WASHINGTON (AP) – Not sleeping, the pilots say. They were engrossed in a complicated new crew-scheduling program on their laptop computers as their plane flew past its Minneapolis landing by 150 miles — a cockpit violation of airline policy that could cost them their licenses.

They were so focused on the scheduling — quite a complicated matter for the pilots after Delta Air Lines acquired Northwest Airlines a year ago — that they were out of communication with air traffic controllers and their airline for more than an hour. They didn't realize their mistake until contacted by a flight attendant about five minutes before the flight's scheduled landing last Wednesday night, the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday.

By then, Northwest Flight 188 with its 144 passengers and five crew members was over Wisconsin, at 37,000 feet. The pilots — Richard Cole of Salem, Ore., the first officer, and Timothy Cheney of Gig Harbor, Wash., the captain — denied they had fallen asleep as aviation experts have suggested, the safety board said in recounting investigators' interviews with the men over the weekend.

U.S. cancer doctors reach out to Africa

SEATTLE (AP) -- When Dr. Corey Casper started looking for doctors to team up with for his work on Kaposi's sarcoma, the medical researcher at the venerable Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center ran into a surprising statistic from the World Health Organization.

He learned that Uganda has one of the highest rates of this type of cancer in the world. In fact, cancer in general kills more people in sub-Saharan Africa than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, according to the WHO.

But unlike the United States, where Casper does his research on a beautiful campus filled with labs and doctors, Uganda at the time had one oncologist _ for a nation of 30 million _ at the tiny Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala.