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New medicines are being developed that are expected to transform the care of patients with hepatitis C, making treatment far more effective and far less grueling.
The new drugs, which could start reaching the market as early as next year, could help subdue a virus that infects roughly four million Americans, most of them baby boomers, and 170 million people worldwide.

“I almost think this will be revolutionary, to be honest,” said Dr. Fred Poordad, chief of hepatology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “We are chomping at the bit to try to treat as many patients as we can.”

About two dozen pharmaceutical companies are now pursuing drugs for hepatitis C, which an executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently called “one of the largest pharmaceutical opportunities this decade.”

That is because the toll of the disease, which now kills about 12,000 Americans a year, is expected to rise in the coming decade. Although new cases have dropped sharply, hundreds of thousands of people who were infected decades ago are expected to start experiencing the effects of liver damage.

New cases of liver cancer are already rising year by year. And hepatitis C is the leading cause of liver transplants, like the one recently received by the rock musician Gregg Allman.

Hopes for new treatments were buoyed in May by the first results from a late-stage clinical trial of one of the new drugs, telaprevir from Vertex. When added to the existing treatment — a combination of alpha interferon and ribavirin — telaprevir effectively cured 75 percent of patients, compared with 44 percent of those treated with the existing drugs alone. And for many patients, the course of treatment could be halved to 24 weeks.

Dr. Poordad, who is a consultant to some of the pharmaceutical companies, said that one-fifth of his patients were being “warehoused,” meaning they were forgoing treatment now to wait for the new drugs.

But even if the drugs do work, some experts and doctors warn that this virus may be particularly tough to vanquish. Three-quarters of the people who are infected do not know it because they are not tested for the virus and because the infection can be asymptomatic for years while it stealthily attacks the liver.

And because this disease is transmitted by blood, those infected largely are former or current IV-drug users — a population that characteristically has little or no health insurance — who may not be the most able to stick to a lengthy treatment regimen that can cause brutal side effects.

Pharmaceutical companies “completely ignore the real face of hepatitis C,” 传奇私服 said Dr. Diana L. Sylvestre, who runs a clinic in Oakland, Calif., that treats drug addicts and former addicts with hepatitis C. “A minority of patients who have hepatitis C will benefit from these drugs.”

When she gave a recent talk at Vertex, Dr. Sylvestre’s first slide showed a man in a suit, meant to be a Vertex executive, with his head in the sand.

Dr. Camilla Graham, a senior director of medical affairs at Vertex, said that addicts accounted for less than 10 percent of people with hepatitis C. While many people got infected by trying drugs in the 1960s and 1970s, they have long since kicked the habit, she said.

Hepatitis C can also be transmitted sexually, particularly when men have sex with other men. And many people got the virus from blood transfusions before 1992, when donated blood began being tested for the virus.

Nevertheless, pharmaceutical companies realize that difficulties getting patients screened and treated could limit the use of their drugs. So they are contributing to a groundswell of activism to raise awareness of what has long been known as a silent epidemic. Also contributing to the new advocacy is the highly organized H.I.V. community, since 15 to 30 percent of those with H.I.V. also have hepatitis C.

A report issued by the Institute of Medicine in January urged a new national strategy to improve prevention, detection and treatment of hepatitis C and hepatitis B, which also causes liver disease. A hepatitis task force created by the Department of Health and Human Services is preparing an action plan by October. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on hepatitis last month.

Drug makers contribute to the National Viral Hepatitis Roundtable, which helped pay for the Institute of Medicine report, and several companies have banded together into the Corporate Hepatitis Alliance to lobby for more government funding. In January, several companies started the Viral Hepatitis Action Coalition, to help finance research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Vertex has commissioned studies projecting a rising toll from hepatitis C. One such study, done by Milliman, a health insurance consulting firm, projected that the number of people with advanced liver disease from hepatitis C would quadruple in 20 years if treatment did not improve.

Screening people for hepatitis C should become easier. In June, the Food and Drug Administration approved a rapid blood test developed by OraSure Technologies that gives an answer in 20 minutes rather than several hours needed if the sample is sent to a lab. Future versions might use a mouth swab, allowing screening to be done at churches, street fairs and other gatherings.

There is a risk that increased screening could result in treatment for people who will never need it. Only 5 to 20 percent of people with chronic infection develop cirrhosis in about 20 to 30 years, and doctors cannot predict which patients those will be.

“I think the companies have done a superb job of marketing this disease,” said Dr. Ronald L. Koretz, emeritus professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Koretz said there was no good evidence that treatment made a difference since many patients cured by the drugs might never have developed serious problems anyway.

The current treatment for hepatitis C consists of weekly injections of alpha interferon — the leading brands are Roche’s Pegasys and Merck’s PegIntron — combined with ribavirin, a generic oral drug. It is not quite clear how these drugs work.

The regimen usually lasts either 24 or 48 weeks and costs more than $30,000. It can be rough, causing flulike symptoms, depression, anemia and other problems. And the treatment fails to cure the patient about half the time, either because it cannot clear the virus from the body or because the patient cannot tolerate the drugs.

The new drugs generally inhibit enzymes needed by the virus, a strategy that has worked well against H.I.V. The two drugs that could conceivably make it to the market by next year, Vertex’s telaprevir and Merck’s boceprevir, are both pills that inhibit the protease enzyme.

For a few years at least, the new drugs would have to be used along with interferon. But doctors are hopeful that starting perhaps in five years, combinations of the new pills will do away with the need for interferon.

The drugs could offer new hope to an estimated 300,000 people for whom the existing treatment has not worked. Some early data suggests that telaprevir, when combined with the existing drugs, could cure half of them.

“I was willing to try yesterday,” said Kenny C. Charles, 58, of Woodbourne, N.Y., who said he got hepatitis C from blood transfusions and had undergone four unsuccessful treatment attempts with the existing drugs. Now, he said, his liver was starting to show signs of cirrhosis, or scarring.

Some people with hemophilia, who were infected more than 25 years ago by blood-clotting drugs derived from human plasma, are pressing the Food and Drug Administration to allow them to be treated with combinations of the new drugs, without interferon, even before the new drugs are approved. The F.D.A. held a public hearing on the request in April and is now formulating a policy.

Mark Antell of Rosslyn, Va., one of the organizers of the petition, said he had to stop taking interferon because of flulike symptoms, loss of hair and creaking joints. “It was as though I was aging very rapidly,” he said.

Mr. Antell, 63, a retired Environmental Protection Agency employee, said hemophiliacs were typically not allowed into clinical trials to test the new drugs, so they needed another way to obtain them.

“I think there’s a lot of guys in my situation, and we don’t have a lot of time,” he said.

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Guess what? Movies don’t have to be sequels or animated to do enormous box-office business in the summer.

“Inception,” a complex dramatic thriller about dream invasion, was No. 1 at North American theaters over the weekend with $60.4 million in ticket sales, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data. That total gave the star of “Inception,” Leonardo DiCaprio, the biggest opening of his career. (While “Titanic,” which starred Mr. DiCaprio, went on to become one of the highest-grossing films ever made, it took in $28 million on its first weekend.)

“Being original and fresh and different matters in this marketplace, and this movie had all of those things,” said Dan Fellman, president for domestic distribution at Warner Brothers, which produced the $160 million film in partnership with Legendary Pictures.

“Inception,” which won mostly positive reviews, was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, the cinematic powerhouse behind films like “The Dark Knight” and “Memento.”

It was not as pretty a picture for Walt Disney Studios and the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Their action fantasy “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” starring Nicolas Cage, had a disastrous weekend, selling just $17.4 million for the weekend for a five-day total of $24.5 million.

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which cost about $150 million to make, is Mr. Bruckheimer’s fourth box-office disappointment in a row. This PG-rated movie, marketed with the clunky tag line “It’s the coolest job ever,” will now need to outperform overseas to avoid becoming a financial debacle for Disney.

The hope is that “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” will mimic the pattern of 传奇世界 “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” Mr. Bruckheimer’s previous outing with Disney. “Prince,” made for about $200 million, was a dud in North America, selling only about $89 million. But overseas sales of $237 million eased the pain a bit.

Chuck Viane, Walt Disney Studio’s president for distribution, did not respond to phone and e-mail messages on Sunday.

In limited release overseas, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sold an additional $8.3 million. For the weekend in North America it was third behind the holdover hit “Despicable Me,” which sold $32.7 million for a new total of $118.4 million. This animated title, from Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment, is another example of an original idea succeeding. Amid a sea of sequels — “Shrek Forever After,” “Toy Story 3” — “Despicable Me” broke through the old-fashioned way: a well-executed story backed by smart marketing.

In fourth place “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” (Summit Entertainment) continued its powerful run with $13.5 million for a new total of $264.9 million. Disney-Pixar’s “Toy Story 3” was fifth with $11.7 million for a new domestic total of $362.7 million.

The unexpectedly strong performance of “Inception” — surveys that track audience interest had indicated an opening of about $40 million — helped keep the summer box office buoyant. Between May 7 and Sunday, moviegoers spent $2.7 billion on tickets, a 2 percent increase over the same period last year, according to Hollywood.com.

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If Wang Jinyan, an unemployed factory worker with a middle school education, had a résumé, it might start out like this: “Objective: seeking well-paid, slow-paced assembly-

line work in air-conditioned plant with Sundays off, free wireless Internet and washing machines in dormitory. Friendly boss a plus.”
As she eased her way along a gantlet of recruiters in this manufacturing megalopolis one recent afternoon, Ms. Wang, 25, was in no particular rush to find a job. An underwear

company was offering subsidized meals and factory worker fashion shows. The maker of electric heaters promised seven-and-a-half-hour days. “If you’re good, you can work in

quality control and won’t have to stand all day,” bragged a woman hawking jobs for a shoe manufacturer.

Ms. Wang flashed an unmistakable look of ennui and popped open an umbrella to shield her fair complexion from the South China sun. “They always make these jobs sound better

than they really are,” she said, turning away. “Besides, I don’t do shoes. Can’t stand the smell of glue.”

Assertive, self-possessed workers like Ms. Wang have become a challenge for the industrial titans of the Pearl River Delta that once filled their mammoth workshops with an

endless stream of pliant labor from China’s rural belly.

In recent months, as the country’s export-driven juggernaut has been revived and many migrants have found jobs closer to home, the balance of power in places like Zhongshan has

shifted, forcing employers to compete for new workers — and to prevent seasoned ones from defecting to sweeter prospects.

The shortage has emboldened workers and inspired a spate of strikes in and around Zhongshan that paralyzed Honda’s Chinese operations earlier this month. The unrest then spread

to the northern city of Tianjin, where strikers briefly paralyzed production at a Toyota car plant and a Japanese-owned electronics factory.

Although the walkouts were quelled with higher salaries, factory owners and labor experts said that the strikes have driven home a looming reality that had been predicted by

demographers: the supply of workers 16 to 24 years old has peaked and will drop by a third in the next 12 years, thanks to stringent family-planning policies that have sharply

reduced China’s population growth.

In Zhongshan, many factories are operating with vacancies of 15 to 20 percent, compelling some bosses to cruise the streets in their BMWs and Mercedeses in a desperate hiring

quest during crunch time.

The other new reality, perhaps harder to quantify, is this: young Chinese factory workers, raised in a country with rapidly rising expectations, are less willing to toil for

long hours for appallingly low wages like dutiful automatons.

Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Tsinghua University, said the new cohort of itinerant 传奇私服 workers was better educated, Internet-savvy and

covetous of the urban niceties they discovered after leaving the farm. “They want a life just like city folk, and they have no interest in going back to being farmers,” said

Ms. Guo, who studies China’s 230 million-strong migrant population.

But the more immediate challenge is to the Chinese export machine, which churns out about a third of China’s gross domestic product. Stanley Lau, deputy chairman of the Hong

Kong Federation of Industries, whose 3,000 members employ more than three million workers, said he had been advising factory owners to offer better salaries, to treat employees

more humanely and to listen to their complaints.

“The young generation thinks differently than their parents, they have been well protected by their families, and they don’t like to ‘chi ku,’ ” Mr. Lau said.

The expression “chi ku,” or eat bitterness, is a time-honored staple of Chinese culture. But for young workers in Zhongshan, it is not the badge of honor that an older

generation wore with pride.

In an effort to avoid eating too much bitterness, Zhang Jinfang, a talkative 28-year-old, has cycled through a dozen factory jobs since arriving in Zhongshan after high school.

“Sometimes I’ll quit after a few weeks because the work is too hard or too boring,” he said, eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant. “Money is important, but it’s also

important to have less pressure in your life.”
Mr. Zhang saves almost nothing of the $260-a-month salary he earns assembling cardboard boxes, another notable shift from the previous generation, which saved voraciously. By

Western standards, he works hard — six days a week, sometimes more when orders pile up — and he spends about a fifth of his pay on a rented apartment, having long since fled

the bunk beds and curfews of the factory-owned dormitory. His dream: to one day run a factory of his own. “But for now, I’d love to work in an air-conditioned office,” he

said.
One factor in the expanding consciousness of migrant laborers is an astounding rise in education. Last year, nearly 8.4 million students graduated from high school, 5 million

more than in 2001. The result is that a growing number young people are ambitious, optimistic and more aware of their rights, said Lin Yanling, a labor specialist at the China

Institute of Industrial Relations. Then there is their fluency with technology — cellphones, e-mail and Internet chat — that connects them to peers in other factories. “When

they bump against unfair treatment, they are less afraid to challenge authority,” she said.

With her iridescent fuchsia toenails and caramel-tinted hair, Liang Yali does not exactly fit the stereotype of the “made in China” worker bee. Raised by rice-farming peasants

on the island province of Hainan, Ms. Liang, 22, is happily employed at a lock factory, where she packs up the finished product into boxes.

She rents an apartment with two friends, eats out for most meals and spends Saturday night bar-hopping or singing at a local karaoke parlor. At night, before she goes to sleep,

she sometimes plays a computer game in which participants steal vegetables from one another’s virtual farm.

Unlike many workers in Zhongshan, Ms. Liang had heard about the strikes, perhaps because the front door to Guangdong Mingmen Lock Industry sits across a muddy canal from where

employees of a Honda lock factory held a rare protest last month. She expressed measured sympathy for the strikers, but said she was not interested in following their lead. “My

boss is nice and the work isn’t strenuous, so I have no complaints,” she said.

Her friend and co-worker Li Jingling, 27, nodded in agreement, adding that their company sponsored sports activities and allowed employees to dress in street clothes on

Saturdays. When the topic turned to her parents, Ms. Li said she felt sorry for them. “They go out to the fields when the sun rises and return home when the sun goes down,”

she said. “No matter how difficult their marriage was, they would stick it out. For us, whether a bad marriage or a bad job, we’ll leave it if it’s lousy.”

Back on recruiters’ row, the afternoon sun had thinned the already sparse crowd of job-seekers, leaving a few roughneck kids so undisciplined that not even the sweltering pipe

factory was interested in taking them on.

Xiang Qing, a 22-year-old recruiter for the Funilai undergarment factory, was looking wilted and abject under the shade of a plastic canopy. Her factory, which normally employs

2,700 people, was about 700 bodies short. She did her best to sound upbeat, but admitted that it was getting more difficult to find people who are willing to “love the factory

and make it their home,” as her brochure suggested.

Ms. Xiang complained that too many young people were unwilling to work hard. 传奇私服 “They’re all spoiled and coddled and have no patience,

” she said. Then, with the interview over, she returned to her reading material, a woman’s magazine called Beauty.

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For months, the dissolution of the marriage of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ owners, Jamie and Frank McCourt, has riveted this town, with public revelations concerning huge hair

-care budgets, lavish homes and a Russian seer hired to send the team good vibes.
But next month (or sooner, as a settlement may be in the offing), the couple will have their day in court and something far more significant to this city will be adjudicated:

the fate of the team itself.

In 2004, the McCourt Broderick Limited Partnership bought the Dodgers from the News Corporation for 430 million almost totally leveraged dollars. Now, the couple are engaged in

a bitter battle over whether Mrs. McCourt, who was fired as the team’s chief executive during last season’s playoffs, has any claim on the team.

The inauspicious doings are something that New York baseball fans, some still smarting over the Dodgers’ move 3,000 miles west from Brooklyn more than a half-century ago, might

perhaps enjoy.

But in Los Angeles, where residents are united over precious little across this sprawling town except their sports teams, the spectacle of a messy marital unraveling that in any

way threatens their franchise has sparked ire.

“Certainly what is going on with the McCourts is something that concerns a lot of hard-core fans,” said Ernest Reyes, who blogs at Blue Heaven, which chronicles the Dodgers

and baseball ephemera. “The last thing you want to see is money we spend on the team being spent on these kinds of things.”

The case centers on a single document signed during their 31-year marriage that delineates the team as Mr. McCourt’s property and the couple’s multiple homes as hers.

Mr. McCourt’s legal team sees the matter as a simple contract dispute, in which they are confident they will prevail. “She has no interest in the Dodgers,” said his divorce

lawyer, Stephen Susman, in an interview here.

Mrs. McCourt’s team, led by David Boies, has framed it as one of sexual injustice, in which an angry husband is trying to deprive a woman who spent most of her adult life

helping him build a successful family business of money, power and a job. After firing Mrs. McCourt, her husband also declined to provide alimony until ordered to — at a lower

rate than she requested — by a judge. He believes Mrs. McCourt is entitled to half the appreciation of the Dodgers under this state’s community property law.

“I think she has been treated very shabbily,” Mr. Boies said, adding, 传奇私服 “I think she deserves justice, and that is what we are in the

business of doing.”

In an extensive interview in her Beverly Hills office, Mrs. McCourt, who said she has dreamed of owning a baseball team since she was a child, made it clear that she would not

go down without a fight. She says her ultimate goal is to be a co-owner and executive of the Dodgers.

“I love business — love, love, love,” she said. “There a side of me that feels like I am fighting for women. It’s a real old-boys’ network in sports, and I think there’s

a real undercurrent here to fight for what is right.”

In 2003, the McCourt Broderick Limited Partnership, its fortunes built in commercial real estate development, made a play for the Red Sox but was beaten out by John Henry, who

then owned the Florida Marlins. Major League Baseball courted them to buy another team, and executives pulled out a map and showed them what was available. As it turned out, at

least two of the teams in California were for sale, she said, and Los Angeles instantly intrigued.

The team was losing money hand over fist under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch, and its record was poor. Still, it was a leap for the McCourts, who have four grown sons. “We

didn’t have a single friend there,” she said. “I had no memory of ever even being in Los Angeles. It was weird for a lot of reasons.”

The deal was fashioned in two unusual ways: it was almost entirely financed by the News Corporation and banks, and the McCourt partnership was the sole owner, rather than part

of a syndicate, which is more common.

The early years seemed good ones — the team became worth more and was more visible in the postseason. But Mrs. McCourt claims her husband was increasingly frustrated with her

high profile within the Dodgers and in Los Angeles, and hectored her constantly about it. Mr. McCourt’s lawyers says she was fired for having a romantic relationship with a

Dodger’s security employee.

“That’s a distraction,” Mrs. McCourt said and insists that her husband wanted her out of the way.
Central to this dispute is a document the couple had drawn up in Boston that states that their homes would be in her name, and the business assets in his. (Today, the equity

value of the seven residential properties — four in California — in question is estimated to be between $75 million and $100 million. The value of the Dodgers is estimated to

be more than $700 million.)
This agreement was created, both sides agree, to protect the homes from his creditors as he often made high-risk, highly leveraged deals, like the one to buy the team.

His lawyers contend that this document, along with one provided to Major League Baseball (whose spokesman would not comment on the case or explain team ownership practices) that

certifies Mr. McCourt as the owner of the team, make the cut-and-dried case for his sole ownership.

Mr. Boies said the document may be fraudulent, because earlier copies of it kept the team as community property. “They have not established, and it is doubtful that they can

establish, that the marital property agreement is an authentic document,” he said. (Mr. Susman contends there was simply a typographical error in that document that was

corrected before the agreement was signed.)

Further, Mr. Boies asserts, under California’s family laws, each spouse in a divorce has an equal interest in all marital property regardless of whose name it is held in, and

any agreements signed are presumptively invalid if they give one spouse a disproportionate share of the marital goods.

Finally, a home-equity loan taken out on at least one home to help finance some of Mr. McCourt’s business concerns commingles the team and homes in a way that makes it harder

to prove she has no claim on the team, he said.

Marshall Grossman, the lawyer for the Dodgers, says this is all poppycock. “There was no chicanery here,” he scoffed. “It’s simply a case of buyer’s remorse.”

Experts in family law said the case was complex because it mixes business ownership with marital property.

“Even though the main agreement might have purported to solve problems regarding debt and creditors, it is without doubt intended to avoid the community-property system of

California,” said Anthony Miller, a professor of family law at Pepperdine University. He added, “Perhaps between high-rollers like the McCourts, the marital finances are like

any other business, but to my mind there are countless other marriages 传奇私服 where one of the partners to the marriage should be protected,

” one of the key purposes behind California’s community-property laws.

Co-ownership of a team, if history is any guide, seems unlikely. “The rule of thumb when there is a dispute,” said Marc Ganis, president of SportsCorp, a sports business

consulting firm based in Chicago. “You can almost take it to the bank there will be some change of ownership.” He added, “These are assets that have so much visibility and

lifestyle associated with them that separation among owners is messy anyway, and when you add to that an extreme with two partners getting a divorce it might be the worst

possible situation.”

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President Obama will bypass Congress and appoint Dr. Donald M. Berwick, a health policy expert, to run Medicare and Medicaid, the White House said Tuesday.
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said the “recess appointment” was needed to carry out the new health care law. The law calls for huge changes in the two programs, which together insure nearly one-third of all Americans.

Mr. Pfeiffer said the president would appoint Dr. Berwick on Wednesday. Mr. Obama decided to act because “many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.

As a recess appointee, Dr. Berwick will have all the powers of a permanent appointee. But under the Constitution, his appointment will expire at the end of the next session of Congress, in late 2011.

In April, Mr. Obama nominated Dr. Berwick to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency has been without a permanent administrator since October 2006.

The recess appointment was somewhat unusual because the Senate is in recess for 传奇私服 less than two weeks and senators were still waiting for Dr. Berwick to submit responses to some of their requests for information. No confirmation hearing has been held or scheduled.

Although hospital executives who have worked with Dr. Berwick describe him as a visionary, inspiring leader, he would have faced a long, difficult struggle to win Senate confirmation.

The president’s action will give the administration a strong voice to defend provisions of the new law that have come under almost daily attack from Republicans in Congress and in political campaigns around the country.

Dr. Berwick, a pediatrician, is president and co-founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit organization in Cambridge, Mass. He is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Republicans have used the nomination to revive their arguments against the new health care law, which they see as a potent issue in this fall’s elections.

In two decades as a professor of health policy and as a prolific writer, Dr. Berwick has championed the interests of patients and consumers. At the same time, he has spoken of the need to ration health care and cap spending, has supported efforts to “reduce the total supply of high-technology medical and surgical care” and has expressed great admiration for the British health care system.

Under the new law, Medicare will be a testing ground for many innovations that reward high-quality care and penalize providers of poor care. The law will expand Medicaid to cover 16 million more people with low incomes.

Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said that, far from trying to delay a confirmation hearing, Republicans had wanted a forum where Dr. Berwick could explain his views.

“This recess appointment proves the Obama administration did not have the support of a majority of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and sought to evade a hearing,” Mr. Roberts said.

But Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal-leaning 传奇私服 consumer group, welcomed the appointment, saying “it augurs well for the implementation of health care reform.”

One of Dr. Berwick’s first tasks will be to work with Congress to avert a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors, scheduled to occur late this year.

The American Medical Association has praised Dr. Berwick, saying he is “widely known and respected” for his efforts to improve the quality and safety of care. But cuts in Medicare payments could damage the quality of care and prompt doctors to turn away new Medicare patients, doctors say.

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Few cities are as generous as New York when it comes to matching political contributions raised by candidates for public office.
In big election years, the city has given anywhere from $4 million to $42 million to candidates in an effort to limit the influence of special interests and level the playing field for candidates of modest means.

There were, though, supposed to be limits to the city’s generosity. Candidates who accepted taxpayer money and did not empty their campaign accounts in the course of their election fights were obliged by law to return all surplus money to the city.

But the city, while handing out a total of roughly $120 million to candidates over the years, has been unable to recover much of the money it is owed.

Tens of thousands of dollars that candidates initially reported as surpluses appear to 传奇私服 have dribbled away as the city took years auditing campaigns to determine how much might be owed. There are also candidates who have seemed to be in no hurry to settle up. Today, for instance, two dozen candidates owe a total of $800,000 from publicly subsidized races in 2001, 2003 and 2005.

Though it has sought to clarify its rules, the city has also struggled to stay a step ahead of candidates who avoid meaningful repayment by using surplus campaign funds to hire lawyers during the audits to challenge the city’s calculation of what they owe, or by paying penalties with surplus funds they would otherwise owe the city.

And to this day the city cannot keep publicly financed candidates from using legal loopholes to funnel leftover money to political or charitable causes of their choosing. Quirks in the rules governing runoff elections, for instance, have allowed two former City Council speakers, Peter F. Vallone Sr. and A. Gifford Miller, to shift six-figure surpluses of campaign money into political action committees they controlled.

For their part, some candidates correctly point out that the city’s Campaign Finance Board, which is responsible for protecting tax dollars and the public interest, is not always careful to make sure that what it publishes about candidates’ finances on its Web site is accurate and up-to-date.

Responding to that criticism, Eric Friedman, the board’s spokesman, said: “There are 1.2 million transactions in the database available for public view, and 1,700 campaigns over the course of the program. Anybody in a government agency or any long-running concern that deals with this kind of volume will have challenges assuring everything is accurate.”

Given that, it is nearly impossible to say how much money the city has missed out on over the years in repayments from candidates it helped underwrite. What seems clear is that the city is in no position to lose track of even small sums when it is cutting library hours and closing senior centers to balance its budget.

June M. Eisland, an unsuccessful candidate for Bronx borough president in 2001, spent years in court fighting the city’s attempts to recover some of the $300,000 it had given her campaign. Helping her do battle were two of the city’s pre-eminent election lawyers, Henry T. Berger and Laurence D. Laufer, a former general counsel of the Campaign Finance Board who now advises campaigns.

Ms. Eisland and her lawyers succeeded in carving out $130,000 she had raised in prior 传奇私服 races, depriving the city of much of what it thought it was due.

Under New York law, the Campaign Finance Board approves all public matching contributions, under formulas that have become sweeter over time. Currently, the city gives candidates $6 for every $1 in qualifying gifts raised from private donors. In certain circumstances, candidates can receive as much as $8.57 for every $1 raised on their own. “It is an extremely generous match,” said Mr. Laufer, the lawyer.

The board monitors the use of the public money — demanding and examining candidates’ detailed expenditure reports — and is the ultimate bill collector when it finds that campaigns have unspent funds or other debts to the city. But less than $10 million of the $120 million that the board has handed out since its inception in 1988 has come back to taxpayers, judging from campaign reports and other statistics posted on the board’s Web site.

To be sure, a lot of the money is properly spent on campaigns, and board officials argue that the benefits of publicly financed elections far outweigh what they contend are the smaller amounts that may get lost in the process.

“At the end of the day, New Yorkers can have confidence that their politics are cleaner and freer from influence, and that’s what their investment gets them,” said Mr. Friedman, the spokesman for the board.
“There will always be challenges in collecting money from people who do not want to pay,” he acknowledged. But he said, “We’re here to watch that investment pretty closely.”

He and his colleagues also reject the idea that they take any of the shenanigans lying down.

They point to more than 40 cases they have litigated in court, and more if small-claims court is counted. Eight staff members, they said, are dedicated to collecting surplus money, and Thacher Associates, an investigative firm, is on call for occasional help.

One oft-used weapon for trying to recover money is publishing the names of those who resist the board’s demands for repayment or remittance of penalties. As of last month, a couple dozen individuals who ran for city offices from 2001 to 2005 were listed as owing a combined $797,293 in “outstanding repayments of public funds,” reflecting unspent funds and other overdue obligations.

Michael Roth was one. He garnered a mere 3 percent of the vote when he ran for 传奇私服 City Council in 2005 but has hardly faded from view.

The board initially ordered him to repay all $20,392 of the public funds he got, once auditors found scads of expenses he had charged to the campaign, including dog food and liquor bought during the race, and sushi dinners and airline tickets bought months after the election.

According to Mr. Friedman, Mr. Roth paid the last of what he owed on June 23, nearly five years after his race.

Some candidates seem to be less receptive than others to the public shaming or to the board’s ability to withhold future financing.

Miguel Martinez is listed on the board’s Web site as owing $128,786 from the 2001 race that put him on the City Council. Currently serving five years in federal prison for misusing money intended for nonprofit organizations in his district, he may not be concerned about repaying the city for its help in getting him elected.

There are also 13 instances in which the board has granted extensions to candidates who “are engaged in efforts” to resolve debts or other obligations totaling $594,000. Lawyers familiar with the deferred payment plans say the recipients pay no interest and sometimes have as long as 10 years to settle up.

The Rev. Edward J. Norman, a 2001 contender for the City Council, was the beneficiary of one such deal. Troubled by sloppiness in his campaign spending reports, the board initially dunned him the entire $65,496 that he had received in public matches. But the board reduced what he owed to $39,179 once he had better documented his spending, and gave him until last year — eight years after his race — to pay off the last of it.

“If they added interest, I’d still be paying back,” said Mr. Norman, the pastor of the Union United Methodist Church in Brooklyn. He chalked up his errors to the inexperience of a first-time candidate, unsupported by party operatives or professional advisers.

In more than a few cases, candidates argue that the board’s assessment of their financial performance is flawed or mistaken. And sometimes those candidates are right.

Just the other day, the board confirmed that information on its Web site 传奇私服 concerning Norman Siegel’s 2001 race for public advocate and William C. Thompson’s 2001 race for city comptroller was incorrect. Double-counting by its computer program had made it inaccurately look as if both campaigns had hung on to huge six-figure surpluses.

“The numbers in 2001 are just wrong,” Mr. Siegel said in an interview.

He later said the board had acknowledged its error and was correcting the data. Proud he had run clean campaigns and was on good terms with the board, he said, “I’ll have to re-evaluate them now in light of this.”

The board’s next challenge will involve trying to collect some $9 million in potentially recoverable funds from the $27 million it gave campaigns in 2009. But it looks as though it will be years before it is clear how much the watchdogs actually win back.

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The Japanese are calling it a small miracle. The Hayabusa space probe returned last month from a seven-year, 382-million-mile round trip to an asteroid, giving a much-needed confidence boost to a country worried that its technological prowess might be waning.
But Japan is still holding its breath. Did the mission accomplish its main objective?

Preliminary tests on a capsule retrieved from the probe have shown no signs of the precious samples of the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid that the Hayabusa was supposed to retrieve — samples that scientists around the globe had hoped would hold new clues about the formation of the solar system.

Last week, the agency followed up with better news. Scientists had detected traces of vaporized material inside the container, some of it possibly from the asteroid, Itokawa, which goes around the sun on an elliptical orbit that crosses the paths of both Earth and Mars.

“Hayabusa capsule yields gas,” declared one newspaper headline. “Vapor gives us hope,” read another.

The June 13 return of the Hayabusa, which drew heavily on Japanese industrial expertise, has fanned hopes that this nation has not lost its edge in technology and manufacturing. The American journal Science has called Hayabusa — the Earth’s first visit to an asteroid and the longest mission to outer space — a “trailblazer.”

Japanese companies hope the mission can translate to sales in the steadily expanding market for space technology.

According to the nonprofit Space Foundation, based in Colorado, the commercial and governmental global market for satellites and other space infrastructure grew to $261 billion in 2009, up 7 percent from 2008 and 40 percent over the last five years. But Japanese companies so far have failed to gain much traction as prime contractors in the global satellite communications market.

NEC, which built the probe’s advanced ion engines, wants to sell its technology in the United States, to NASA as well as to commercial customers through a joint venture with the American aerospace firm Aerojet-General.

Ion engines use electric fields, instead of chemical reactions, to propel rockets and satellites. They are less powerful but more efficient than conventional chemical engines and can last for years before running out of fuel.
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The information technology behemoth Fujitsu, meanwhile, is aggressively marketing its communications systems, which are credited with guiding the Hayabusa spacecraft back to Earth.

And IHI, which developed the probe’s heat-resistance technology, says it hopes to build on the mission’s publicity to double the revenue from its space-related business.

An expert panel was appointed earlier this year to advise the government on ways to help double Japanese companies’ earnings from their space businesses to at least 14 trillion yen ($158 billion).

“Achieving big goals is always accompanied with adversity, but where there’s a strong will, there’s a way,” NEC’s president, Nobuhiro Endo, said at a shareholders’ meeting on June 22, showing off a scaled model of the Hayabusa.

Japan, the third country after the United States and the former Soviet Union to put a satellite into orbit, in 1977, has since launched a string of successful rockets and has been intent on being a space power. But its aspirations have more recently been usurped by China, which put a man in space — a feat Japan has not yet managed on its own — and it has also incurred a series of setbacks, including a Mars probe launched in 1998 that failed to reach orbit around that planet.

And the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — known as JAXA — with a budget of about 230 billion yen for 2010 ($2.6 billion), is still relatively tiny compared with the United States’ NASA and its $18.7 billion budget.

Launched on a Japanese rocket in May 2003, the Hayabusa (translation: peregrine falcon) had a benighted journey. After the probe landed in 2005 on the Itokawa asteroid, which is about a third of a mile long and shaped like a potato, its sample-capture mechanism went awry. To the public’s dismay, JAXA officials said they were not sure whether any samples had been collected.

Next, the probe’s robotic rover, meant to take photos and temperature readings on the asteroid, inexplicably floated off into space and was never heard from again.
Worse yet, after Hayabusa took off from the asteroid, all four of NEC’s ion engines shut down. So did all 12 of the chemical-fueled rocket engines made by another space industry giant, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The probe was left drifting in space.

Then, for more than seven weeks, for reasons still not clear, there were no communication signals from the probe. Public dismay quickly turned to derision and, eventually, indifference.
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On the 49th day of radio silence, the Hayabusa control room finally made contact with the probe, Junichiro Kawaguchi, the mission’s leader, recalled in an interview. But scientists intent on remotely reviving the failed engines succeeded only in getting the undamaged half of one ion engine to work with the undamaged portion of a second engine.

With the Hayabusa limping along, JAXA had to drastically alter its original plan, which had called for the probe to approach Earth, eject its capsule of samples back into the atmosphere and then remain in orbit awaiting orders for a new mission.

But the equivalent of only one full engine made it impossible for the probe to muster the propulsion to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. The probe itself would have to re-enter the atmosphere in a ball of fire, with only the heatproof sample capsule surviving.

“I could see the sparks as the probe disintegrated,” Mr. Kawaguchi said of the June 13 re-entry. “It was a miraculous return, yet I had very mixed emotions.”

Still, the Hayabusa’s fiery return, two years later than the originally scheduled capsule drop, has generally been hailed as a national triumph. Fans flocked to public viewings, some decked out in handmade costumes meant to resemble the probe.

Now, though, as JAXA continues to slowly open and examine the capsule, officials say it will take months to determine whether it contains any asteroid samples.

Some Japanese space experts choose to see the glass as more than half full.

“What Hayabusa has shown is the reliability of Japan’s technology,” said Hiroaki Akiyama, a specialist in planet geology at Wakayama University in western Japan. “Traveling to the asteroid, making a landing and then returning to Earth is in itself a near miracle,” he said. “The return of the probe has proven that Japan’s space program might not be big, but it is one of the most advanced in the world.”

But the fear lingers that after its million-mile errand of retrieval, the Hayabusa falcon has returned with empty talons.

If there are no meaningful asteroid samples, space enthusiasts fear that public disappointment could lead the government to slash spending on basic space exploration programs. Most directly at stake, as Tokyo tries to rein in public spending, is a second Hayabusa mission planned for around 2014 to journey to another asteroid — this time in a search for water or organic matter — looking for clues not just to the Earth’s beginnings but to the origins of life itself.
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The Democratic government, which took office in September and is now led by a new prime minister, Naoto Kan, is talking a fiscal hard line. The Democrats had threatened to scale back this year’s approximately $1.9 million budget for the Hayabusa 2 program to less than $565,000, although Mr. Kan has recently said he will consider reviving financing for the next Hayabusa project.

And while initial polls after the Hayabusa’s return showed renewed public support for increased space spending, doubts are already surfacing in the news media.

“Apart from making it back to Earth, there aren’t any results to show,” the influential Nikkei Industrial Journal said in an editorial on Monday. “With three out of four engines breaking down, there is no proof that the technology is reliable. And it’s extremely suspect that any sand from the asteroid was collected — the goal of the mission.”

But Mr. Kawaguchi, the Hayabusa project leader, and other space industry insiders say the real failure will come if Japan gives up so easily.

“Yes, there were problems, but we learned how to overcome those — that’s the whole point,” he said. “We’ve sent a message out to the world that Japanese technology still leads.”

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A 16-year-old girl trying to sail solo around the world was missing in the Indian Ocean some 2,000 miles east of Madagascar, according to her family, who said Thursday that she had encountered treacherous seas.

The girl, Abby Sunderland of Thousand Oaks, Calif., departed alone Jan. 23 in her sailboat Wild Eyes. On Thursday, she lost satellite phone contact with her family and set off emergency beacons, triggering a rescue effort by United States, Australian and French authorities. Ms. Sunderland was trying to break the record for the youngest sailor to circumnavigate the globe, a title held briefly by her older brother Zac, who completed his sail last year at 17.

Christian Pinkston, a spokesman for Ms. Sunderland’s parents, Marianne and Laurence Sunderland, said they last spoke with her at about 4 a.m. Thursday, when Ms. Sunderland was reporting swells of 30 feet.

“She was having trouble with the engine and had taken on some water but she felt upbeat,” Mr. Pinkston said. An hour later the family was alerted that two G.P.S. emergency beacons had been activated, one on the boat and one on Ms. Sunderland’s survival suit.

“The family is fully, 100 percent focused on the rescue effort right now,” Mr. Pinkston said. “They’re seriously concerned but hopeful.” He added that Ms. Sunderland was well equipped and well trained for the sailing mission.

The two nearest ships — a fishing boat about 40 hours away and a French naval vessel more than three days away — were headed toward the location of Ms. Sunderland’s emergency beacons. Australia’s Rescue Coordination Centre planned to send a plane to look for Ms. Sunderland at daybreak, Mr. Pinkston said.

In her last blog post published on Wednesday, Ms. Sunderland reported huge seas and a torn sail.

“The wind is beginning to pick up,” she wrote. “It is back up to 20 knots and I am expecting that by midnight tonight I could have 35-50 knots with gusts to 60 so I am off to sleep before it really picks up.”
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Workers at a strikebound Honda Motor parts factory in southern China continued Monday with a drive to win higher wages even as the Japanese carmaker lured some laborers back to partially resume production.
Executives at Honda’s Tokyo headquarters said negotiations were proceeding with workers at the factory, leaving four other plants idle at least through Tuesday after being closed for most of last week.

China, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, has been subjected to a string of mbt schuhe** labor disputes at foreign companies, whose migrant workers have begun to demand better pay and working conditions.

Workers at Honda have been on strike for higher wages and more benefits since May 22, leaving Japan’s No. 2 automaker, after Toyota, with thousands of units in lost sales in the world’s biggest market.

The strike’s duration is unusual in China, where foreign investors have come to count on a low-cost and disciplined labor force.

The Communist Party-backed All China Federation of Labor Unions discourages independent worker activism, and generally sides with management.

Honda said employees were gradually returning to work at the transmission plant in Foshan in Guangdong Province, and that assembly had restarted in the late afternoon.

That might enable a factory that exports Jazz subcompacts to restart on Wednesday, a Honda spokesman, Hideto Maehara, said.

A spokeswoman in Tokyo, Tomoko Uchida, said Honda did not know when operations would return to normal. A China-based spokesman earlier said talks with workers had been completed.

A few dozen striking workers at the parts plant said up to 80 workers had been fired for refusing a pay increase that they said amounted to 11 renminbi ($1.60) a month. Honda said it could not immediately confirm the dismissals.

About 30 workers told reporters at the factory gates that they were unhappy mbt beach shoes** with how official trade unions were representing them. Some said they had been roughed up by union officials, displaying scratches underneath their shirts.

About 100 representatives of the official workers’ union then confronted the workers at the gates, trying to push them out of the factory grounds as the police and reporters watched.

Full-time workers at the plant earn about 1,500 renminbi a month. But a large contingent of the work force is made up of vocation school “interns,” who earn less.

Honda, which lags Toyota Motor and Nissan Motor in China, operates car ventures with Dongfeng Motor Group Company and Guangzhou Automobile. It also has a small plant making its Jazz model for export.

It said the two plants it owned with Guangzhou Auto would close at least until Tuesday, while the Dongfeng factory would remain closed until Wednesday. Including the export plant, Honda has the capacity to build 650,000 cars a year in China.

Some foreign companies have begun to take corrective action in view of worker discontent.

Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Company said it planned to raise workers’ salaries by about a fifth at its Foxconn International unit in China, as it struggled to end a spate of worker suicides and quell rising public anger. Foxconn makes Apple’s iPhone.

More than 1,000 workers at a parts factory near Beijing that supplies South Korea’s 传奇私服** Hyundai Motor suspended work for most of Saturday to demand higher wages. They returned to work after management promised a raise, the local media reported.

“There was a little production disruption on both May 28 and 29, but it has been back to normal operations since May 30,” a Hyundai representative said in an e-mail message from Seoul.

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The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday voted to let the Defense Department repeal the ban on gay and bisexual people from serving openly in the military, a big step toward dismantling the Clinton-era policy widely known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The House was considering a provision for repealing the ban in its version of the annual Pentagon policy bill. If approved, it would be the most forceful step yet in the effort by Democrats to repeal the ban.

The Senate Armed Services Committee voted in closed session mbt schuhe** after an hour of heated debate. The vote was 16 to 12, with one Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, voting in favor of the repeal, and one Democrat, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, in opposition.

Leaving the committee session, Ms. Collins called the debate “vigorous.”

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the committee, said he believed that the full Senate would support allowing the repeal, because procedures were in place for the Pentagon to move carefully and only after studying the ramifications of a policy change in a report that is due by Dec. 1.

President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates favor repealing the ban, but the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have objected. In letters solicited by Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, they urged Congress to delay voting on the issue until after the Defense Department completed its report.

After the vote, Mr. McCain said he would continue to fight a repeal when the bill reached the Senate floor. “I think it’s really going to be really harmful to the morale and battle effectiveness of our military,” he said.

The Armed Services Committee approved the broader policy bill by a vote of 18 to 10, with Mr. Webb and Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, who also opposed the repeal, supporting the broader measure.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who voted for allowing the repeal, said, “The ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy doesn’t serve the best interests of our military and doesn’t reflect the best values of our country.”

“Bottom line,” Mr. Lieberman, added, “thousands of service members have been mbt beach shoes** pushed out of the U.S. military not because they were inadequate or bad soldiers, sailors, Marines or airmen but because of their sexual orientation. And that’s not what America is all about.”

With liberals in Congress being asked to vote this week on an unpopular war spending bill, Congressional Democratic leaders have been pushing to finally do away with a ban that many in their party view as discriminatory and unpatriotic.

In a floor speech on Thursday, Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, denounced the policy that requires gay men, lesbians and bisexuals to keep their sexual orientation secret if they want to serve in the armed forces.

Mr. Frank noted that the Israeli military, which he called “as effective a fighting force as has existed in modern times,” does not bar gay men or lesbians from service. Mr. Frank, who is openly gay, also said that he would be criticized — rightly, he said — if he were to suggest that gay men and lesbians be exempted if a military draft were needed.

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the No. 3 Republican in the House, accused Democrats of trying to use the military “to advance a liberal social agenda” and demanded that Congress “put its priorities in order.”

Earlier this week, Mr. Gates reluctantly said he would support a compromise between the White House and Congressional leaders that would allow Congress to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law now, but delay putting the new policy in place until after the Pentagon completed its review.

The politically charged issue set off a sometimes emotional debate as mbt tunisha shoes** the House headed toward the vote. Republicans decried it as a premature move that would unsettle the armed services mainly to appease a liberal political constituency.

“We are dissing the troops, that is what we are doing,” said Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

Other Republicans said the military was a unique institution and its rules sometimes had to differ from civilian society. They also questioned if the military leaders who would have to make the final decision would be able to resist pressure from the White House to lift the repeal.

Democrats who backed the repeal compared the vote to the racial integration of the military and hailed the action as long overdue, saying it would allow all Americans who wanted to serve to do so without regard to sexual identity.

“In the land of the free and the home of the brave, it is long past time for Congress to end this un-American policy,” said Representative Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat who is openly gay.

Democrats accused Republicans of mischaracterizing the proposal, noted that it would not be implemented if the Pentagon leadership determined that it would disrupt military readiness, unit cohesion or recruiting.

“It doesn’t repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said. 传奇私服** “It defers to when that report comes forth and then repeals ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ”

“This policy will happen only when the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff stay that it is the right thing to do for this country,” said Representative Robert Andrews, Democrat of New Jersey.

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