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    A Blood Test Accurately Diagnosed Alzheimer’s 90% of the Time, Study Finds

    It was much more accurate than primary care doctors using cognitive tests and CT scans. The findings could speed the quest for an affordable and accessible way to diagnose patients with memory problems.Scientists have made another major stride toward the long-sought goal of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease with a simple blood test. On Sunday, a team of researchers reported that a blood test was significantly more accurate than doctors’ interpretation of cognitive tests and CT scans in signaling the condition.The study, published Sunday in the journal JAMA, found that about 90 percent of the time the blood test correctly identified whether patients with memory problems had Alzheimer’s. Dementia specialists using standard methods that did not include expensive PET scans or invasive spinal taps were accurate 73 percent of the time, while primary care doctors using those methods got it right only 61 percent of the time.“Not too long ago measuring pathology in the brain of a living human was considered just impossible,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, a co-director of the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. “This study adds to the revolution that has occurred in our ability to measure what’s going on in the brain of living humans.”The results, presented Sunday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Philadelphia, are the latest milestone in the search for affordable and accessible ways to diagnose Alzheimer’s, a disease that afflicts nearly seven million Americans and over 32 million people worldwide. Medical experts say the findings bring the field closer to a day when people might receive routine blood tests for cognitive impairment as part of primary care checkups, similar to the way they receive cholesterol tests.“Now, we screen people with mammograms and PSA or prostate exams and other things to look for very early signs of cancer,” said Dr. Adam Boxer, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. “And I think we’re going to be doing the same thing for Alzheimer’s disease and hopefully other forms of neurodegeneration.”In recent years, several blood tests have been developed for Alzheimer’s. They are currently used mostly to screen participants in clinical trials and by some specialists like Dr. Boxer to help pinpoint if a patient’s dementia is caused by Alzheimer’s or another condition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Hulk Hogan Is Not the Only Way to Be a Man

    The Democratic Party must join the battle for the hearts and minds of young men. It matters not just for this election, though the vast and growing gender gap means that disaffected men could hand Donald Trump the presidency. It matters for how we mentor young men, and it matters for how we view masculinity itself.And yes, the Democrats can do it. Within the Kamala Harris coalition, there are men who can show a better way.If you ever wondered whether the Republican Party sees itself as the party of men, I’d invite you to rewatch the last night of the Republican National Convention. Prime time featured a rousing speech by the wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, a song by Kid Rock and a speech by Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship — all as warm-up acts before Trump delivered his acceptance speech. Republican manliness was the capstone of the convention.But what kind of men were featured? They’re all rich and powerful, and as a longtime fan of professional wrestling, I loved watching Hogan as a kid, but none of them are the kind of man I’d want my son to be. White was caught on video slapping his wife. Kid Rock has his own checkered past, including a sex tape and an assault charge related to a fight in a Nashville strip club. Hogan faced his own sex scandal after he had a bizarre sexual relationship with a woman who was married to one of his close friends, a radio host who goes by “Bubba the Love Sponge.”We know all about Trump, but it’s worth remembering some of his worst moments — including a jury finding that he was liable for sexual abuse, his defamation of his sex-abuse victim, the “Access Hollywood” tape and the countless examples of his cruelly insulting the women he so plainly hates.JD Vance is different. No one should denigrate his personal story. He has overcome great adversity, served his country honorably as a Marine and, by all accounts, is a good husband and father. But he now wears Trumpist masculinity like an ill-fitting suit. Last week, he was justifiably attacked for a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson in which he declared that the country is run, “via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies.” He identified Harris (who has two stepchildren) as just the kind of person he was talking about.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Sunday Read: ‘The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape’

    Adrienne Hurst and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeOn Nov. 12, 1974, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s father’s childhood friend Jack Teich was kidnapped out of his driveway in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island. He was arriving home from work when two men forced him into their car at gunpoint and took him to a house where they chained and interrogated him.On the second day of his kidnapping, Jack’s wife, Janet, received a call from someone demanding a ransom of $750,000, and a few days later, Janet and Jack’s brother Buddy dropped the money off at Penn Station under F.B.I. surveillance. The F.B.I. did not catch the kidnapper, but afterward, he decided to let Jack go.Jack was home safe. He had survived his kidnapping. But the actual kidnapping is not what this story is about, if you can believe it. It’s about surviving what you survived, which is also known as the rest of your life.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at [email protected]. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at [email protected] production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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    Beshear, a Potential Harris V.P. Pick, Rallies Democrats in Deep-Red Iowa

    Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, in contention to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, tried out for the post in Iowa on Saturday by going after the man he would face on the Republican ticket, telling Iowa Democrats that Senator JD Vance of Ohio has “contrived” his claims to be from Appalachia.“He ain’t gonna be your vice president,” Mr. Beshear told a standing cheering crowd of around 450 of Iowa’s top Democratic Party supporters. Mr. Beshear headlined the state party’s Liberty & Justice fund-raiser in Des Moines, which sought to energize voters in the run-up to the November general election.After a bruising 2024 legislative session overseen by the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and a majority Republican Legislature, Democratic lawmakers have been desperate for the voter energy they said they had seen since the Harris announcement.“There’s just a sense of, OK, the election is starting now,” State Senator Nate Boulton of Des Moines, the Democratic whip, said just before the event.Mr. Boulton, who is up for re-election in November, said that while Ms. Harris had a large pool of promising candidates for her vice-presidential pick, he was excited about Mr. Beshear’s ability to win twice in a deep-red state like Kentucky.“I think that’s a story we’re looking for here in Iowa,” he said.Though Mr. Beshear has shown off his chops as an attack dog in recent days, his message to Iowa Democrats also invoked calls for unity and kindness.“We are called to love and get along with every other human being in this country and across our globe,” he said.But his biggest applause lines came when he described Ms. Harris as both tough and caring.“In November, we are going to win and get back to being each other’s neighbors, to being American before we’re Democrats or Republicans,” Mr. Beshear said. “We’re going to get back to working together to get things done. And I believe that while they will falsely say, ‘Oh, she’s too far to the left,’ what she will do as president is not move a country to the right or the left. She will move it forward for every single American citizen.” More

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    Trump, Appealing to Bitcoin Fans, Vows U.S. Will Be ‘Crypto Capital of the Planet’

    Former President Donald J. Trump vowed on Saturday that he would turn the United States into a “Bitcoin superpower” if returned to the White House, wielding much of the same rhetoric of persecution that he has applied to himself and his supporters to appeal to cryptocurrency enthusiasts who want to see less regulation.“Sadly, we see the attacks on crypto,” Mr. Trump told a gathering of cryptocurrency fans in Nashville. “It’s a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by the same left-wing fascists to weaponize government against any threat to their power. They’ve done it to me.”He added that, if he were elected, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over” and that “the moment I’m sworn in, the persecution stops and the weaponization ends against your industry.”Mr. Trump has been competing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate, for the support of cryptocurrency holders, and his remarks represented one of his most direct pitches yet.Three large crypto firms have invested about $150 million to elect pro-crypto candidates in congressional races. In his speech, Mr. Trump promoted himself as “the first major party nominee in American history to accept donations in Bitcoin and crypto,” adding that his campaign has raised $25 million from cryptocurrency donations in the last two months.The former president offered promises of sweeping deregulation and the establishment of a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    JD Vance Stumbles in His Debut as Democrats Go on Offense

    In the 12 days since Ohio’s junior senator was tapped as the future of Donald J. Trump’s movement, old comments and a chorus of derision have blunted any sense of invulnerability.The choice of Senator JD Vance as former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate reflected the confidence of a campaign so sure of victory in November that it could look beyond a second Trump term to the legacy of his movement.But in less than two weeks, Mr. Vance has found himself on the defensive, and his struggles have dented the sense of invulnerability that only a week ago seemed to be the overriding image of the Trump campaign.A stream of years-old quotes, videos and audio comments unearthed by Democrats and the news media in recent days has threatened to undermine the Trump campaign’s outreach to women, voters of color and the very blue-collar voters to whom Mr. Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was supposed to appeal.His past comments deriding “childless cat ladies,” supporting a “federal response” to stop abortion in Democratic states and promoting a higher tax burden for childless Americans have yielded a chorus of criticism from Democrats. Mr. Vance’s fresh efforts to explain them have provided Democrats more material, with the Harris campaign promoting one short clip in which he seems to suggest that when he spoke of childless cat ladies, he meant no insult to cats — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said.And his first handful of appearances on the stump have drawn unflattering attention. During an appearance in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, he tried to explain how his critics would call his drinking Diet Mountain Dew racist, with an awkward aside assuring the audience that Diet Mountain Dew was good.Mr. Vance’s stumbles have come after a remarkable two weeks when Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt, and then rallied the party — and even some skeptics — behind him. The Republican National Convention began with calls for national unity, and though those calls were at times undercut by the Republican presidential nominee, the ticket vaulted out of Milwaukee with a head of steam and an expanded lead in the polls.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Who Is Eminem for in 2024?

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe 12th studio album by Eminem, “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce),” just had its debut atop the Billboard album chart, 25 years after the rapper’s major-label debut launched him into the pop stratosphere.It’s been an uneven ride — Eminem is one of the most commercially successful rappers of all time, and also an artist who has had numerous musical highs and lows, all while maintaining a durably committed fan base. He has been a flashpoint and an afterthought, sometimes all at once.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Eminem’s long and unlikely career, the forces that propelled him to superstardom, his stubbornness in the face of the ever-evolving sound of hip-hop, and how he toys with offense so much that he no longer truly offends.Guests:Jayson Buford, who writes for Complex, Stereogum and othersRob Markman, longtime hip-hop journalistConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    What to Know About Suni Lee’s New Uneven Bars Move

    Sunisa Lee, the defending Olympic all-around gold medalist and uneven bars bronze medalist, may attempt a new skill at the 2024 Paris Games. The new element in her uneven bars routine is a release move in which a gymnast does a front flip and a full twist in the layout position. Lee is seeking to […] More