Daniel Brandt found the examples of suspected plagiarism at
Wikipedia using a program he created to run a few sentences from about 12,000 articles against Google Inc.'s search engine. He removed matches in which another site appeared to be copying from Wikipedia, rather than the other way around, and examples in which material is in the public domain and was properly attributed.

Brandt ended with a list of 142 articles, which he brought to Wikipedia's attention.

The site's founder, Jimmy Wales, acknowledged that plagiarized passages do occasionally slip in but he dismissed Brandt's findings as exaggerated.

Wikipedia allows anyone to post, edit and even delete items regardless of expertise and leaves it to other users to catch factual errors and other problems, including plagiarism.

Although plagiarism and copyright infringement are common among sites with user-generated content, Brandt said Wikipedia must be held to a higher standard, a point with which Wales agreed.

"They present it as an encyclopedia," Brandt said Friday. "They go around claiming it's almost as good as Britannica. They are trying to be mainstream respectable."

Brandt, who has long sparred with Wikipedia over an unflattering biography of himself, called on Wikipedia to conduct a throughout review of all its articles. The site currently has nearly 1.5 million in the English language alone.

Wales said plagiarism is always possible in a site that offers "wide-open editing ... but in general we take a very strong anti-plagiarism stance." Any time plagiarism is brought to the site's attention, he said, Wikipedia administrators review all postings made by that author.

Wikipedia editors have been reviewing the 142 articles in question and have declared a handful to be OK because copied passages came from the public domain. Editors found others where Wikipedia appeared to be the one plagiarized.

But editors found extensive problems in several cases, with many still not yet fully checked.

Articles with offending passages have been stripped of most text. An entire paragraph in Alonzo Clark's entry, for instance, was deleted, leaving the article with the bare-bones: "Alonzo M. Clark (August 13, 1868-October 12, 1952) was an American politician who was Governor of Wyoming from 1931 to 1933."

The original article, Brandt said, was copied from a biography on the Wyoming state government site.

Doctors rushed to treat her, but she had no pulse. It was too late.

Her wait, the coroner said, lasted two hours and 10 minutes.

Even when the consequences aren't so tragic, time seems to pass at an excruciatingly slow pace when you're waiting for medical care.

Whether it's emergency room treatment, a routine doctor's appointment, or those anxious days between getting poked and prodded for medical tests and receiving the results, waiting happens to just about everyone seeking medical care. It's often one of the most frustrating parts about seeing the doctor.

After years of overcrowding, overbooking, and angry patient complaints, many hospitals and doctors' offices are finally doing something about those waits:

Providing test results quickly onsite or online. Offering same-day exams to patients who call early. Speeding up emergency-room triage to get patients faster treatment. And offering restaurant-style pagers so not-so-sick patients don't feel stuck in a crowded emergency waiting room.

Shortening waiting times is part of a nationwide move toward empowering patients, reducing medical errors and improving health care, said Frank Federico, a director of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The nonprofit group helps doctors and hospitals devise solutions.

When patients are ill, "the longer that they have to wait to get into the system, the greater the chance" their sickness will worsen, too, said Sue Gullo, a nurse and also an IHI director.

"That's a huge problem," Gullo said, because it puts patients' health at risk and costs hospitals more in resources and dollars.

Gullo knows the experience from both sides.

She used to work in a hospital maternity center and often faced the wrath of women who arrived for a scheduled Caesarean section only to learn they'd have to wait so emergency cases could go first.

"It was very frustrating, any one of us knew we could be a patient tomorrow," Gullo said.

And then she was, arriving in the emergency room one day with a broken leg after slipping on ice.

"It was overburdened. I ended up in a hallway without a stretcher" for more than an hour, she said. "I was sick to my stomach, I had to yell to get anything that I needed."

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EMERGENCY WAITS

An Institute of Medicine report on the crisis in U.S. emergency care detailed trends that have contributed to long emergency room waits, including increased demand, staff shortages and hospital closings.

Excess demand might have contributed to Beatrice Vance's death because a nearby hospital had recently closed, a coroner's employee said.

In a highly unusual ruling in September, a coroner's jury called the death a homicide, in part because of the long wait for treatment. These juries determine cause of death but don't try cases.

Prosecutors are investigating, but no criminal charges have been filed. A civil suit is almost a certainty. A Vista spokeswoman declined to comment "beyond extending our continued sympathies to the Vance family."

Between 1993-2003, the number of U.S. emergency departments fell by about 425, or about 12 percent, while the number of patients seeking ER care jumped 26 percent to 114 million. They include uninsured or underinsured patients and those who seek emergency care for non-emergencies because they have no regular doctor.

Many hospitals are creating "fast-track" programs for these patients who will not require hospitalization and who tend to wait the longest for emergency care.

Montefiore Medical Center in New York City spent at least $35 million in the past five years on ER improvements, including a fast-track program that has cut average arrival-to-discharge times for less serious cases from about six hours to two.

Changes included hiring about 50 additional emergency room doctors, building a separate area for fast-track cases; and investing in electronic systems to speed up patient registration.

Montefiore's walkout rate, reflecting patients who get fed up with waiting and go home, dropped from about 5 percent to 1.5 percent this year, said Peter Semczuk, the hospital's vice president of clinical services.

That's significant because walkout patients often get sicker and show up later in worse shape.

Spectrum Health's Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., added a fast-track system as part of an emergency department overhaul three years ago.

Then, three-hour patient waits were typical, and eight hour waits were not unheard of, said Jeanne Roode, Butterworth's emergency services director.

Now the average door-to-doctor time is about 23 minutes for all ER patients.

Improvements include adding 25 nurses, and during busy times having triage begin with a preliminary physician exam. That allows X-rays and other tests to be ordered immediately, with results ready when the patient is assigned to an emergency room bed, Roode said.

Patient satisfaction was the idea behind restaurant-style pagers distributed in the emergency waiting room at Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet, Ill. They allow patients awaiting care to grab a bite in the hospital cafeteria or just get some fresh air.

Anita Uthe gave the new pagers a thumbs-up. The 43-year-old mother from New Lenox, Ill., waited four hours for emergency care with her 11-year-old son last winter after he slipped on ice and suffered a concussion.

She braced for another long wait at Silver Cross last month when her son stepped on a rusty nail. This time she got a pager.

"It helps, because if you want to step outside," you can, she said.

"I think everybody feels the same way going to the emergency room - you just don't know when you'll get called," Uthe said.

But just then, her pager suddenly flashed - it was her turn, after only half an hour.

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NON-EMERGENCY WAITS

For Santa Clarita, Calif., college professor David Stevenson, 46, the Wait from Hell involved a procedure he was a little anxious about, a vasectomy. He and his wife took time off work, hired a baby sitter for their three children, checked in at the doctor's office, and then sat. After 15 minutes in a crowded waiting room, they were told he was next. The waiting room emptied, filled, and emptied again "and then it was just me," Stevenson said.

After an hour and a half, the doctor said he had to leave for an emergency. Fuming, Stevenson said he'd just wait some more, but the doctor replied curtly that he wouldn't be returning that day.

"He just said, 'Sorry buddy, you're going to have to reschedule,'" Stevenson said.

For 30-year-old Ihor Andruch of Elmwood Park, N.J., the unbearable waits were just for routine exams. Until he recently switched doctors, Andruch had to take a partial sick day for doctors' visits that would last 10 minutes but required waiting two to three hours.

One time, after checking in, he took a "brunch break" at a nearby bagel shop, returning with plenty of time before he was called.

"I was as patient as I could be, but it was very frustrating," Andruch said.

Such waits often are due to overbooking. That happens partly because under many health insurance reimbursement systems, doctors are paid by volume.

Doctors "are responsive to the same economic pressures that everybody else is," said Dr. Michael Barr of the American College of Physicians.

The group, which represents about 120,000 internists and other doctors, issued a policy statement earlier this year advocating changes that Barr said could help address the waiting problem.

Recommendations include insurance reimbursement for less traditional patient visits, such as telephone and e-mail consultations to give patients speedier access to doctors.

The group also supports "open-access" scheduling, which some doctors already use, reserving up to 70 percent of their daily schedules for patients who call early for same-day appointments.

Patient-friendly scheduling is also a feature in so-called "boutique" medical practices, which offer virtually no waiting but often aren't covered by insurance.

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AWAITING TEST RESULTS

Most patients have experienced playing phone-tag to get test results. That's at least partly because of the traditional paper-based method of relaying information. Test results are transcribed onto paper, then given to the doctor, who then phones or snail-mails them to patients.

At Boston's Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center, patients can get test results electronically the same time as the doctor through a private online account called PatientSite.

"There is no waiting for paper printouts to arrive by mail," said Dr. John Halamka.

All test results show up on the site, except those involving diagnosing cancer or
HIV, "assuming that this news should be delivered in person," he said.

The waiting that goes along with diagnosing and even ruling out cancer can be particularly nerve-racking.

Dr. Marisa Weiss, a Philadelphia-area breast cancer specialist, hears from patients upset about long waits for routine mammograms, then more waiting for the results.

"This is part of the job description" of being a woman today, said Weiss, founder of an online resource center for breast cancer patients.

Weiss, 47, said she dreads her own annual mammogram - especially that windowless waiting room full of women in ill-fitting hospital gowns who are nervously waiting, too.

"Meanwhile, I have a full practice, three kids, I'm text-messaging back and forth - thank God it's only once a year," she said.

In conventional busy mammogram centers, technicians perform dozens of routine screenings daily, piling up X-ray images that a radiologist reads later in bulk. Patients get the results days or weeks later.

Many physicians consider that process the most efficient, although research has shown that having a radiologist read mammograms immediately and give results during the appointment makes women feel much less anxious.

Malpractice concerns and low insurance reimbursements for mammograms have led to radiologist shortages in some places, and not all centers are equipped to offer same-day results for routine exams.

But Faulkner Hospital's breast center in Boston is, with three radiologists reading mammograms full-time and a computer-assisted system that helps identify X-ray abnormalities.

Dr. Norman Sadowsky, a radiologist who helped create the program more than 30 years ago, said he's given talks around the country promoting the same-day service but few centers have followed suit.

"This is the most anxiety-producing routine exam," Sadowsky said. "You come in and you worry, and you worry until you get an answer.

"If we can get the patient an answer before she leaves, that's the way to do it. You get a lot of kisses" instead of complaints, he said.

Attorney General Phill Kline obtained the records recently after a two-year battle that prompted privacy concerns. He has said he sought the records to review them for evidence of possible crimes including rape and illegal abortions.

During a Friday night broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," the conservative host said a "source inside" told the show that Tiller performs late-term abortions when a patient is depressed, which O'Reilly deemed "executing babies."

O'Reilly also said his show has evidence that Tiller's clinic and another unnamed clinic have broken Kansas law by failing to report potential rapes with victims ages 10 to 15.

A spokeswoman for Kline, who received redacted copies of the records Oct. 24, said Saturday he doesn't know how O'Reilly obtained the information.

"We don't know anything about Mr. O'Reilly's inside source," spokeswoman Sherriene Jones said. "I assumed he was talking about somebody on the inside of the abortion clinics."

Kline, an abortion opponent and Republican in a tight race with Democrat Paul Morrison, was interviewed by O'Reilly during the segment.

"Our information says that on almost every medical sheet - and obviously we have a source inside here - it says, 'depression,'" O'Reilly told Kline during the broadcast. "I don't know whether you have that information or not - I don't know - but that's what it says."

Pedro Irigonegaray, who represents Tiller and the clinics, said it was "preposterous" that the information would come from an insider at one of the clinics.

"This has been our concern from the beginning, that if he ended up with these records, that just this type of event would occur. Our worst nightmare has happened," Irigonegaray said. "Women in America deserve better than this."

It wasn't clear Saturday whether O'Reilly's source had broken state or federal laws by divulging patient information or whether O'Reilly or his staff had viewed any records themselves. A request to Fox in Washington to interview O'Reilly or someone associated with his show wasn't answered Saturday.

Kline, one of the nation's foremost abortion opponents, has said the targets of his investigation are rapists, sex offenders with child victims, and doctors involved in illegal abortions. Those could include doctors performing illegal late-term abortions or those failing to report abuse of a child.

The clinics had argued that giving the attorney general access to the records would invade patients' privacy.

Shawnee County District Judge Richard Anderson subpoenaed the records at Kline's request in September 2004, concluding there was probable cause to believe they contained evidence of crimes. The documents Kline received were edited so that individual patients could not be identified.

The driver, 43-year-old John Oliver, and three Boy Scouts died at the scene, said state police Sgt. D.S. Carr. The driver's son, Michael Oliver, 12, was able to get out of the car and was taken to a hospital, police said.

The three boys who died were identified as Luke Drewry, 12, and Carter Stephenson, 14, both of Franklin, and Jackson Fox, 13, of Capron, officials said. All were members of Boy Scout Troop 17 in Franklin.

The accident occurred around noon, police said. Another driver with the Boy Scout group looked in her rearview mirror and saw Oliver's vehicle run off "a sweeping curve" on Virginia 35 in Southampton County, Carr said. Carr said there were no skid marks and no evidence the Oliver was exceeding the 55 mph speed limit.

"At this time our primary concern is for the individuals and the families of those individuals involved in the accident, as well as four our scouting family as a whole," the Colonial Virginia Council said in a written statement Sunday night.

he town's governor, Hasan Aghajani, put the quake's light impact down to the construction materials.

"Buildings in this area are made of wood," Aghajani told The Associated Press. "Such buildings would not be destroyed during moderate earquakes. That's the reason there weren't any casualties."

The town is 500 kilometers (300 miles) northwest of Tehran, the Iranian capital.

Magnitude-5 quakes can topple weak buildings and cause roads to crack.

Iran is located on seismic fault lines and is prone to earthquakes. It experiences at least one slight earthquake everyday on average.

In March, three strong earthquakes and several aftershocks struck western Iran, killing at least 66 people.

In 2003, a 6.6-magnitude quake flattened the historic city of Bam in southern Iran, killing about 26,000 people.

The experts arrived in Tehran on Friday and will stay for four days to carry out their inspections in line with Iran's commitment to the safeguards agreement of Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the official said.

The inspectors will provide the results of their inspection to IAEA chief Mohammed El Baradei, who is expected to deliver a report to a meeting of IAEA Board of Governors scheduled on Nov. 30, according to the IRNA report.

Iran announced in late October that it had fed gas into a second cascade of centrifuges at a uranium enrichment facility and obtained the product.

The United States has been seeking to impose sanctions on Iran through the UN Security Council on the grounds that Tehran is developing a nuclear-weapons program under the guise of a civilian-use program.

However, Iran has insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and voiced hope for talks with Europe, Russia, China and the United States, but the Islamic Republic rejected a prerequisite of suspending nuclear work for such talks.

However, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's office had no comment on the Iranian initiative.

A high-ranking Lebanese Army source confirmed that the statement "was indeed given by the Iranian ambassador and the Lebanese Army has no comments on the matter so far," said the report.

But the source noted that "the Lebanese Army has no problem with the source of weapons as long as they are provided in the context of defending Lebanon."

The United States and Israel accuse Iran of supplying arms and financial support to Lebanese Hezbollah and Syria of being one of the routes by which such weapons are smuggled to Hezbollah. Damascus and Tehran deny the allegations.

Lebanon was subjected to a massive Israeli offensive in July and August that demolished the country's infrastructure, killed over 1,400 citizens, one third of whom were children, and wounded over 4,000 people, mostly women and children, said the Daily Star.

The army has since said it was in market for anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry.

The mission was scrubbed for the day at around 10:30 a.m., according to Dan Bender, a Coast Guard spokesman.

The Intrepid's giant propellers got stuck in the mud as the tugboats strained to move the behemoth. It eventually began inching backward out of its berth, but moved only a few feet.

"We knew it was not going to come out like a cruise ship," said Matt Woods, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum's vice president for operations.

The legendary aircraft carrier was being moved to New Jersey for a $60 million overhaul.