CENTENNIAL, Colo. – Attorneys for the suspect in the Colorado movie theater shootings said Thursday their client is mentally ill and that they need more time to assess the nature of his illness.

James Holmes’ lawyers made the disclosure at a court hearing in suburban Denver where news media organizations asked a judge to unseal documents in the case.

Holmes, a 24-year-old former Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Denver, had the familiar, dazed demeanor that he had in previous court appearances.

Holmes is accused of going on a shooting rampage July 20 at a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others.

Nation

FTC fines Google record $22.5 million

Google is paying a $22.5 million fine to settle the latest regulatory case questioning the Internet search leader’s respect for people’s privacy and the integrity of its internal controls.

The penalty announced Thursday by the Federal Trade Commission is the most it has ever fined a company for a civil violation.

Google had assured users of Apple Inc.’s Safari browser that it wouldn’t monitor their online activities, as long as they didn’t change the browser settings to permit the tracking. Google broke that promise, according to the FTC, by creating a technological loophole that enabled the company’s DoubleClick advertising network to shadow unwitting Safari users.

Old vaccine shows diabetes promise

A tuberculosis vaccine in use for 90 years may help reverse Type 1 diabetes and eliminate the lifelong need for insulin injections, say Harvard University researchers raising money to conduct large, human studies.

Patients with Type 1 diabetes must inject insulin daily to control their blood sugar because their bodies don’t produce the hormone, the result of an immune system that destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.

The vaccine, called bacillus Calmette-Guérin, or BCG, stimulated production of a protein that killed the insulin-attacking cells, according to the findings of an early-stage study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One.

California sues veterans charity

California’s attorney general has sued a major veterans charity on allegations that its directors misused millions of dollars in private donations for hefty pensions and other perks, including more than $80,000 in golf memberships for its board members.

Help Hospitalized Veterans of Winchester ranks among the nation’s top 1 percent of charities in size, with more than $436 million in revenue since 2001.

At the same time, it has ranked for more than a decade at the bottom of lists by charity watchdog groups that rate nonprofit organizations based on sound financial management and the proportion of their donations that go toward their causes.

Guilty plea in boy’s dismemberment

Looking dazed and speaking barely above a whisper, a Brooklyn hardware store clerk pleaded guilty Thursday to charges he abducted and dismembered an 8-year-old boy who lost his way home.

The guilty plea to second-degree murder and kidnapping guarantees Levi Aron, 36, a sentence of 40 years to life in a case that traumatized the victim’s tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community.

World

Interim president elected in Libya

Libya’s newly formed national assembly elected former opposition leader Mohammed el-Megarif as the country’s interim president early today, the latest move to establish a democratically based leadership after decades of rule by deposed dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

El-Megarif won 113 votes to defeat another opposition leader and human rights lawyer, Ali Zidan, who won 85 votes from the 200-member General National Congress, an assembly created in the first nationwide election since Gadhafi’s ouster and killing last year.

Both men had been diplomats who defected and fought Gadhafi’s regime while living in exile since the 1980s.

British astronomer Lovell dies at 98

Pioneering British physicist and astronomer Bernard Lovell, who developed one of the world’s largest radio telescopes exploring particles in the universe, has died at 98.

Lovell, who died Monday, was founder of England’s Jodrell Bank Observatory and creator of its 250-foot-wide radio telescope that has borne his name since 1987.

Three decades earlier, the half-built telescope was in danger of being mothballed because it had cost far too much to develop. Lovell credited the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, with saving his project.