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.

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

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Online:

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

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L.A. County courts plan will hurt poor tenants, advocates say

Low-income tenants fighting eviction will be disproportionately harmed by a Los Angeles County Superior Court plan to cut costs by reducing the number of courts handling landlord disputes, legal advocates for the poor say.

The number of courthouses hearing such cases will be reduced from 26 to five throughout the county under a plan expected to be implemented by the end of June. Some people will have to travel up to 32 miles to litigate their cases, court officials said.

For some, the trips could take several hours using public transportation and include transfers on multiple trains and buses, said Neal Dudovitz, executive director of Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County. The travel time is of particular concern in eviction cases because the courts move quickly, he said.

"For people who are already in great stress and can't really afford to take days off work or have to bring little kids with them wherever they go, it's really impossible," Dudovitz said.

Under California law, tenants in most cases have five days to file a written response to the lawsuit brought by their landlords. If the person does not file a response within that time frame, the court rules in favor of the landlord.

The court also enters a judgment in the landlord's favor if the tenant does not appear in court. Judges typically hear and decide the cases within 20 days after the landlord or tenant requests that the case go to trial.

"This is not just about a court hearing; this is about people's lives," Dudovitz said. "This is where the court in a very real way touches people.... For the low-income community, this is about being able to stay in their homes."

In the last fiscal year, 67,182 eviction lawsuits, known as unlawful detainer cases, were filed in Los Angeles County courts, said Mary Hearn, a court spokeswoman. Under the court's plan, the cases would be heard only in Pasadena, Long Beach, Santa Monica, the Antelope Valley Courthouse in Lancaster and the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

When Margaret Howze's landlord tried to evict her late last year, Howze traveled by bus from her home in Winnetka to the nearest courthouse in Van Nuys. Twice she made the trip — which she said took more than two hours in one direction — to file her response to the suit and to attend an early-morning hearing in January.

Under the court's plan, Howze would have had to travel from the San Fernando Valley to a courthouse in Santa Monica — double the distance she traveled to the Van Nuys courthouse.

Howze said she had worried about arriving on time to her hearing in Van Nuys, knowing that a missed bus could cause her to miss her hearing and lose her case.

"It's too far," she said. "Why would you take something that helps people in the community and take it out and make a hardship for them?"

After her landlord filed the eviction lawsuit, Howze said she worried she would become homeless. In a panic, she called a secondhand store to take her furniture. She had her daughter's high school diploma and awards packed in a plastic crate and was considering sleeping in a 24-hour laundromat, she said.

Howze made it to her hearing, and the judge dismissed the case because the landlord did not give Howze — who always paid her rent on time — a reason for terminating her tenancy and because the landlord did not show up to the hearing, said Howze's attorney, Maria Palomares.

For Howze, who has no vehicle, no Internet access and no familiarity with the Westside, the trip to Santa Monica to have her case heard would have taken away her right to a fair hearing, Palomares said.

"It's not an inconvenience," she said. "It's about protecting your right to your day in court."

Last week, L.A. City Councilwoman Jan Perry drafted a resolution opposing the removal of eviction cases from the San Fernando Valley.

The travel time to the hubs would create "an insurmountable barrier to the courts for thousands of poor, low-income, disabled, elderly and limited-English–speaking ... residents, who are most often the [unlawful detainer] respondents," the resolution states. The city has no power over the court's plan.

The changes come as the court system works to close a $56-million-to-$85-million budget shortfall by the beginning of the next fiscal year July 1, Hearn said. The assigning of eviction cases to certain courts is part of an overall cost-cutting plan that includes the closure of 10 regional courthouses.

Plans also call for the creation of "trial hubs" to handle small claims, collections and personal injury cases.

Court officials say the bulk of savings from the overall plan will come from layoffs. Though it is unclear how many court workers will lose their jobs, the system is "going to be laying off many, many employees," Hearn said.

The Los Angeles County court system already has laid off hundreds of employees and left more positions unfilled. In the last fiscal year, the court system slashed $70 million from its budget, in part by freezing wages and forcing staff members to take furlough days.

"We have to make changes," Hearn said, "because we don't have the money to provide the level of services, the immediacy of services that we have historically."

hailey.branson@latimes.com

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IHT Rendezvous: Eve Best Returns to the Globe, This Time as a Director

LONDON — The recent press conference announcing the 2013 season at Shakespeare’s Globe on one level seemed like variations on an ongoing theme.

A onetime Falstaff at this address, Roger Allam, is returning to open the season as Prospero in “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, while the perennial favorite, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” will be seen in May in a new staging, this time from the Globe’s artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole. The 2011 Olivier winner Michelle Terry (“Tribes”) will play Titania.

The international season that so galvanized the space for six weeks last spring will return in a greatly pared-down form, and there will be three new plays, including one, “Blue Stockings” by Jessica Swale, that tells of the first female students at Cambridge University.

But it’s the last in the trio of supernaturally charged Shakespeares that promises to break fresh theatrical ground. In what represents her first-ever stab (you’ll forgive the word in context) at directing, the much-laureled actress Eve Best will stage a new production in June of “Macbeth.” Joseph Millson and Samantha Spiro have signed on as the murderous couple at the play’s black, bleak heart.

What prompted one of the most accomplished stage performers of her generation (an actress with an Olivier Award and two Tony nominations) to make the shift? The answer was arrived at via a lengthy phone call to a remote island in Denmark, where Ms. Best, 41, is currently filming “Someone You Love” for the director Lars von Trier’s Zentropa production group. This film’s specific director is Pernille Fischer Christensen.

To hear Ms. Best describe it, she thought her time at the Globe was finished, at least for a while, following a triumphant 2011 production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which she played Beatrice opposite Charles Edwards’s no less witty and scintillating Benedick. (That staging opened within days of a contrasting commercial production of the same play, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and trumped its starrier competitor hands down.)

“I love the Globe so much,” Ms. Best recalled, “and wanted any excuse to spend some time there, having played Beatrice which was just my most favorite part ever. But I did think I was sort of running out of parts to play for a little while until I get into the world of Cleopatra and those kinds of parts” — that’s to say, Shakespeare’s more senior women.

But all that was before Mr. Dromgoole surprised Ms. Best with an offer to take on the directing of the Shakespeare tragedy in which she had made her Globe debut in 2001, opposite Jasper Britton.

“I put myself forward to direct something thinking that they might say yes in a couple of years and that if they did say yes they might start me off with something light or something simpler or more obscure,” she said.

“I was not prepared for them to turn around and say, ‘Yes, all right, and what about “Macbeth?”’ Ms. Best continued, delight evident in her voice. “It took me back. My first response was: ‘Absolutely no way; you must be kidding!’”

The play is particularly challenging at the Globe. Open to the elements, the theater is a tricky fit for a text suffused with darkness, and it can be hard to focus the gathering intensity of the Macbeths’ toxic rise and fall.

“We are in the broad daylight and the open air,” Ms. Best acknowledged, “and that particular circular shape is certainly going to have a significant effect on the kind of production ours is. We can’t set it in the dark with candles, so we just have to embrace what it is that the Globe will give us: I’m very interested in just seeing the play as clearly as we possibly can and focusing on the human relationships within it.”

Mr. Dromgoole for his part said he thought Ms. Best would be able to meet the play head-on without lots of additional mumbo jumbo. “I wanted someone who I thought could just let [“Macbeth”] play itself rather than forcing it down a tunnel of darkness.”

As it happens, Ms. Best has firsthand knowledge of both central roles. In addition to acting Lady Macbeth at the Globe, she participated in workshops of the play in New York with the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in which she played the title role opposite Mr. Cumming’s Lady. Mr. Cumming is soon to open his own solo take on the play on Broadway.

(For those collecting “Macbeths,” the West End is now hosting the film actor James McAvoy in a modern-dress, gory, commendably visceral version. That one, at the Trafalgar Studios, will have finished roughly two months before Ms. Best’s begins.)

“What’s really lovely about this play — and all Shakespeare plays obviously — is that they are so magnificently and eminently flexible,” said Ms. Best, who was sounding in no way deterred by other productions arriving before hers. “They can encompass 6 or 8 or 10 productions all going on at the same time, all equally fascinating, all equally interesting, with all kinds of different approaches.”

Nor was she sounding spooked by a famously hexed play that has on occasion brought disaster in its wake. Whereas theater lore, for instance, often insists that those involved with this text refer to it as “the Scottish play,” Ms. Best was having none of that.

“I’ve been saying it like mad,” she said. “If we’re going to be working on it for two months, life’s too short to be worried.”

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Billie Joe Armstrong Comes Clean About Rehab

By Kevin O'Donnell

02/27/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Last September, Billie Joe Armstrong made headlines when, during his band Green Day's performance at the I Heart Radio Music Festival in Las Vegas, the rocker unleashed a profanity-laced tirade that took aim at everyone from the concert's promoter, Clear Channel, to Justin Bieber.

The meltdown forced Armstrong to enter an outpatient rehab program for a month and in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, the frontman, who turned 41 this month, reveals his struggle to get sober.

"I'm a blackout drinker," he reveals. "That's basically what happened [that night]."

Leading up to that infamous performance, Armstrong was struggling with a dependence on pills for anxiety and insomnia, combined with a heavy drinking problem. After the concert, he agreed to enter an outpatient rehab program for a month.

Although he declines to specify what type of medications he was taking, he tells the magazine, "I started combining them to a point where I didn't know what I was taking during the day and what I was taking at night. It was just this routine. My backpack sounded like a giant baby rattle [from all of the bottles inside]."

Armstrong, who has been married to wife Adrienne since 1994 and has two sons, Joseph and Jakob, also reveals how hard it was to go through withdrawal.

"That was gruesome, laying on the bathroom floor and just feeling like ... [pauses] I didn't realize how much of that stuff affected me." He also opens up about the toll it took on his family: "I kept [the withdrawal] away from my sons pretty good ... [And my wife] knew the deal. I'm sure it was rough for her to see me going through this."

Now, the musician insists he's on the mend and no longer drinking. "I want to put on good shows," says Armstrong, who will resume touring with Green Day on March 10 in Pomona, Calif. "I want to be reliable." 

Armstrong also admits maintaining his sobriety will be a challenge. "There is still the obsession for alcohol," he says. "There's also sleepless nights. But I have to work on it every day. Because I know what goes on out there … I've got to watch my step."

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Huge study: 5 mental disorders share genetic links

WASHINGTON (AP) — The largest genetic study of mental illnesses to date finds five major disorders may not look much alike but they share some gene-based risks. The surprising discovery comes in the quest to unravel what causes psychiatric disorders and how to better diagnose and treat them.

The disorders — autism, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder or ADHD, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia — are considered distinct problems. But findings published online Wednesday suggest they're related in some way.

"These disorders that we thought of as quite different may not have such sharp boundaries," said Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead researchers for the international study appearing in The Lancet.

That has implications for learning how to diagnose mental illnesses with the same precision that physical illnesses are diagnosed, said Dr. Bruce Cuthbert of the National Institute on Mental Health, which funded the research.

Consider: Just because someone has chest pain doesn't mean it's a heart attack; doctors have a variety of tests to find out. But there's no blood test for schizophrenia or other mental illnesses. Instead, doctors rely on symptoms agreed upon by experts. Learning the genetic underpinnings of mental illnesses is part of one day knowing if someone's symptoms really are schizophrenia and not something a bit different.

"If we really want to diagnose and treat people effectively, we have to get to these more fine-grained understandings of what's actually going wrong biologically," Cuthbert explained.

Added Mass General's Smoller: "We are still in the early stages of understanding what are the causes of mental illnesses, so these are clues."

The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, a collaboration of researchers in 19 countries, analyzed the genomes of more than 61,000 people, some with one of the five disorders and some without. They found four regions of the genetic code where variation was linked to all five disorders.

Of particular interest are disruptions in two specific genes that regulate the flow of calcium in brain cells, key to how neurons signal each other. That suggests that this change in a basic brain function could be one early pathway that leaves someone vulnerable to developing these disorders, depending on what else goes wrong.

For patients and their families, the research offers no immediate benefit. These disorders are thought to be caused by a complex mix of numerous genes and other risk factors that range from exposures in the womb to the experiences of daily life.

"There may be many paths to each of these illnesses," Smoller cautioned.

But the study offers a lead in the hunt for psychiatric treatments, said NIMH's Cuthbert. Drugs that affect calcium channels in other parts of the body are used for such conditions as high blood pressure, and scientists could explore whether they'd be useful for psychiatric disorders as well.

The findings make sense, as there is some overlap in the symptoms of the different disorders, he said. People with schizophrenia can have some of the same social withdrawal that's so characteristic of autism, for example. Nor is it uncommon for people to be affected by more than one psychiatric disorder.

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Online:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(13)60223-8/abstract

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Insurers not covering behavioral therapies for autism, California says

Insurers have been skirting their obligation under recently enacted state law to provide costly behavioral therapies for autism, according to the Department of Insurance, which is proposing emergency regulations aimed at enforcing the law.

In July, California joined more than two dozen other states in requiring private insurers to cover such treatments when medically necessary.

But state officials said they have received dozens of formal complaints that insurers have been delaying and denying coverage by imposing limits on how much therapy a child can receive and who can provide it, and in some cases by requiring extensive cognitive testing before treatment can begin.

The emergency regulations stipulate that those are not valid justifications for denying treatment. Officials said they planned to file the proposed rules Thursday with the state Office of Administrative Law, which will decide in March whether to put them into effect.

"Behavioral therapy is a medical treatment and has to be covered," Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said in an interview.

Richard Wiebe, a spokesman for the Assn. of California Life and Health Insurance Companies, said insurers are reviewing the proposed regulations and preparing comments for official review. "The science continues to evolve," he said. "The regulations should … let that evolution take place."

An explosion in autism diagnoses over the last two decades has driven the demand for intensive behavioral therapies and launched a multimillion-dollar industry. Most prominent among the treatments is Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA, in which a therapist spends up to 40 hours a week with a child, using praise and firm guidance to teach the child basic life skills. Treatment for one child often costs $50,000 a year or more.

In California, much of the financial burden has fallen to schools and the state. The new law was aimed in part at shifting a chunk of the costs from taxpayers to private insurers.

ABA is supported by decades of research showing it can improve language, behavior and intelligence test scores. But researchers are still trying to figure out how much treatment is required and why some children respond while others make little progress.

Many parents are motivated by controversial claims that with enough therapy a child can "recover" from autism, a wide-ranging social and communication disorder that has long been seen by scientists as an incurable condition.

Kristin Jacobson, an advocate for autism coverage, said in the last several months she has handled several cases in which Anthem Blue Cross has tried to deny treatment because a child had a low IQ.

Less impaired children tend to have better outcomes in treatment, but even those with low intelligence can benefit, research shows. Furthermore, cognitive testing in people with autism is unreliable because social and communication deficits can interfere with test-taking.

"For a nonverbal child with autism who hasn't begun treatment, it's irrelevant," Jacobson said.

Darrel Ng, a spokesman for Anthem Blue Cross, said he could not comment on the company's policy because of pending litigation.

alan.zarembo@latimes.com

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News Analysis: Now Gathering in Rome, a Conclave of Fallible Cardinals

Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press

St. Peter’s Basilica on Tuesday. Roman Catholic cardinals were gathering at the Vatican amid scandal to choose a new pope.

The sudden resignation of the most senior Roman Catholic cardinal in Britain, who stepped aside on Monday in the face of accusations that he made unwanted sexual advances toward priests years ago, showed that the taint of scandal could force a cardinal from participating in the selection of a new pope.

His exit came as at least a dozen other cardinals tarnished with accusations that they failed to remove priests accused of sexually abusing minors were among those gathering in Rome to prepare for the conclave to select a successor to Pope Benedict XVI. There was no sign that the church’s promise to confront the sexual abuse scandal had led to direct pressure on those cardinals to exempt themselves from the conclave.

Advocates for abuse victims who were in Rome on Tuesday focused particular ire on Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, and called for him to be excluded from the conclave. But Cardinal Mahony, who has vigorously defended his record, was already in Rome, posting on Twitter about the weather.

Even stalwart defenders of the church point out that to disqualify Cardinal Mahony would leave many more cardinals similarly vulnerable. Many of the men who will go into the Sistine Chapel to elect a pope they hope will help the church recover from the bruising scandal of sexual abuse have themselves been blemished by it.

“Among bishops and cardinals, certainly the old guys who have been involved for so long, sure they’re going to have blood on their hands,” said Thomas G. Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, who has served on the American bishops’ national abuse advisory board and has written three books on sexual abuse. “So when Cardinal Mahony says he’s being scapegoated, in some respects I think he’s right. All the focus is on him, but what about the other guys?”

Among the many challenges facing the church, addressing the wounds caused by sexual abuse is among the top priorities, church analysts say. When Pope Benedict was elected in 2005, many Catholics hoped that his previous experience at the helm of the Vatican office that dealt with abuse cases would result in substantive changes.

Benedict has repeatedly apologized to victims, and listened personally to their testimonies of pain. After the abuse scandal paralyzed the church in Europe in 2010, and began to emerge on other continents, Benedict issued new policies for bishops to follow on handling sexual abuse accusations, and he held a conference at the Vatican on the issue. But despite calls from many Catholics, he never removed prelates who, court cases and documents revealed, put children at risk by failing to report pedophiles or remove them from the priesthood.

It is not that these cardinals behaved so differently from the others, or that they do not have achievements to their names. It is just that they happened to come from pinpoints on the Catholic world map where long-hidden secrets became public because victims organized, government officials investigated, lawyers sued or the news media paid attention.

They include cardinals from Belgium, Chile and Italy. They include the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, who is accused of taking large monetary gifts from a religious order, the Legion of Christ, and halting an investigation into its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel — who was later exposed as a pathological abuser and liar.

They also include cardinals reviled by many in their own countries, like Cardinal Sean Brady, the primate of All Ireland, who survived an uproar after government investigations uncovered endemic cover-ups of the sexual and physical abuse of minors.

“There’s so many of them,” said Justice Anne Burke, a judge in Illinois who served on the American bishops’ first advisory board 10 years ago. “They all have participated in one way or another in having actual information about criminal conduct, and not doing anything about it. What are you going to do? They’re all not going to participate in the conclave?”

Even one cardinal frequently mentioned as a leading candidate for pope has been accused of turning a blind eye toward abuse victims. The Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet issued apologies to the many victims of abuse in church boarding schools in Quebec Province, but left behind widespread resentment when he reportedly refused to meet with them.

Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago, Chile; Ian Austen from Ottawa; and Gaia Pianigiani from Rome.

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Bobby Brown Sentenced to 55 Days in Jail in Drunk Driving Case

02/26/2013 at 09:30 PM EST

Bobby Brown has been sentenced to 55 days in jail and four years probation in his most recent drunk driving arrest.

Brown, 44, was pulled over in Studio City, Calif., on Oct. 24 for driving erratically and was arrested when the officer detected "a strong scent of alcohol." He was charged with DUI and driving on a suspended license.

He was also arrested for driving under the influence in March of 2012.

Brown pled no contest to the charges on Tuesday, reports TMZ. He was also ordered to complete an 18-month alcohol treatment program.

The singer, who married Alicia Etheredge in Hawaii in June of 2012, must report to jail by March 20.

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Coast Guard suspends search for missing sailboat south of San Francisco

By Garrett Therolf, Los Angeles Times

February 27, 2013

The Coast Guard on Tuesday suspended its search for four people, including two young children, who were believed to be missing after a distress call from what was said to be a sinking sailboat in the ocean south of San Francisco.

Officials are investigating the possibility that the incident was a hoax.

Searchers using aircraft and sea vessels found "no signs of distress, no signs of debris, no reports of missing people," Coast Guard spokesman Mike Lutz said.

The agency will continue to investigate the case, including whether the initial distress call was a hoax, Lutz said.

"We are looking for additional information," he said. "We handle every situation like it's a life-threatening situation unless we are 100% sure it's a hoax."

The alleged distress call from a 29-foot sailboat, possibly named Charmblow, was made about 4:20 p.m. Sunday, authorities said. The boat was said to be 65 miles off Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.

The caller reported that the boat was taking on water and that its electronics were failing. At 5:30 p.m., the vessel operator reported that the occupants were abandoning the boat, possibly for a makeshift life raft. The Coast Guard then lost radio communications with the caller.

Multiple rescue efforts were launched using watercraft and aircraft, but there were no reported sightings as of Tuesday morning, and authorities said they had no information about the identities of anyone on board.

Lutz said a cost estimate for the search won't be completed for days, and he said authorities have been unable to pinpoint the location where the distress call originated.

The Coast Guard asked anyone with information about the incident to call (415) 399-3547.

garrett.therolf@latimes.com

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Video Shows French Family’s Kidnappers Are Nigerian Extremists

LAGOS, Nigeria — A French family kidnapped last week on the Cameroon-Nigeria border appeared on a video posted Monday on YouTube, with one of the hostages and a gunman saying that the family is being held by the Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram.

The family members — three adults and four children — are shown sitting on the ground inside a sort of tent made from prayer mats, in front of a black Qaeda-style banner, grim-faced but apparently in good health. The children, boys ages 5 to 12, fidget and glance at the camera. The family is flanked by two masked, fatigues-wearing men holding rifles, and in front of them s another masked hostage taker, who reads out a statement in Arabic demanding the release of “brothers” and “sisters” and threatening twice to “slaughter those we took” unless the group’s demands are met.

The French military campaign against Islamist militants in Mali is obliquely referred to by the masked gunman, who says “the president of France” has “waged war against Islam.”

Before that, a man identified by the French media as Tanguy Moulin-Fournier, the children’s father, reads a statement in French saying the family was “arrested” by Boko Haram. He uses the group’s Arabic name — it means “those engaged in the propagation and teaching of the prophet and of jihad” — which is responsible for hundreds of killings in a three-year insurgency in Nigeria’s north.

Next to him are a woman, apparently his wife, and a man, his brother; his wife is wearing a black head covering.

On Monday evening, French officials, including Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, identified the kidnappers as members of Boko Haram, with Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius calling the video “terribly shocking.”

But the link to Boko Haram remained unproven Monday night. The video differs from others released by the group in that Hausa, the language of Nigeria’s north, is not spoken on it, and Boko Haram had not previously been associated with kidnapping Westerners or showing them on videos. In addition, purported members of Boko Haram denied, in a statement to Nigerian journalists over the weekend, involvement in the kidnapping.

Mr. Moulin-Fournier, an expatriate employee of the French gas group GDF Suez, was vacationing with his family at a national park in northern Cameroon near the border with Nigeria when they were seized early last Tuesday by motorcycle-riding gunmen. Cameroon officials said the hostages were then taken across the border to Nigeria to the area that gave birth to Boko Haram nearly four years ago and where it is strongest, Borno State.

The group has waged a relentless guerrilla campaign of bombings and ambushes there and across northern Nigeria, which killed some 800 people last year alone. Its goals, beyond spreading mayhem and undermining the Nigerian state, remain vague, though it has demanded the establishment of Shariah law in Nigeria.

While Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the deadly 2011 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, the group has focused mostly on Nigerian targets, which would make the kidnapping of the French family something of a departure. In the video, apart from the admonishment to “the president of France,” the masked gunman warns President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria that “we will establish the Islamic state of Nigeria.”

The gunman tells Mr. Jonathan in Arabic, according to the SITE Monitoring Service: “We say to you: If you want us to leave those French people, leave all of our women whom you imprisoned by your hands quickly, because we know that all ways of disbelief are the same, and all of you are equally in war with us.”

The gunman also warns the president of Cameroon to release Boko Haram members — the gunman uses that informal name for the group — though none is known to be held by that country.

Though kidnapping has not so far been part of Boko Haram’s campaign, it has figured in that of a splinter group, Ansaru, known to be holding a number of Western hostages.

Nigerian officials declined to comment on the video Monday night and have said almost nothing about the kidnapping. The French, however, reiterated their belief that the family is being held in Nigeria, not Cameroon.

Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris.

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