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October 04, 2016

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ByRussBynum The Associated Press BRUNSWICK, GA. A jury evenly split between men and women was selected Monday to decide the trial of a Georgia man charged with murder after his tod- dler son died two years ago while left in the back of a hot SUV. Justin Ross Harris is charged with malice mur- der and other crimes in the June 2014 death of his 22-month-old son, Coo- per. Prosecutors have said Harris, 35, exchanged lewd text messages during the hours the boy sweltered in the parked vehicle outside his father's metro Atlanta workplace. The case drew national attention and was so closely followed in Harris' subur- ban home of Cobb County that a judge moved the trial 275 miles to Brunswick, on the Georgia coast. Sixteen total jurors — eight men and eight women — were seated Monday morning to hear the case. Four of them will serve as alternate jurors, who will have a final say in the trial only if one more of the 12 main jurors are dismissed. Superior Court Judge Mary Staley Clark did not specify which jury members were alternates. The final jury was picked from a pool of 45 people deemed qualified by the judge and attorneys dur- ing jury selection proceed- ings in September. Prosecutors and Har- ris' defense attorneys were scheduled to deliver open- ing statements Monday af- ternoon. Prosecutors say Harris, who moved to Georgia in 2012 from Tuscaloosa, Ala- bama, left his son to die on purpose. They say he was unhappy in his marriage, sought relationships with other women and had re- searched websites promot- ing a child-free lifestyle. In addition to charges re- lated to his son's death, Harris is also charged with sending sexually ex- plicit text messages and a photo to a girl under the age of 18. Defense attorneys have called the death a tragic accident. Harris told po- lice he watched cartoons with his son that morning, took him to breakfast at a Chick-fil-A restaurant and kissed Cooper while strap- ping him into his car seat. But Harris said he forgot to drop his son off at day care and drove to work, for- getting the boy was in the back seat. GEORGIA Ju ry se at ed i n tr ia l fo r hot car death of toddler STEPHENB.MORTON—ATLANTAJOURNAL-CONSTITUTION Justin Ross Harris listens to Cobb County Senior Assistant District Attorney Chuck Boring during his trial at the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Ga., on Monday. By Michael Balsamo The Associated Press HOBOKEN, N.J. It could be days before federal in- vestigators working in 12- hour shifts clear enough debris to recover the data recorder from a train that crashed into a station, kill- ing a woman and injuring more than 100 others. National Transporta- tion Safety Board spokes- man Chris O'Neil described the effort as "complex" and said workers are going as "quickly as possible to make that happen." The effort comes as in- vestigators learned that a separate device that was supposed to record the New Jersey Transit train's speed and braking infor- mation wasn't functioning, according to the National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chair T. Bella Dinh-Zarr. The remaining data re- corder, which officials said was likely to be newer than the nonworking device, is in the cab control car in the front of the train and has not been recovered because it is under a col- lapsed section of the sta- tion's roof. Officials say they hope to access that device "in a matter of days," O'Neil said. The NTSB did not re- spond to questions or pro- vide an update on its prog- ress Monday. "You hear all the ma- chinery in the background. They are working around the clock, in 12-hour shifts, to remove the debris as quickly and safely as possi- ble," he added. Federal regulations re- quire commuter trains to have a working recorder in the lead car, according to Jim Southworth, the NTSB's lead investigator for the crash. The regulations also re- quire the recorders to be in- spected every year. It was unclear when the record- ers in the train were last inspected. Federal officials said the recorder that didn't work was an older device installed in 1995. An un- known number have had to be replaced over the years as they failed. Investigators have said the train's engineer, Thomas Gallagher, told them he was going only 10 mph as he approached the station, but he had no mem- ory of the crash, according to Dinh-Zarr. He said he only remem- bered waking up on the floor of the engineer's cab, she said. Gallagher also told inves- tigators that he was fully rested and that the train was operating properly Thursday morning before it crashed in Hoboken. NEW JERSEY TRAIN Official: Recovering data re co rd er c ou ld t ak e da ys By Lindsey Tanner The Associated Press CHICAGO Forget the pink ribbons. Spitting in a tube for science is what unites a growing group of breast cancer patients taking part in a unique project to ad- vance treatment for the deadliest form of the dis- ease. For many of the 150,000- plus patients nationwide whose tumors have spread to bones, brains, lungs or other distant organs, the hue heralding breast can- cer awareness and sur- vival each October is a lit- tle too rosy. They know can- cer will likely kill them. And they've often felt neglected by mainstream advocacy and medical research. But now they have a way to get involved, with a big new project that aims to gather enormous troves of information about their diseases in hopes of find- ing new and better ways of treating patients like them — women whose cancer has spread, or metastasized, and left them nearly out of options. "Patients want to live and we know that research is the way that we're go- ing to be able to live," said Beth Caldwell, a former civil rights attorney in Se- attle diagnosed with meta- static disease in 2014. The idea is to gather mo- lecular and genetic clues from as broad a group of metastatic breast cancer patients as possible. With data from thousands of people, researchers think they will be better able tar- get treatments or come up with new ones by answer- ing important questions about the disease. For ex- ample: Is there something unique about tumors that spread to the brain, or that recur many years after di- agnosis? What allows a very few women to outlive others by many years despite the same prognosis? Most breast cancer pa- tients are treated at centers that don't do research on tumors, so participating in studies at academic medi- cal centers far from home is cumbersomeatbest.Patients sick or dying from their dis- ease face additional hurdles. This project is different. Patients sign up online, mail in saliva kits for ge- netic testing, and allow use of their tumor tissue sam- ples and medical records. Researchers use social me- dia to keep them posted about progress, and period- ically invite participants to visit the Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts, lab where their specimens are being ana- lyzed. The Metastatic Breast Cancer Project is run by scientists at Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Insti- tute and was launched last October with funding from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, an indepen- dent nonprofit group. Us- ing word of mouth and so- cial media, it has already enrolled more than 2,600 patients — a pace nearly unheard of in medical re- search. "I enrolled from my re- cliner in my living room. I did my spit tube in bed," Caldwell said. The mother of two turns 40 on Thursday, and can- cer has reached her brain, lungs, bones and liver. She tries to stay positive, but October "is a month where I just want to hide under the covers and check out," Caldwell said. "I just don't want to be confronted with all this pink garbage." Lara MacGregor, who runs a Louisville, Kentucky- based nonprofit group for cancer patients, said she feels the same way. "Everything about breast cancer is about survivors and beating cancer," Mac- Gregor said. "And we're sit- ting in the wings saying, "I'm never going to cele- brate the end of treatment.'" MacGregor was pregnant when diagnosed with early- stage breast cancer in 2007. She had both breasts re- moved plus chemotherapy, and went on with her life thinking she was cured un- til two years ago, when tests for nagging back pain re- vealed cancer had returned and spread to her bones. Now 39, MacGregor read about the project online, de- cided immediately to take part, and emailed dozens of friends and connections who also signed on. Before she mailed her saliva kit, "my 8-year-old drew a picture on the box and said, 'thanks for help- ing my mom,'" MacGregor said. "I hope that real data about real people is going lead to better treatment op- tions," she said. "My life de- pends on it." More than 200,000 peo- ple, mostly women, are di- agnosed with breast can- cer nationwide each year. Most are diagnosed when cancer is at an early, po- tentially curable, stage. For about 6 percent, or 15,000 patients, the disease has al- ready spread at diagnosis. And for about 30 percent of patients diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, the disease will eventually recur in distant parts of the body. The average survival for patients with metastatic disease is about three years. According to a 2014 analysis from an alliance of breast cancer advocacy groups, less than 10 percent of government and non- profit groups' investment in breast cancer research in recent years went to study- ing metastatic disease. "Metastatic breast cancer in general is an understud- ied area," says Marc Hurl- bert of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. "We don't know, for example, how the tumor has changed. Is it the same makeup as it was before? Do cells have a different molecular profile than cancer that started first in the breast?" By gathering large num- bers of tissue samples and information about how the diseases progresses in dif- ferent people, the project may be able to uncover use- ful trends. It has produced a few enticing clues already, including small groups of patients who've responded unusually well to standard chemotherapy or to new im- munotherapy drugs — some have survived for 10 years or more. The researchers hope DNA analyses will help explain why and lead to treatments that will im- prove the odds for all pa- tients with the disease. HEALTH Enormous crowdsourcing effort takes aim at the deadliest breast cancers TIMOTHY D. EASLEY — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Lara MacGregor, a participant in a new crowdsourcing project for metastatic breast cancer research, poses for a photo as she undergoes treatment at the Norton Cancer Center in Louisville, Ky., on Wednesday. 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