WASHINGTON
Falling mammogram rate worries experts
After rising steadily for decades, the proportion of U.S. women getting mammograms to screen for breast cancer has dropped for the first time, federal researchers are reporting today.
The overall rate at which women are undergoing regular mammograms fell 4 percent between 2000 and 2005, marking the first significant decline since use of the breast X-rays started expanding rapidly in 1987, the study by the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
The reasons remain unclear, but researchers speculated that it could be because of factors such as increasingly long waiting times to get appointments, waning fears about breast cancer, the drop in hormone use after menopause and the ongoing debate over the benefits and risks of the breast exams.
Regardless of the cause, the trend is worrying breast-cancer experts, who credit mammograms with playing a crucial role in reducing deaths from breast cancer.
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VERONA BEACH, N.Y.
Scissors stab kills girl as she falls from chair
A 6-year-old girl reaching for scissors on top of a refrigerator died when she fell from a chair and the blades stabbed her in the neck, police said.
Kayleigh Cochis wanted the scissors to cut off gum stuck in her hair.
She was standing on a wheeled, office-style chair when it moved and she lost her balance Friday night, according to state police. She was pronounced dead at a hospital.
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SANTA MARIA, Calif.
No team wins NASA’s moon-dirt-dig contest
Four teams and some strange machines competed for $250,000 from NASA, but all walked away empty-handed.
NASA’s Regolith Excavation Challenge invited teams to build machines for digging mock moon dirt, or regolith, in a competition held in a 1-ton sandbox Saturday.
But all the teams fell well short of the winning requirement of 330 pounds of regolith deposited in a container in 30 minutes, and no one claimed the $250,000 purse.
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BELEM, Brazil
Trial begins in killing of American nun
A rancher goes to trial today in the killing of an American nun whose death while trying to save the Amazon rain forest threatens to strip away the impunity of the region’s often-violent elite.
Vitalmiro Bastos Moura is one of two ranchers accused of ordering the 2005 killing of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang, a naturalized Brazilian originally from Dayton, Ohio.
She spent the last 23 years of her life in Anapu, a hardscrabble town on the edge of the Trans- Amazon Highway, where she helped build schools and taught settlers to defend their rights. She was slain by six bullets at close range on a muddy patch of road deep in Para state.
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MARION, Mont.
Plane turned abruptly before fatal crash
A small plane that crashed near a private airstrip, killing its pilot and four skydivers, had made an abrupt turn just before going down, a federal investigator said Sunday.
The Cessna 182 had just taken off from Skydive Lost Prairie when it crashed Saturday.
Tom Little, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said it was too early to tell what caused the crash, but he said it appeared that the plane made a 180-degree turn just after takeoff and was only about 500 feet high before it plummeted to earth.
Little said he and representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration should have a preliminary report ready by Thursday.
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CHICAGO
School board sued over film viewing
A girl and her grandparents have sued the Chicago Board of Education, alleging that a substitute teacher showed the R-rated film “Brokeback Mountain” in class.
The lawsuit claims that Jessica Turner, 12, suffered psychological distress after viewing the movie in her eighth-grade class at Ashburn Community Elementary School last year.
The film, which won three Oscars, depicts two cowboys who conceal their homosexual affair.
Jessica and her grandparents, Kenneth and LaVerne Richardson, are seeking about $500,000 in damages.
