

In an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, Kellyanne Conway, the former Trump campaign manager and a senior adviser to his transition, said the president-elect wanted to "move beyond the issues of the campaign" and confirmed that Mr. Trump did not want his promised Clinton investigations to take place.

"If Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that's a good thing," Ms. Conway said.

Isn't that sweet? Trump is going to help Hillary Clinton "heal." What a guy.

Of course, he's also signaling that he won't undertake the most corrupt use of the Justice Department since Watergate. So that's a positive, I guess.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that shipping Hillary off to Sing Sing was never something Trump planned to do in the first place. It just sounded good and made his crowds happy. Once the election was over, he didn't care anymore. I wonder how many more of Trump's promises fall into that category? His supporters are about to find out just how far the Trump con goes.


Trump's wildly abusive language and anti-logic made his crowds "happy." One of the things I am most concerned about, and disgusted by, is the lowbrow grade of our "crowds here." Those people should be few in number rather than populous. Perhaps we have become the mobs that the Founding Fathers feared. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't work to eliminate the silly, cumbersome, unfair Electoral College immediately or sooner.



http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-has-attended-only-two-intel-briefings-steep-drop-n687916?cid=eml_nnn_20161124

Donald Trump Has Attended Only Two Intelligence Briefings
by KRISTEN WELKER, KEN DILANIAN and ALEXANDRA JAFFE
POLITICS NOV 24 2016, 7:46 PM ET


President-elect Donald Trump has had only two intelligence briefings since he won the election more than two weeks ago, intelligence sources told NBC News on Wednesday — a much lower number than his predecessors had and fewer even than Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

A senior intelligence official cautioned that it was too early to gauge the significance of Trump's sparse briefing schedule, given that he is in the middle of his transition process.

But the news, first reported by The Washington Post, will likely fuel critics who've questioned Trump's knowledge of foreign affairs and national security issues.

Related: Clinton's Popular Vote Lead Now More Than 2 Million

While a team of intelligence analysts remains ready and waiting to deliver briefings to the president-elect, sources told NBC News that he has accepted them only twice. Instead, Trump has turned the briefings down to focus on meetings with potential Cabinet members, media executives and business associates.

Pence, on the other hand, has received the briefings nearly every day, the sources said.

The President's Daily Brief is a document that includes top-secret information and is meant to provide presidents-elect with an overview of security developments and the workings of the U.S. intelligence community and defense apparatus.

Play -- Trump Scrutinized Over Cabinet Picks, Intelligence Briefings 2:38

It could offer Trump an opportunity to study up on foreign policy, a key issue in which his lack of knowledge during the campaign drew criticism even from Republicans and prompted a number of GOP national security experts to speak out against him and sign letters denouncing him.

During the campaign, Trump showed a lack of understanding of basic foreign policy concepts, and he was at separate times unable to distinguish between the Iranian Quds Force and the Kurdish people or to define the nuclear triad.

In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump was unable to distinguish between Hamas, the Sunni militant group in Gaza, and Hezbollah, the Shiite group in Lebanon and Syria.

At the time, Trump told Hewitt that he'd learn the difference "when it's appropriate," and boasted, "I will know more about it than you know."

"And believe me, it won't take me long," he added.



Even as Trump seems to me to be less aggressive and scattered in his attention span lately, he still isn’t applying himself to the things he needs to learn. Maybe he thinks he doesn’t need to know anything personally as long as he has his bevy of personal assistants and spokesmen. I see above that Pence is diligently attending the briefings, so maybe he will be the real President behind the showman pretending to be President. It is really unbelievable to me.



http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/long-reach-to-find-precedent-for-2016-popular-vote-gap-in-us-past-816737347527

Long reach to find precedent for 2016 popular vote gap in US past
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 11/23/16

View video of Maddow’s commentary 13.21

Rachel Maddow looks back 140 years to Reconstruction era U.S. history to find a remotely comparable gap between the popular vote and the electoral vote winner, and warns against leaping to conclusions about the significance of the 2016 popular vote.



http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/watch/should-electoral-college-be-abolished-818386499566

VIEW VIDEO -- POLITICSNATION WITH AL SHARPTON 11/27/16

Should electoral college be abolished?

When the votes have all counted, Hillary Clinton will likely win the popular vote by over 2 million votes, but Donald Trump will still be president because of the electoral college. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-NY, is fighting to change this. Duration: 5:28



MEDICINE --

(SEE ALSO: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-preview-alzheimers-disease-colombia-lesley-stahl/)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-alzheimers-disease-medellin-colombia-lesley-stahl/

The Alzheimer's Laboratory
An extended family in Colombia with a genetic mutation causing Alzheimer’s may help scientists prevent the disease someday. Lesley Stahl reports on the groundbreaking study

November 27, 2016

The following script is from “The Alzheimer’s Laboratory,” which aired on Nov. 27, 2016. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shari Finkelstein, producer.

UNCUT

Nobel-prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote of a mythical town in the middle of the jungle whose residents suffer from a mysterious affliction that erases their memories. Today, in a region of Colombia called Antioquia, reality appears to be imitating fiction -- in a way that may answer questions for all of us.

Antioquia is home to the largest concentration in the world of people who carry a rare genetic mutation that makes them 100 percent certain to develop Alzheimer’s disease. And as devastating as Alzheimer’s is anywhere, this is a particularly cruel version -- it strikes when people are in their mid-40s and leads to death about a decade later. It is a tragic situation, but a perfect scientific laboratory. And it’s now the center of a multimillion dollar, NIH-backed study trying to find out for the first time whether Alzheimer’s disease may be preventable.

Photograph -- alzmain.png, These are the Andes Mountains and lush countryside of Antioquia, Colombia, whose capital city, Medellin was once famous for murder and the drug cartel of Pablo Escobar. Today Medellin -- or “Medejin” as it’s pronounced here -- is peaceful. But for some families here, there’s still a battle going on, a battle against an insidious disease. This family, mother Cecilia, her seven children, and grandchildren, lost its patriarch, Alonso.

Freddie: For me, my father was number one.

Freddie, the oldest, remembers his dad always eager to join in and play with him and his friends.

Video -- Drug trials to prevent Alzheimer's 60 MINUTES OVERTIME

Cecilia: He was a very joyful person. He loved to dance. He was a really nice person, a very good father, before the disease.

Lesley Stahl: When it first started, what were you noticing that made you think he’s-- he’s different?

Cecilia: He started asking, “What is the date today? Do I have to go to work?” And we got concerned.

Alonso at the time was in his mid-40s, so the memory loss and confusion made no sense. His doctor suggested exercise and vitamins, but Alonso just got worse -- forgetting the names of his children, getting lost and disoriented. His son Victor had to help him get dressed.

Victor: I gave him his shirt, I told him “Dad, come, I’ll help you put your shirt on” and the first thing he did was to grab it and put it on through his feet.

Lesley Stahl: Did he understand what was happening to him?

Victor: There were moments of lucidity where he would ask me and say, “Son, what’s happening to me? Why don’t I remember? I don’t remember my children, or my wife. I don’t know who I am.”

His son Julio took him back to see the doctor:

Julio: When I asked the doctor I told him “Doctor, I am not leaving here--” Sorry. “Until you tell me what is wrong with my father.”

The doctor sent them to Francisco Lopera, a neurologist at the University of Antioquia who knew exactly what was wrong with Alonso, because he’d become the local authority on a rash of early-onset Alzheimer’s cases in and around Medellin.

Photograph -- drlopera.png, Dr. Francisco Lopera CBS NEWS
Francisco Lopera: They were getting disease very early in the life.

It all began many years earlier, back in the 1980s when Lopera was a young medical resident. He had read about small numbers of people scattered around the world who’d developed Alzheimer’s in their 40s. So when a 47-year-old man came into his Medellin clinic with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms, he was intrigued and decided to investigate.

Lesley Stahl: You met this one man and you decided to go to where he was from?

Francisco Lopera: I decided to go to the town where he was living.

Lopera learned that the man’s father and grandfather had also lost their memories in their 40s. Then, a few years later, another similar patient came into the clinic, this time a 42-year-old woman from a town 40 miles away. Dr. Lopera’s then-nurse, Lucia Madrigal, asked if any of her relatives also started losing their memories when they were young.

Lucia: They told us yes, that the father, the uncles, the grandfather, the great grandfather, so I started making a little family tree, on one page, and I showed it to Dr. Lopera and I told him “Look what we have here. What is this? So many with the same disease…”

And so began a detective hunt that lasted more than a decade. Lopera and Madrigal traveled all over the region, finding more and more people afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s and compiling family trees.

They thought it might be genetic, so Madrigal spent days at parish churches, poring over heavy ledgers where priests for generations had recorded village births, marriages, and deaths. Thanks to these meticulous records, she was able to trace the disease back hundreds of years, and to make an important discovery -- the different families were actually one huge extended family, connected generations back by common ancestors who had died young, with an unusual cause of death written down by the priest: “softening of the brain.”

This is what “softening of the brain” looks like in real life. Fernando is 46 years old, a descendant of that second patient years ago. He started forgetting things when he was in his late 30s, and now can no longer speak, feed himself, or do just about anything on his own. His aunt takes care of him round the clock just as she did with his mother when she got the disease at the same age.

Norelly is at an even later stage of the disease. Despite her appearance, she is just 58 years old. Patients were going from mild symptoms to complete dementia and then death within about a decade -- as Dr. Lopera showed us in these cognitive test results.

Francisco Lopera: You can see, at 38…

Even at age 38, this man struggled -- as many older Alzheimer’s patients do -- to copy a complex drawing accurately.

Francisco Lopera: At 45.

And things got worse from there.

Francisco Lopera: He lost more. At 50.

Lesley Stahl: Ah! Oh!

Francisco Lopera: At 51.

Lesley Stahl: Oh!

Dr. Lopera was convinced that what he and Madrigal were discovering was scientifically important, but even as they found more patients and more related families, he couldn’t get anyone outside Colombia to take notice. Until 1993, when a Harvard professor came to give a talk about Alzheimer’s in Bogota, several hours away.

Ken Kosik: There was a person in the audience, Francisco Lopera, who came up after the talk and said, “You know, there’s-- I have a family here that w-- has-- early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

Ken Kosik, now at UC Santa Barbara, was that professor.

Lesley Stahl: A family. Could’ve been four people.

Ken Kosik: It could’ve been just four people. But he started to tell me how many it was. And as I listened to him, I became just so absorbed and taken with what he was telling me that I changed all my plans, went with him to Medellín. And, we began a collaboration that goes on to this day.

They showed Kosik what Lucia Madrigal showed us -- the family tree they had compiled based on all that searching through church records, for just one of the affected families, going back all the way to the 1800s.

Lesley Stahl: This is one family?

Lucia: Una sola! (Only one!)

It just kept unfolding and unfolding. Covering these pages are small squares representing men, circles for women. The colored-in squares and circles mean the person got sick with Alzheimer’s at an early age.

Lesley Stahl: Look, she had these sons and a daughter. And then it just kept going down-- through the generations—

Lucia: Si.

Ken Kosik: When we looked at the family trees, about 50 percent of the offspring were getting the disease. That’s a clear signature of a gene.

But what gene? Kosik connected Dr. Lopera with leading geneticists in the U.S., and they started collecting blood samples and searching. Within a year, a major breakthrough. They found a specific mutation in a gene on chromosome 14 – one tiny flaw in the DNA responsible for all this family’s suffering. The discovery was published in 1997 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Lopera had identified the largest concentration of early onset Alzheimer’s cases in the world.

Lesley Stahl: If a person has that mutation, do they get Alzheimer’s?

Ken Kosik: Yes, they do.

Lesley Stahl: If they have it, they definitely get the disease.

Ken Kosik: Right. There are some mutations where you don’t definitely get it. But this is a bad one. And if you have this mutation, you get it.

For families like Alonso’s, discovering the mutation was a blessing – a crucial first step toward finding a way to fight the disease. But it was also a curse, because it meant that anyone whose parent had the mutation has a 50/50 chance of having inherited it too.

Lesley Stahl: Do any of you know if you have that mutation? Do you know?

Victor: No.

Freddie: Nobody knows.

Lesley Stahl: Nobody knows.

Well, somebody knows. Dr. Lopera and his team have been testing for the mutation and compiling a database, but their policy is not to tell family members if they have the mutation or not -- and not even to reveal the results to Dr. Lopera -- since at this point there is nothing that can be done to help.

Cecilia: Sometimes I ask, which one will get it? But I throw that thought away, because I don’t want to think about that. I pray a lot to God that none of them gets it. I don’t want to see my children with that disease.

Lesley Stahl: Each one of you knows, because of your father, that you have a 50/50 chance. So what kind of a weight does that put on you, day in and day out?

Julio: I’ve even prayed to God that if there’s one person who has to have the disease, I say to God, “Let it be me.”

Sara: I thank God that I’m a nurse and that I would be able to take care of them, but I tell myself, “First I had to go through it with my dad, the experience of the disease, and I may have to go through it with one of my siblings, or with several, we don’t know.”

Sara told us she would love to have children of her own, but given her risk of developing the disease, she’s decided against it.

Sara: So that my children don’t have to go through my same experience.

Lesley Stahl: You’ve been working on this 30 years. How do you cope with all this pain?

Francisco Lopera: [breaks down]

It was not the response we had expected.

Lesley Stahl: It’s that hard? It’s that hard.

But Dr. Lopera knew that even in the midst of all this tragedy, there might just be a glimmer of hope. Because what he had discovered in these families -- hundreds of people destined to develop Alzheimer’s, and easily identifiable with a simple genetic test -- presented a unique scientific opportunity to test whether it’s possible to step in and stop early-onset, and maybe all, Alzheimer’s disease before it starts. That part of the story, when we come back.

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s right now, and given the aging baby boomer population, that number is projected to nearly triple by mid-century. Yet unlike many other leading killers, there is no effective treatment. An Alzheimer’s diagnosis is essentially a prescription for a slow descent into oblivion -- an inexorable loss of the memories, spatial skills, and ability to think that make us who we are.

Early-onset Alzheimer’s patients like the hundreds of family members in Colombia are a tiny fraction of the whole, but to scientists, they could be everything. Because they are offering researchers something they have never had before -- a way to test whether intervening years before people start having symptoms, might halt the disease in its tracks. Answers are still years away, but with more than a thousand Americans developing Alzheimer’s every day, a way to prevent it can not come soon enough.

The scene we witnessed in Dr. Pierre Tariot’s exam room at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix is one that plays out in neurologist’s offices every day.

Dr. Tariot: So if I asked you what city we’re in right now, what would you say?

Norm: Uh, you know, right, I don’t know at this moment.

Norm, age 72, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s -- the typical, late-in-life form so many of us fear. It begins with mild memory and thinking problems and spirals into full-on dementia.

Dr. Tariot: Who is that young lady over there?

Norm: Betsy.

Dr. Tariot: Betsy. And is she a friend?

Norm: Yes.

Dr. Tariot: How do you know Betsy?

Norm: Because I’ve been loving her for a long time.

Dr. Tariot: OK. Is she your sister?

Norm: A little bit of both.

Dr. Tariot: Uh-huh. Is she your wife?

Norm: I don’t think so. I think you’re-- somebody. I wish I was, but…

They’ve been married 51 years. Unlike early-onset Alzheimer’s, there’s been no single gene identified that causes this. No way to know who among us is destined to get it.

Lesley Stahl: What percentage of all people are going to be get Alzheimer’s?

Pierre Tariot: One percent of us 60 or older will have a dementia like Alzheimer’s disease. But by the time you hit 85—

Lesley Stahl: What percent?

Pierre Tariot: --that-- that percentage is approaching 40ish percent.

Norm: That’s a Dogan and these are Gogans.

Pierre Tariot: Alzheimer’s disease has been called out by the World Health Organization as the coming pandemic of the West. We have to do something to put it behind us.

Claudia to female patient: Can you draw the numbers for a clock?

But Dr. Claudia Kawas, a leading Alzheimer’s researcher and clinician at the University of California Irvine, says she’s frustrated that she can’t offer her patients any hope.

Claudia Kawas: I have to say I’ve been doing this now for a third of a century. And when I started, I just never would have believed we would still not be closer than we are now to making a real difference. It has been a little disappointing.

It hasn’t been for lack of trying. Kawas gave us a quick primer on the tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain after autopsy.

Claudia Kawas: Every place you see a brown spot, that is a senile amyloid plaque. In contrast, you see these black things that tend to be triangular shape. Those are what we call neurofibrillary tangles.

The relationship between plaques and tangles isn’t completely understood, but because it’s been shown that amyloid plaques build up in the brain before tangles -- and years before patients develop symptoms -- pharmaceutical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s developing drugs to remove amyloid from the brain, and hundreds of millions more to test those drugs in patients like Norm.

Lesley Stahl: Of all the trials that have been done, what percent have succeeded?

Pierre Tariot: About one percent.

In other words, a resounding failure.

Lesley Stahl: So what does that say, do you think?

Claudia Kawas: Well, it says either amyloid is not the right thing to go after. Or it says we need to remove it earlier on in the process before it’s made all the other things cascade after it. You know, if you give a polio vaccine once somebody has polio, you can understand why it doesn’t work.

Lesley Stahl: You’re saying that maybe those drugs haven’t worked because the person already had Alzheimer’s?

Claudia Kawas: Exactly. And maybe if we give ‘em early enough, it might work.

But how can you test drugs on people before they develop the disease, when you don’t know who among us is going to get it? Dr. Tariot and the executive director at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, Dr. Eric Reiman, realized there was a place where you could know who was going to get Alzheimer’s --- Antioquia.

Ken Kosik: And that’s when my phone began to ring.

By then, Ken Kosik had been studying the Colombian extended family for 15 years.

Ken Kosik: Received a call from the people at Banner. And they said, you know, “You have this family. We know when they’re gonna get it. We know who’s gonna get it. Can we start treating before the disease strikes?”

Kosik connected Tariot and Teiman with Dr. Lopera, who by that time had identified hundreds of people who carried the gene mutation, guaranteeing they would be struck with Alzheimer’s in the prime of their lives. Reiman and Tariot traveled to Medellin and met with both healthy and sick members of the extended family.

Lesley Stahl: Is this particular family, in the world-- extraordinary?

Pierre Tariot: There’s nothing else like it. The idea that there’s this concentration within roughly 100 miles of each other is-- just an extraordinary phenomenon.

And a perfect scientific laboratory. To lay the groundwork for a large clinical trial, Banner flew a group of extended family members from Medellin to Phoenix for PET scans. One goal: to compare the brains of those with and without the mutation years before any memory loss began, when they were in their 30s. Dr. Reiman showed us the results.

Eric Reiman: This is somebody who doesn’t have the gene. They have no plaques in the brain.

But in members of the family with the mutation, it was a different story.

Eric Reiman: Extensive amyloid deposition in the brain.

Lesley Stahl: That’s the red.

Eric Reiman: Red is more amyloid. But yellow is also amyloid.

This brain had even more. The images showed that amyloid plaques build up in the brain more than a decade before memory loss begins.

So if a drug could remove that red and yellow, maybe the disease could be prevented. Banner developed a plan for a multimillion dollar drug trial and convened a meeting with leading scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and representatives of the NIH.

Pierre Tariot: The end of the meeting, each scientist was allowed to say one closing thought. And Francisco had the last word.

Lesley Stahl: Lopera?

Pierre Tariot: And he paused a long time. And you could hear a pin drop in the room.

Francisco Lopera: I said to them-- “We w-- the families are waiting for you.”

Lesley Stahl: They’re waiting for you.

Pierre Tariot: That’s the point when, you know, the goose bumps came, and we said, “We really have to make this work. We really do.”

And they did. With a commitment of $15 million from NIH, another $15 million from philanthropists, and the rest from drug company Genentech, the trial -- on an immunotherapy drug to remove amyloid plaque -- enrolled its first patient three years ago, and they’ve been enrolling more people ever since.

Freddie: They told me about the study and I said yes. I’ll go right away, and anything that you need it, I am here.

Freddie and all his siblings signed up. The plan is to enroll a total of 300 members of the extended family who are healthy and have no memory loss yet -- 200 who have the mutation and another 100 who don’t. That way, no one will learn their genetic status just by being accepted into the study. Of the 200 with the mutation, half will get injections of the drug; the other half will be injected with a harmless placebo.

The study is double-blind: neither patients nor investigators will know who’s getting what. They have to come in every two weeks, for at least five years -- long enough to see whether the group taking the drug does better than the group taking placebo. Final results aren’t expected until 2021.

Lesley Stahl: Is this the first time in all these years of seeing these patients that you can actually offer them hope?

Dr. Lopera: Yes, this is the first time. Because in the past we only offer them education-- better quality of life but no hope to have a solution. And now they have hope, a big hope.

Lesley Stahl: What would be the best outcome?

Pierre Tariot: Nobody who receives the immunotherapy experiences any worsening of their thinking or memory ability. Doesn’t change at all. Doesn’t decline. That would be fabulous. That’s a stretch goal.

And that would be just the beginning.

Claudia Kawas: If it makes a difference for them, I think there’s a reasonable chance it could make a difference for all the rest of the people who get Alzheimer’s disease.

And that of course is the ultimate goal: to help prevent the late in life form of Alzheimer’s that we’re all susceptible to. The hope is that one day every one of us could be screened and when necessary, treated before problems begin.

Claudia Kawas: It might be the case that just like when you go to your doctor to get your cholesterol checked in your blood to see if you need drugs to lower your cholesterol, you would go, and get an amyloid PET scan, and-- it would be part of—

Lesley Stahl: Routine.

Claudia Kawas: --routine prevention.

Lesley Stahl: What if the drug removes the amyloid, and they still get the disease?

Claudia Kawas: I think that’ll mean that there are other things we need to be targeting besides amyloid.

Lesley Stahl: But will you say that the drug test was successful?

Claudia Kawas: Hard as this is to say, yes. I think that we need to know the answer.

The answer to whether the field’s focus on amyloid plaque removal for the last 15 years has been a failure. If this test doesn’t work, they will at least know they need to go in a different direction.

Lesley Stahl: You know, Victor, all the other drug trials that have gone on for years have all failed.

Victor: Yes.

Lesley Stahl: You know that.

Victor: But this is going to be the exception. This is the exception.

Lesley Stahl: If it does work, this saves this community.

Ken Kosik: Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Lesley Stahl: That would be amazing.

Ken Kosik: To me, I am always impressed that these families that come from such a remote area of the world-- have the potential for informing all of us, globally, about a path forward for conquering Alzheimer’s.



This is a long and complex article, but it does give a good overview of Alzheimer’s as we know it today. I hope these family members will be able to see improvement in their own condition, and provide a window on one of the worst human conditions, in my opinion, known to man. Perhaps everybody with some memory problems could get the PET scan before their situation becomes severe. I think medical insurance companies should pay for that, as they do for mammograms in women over a certain age. Of course, if the plaques are found then treatment should begin immediately.