Hurricane Katia continues moving across Atlantic: Latest news Imagine newly formed Hurricane Katia, visible from the International Space Station.
Katia, a Category 1 hurricane continued westward, with little change in strength, according to the latest National Hurricane Center on Thursday.
Katia was the second named storm of the season in the Atlantic on Wednesday, but forecasters said it was too early to determine where it could go.The National Hurricane Center in Miami warned the public – is still recovering as well as parts of the U.S. east coast Irene – no limit for the storm. It is based on the warm water and wind shear is low, two ingredients that drive you could become a major hurricane, likely through the weekend. But it is too early to say whether it will ever come to earth.
“He has to leave a lot of coast. There is no way at this point that if you make any impact, let alone if you can do,” said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman for the NHC. “There’s a reason why we do not expect more than 5 days in advance – the information is not simply about the mistakes that simply is not acceptable” ..
Of 23 hours (0300 GMT), Hurricane Katia is about 1,800 kilometers east of the Leeward Islands and west-northwest near 20 focuses mph.
Maximum wind speeds of 75 miles per hour.Also a concern is a storm in the Gulf of Mexico southeast of group. Is likely to become a tropical storm over the next two days.
National Weather Service meteorologist Fred Zeigler said the system could bring rain to the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana, but it is too early to say whether it is an understatement.
Most models can be used to fight in order to monitor these systems to predict whether to move to Brownsville, Texas and the Panhandle of Florida, said.
When Hurricane Katia, some models show that near the East Coast. But Feltgen said it was too early to tell residents of the coast.
“People should not be along the east coast a lot of heartburn over this – not yet,” he said.
The name replaces the storm of Hurricane Katrina in the rotation list of storm damage from catastrophic storm that devastated New Orleans in 2005 and the coast. World Meteorological Organization has six lists of names of rotation of the storm, but attacks with names with bad weather, the catastrophically deadly or costly.Meanwhile, broke a tropical depression in the Pacific Ocean in the southwest of Mexico with winds of autumn and the danger.
(Reuters) - A Muslim militant has urged American followers to assassinate talk show host David Letterman, saying his tongue deserved to be cut out, a U.S. intelligence monitoring group said on Wednesday.
The SITE intelligence group said the death threat was posted on an online website used by militants after the writer became upset by a joke Letterman made about the death of a leading member of al Qaeda killed in an air strike in Pakistan.
The militant called on Muslims in the United States to "cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever," the threat against Letterman said, according to a translation by SITE. The popular late-night television host is not Jewish.
The FBI said it was taking the threat seriously.
The writer was angered by watching Letterman on his show drawing his finger across his neck while talking about the June death of senior al Qaeda figure Ilyas Kashmiri.
The message was posted on the website Shumukh al-Islam. SITE analyst Adam Raisman told Entertainment Weekly the website was "a clearing house for al Qaeda material" and drew supporters of the group headed by the late Osama bin Laden.
Executives at broadcaster CBS and a spokesman for Letterman declined on Wednesday to comment on the threat.
Tim Flannelly, an FBI spokesman in New York, said the agency was looking into the matter.
"The FBI takes all threats seriously and we will run it down like we do all threats," Flannelly said.
A Muslim group in 2010 threatened the makers of "South Park" after the animated satirical show depicted the Prophet Mohammad in a bear suit. Most Muslims consider any depiction of the founder of Islam as offensive.
A 21-year old man from Virginia was sentenced in February to 25 years in prison for publishing the home addresses of the "South Park" creators and urging readers to pay them a visit, as well as trying to help a Somali militant group.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and Peter Cooney)
(Reuters) - The United States for the first time explicitly called on Thursday for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down and imposed new economic sanctions likely to be followed up by the European Union.
U.S. President Barack Obama made his appeal after five months of a brutal Syrian government crackdown against protesters seeking an end to the 41-year reign by the Syrian president and his late father, Hafez al-Assad.
The fresh U.S. sanctions would freeze Syrian government assets under U.S. jurisdiction, bar U.S. individuals or companies from transactions with Assad's government and ban U.S. imports of Syrian petroleum.
The U.S. sanctions are likely to have limited impact because of the low level of U.S.-Syrian trade and the minimal U.S. imports of Syrian oil, analysts said, but would likely be followed by European nations with greater economic leverage.
Britain, France and Germany also demanded that Assad go, as did the EU, whose foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said the bloc's 27 members were preparing to target more Syrian entities and looking at ways to broaden their sanctions.
EU diplomats are scheduled to discuss sanctions in Brussels on Friday, opening the way for any new measures to go into effect as early as next week.
While the United States has previously called for Assad to embark on democratic reforms or to get out of the way, Obama's statement marks the first unambiguous demand for him to go.
Obama's decision to take a harder stance toward Assad appears to reflect a U.S. conclusion that he is incapable of reform as well as growing condemnation of the Syrian leader, including from influential Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia.
"For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside," Obama said in a statement.
"His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people," Obama said in the written statement announcing the sanctions.
Assad told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that military and police operations against pro-democracy protesters have stopped, but activists and residents reported more killing overnight and more shooting on Thursday.
Separately, U.N. human rights investigators said Assad's forces had carried out systematic attacks on civilians, often firing at short range and without warning, killing at least 1,900 civilians, including children.
NO U.S. MILITARY THREAT
A U.S. official all but ruled out military action to force Assad out. Barring that, and with a weak and divided political opposition, it seemed possible the Syrian leader could defy calls for his removal for some time to come.
The United States is trying to push two other Arab leaders from power: Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, where NATO air strikes are helping anti-Gaddafi rebels, and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, where Washington is relying on diplomacy.
U.S. officials told reporters that they were confident the balance had shifted in Syria, that the Syrian people were no longer afraid of Assad and would no longer tolerate his rule.
"Syria is a country that is only now emerging from what in effect has been 40 years of an induced political coma," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We can't predict how long this transition will take. Nothing about it is likely to be easy but we are certain that Assad is on the way out."
The new U.S. sanctions immediately freeze all Syrian government assets subject to U.S. jurisdiction and prohibit any transactions involving the Assad government.
They also ban U.S. imports of Syrian petroleum or petroleum products -- a tiny fraction of U.S. oil imports -- and prohibit U.S. citizens from operating or investing in Syria.
The United States has already imposed several rounds of sanctions on Assad and other Syrian officials and financial institutions but these are believed to have had little impact given the limited nature of U.S.-Syrian dealings.
According to U.S. government figures, in 2010 the United States imported an average of just 9,000 barrels per day of oil from Syria, a tiny fraction of the U.S. average consumption of 19.18 million barrels per day.
"What was announced today will have a very limited impact as it doesn't really prevent anyone from outside the U.S. dealing with Syrian oil," said Greg Priddy, global oil analyst at Eurasia Group in Washington.
"With 95 percent of Syrian oil exports going to the EU, you might see more action there," he added.
"Oil sales account for a third of Assad regime revenue, so banning their purchases, with possible measures by the EU tomorrow, would strike a crippling blow to the Assad regime," said Andrew Tabler, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington-based think tank.
(Additional reporting by Deborah Charles, Andrew Quinn, Ayesha Rascoe, and Warren Strobel in Washington; by David Sheppard in New York and by Justyna Pawlak in Brussels; Editing by Will Dunham)
(Reuters) - A Seattle man accused of killing a young Chicago-area girl five decades ago was arraigned on murder charges in Illinois on Thursday, one day after he was extradited from Washington state,Jack McCullough, a 71-year-old former police officer, was given a local lawyer during Thursday's brief proceedings in courtroom, the DeKalb county state's attorney's office said. His next hearing is August 8.
McCullough is charged with murdering 7-year-old Maria Ridulph, who disappeared from her home about 50 miles west of Chicago on December 3, 1957. Her remains were found five months later more than 100 miles away.
McCullough, a neighbor of Ridulph's when the abduction occurred, was working as a security guard at a senior community when he was arrested in late June. McCullough has denied the charges and last week he waived his right to challenge extradition.
As he was being transferred to Illinois on Wednesday for his arraignment in DeKalb County Court, investigators were exhuming the Ridulph's remains in a cemetery in Sycamore, Illinois.
Investigators hope modern forensic scientists may be able to uncover DNA evidence from the young girl's remains that could not be detected or analyzed in 1958.
McCullough was arrested on June 29 in Seattle and charged in Washington state court with being a fugitive from justice. He had been held in lieu of $3 million bail in the King County jail.
On July 1, prosecutors in DeKalb County, Illinois, charged him with the girl's murder.
So far, the case against him, as outlined in the charging documents, appears largely circumstantial.
Maria Ridulph's playmate at the time of her disappearance reported that a man named "Johnny" had approached the girls and asked if they wanted piggyback rides.
TRAIN TICKET
Later, the friend went home to get her mittens. When she returned, Ridulph and the man were both gone, a probable cause statement filed by Seattle police in conjunction with McCullough's arrest said.
McCullough, then a teenager known as John Tessier, was a suspect in the crime but was not charged at the time. He told police he had been on a train from Rockford to Chicago on the day Ridulph disappeared.
But a woman who had a relationship with McCullough told authorities last year that she had seen the train ticket and it had not been used, court papers said.
The probable cause statement added that investigators tracked down the murder victim's friend last year, and she picked McCullough's photo out of a montage.
McCullough's stepdaughter, Janey O'Connor, 33, said last week that he wanted to return to Illinois because he felt confident he would be found not guilty.
"The sooner he gets to Illinois and gets his trial, the sooner he can come home," she said. McCullough's wife, Susan, did not attend last Friday's extradition hearing.
McCullough's arrest in connection with the Maria Ridulph slaying was not his only brush with the law.
A runaway teenage girl who met McCullough in the early 1980s accused him of sexually assaulting her, the probable cause statement said.
He was ultimately convicted of unlawful communication over his interaction with the girl, and fired from his position with the police department in Milton, Washington, the statement said.
(Additional reporting by Laura L. Myers; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Greg McCune)
By Jim Forsyth
SAN ANTONIO | Fri Jul 29, 2011 8:43am EDT
(Reuters) - Prosecutors trying polygamist leader Warren Jeffs on child sexual assault charges plan to use the DNA of a child conceived in a union with a 14-year-old girl to convict him in a Texas court.
Jeffs, the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, is charged with child sexual assault and aggravated child sexual assault in connection with his "spiritual marriages" to two girls, ages 12 and 14, at the remote Yearning for Zion Ranch in Texas.
"You will hear and see evidence that as a result of sexual activity a child was conceived, and from the DNA evidence you will be able to determine that Warren Steed Jeffs is the father of this child," Assistant Texas Attorney General Eric Nichols told the jury at the start of the trial.
Prosecutors said they would also present an audio tape of a sexual encounter between Jeffs, 55, and the 14-year-old that he secretly recorded.
Jeffs is considered the spiritual leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which has been condemned by the mainstream Mormon Church and is accused of promoting marriages between older men and girls.
The sect, which experts estimate has 10,000 followers in North America, also teaches that for a man to be among the select in heaven, he must have at least three wives.
Nichols also called a string of law enforcement witnesses who testified about a 2008 raid on the Texas ranch in which the two girls and more than 400 other children were taken into protective custody, and about Jeffs' 2007 arrest in Nevada.
Jeffs sat silently, alone at the defense table, with his head bowed and his hands folded in his lap, in what appeared to be a position of prayer. He never spoke to question witnesses or to object to testimony.
Danny Guajardo, a Texas Attorney General's Office investigator who took DNA samples from the two girls and the baby, was expected to discuss his findings on Friday.
WILL REPRESENT HIMSELF
Jeffs had thrown the trial into disarray earlier on Thursday when he fired his defense lawyers and demanded the right to represent himself, which the judge then granted.
"It's not as easy as it looks on TV, Mr. Jeffs," State District Judge Barbara Walther told him. "You're on your own."
Jeffs, who founded the ranch in 2003 as an outpost for his church after decades on the Utah-Arizona border, refused to enter a plea, so the court recorded a "not guilty" plea.
"My counsel doesn't have the full understanding of the facts and are unable to assist in my defense," Jeffs told the court in a slow, halting voice as he explained his move to fire his counsel.
"I have trained my defense, but they were unable to do what I said. I am presenting the need for true justice to be presented, and for the truth to come out."
Jeffs has fired myriad attorneys in what prosecutors said was an attempt to delay the trial on charges that could send him to prison for life. Judge Walther instructed his attorneys to remain on standby although they do not have to appear in court as his advisers.
There were no signs of any sect members or supporters of Jeffs in the half-full courtroom.
Before being fired, defense attorneys had worked to exclude evidence seized when Jeffs was arrested in Nevada in 2007, as well as items seized from the ranch in 2008.
Defense lawyers said those items shouldn't be used. They include a list of adult male members of the sect detailing their numerous wives and a photograph of a grinning Jeffs kissing one of his brides.
They argued against that evidence because the raid was prompted by a false report to a San Angelo domestic violence hotline by a woman falsely claiming to be a 16-year-old child bride. The raid resulted in hundreds of children being temporarily removed from the compound.
(Editing by Karen Brooks, Greg McCune and Cynthia Johnston)
The indictment against Catherine Greig, 60, alleges that she conspired with Bulger and others to conceal and harbor the aging gangster during the 16 years the pair were on the run together.
She faces up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine if convicted of the crime.
Greig said she understood the charges against her before softly saying, "Not guilty."
When she entered the courtroom, Greig smiled and nodded to her twin sister and carried on an animated conversation with her lawyer.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington told reporters after the court appearance that Greig is an excellent candidate for bail and not a flight risk.
"Where's she gonna go? What's the incentive to take off? She's got her family, she's got her sister. She's putting this behind her," he said.
Greig remains behind bars while Reddington prepares additional materials in a request for release. The judge will then decide whether she should be released pending trial.
Reddington would not say whether his client has had any contact with Bulger. There has been no discussion of Greig cooperating with the government or law enforcement, he said.
Greig and the 81-year-old Bulger were arrested on June 22 in their Santa Monica, California, hide-out with a stash of about 30 firearms and $822,000 in cash hidden in holes in the wall.
Greig had used a host of aliases over the years including Carol Gasko, Helen Marshall, Carol Shapeton and Mrs. Thomas Baxter to make purchases and pay bills, according to the indictment.
She ran many of the errands to minimize Bulger's time in public. To erase any suspicion about time spent inside with the window shades drawn, Greig told a property manager at their Santa Monica apartment complex that her husband "Charlie," actually Bulger, was sick with emphysema, the indictment said.
On Wednesday the government released a series of fake identification cards including a New York state ID, Social Security card and AARP membership cards said to have been used by the pair. Some include a photo that resembles Bulger.
Bulger, the former leader of the Winter Hill Gang, was wanted on federal racketeering charges in connection with 19 murders from the 1970s and 1980s. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts against him.
He fled Boston in late 1994 after receiving a tip from a corrupt FBI agent that federal charges were pending. Greig joined him a short time later.
Magistrate Judge Jennifer Boal set a status conference for the Greig case on September 29.
(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Jerry Norton)
For literary types, however, the most important questions are actually these: What are we reading before the apocalypse, and what volumes are just not going to be flying off the shelves if the world ends in a steaming, smoking ball of vengeful divine wrath before the next episode of SNL?
As regular readers of Publishers Weekly and those who list the Frankfurter Buchmesse among their Facebook friends already know, the sale of diet books will be thin this week.
Nobody who doesn't already have great abs or thin thighs is getting them before Saturday. Will it truly be important to look twenty years younger for the Grim Reaper? Not that I'm bitter, but I hope the GR gets to Suzanne Somers first so that she can learn what the "forever" in "forever sexy" really means. (Ever see that third panel in "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch, Suzanne? Svelte won't help.)
And although such bestsellers as "No Time Left," "Born to Run," and "Heaven is For Real" might draw those who never before glanced at them-their titles giving an advantage over others with ones like "I'd Change My Life If I Had More Time"-they're probably not going to grab new readers.
Nor are books like "The Happiness Project" or even the most nicely illustrated volumes on crafting, scrapbooking, learning Photoshop, or finding your own parachute (unless it's literally about finding your own parachute and, while you're at it, finding your own machete, your own gas-mask and your own zombie-fighting equipment.)
Books on achieving sobriety, collecting Hummel figurines, putting an end to deforestation, and finding Prince Charming will languish, unopened.
But we're also not going to have time to luxuriate in existential angst. We're tossing Foucault (and Foucault's Pendulum, for that matter) to the wind. We're not going to be looking for fad philosophies or perusing books by obscure and idiot scholars. We're not going to worry if books are under-theorized, overly sentimental, or if their bibliographies seem a tad incomplete. Yes, I have colleagues who will be looking for errors in the Book of Revelations, just so they can mark little pious notes in the margin, but they're in limbo already.
I have many more friends who will be reading the New Testament, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Talmud, the Koran, and "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" the way W.C. Fields said he was reading the Bible: this is, looking for loopholes.
It'd be interesting to see what we'd read if we actually considered ourselves an endangered species. We'd have to give up the pretence and get with the program; we'd have to read only what we know (or believe) we'd love and skip those books we've been carrying around as accessories or using as table decorations.
The scanning project, started in 2008, was in keeping with the company's mission to "organize the world's information and universally accessible and useful."
Google told Search Engine Land in a statement:
Google also recently closed its Google Video service, which had been a predecessor to YouTube. These changes could perhaps be part of recently re-installed CEO Larry Page's efforts to refocus the company's efforts.
We work closely with newspaper partners on a number of initiatives, and as part of the Google News Archives digitization program we collaborated to make older newspapers accessible and searchable online. These have included publications like the London Advertiser in 1895, L’Ami du Lecteur at the turn of the century, and the Milwaukee Sentinel from 1910 to 1995. Users can continue to search digitized newspapers at http://news.google.com/archivesearch, but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing.
Have you used Google's online newspaper archive? Was the project a valuable one? Tell us what you think below.
"I want you defend your company here because I don't know how you can," Sen. Jay Rockefeller told Taylor during a Senate commerce subcommitee hearing on mobile privacy.
Though Facebook's terms of service prohibit children from using their site, the West Virginia Democrat questioned its efforts to verify users' ages, citing a recent Consumer Reports study that estimated 7.5 million children had profiles on the social network.
Rockefeller also expressed concerned about Facebook's app, which Apple's App Store describes as appropriate for all users over four years of age.
"That's actually news to me," Taylor said of the app's rating. "We don't allow people to have accounts under the age of 13... Certainly your iPhone app has the same rules and conditions governing it as our website, which means that no one under the age of 13 can create an account."
"I appreciate that, but it doesn't appear to be the truth," Rockefeller responded. "You can't just dismiss that seven-and-a-half million users are younger than 13 and say you have a policy that doesn't allow that to happen," he added later.
Rockefeller recounted a conversation he had had with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in which she told him that the company had 100 people in place to supervise content posted by the site's 600 million users. The West Virginia senator expressed strong doubts that such a small team could effectively prevent bullying and other abuses on the social network.
In an aside, the 73-year-old senator suggested that problems with Facebook's privacy protections could in part be traced to the young age of its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"It's my general feeling that people who are 20, 21, 22 years old really don't have any social values at this point," said Rockefeller, noting that Zuckerberg started working on Facebook while a college student at Harvard University. "I think he was focused on how his business model would work and he wanted to make it bigger and do it faster than anyone else ever had, and nothing I know suggests otherwise."
Taylor noted that Facebook has instituted features, such as its Social Reporting tool, to allow users to flag content that violates the site's policies and, when relevant, alert parents and teachers to the posts.
"We work hard to protect individuals' privacy by giving them control over the information they share and the connections they make. For Facebook -- like other providers of social technologies -- getting this balance right is not only the right thing to do, but a matter of survival," Taylor said in his prepared testimony.
That didn't alleviate the concerns of Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, chief operating officer of Common Sense Media and another witness at the hearing.
"Our view is there's not enough being done," she said, referring to the site's measures to prevent underage users. "If we took a small amount of the time that any of these companies spend innovating products and start to think about how to protect kids and -- frankly -- adults, it would go a long way."
"These are organizations that have created a platform that 600 million people use across the globe... and instead of spending money to try to hire PR firms to try and take down the other company, let's take that money and spend it on figuring out technological ways to protect our kids," Shenkan explained, referencing the revelation that Facebook had paid a company to plant negative stories about Google in the press.
The deal would salvage the British oil giant's efforts to reach a landmark Arctic alliance with Russian state oil company Rosneft, the Journal said, citing people familiar with the situation.
Through a series of transactions with BP, it would give Rosneft the 50 percent stake in TNK-BP now owned by the billionaire partners, the report said. In turn, those partners would get cash and substantial stakes in both BP and Rosneft, according to the report.
BP and Rosneft, meanwhile, would be able to proceed with a multibillion-dollar plan to explore for oil in the Arctic Sea north of Russia, a deal that BP's existing Russian partners in the TNK venture had opposed.
Representatives for BP were not immediately reached for comment outside business hours.
A preliminary agreement could be announced as early as Monday, when BP faces a deadline to complete the arctic alliance with Rosneft, including a $16 billion exchange of shares between the two companies, the Journal said.
The talks are continuing and could still break down, the report said. Failure would likely mean the end for BP's hopes of closing the Arctic deal, because Rosneft has so far opposed a compromise plan that would have seen TNK-BP take the British giant's place in the project.
In January, BP and Rosneft agreed to a USD 16 billion share swap and an exploration venture aimed at unlocking potentially 40 billion barrels of oil in the Russian Arctic Sea.
The deal, which was announced with great fanfare by BP, was supposed to mark a turning point in the London-based oil giant's fortunes after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. But BP's oligarch partners in TNK-BP objected, saying the transaction violated an agreement BP made, when founding TNK-BP, to use TNK-BP as its principal vehicle for investment in Russia.
Monica Long had expected a routine appointment. But here she was sitting in her new oncologist’s office, and he was delivering deeply disturbing news.
Pathologists at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan examine slides of breast tissue.
Nearly a year earlier, in 2007, a pathologist at a small hospital in Cheboygan, Mich., had found the earliest stage of breast cancer from a biopsy. Extensive surgery followed, leaving Ms. Long’s right breast missing a golf-ball-size chunk.
Now she was being told the pathologist had made a mistake. Her new doctor was certain she never had the disease, called ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S. It had all been unnecessary — the surgery, the radiation, the drugs and, worst of all, the fear.
“Psychologically, it’s horrible,” Ms. Long said. “I never should have had to go through what I did.”
Like most women, Ms. Long had regarded the breast biopsy as the gold standard, an infallible way to identify cancer. “I thought it was pretty cut and dried,” said Ms. Long, who is a registered nurse.
As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times.
Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.
Diagnosing D.C.I.S. “is a 30-year history of confusion, differences of opinion and under- and overtreatment,” said Dr. Shahla Masood, the head of pathology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville. “There are studies that show that diagnosing these borderline breast lesions occasionally comes down to the flip of a coin.”
There is an increasing recognition of the problems, and the federal government is now financing a nationwide study of variations in breast pathology, based on concerns that 17 percent of D.C.I.S. cases identified by a commonly used needle biopsy may be misdiagnosed. Despite this, there are no mandated diagnostic standards or requirements that pathologists performing the work have any specialized expertise, meaning that the chances of getting an accurate diagnosis vary from hospital to hospital.
Dr. Linh Vi, the pathologist at Cheboygan Memorial Hospital who diagnosed D.C.I.S. in Ms. Long, was not board certified and has said he reads about 50 breast biopsies a year, far short of the experience that leading pathologists say is needed in dealing with the nuances of difficult breast cancer cases. In responding to a lawsuit brought by Ms. Long, Dr. Vi maintains that she had cancer and that two board-certified pathologists at a neighboring hospital concurred with his diagnosis.
Yet several leading experts who reviewed Ms. Long’s case disagreed, with one saying flatly that her local pathologists “blew the diagnosis.”
The questions that often surround D.C.I.S. diagnoses take on added significance when combined with criticism that it is both overdiagnosed and overtreated in the United States — concerns that helped fuel the recent controversy over the routine use of mammograms for women in their 40s.
The United States Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel that issues guidelines on cancer screening, found last November that the downside of routine annual mammograms for younger women might offset the benefits of early detection. The panel specifically referred to overdiagnosis of D.C.I.S., as well as benign but atypical breast lesions that left undetected would never cause problems.
D.C.I.S., which is also called Stage 0 or noninvasive cancer, was a rare diagnosis before mammograms began to be widely used in the 1980s. Until then, breast pathology typically involved reading tissue from palpable lumps. The diagnoses — usually invasive cancer, a benign fibroid tumor or a cyst — were often obvious.
Today, D.C.I.S. is diagnosed in more than 50,000 women a year in this country alone. The abnormal cells, which are encased in breast ducts, are removed before they develop into invasive cancer. There are estimates that if left untreated, it will turn into invasive cancer 30 percent of the time, though it could take decades in some cases.
Concerned about the accuracy of breast pathology, the College of American Pathologists said it would start a voluntary certification program for pathologists who read breast tissue. Among its requirements is that the pathologists must read 250 breast cases a year.
“There’s no question there’s a problem, and that’s why we’re starting this certificate program,” said Dr. James L. Connolly, director of anatomic pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
While the program has not started yet, it is still controversial.
Instead, the women say, they were subjected to 16-hour workdays assembling cellphones at below the minimum wage, with little training of any sort, all under the auspices of a government-approved “foreign trainee” program that critics call industrial Japan’s dirty secret.
“My head hurt, my throat stung,” said Zhang Yuwei, 23, who operated a machine that printed cellphone keypads, battling fumes that she said made the air so noxious that managers would tell Japanese employees to avoid her work area.
Ms. Zhang says she was let go last month after her employer found that she and five compatriots had complained to a social worker about their work conditions. A Japanese lawyer is now helping the group sue their former employer, seeking back pay and damages totaling $207,000.
Critics say foreign trainees have become an exploited source of cheap labor in a country with one of the world’s most rapidly aging populations and lowest birthrates. All but closed to immigration, Japan faces an acute labor shortage, especially for jobs at the country’s hardscrabble farms or small family-run factories.
“The mistreatment of trainees appears to be widespread,” said Shoichi Ibusuki, a human rights lawyer based in Tokyo.
From across Asia, about 190,000 trainees — migrant workers in their late teens to early 30s — now toil in factories and farms in Japan. They have been brought to the country, in theory, to learn technical expertise under an international aid program started by the Japanese government in the 1990s.
For businesses, the government-sponsored trainee program has offered a loophole to hiring foreign workers. But with little legal protection, the indentured work force is exposed to substandard, sometimes even deadly, working conditions, critics say.
Government records show that at least 127 of the trainees have died since 2005 — or one of about every 2,600 trainees, which experts say is a high death rate for young people who must pass stringent physicals to enter the program. Many deaths involved strokes or heart failure that worker rights groups attribute to the strain of excessive labor.
The Justice Ministry found more than 400 cases of mistreatment of trainees at companies across Japan in 2009, including failing to pay legal wages and exposing trainees to dangerous work conditions. This month, labor inspectors in central Japan ruled that a 31-year-old Chinese trainee, Jiang Xiaodong, had died from heart failure induced by overwork.
Under pressure by human rights groups and a string of court cases, the government has begun to address some of the program’s worst abuses. The United Nations has urged Japan to scrap it altogether.
After one year of training, during which the migrant workers receive subsistence pay below the minimum wage, trainees are allowed to work for two more years in their area of expertise at legal wage levels. But interviews with labor experts and a dozen trainees indicate that the foreign workers seldom achieve those pay rates.
On paper, the promised pay still sounds alluring to the migrant workers. Many are from rural China, where per-capita disposable income can be as low as $750 a year. To secure a spot in the program, would-be trainees pay many times that amount in fees and deposits to local brokers, sometimes putting up their homes as collateral — which can be confiscated if trainees quit early or cause trouble.
The Japan International Training Cooperation Organization, or Jitco, which operates the program, said it was aware some companies had abused the system and that it was taking steps to crack down on the worst cases. The organization plans to ensure that “trainees receive legal protection, and that cases of fraud are eliminated,” Jitco said in a written response to questions.
Ms. Zhang says she paid $8,860 to a broker in her native Hebei Province for a spot in the program. She was assigned to a workshop run by Modex-Alpha, which assembles cellphones sold by Sharp and other electronics makers. Ms. Zhang said her employer demanded her passport and housed her in a cramped apartment with no heat, alongside five other trainees.
In her first year, Ms. Zhang worked eight-hour days and received $660 a month after various deductions, according to her court filing — about $3.77 an hour, or less than half the minimum wage level in Hiroshima. Moreover, all but $170 a month was forcibly withheld by the company as savings, and paid out only after Ms. Zhang pushed the company for the full amount, she said.
