Trutanich struggling in bid to keep his city attorney post

With large numbers of Los Angeles voters yet to make up their minds, a new poll shows that first-term City Atty. Carmen Trutanich is struggling to stay afloat as Tuesday's primary election approaches.

Trutanich is in a statistical dead heat for second place with private attorney Greg Smith. Former lawmaker Mike Feuer enjoys a slight edge over both as the three candidates battle to advance to an expected May runoff.

Feuer, who served on the City Council and then in the state Assembly representing the city's Westside, was the choice of 23.8% of those surveyed for the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Primary Poll, while 16.4% favored Trutanich, who won the office in a 2009 upset. Smith, a first-time candidate who has pumped more than $800,000 of his personal wealth into the race, was preferred by 15.2%.

But the poll has a margin of sampling error of 4.4 percentage points in either direction. Furthermore, 40% of those surveyed said they hadn't decided on a candidate.

"Feuer maintains a small advantage," said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. But, he added, Smith's television and radio advertising and incumbent Trutanich's name ID "could change that," particularly with so many undecided voters.

Just 4.7% of respondents favor a fourth candidate on the ballot, private attorney Noel Weiss. Weiss, who also ran for the post in 2009, has not had the money to mount a viable campaign.

The bipartisan telephone survey canvassed 500 likely voters in the city from Feb. 24 through 27. It was conducted jointly by the Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company.

Earlier independent surveys by other organizations showed that Trutanich had started the race with a lead. But he got into the contest late — after failing to make the runoff in his bid for county district attorney last year — and has not been able to match the campaign treasuries of Feuer and Smith, both earlier entrants in the contest. The blunt-spoken Trutanich, who has tangled publicly with the mayor and City Council, has also alienated some of his past supporters with his style and his decision to run for D.A. despite his 2009 campaign promise to serve two full terms at City Hall before seeking another post.

"To the extent that voters know about the candidates, this race is a referendum on Carmen Trutanich," Schnur said.

In the survey, Trutanich did somewhat better than Feuer and Smith among Latinos: 22.8% of voters in that group said they would vote for the incumbent, compared with 17.8% for Feuer and 12.7% for Smith. Feuer fared best among whites — 26.1% favored him, while Trutanich and Smith were backed by 16.7% and 16.4%, respectively.

Feuer also fared better with female voters (25%) than either Trutanich (13%) or Smith (14%). A Democrat, Feuer also did best among voters who identified with that party — 32% preferred him to Smith, another Democrat, who was chosen by 11%; while 15% favored Trutanich, a former Republican who is currently unaffiliated with a party. Among Republicans, who make up about one-fifth of the city's voters, Trutanich and Smith tied with 23% apiece, while 8% preferred Feuer.

jean.merl@latimes.com

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India Ink: Image of the Day: March 1

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HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.

LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.

Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.

HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.

“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.

“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.

Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”

Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.

LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.

HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.

The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.

HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.

WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.

(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)

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Valerie Bertinelli Pays Special Tribute to Bonnie Franklin

03/01/2013 at 02:55 PM EST

Bonnie Franklin, who died of pancreatic cancer Friday, and Valerie Bertinelli go back nearly 40 years, to the sitcom One Day at a TIme, on which Franklin played her mother, Ann Romano.

Two years ago the actresses reunited professionally, on Bertinelii's series Hot in Cleveland.

Bertinelli said in a statement Friday: "My heart is breaking. Bonnie has always been one of the most important women in my life and was a second mother to me.

"The years on One Day at a Time were some of the happiest of my life, and along with Pat [Harrington Jr.] and Mackenzie [Phillips] we were a family in every way.

"She taught me how to navigate this business and life itself with grace and humor, and to always be true to yourself. I will miss her terribly."

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

__

Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

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Population growth is threat to other species, poll respondents say

Nearly two-thirds of American voters believe that human population growth is driving other animal species to extinction and that if the situation gets worse, society has a "moral responsibility to address the problem," according to new national public opinion poll.

A slightly lower percentage of those polled — 59% — believes that population growth is an important environmental issue and 54% believe that stabilizing the population will help protect the environment.

The survey was conducted on behalf of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, which unlike other environmental groups has targeted population growth as part of its campaign to save wildlife species from extinction.

The center has handed out more than half a million condoms at music concerts, farmers markets, churches and college campuses with labels featuring drawings of endangered species and playful, even humorous, messages such as, "Wrap with care, save the polar bear."

The organization hired a polling firm to show other environmental groups that their fears about alienating the public by bringing up population matters are overblown, said Kieran Suckling, the center's executive director. When the center broke the near-silence on population growth with its condom campaign, other environmental leaders "reacted with a mix of worry and horror that we were going to experience a huge backlash and drag them into it," he said.

Instead, Suckling said the campaign has swelled its membership — now about 500,000 — and donations and energized 5,000 volunteers who pass out prophylactics. He said a common response is, "Thank God, someone is talking about this critical issue."

The poll results, he said, show such views are mainstream.

In the survey, the pollsters explained that the world population hit 7 billion last year and is projected to reach 10 billion by the end of the century. Given those facts, 50% of people reached by telephone said they think the world population is growing too fast, while 38% said population growth was on the right pace and 4% thought it was growing too slowly. About 8% were not sure.

Sixty-one percent of respondents expressed concerned about disappearing wildlife. Depending how the question was phrased, 57% to 64% of respondents said population growth was having an adverse effect. If widespread wildlife extinctions were unavoidable without slowing human population growth, 60% agreed that society has a moral responsibility to address the problem.

Respondents didn't make as clear a connection between population and climate change, reflecting the decades-old debate over population growth versus consumption. Although 57% of respondents agreed that population growth is making climate change worse, only 46% said they think having more people will make it harder to solve, and 34% said the number of people will make no difference.

Asked about natural resources, 48% said they think the average American consumes too much. The view split sharply along party lines, with 62% of Democrats saying the average American consumes too much, compared with 29% of Republicans. Independents fell in the middle at 49%.

The survey of 657 registered voters was conducted Feb. 22-24 by Public Policy Polling, a Raleigh, N.C., firm that takes the pulse of voters for Democratic candidates and Democratic-leaning clients. It has a margin of error of 3.9%.

ken.weiss@latimes.com

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After Pledging Loyalty to Successor, Pope Leaves Vatican

VATICAN CITY — Benedict XVI ceased to be pope at 8 p.m. local time (2 p.m. Eastern) Thursday when his resignation took effect, leaving the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church vacant while its leading clerics consider who should succeed him.

Benedict left the Vatican by helicopter on Thursday afternoon to spend the final hours of his scandal-dogged papacy and the first of his retirement at a summer residence used by popes for centuries. Onlookers in St. Peter’s Square cheered, church bells rang and Romans stood on rooftops to wave flags to see him off as he flew from Rome to the summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, a hilltop town southeast of the city. More carillons heralded his arrival there, and he was greeted by a vivid contingent of silver-suited firemen, gendarmes in red capes, and bishops in black and pink.

Addressing cheering well-wishers from a window at the residence, he said: “Dear friends, I am happy to be with you! Thanks for your friendship and affection! You know this is a different day than others.”

Earlier in the day, in one of his concluding acts, Benedict addressed a gathering of more than 100 cardinals who will elect his successor, urging them to be “like an orchestra” that harmonizes for the good of the Roman Catholic Church. From a gilded throne in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace, the pope thanked the cardinals collectively, and then rose to greet each of them individually.

Draped in a red and gold mantle lined with snow-white ermine, Benedict clasped the hands of each cardinal as they removed their red skullcaps and kissed the pope’s ring. Benedict told them, “I will be close to you in prayer” as the next leader of the church is chosen. Many of them were appointed to their powerful positions as so-called princes of the church by Benedict or by his predecessor, John Paul II, and are seen as doctrinal conservatives in their mold. “Among you is also the future pope, whom I promise my unconditional reverence and obedience,” Benedict told the cardinals, reflecting the concern among Vatican watchers about what it will mean to have two popes residing in the Vatican.

As pope emeritus, Benedict intends to reside in Castel Gandolfo for several months and then return to the Vatican to live in an apartment being prepared for him in a convent whose gardens offer a perfect view of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.

He surprised many on Feb. 11 when he announced that, feeling his age and diminishing strength, he would retire, a dramatic step that sent the Vatican hierarchy spinning. He reassured the faithful on Sunday that he was not “abandoning” the church, but would continue to serve, even in retirement. In an emotional and unusually personal message on Wednesday, his final public audience in St. Peter’s Square, Benedict said that he sometimes felt that “the waters were agitated and the winds were blowing against” the church.

His retirement will bring changes in style and substance. Rather than the heavy ornate robes he wore to greet the cardinals, Benedict will wear a simple white cassock, with brown shoes from Mexico replacing the red slippers that he and other popes have traditionally worn, the color symbolizing the blood of the martyrs.

The conclave to elect the next pope, expected in mid-March, will begin amid a swirl of scandal. On Monday, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Britain’s senior Roman Catholic cleric, said he would not participate in the conclave, after having been accused of “inappropriate acts” with several priests, charges that he denies. Other cardinals have also come under fire in sexual abuse scandals, but only Cardinal O’Brien has recused himself.

On Monday, Benedict met with three cardinals he had asked to conduct an investigation into a Vatican scandal in which hundreds of confidential documents were leaked to the press and published in a tell-all book last May, the worst security breach in the church’s modern history. The three cardinals compiled a hefty dossier on the scandal, which Benedict has entrusted only to his successor, not to the cardinals entering the conclave, the Vatican spokesman said earlier this week.

On Thursday, Panorama, a weekly magazine, reported that the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, had been conducting his own investigation into the leaks scandal, including requesting wiretaps on the phones of some members of the Vatican hierarchy. That would be taking a page from the playbook of magistrates in Italy, where wiretaps are extensive.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said on Thursday that in the context of an investigation into the leaks, magistrates of the Vatican, not the secretary of state, “might have authorized some wiretaps or some checks,” but nothing on a significant scale. The idea of “an investigation that creates an atmosphere of fear of mistrust that will now affect the conclave has no foundation in reality.”

A shy theologian who appeared to have little interest in the internal politics of the Vatican, Benedict has said that he is retiring “freely, and for the good of the church,” entrusting it to a successor who has more strength than he does. But shadows linger. The next pope will inherit a hierarchy buffeted by crises of governance as well as power struggles over the Vatican Bank, which has struggled to conform to international transparency norms.

Many faithful have welcomed Benedict’s gesture as a sign of humility and humanity, a rational decision taken by a man who no longer feels up to the job.

As he stood near St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday after attending the pope’s last public audience, Vincenzo Petrucci, 26, said he had come to express “not so much solidarity, but more like closeness” to the pope. “At first we felt astonished, shocked and disoriented,” he said. “But then we saw what a weighty decision it must have been. He seemed almost lonely.”

Many in the Vatican hierarchy, known as the Roman Curia, are still reeling from the news. Many are bereaved and others seem almost angry. “We are terribly, terribly, terribly shocked,” one senior Vatican official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 28, 2013

An earlier version of the credit for the picture with this article showing a helicopter flying over St. Peter’s Square misstated the surname of the photographer. He is Alberto Pizzoli, not Alberto Pizzolialberto.

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HP sells webOS operating system to LG Electronics

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hewlett-Packard Co said on Monday it will sell the webOS operating system to South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc, unloading the smartphone software it acquired through a $ 1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in 2010.

LG will use the operating software, used in now-defunct Palm smartphones years ago, for its “smart” or Internet-connected TVs. The Asian electronics company had worked with HP on WebOS before offering to buy it outright.

Under the terms of their agreement, LG acquires the operating software’s source code, associated documentation, engineering talent, various associated websites, and licenses under HP’s intellectual property including patents covering fundamental operating system and user interface technology.

HP will retain the patents and all the technology relating to the cloud service of webOS, HP Chief Operating Officer Bill Veghte said in an interview.

“As we looked at it, we saw a very compelling IP that was very unique in the marketplace,” he said, adding that HP has already had a partnership with LG on webOS before the deal was announced.

“As a result of this collaboration, LG offered to acquire the webOS operating system technology,” Veghte said.

Skott Ahn, President and CTO, LG Electronics, said the company will incorporate the operating system in the Smart TV line-up first “and then hopefully all the other devices in the future.”

Both companies declined to reveal the terms of the deal.

LG will keep the WebOS team in Silicon Valley and, for now, will continue to be based out of HP offices, Ahn said.

HP opened its webOS mobile operating system to developers and companies in 2012 after trying to figure out how to recoup its investment in Palm, one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry.

The company had tried to build products based on webOS with the now-defunct TouchPad tablet its flagship product.

HP launched and discontinued the TouchPad in 2010, a little over a month after it hit store shelves with costly fanfare after it saw poor demand for a tablet priced on par with Apple’s dominant iPad.

WebOS is widely viewed as a strong mobile platform, but has been assailed for its paucity of applications, an important consideration while choosing a mobile device.

(Additional reporting By Paul Sandle and Alistair Barr; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Tim Dobbyn and M.D. Golan)

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Natalie and Derrica Wilson Help Find the Missing

Heroes Among Us

By Nicole Weisensee Egan

02/28/2013 at 02:45 PM EST

Natalie Wilson (left) and Derrica Wilson

Shaul Schwarz

One spring day in 2004 a young African-American woman named Tamika Huston vanished from her Spartanburg, S.C., apartment.

Her family did everything they could to get the media to pay attention to the 24-year-old's disappearance, sending out emails, calling newspapers and TV stations – to no avail.

"It was painful watching them struggle for any kind of media coverage-local or national," says Derrica Wilson, who was born and raised in Spartanburg. "This could have been one of my family members."

One year almost to the day later, high school senior Natalee Holloway disappeared in Aruba. And that story, of course, was everywhere. "It made me angry but angry in a positive way," says Derrica. "I wanted to do something to help families like Tamika's."

So she turned to her own family to make that happen. In 2008, Derrica and her sister-in-law, Natalie Wilson, started the Black and Missing Foundation, a non-profit geared toward helping minority families find missing loved ones. By working closely with police, the media and the families themselves, they have helped locate more than 113 missing people – 71 of them alive.

It's a daunting task: Thousands of African-Americans go missing each year (one-third of all missing-persons cases). The problem has caught Hollywood's eye: Tyler Perry recently offered a $100,000 reward for tips leading to the discovery of two missing Florida men.

The Wilsons fund the foundation out of their own pockets and make themselves available day and night to grieving families – even though they both have full-time jobs and families of their own. "Let's just say it's a calling," says Derrica, 34. They have more than 2,000 cases in their database (they only take on cases in which police reports were filed).

"I believe in what they do," says Washington, D.C. assistant police chief Diane Groomes, who was so impressed with their work she joined their board of directors.

The sisters in law divvy up their duties based on what they do best. Derrica, a cop for years who currently works as an investigator for a D.C. agency, coaches families on how to deal with law enforcement and the media. Natalie, 43, a public relations expert, works on getting the cases coverage on radio, newspapers, the web and television.

They've also partnered with TV One and national radio host Michael Baisden to get ongoing coverage of different cases. "It's one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had," says Baisden, whose show has helped find 14 children. "There is nothing more traumatizing than losing your child and not knowing if they are alive or dead."

On Feb. 13, the sisters-in-law started a support group for families that meets weekly in Washington, D.C. "Coping with a missing loved one is traumatic and overwhelming," says Natalie. "We want families to know that they are not alone." On May 25, they will host a 5K run in Ft. Washington, Md. to raise awareness of the issue.

No one is more appreciative of these efforts than the families they are helping. "If I had the next hundred years I couldn't thank them enough," says Unique Harris, 45, who says Derrica and Natalie got the Washington, D.C. media to give some much-needed attention to the still-unsolved disappearance of her daughter Valencia, 24.

"When I talk to Natalie and Derrica I let them know I love them, "she says, "and they're like family now."

Know a hero? Send suggestions to heroesamongus@peoplemag.com. For more inspiring stories, read the latest issue of PEOPLE magazine

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WHO: Small cancer risk after Fukushima accident

LONDON (AP) — People exposed to the highest doses of radiation during Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011 may have a slightly higher risk of cancer but one so small it probably won't be detectable, the World Health Organization said in a report released Thursday.

A group of experts convened by the agency assessed the risk of various cancers based on estimates of how much radiation people at the epicenter of the nuclear disaster received, namely those directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, a rural agricultural area about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

Some 110,000 people living around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant were evacuated after the massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 knocked out the plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water.

In the new report, the highest increases in risk appeared for people exposed as infants to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

"These are pretty small proportional increases," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," he said. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

WHO estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare, one of the most treatable cancers when caught early, and the normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That risk would be half of one percentage point higher for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase in such cancers may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most heavily exposed areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected to the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who was not connected to the WHO report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the WHO of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally-grown food. Kanno accused the report of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

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