Aug
22
Twenty-one more gold medals are up for grab today at the Beijing Olympics.
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The evens are athletics, beach volleyball, canoeing, cycling, hockey, modern pentathlon, table tennis, and Taekwondo. China continues to maintain its lead on the medals table with 46 golds while the US has 29 gold medals to its credit.
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Jul
8
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - There’s new advice for older men who want to preserve their sexual function: have sex, and have it often, researchers say.
In a study that followed nearly 1,000 older Finnish men for five years, researchers found that those who were regularly having sex at the start of the study were at lower risk of developing erectile dysfunction (ED) by the study’s end.
In fact, the more often the men had sex, the lower their ED risk.
The implication, say the researchers, is that men should be encouraged to stay sexually active into their golden years.
Dr. Juha Koskimaki and colleagues at the University of Tampere in Finland report the findings in the American Journal of Medicine. The study included 989 men who were between the ages of 55 and 75 at the outset.
Overall, those who said they had sex less than once per week were twice as likely to develop ED over the next five years as men who had sex at least once a week. Furthermore, compared with men who had sex three or more times per week, their ED risk was increased nearly four-fold.
A number of factors contribute to ED development, many of which could also affect a man’s sexually activity — such as age, diabetes and heart disease. However, after taking account of those factors, sexual activity itself remained linked to ED risk, Koskimaki’s team found.
It may be a matter of “use it or lose it,” according to the researchers. Just as exercise boosts physical fitness, they note, regular sexual activity may help a man preserve his erectile function.
ED occurs when there are problems with blood flow to the penis. Regular sexual activity, Koskimaki’s team writes, may help maintain healthy blood vessel function in the erectile tissue.
SOURCE: American Journal of Medicine, July 2008.
Jun
23
NEW YORK - Raging Midwest floodwaters that swallowed crops and sent corn and soybean prices soaring are about to give consumers more grief at the grocery store.
In the latest bout of food inflation, beef, pork, poultry and even eggs, cheese and milk are expected to get more expensive as livestock owners go out of business or are forced to slaughter more cattle, hogs, turkeys and chickens to cope with rocketing costs for corn-based animal feed.
The floods engulfed an estimated 2 million or more acres of corn and soybean fields in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and other key growing states, sending world grain prices skyward on fears of a substantially smaller corn crop. The government will give a partial idea of how many corn acres were lost before the end of the month, but experts say the trickle-down effect could be more dramatic later this year, affecting everything from Thanksgiving turkeys to Christmas hams.
Rod Brenneman, president and chief executive of Seaboard Foods, a pork supplier in Sawnee Mission, Kan. that produces 4 million hogs a year, said high corn costs were already forcing producers in his industry to cut back on the number of animals they raise.
“There’s definitely liquidation of livestock happening,” and that will cause meat prices to rise later this year and into 2009, said Brenneman, who is also the vice chairman of the American Meat Institute.
Brenneman’s cost for feeding a single hog has shot up $30 in the past year because of record-high prices for corn and soybeans, the main ingredients in animal feed. Passing that increase on to consumers would tack an extra 15 cents per pound onto a pork chop.
It’s a similar story for U.S. beef producers, who now spend a whopping 60-70 percent of their production costs on animal feed and are seeing that number rise daily as corn prices hover near an unprecedented $8 a bushel, up from about $4 a year ago.
“This is not sustainable. The cattle industry is going to have to get smaller,” said James Herring, president and CEO of Amarillo, Tex.-based Friona Industries, which buys 20 million bushels of corn each year to feed 550,000 cattle.
Corn’s prices were already rising before the floods, driven up 80 percent over the past year as developing countries like China and India scramble for grains to feed people and livestock. U.S. production of ethanol, an alternative fuel that can be made with corn, has also pushed prices higher, prompting livestock owners to lobby Washington to roll back ethanol mandates.
Before the floods, corn farmers were enjoying record profits selling the grain to feed animals and for use in cereals and as a sweetener in soda and candy. But a sharply smaller corn crop could wipe out those gains.
In Iowa, the No. 1 U.S. corn grower, floods inundated about 9 percent of corn crops, representing about 1.2 million acres - almost 1.5 percent of the country’s anticipated harvest.
In Indiana, another 9 percent of corn and soybean crops were flooded, potentially costing farmers up to $840 million in lost earnings, Indiana Agriculture Director Andy Miller said.
Floodwaters also tossed farm equipment, sprayed cornfields with debris and silt and sucked away large chunks of topsoil. For livestock owners and meat producers, the damage may be felt long after the corn grows back.
Even before the floods, Tyson Foods was complaining that high grain prices would drive up its costs by $600 million this year. The world’s largest poultry company has already raised its prices over the past year, and expects to keep raising them, CEO Dick Bond told analysts at a conference in May.
Higher feed prices will eventually filter through to the cost of milk, cheese and yogurt, too, since 65 to 75 percent of a dairy farmers’ production costs are for feed, said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation.
With the cost of animal feed only going higher, many poultry and dairy farmers are starting to look for cheaper alternatives.
Nebraska dairy farmer Dan Rice, who has 1,500 cows, said one alternative is to buy some of the byproducts of cereal or flour production, but they’re not nearly as productive compared to corn.
“If we all feed less corn and get less production, then the price at the grocery stores are going to go up,” said Rice, who supplies milk to grocery stores in Omaha and around Kansas City.
Without easy ways to cut costs, many livestock producers will have little choice but to slaughter more animals and send them to market.
“We’re in survival mode now,” said Paul Hill, chairman of West Liberty Foods, a turkey processor based in West Liberty, Iowa. He estimated U.S. turkey producers will reduce their flocks by 10 to 15 percent nationwide, a cutback that will send consumer prices dramatically higher.
“The cost of Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys will go up this year, and maybe even more next year,” said Hill, who is also the chairman of the National Turkey Federation.
If corn were to rise to $10 a bushel, Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said recouping costs through higher retail prices may not be possible.
“Can you possibly charge enough for the chicken to recoup that investment?” he said. “That’s a question no one can answer yet because it’s never been done.”
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May
15
MIENYANG, China (CNN) — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday ordered 90 more helicopters for rescue missions in Sichuan province, adding urgency to the massive relief operations under way since Monday’s devastating earthquake.
Rescuers carry the injured from the quake-stricken town of Yingxiu Wednesday in Sichuan province.
1 of 3more photos » As mudslides, debris and fallen rocks blocked rescuers and aid workers from China’s quake-hit areas, Wen ordered 90 more helicopters to the region, Xinhua reported.
Since the 7.9-magnitude quake struck Monday, China has dispatched 20 choppers for dropping food and water, transporting the injured and delivering rescuers, Xinhua reported. Thursday’s order brings the total to 110.
Rescuers continued their attempts to save those trapped beneath the rubble at schools, businesses and homes.
Aftershocks at times forced rescuers to turn away from the fallen buildings, leaving crowds frustrated without knowing the fate of loved ones. Video from one disaster scene shows a woman clinging to a crane after rescuers suspended a mission at a crumbled building, deeming the site to dangerous to enter.
But there were scattered stories of survival. A 3-year-old girl was rescued from beneath a toppled building in Sichuan’s Beichuan County on Thursday, Xinhua said. Photos of the rescue showed the girl sustained a leg injury, but was otherwise alert.
A frightened seventh-grade girl was pulled safely from the rubble of a school dormitory Wednesday evening — 50 hours after she was buried by Monday’s earthquake, state-run media said.
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In a weak voice, the trapped girl called out to one of the rescuers, “uncle, save me, save me,” he said. “If anything (bad) had happened to her, the voice could haunt me for the rest of my life.”
More than 4.3 million homes collapsed or sustained damage, according to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, and the official death toll from the quake had reached 14,866 by Wednesday evening. But casualty figures from various cities indicate a higher number of dead.
The state-run Xinhua news agency has provided death tolls for eight communities in Sichuan province that add up to nearly 20,000, including roughly 7,700 who perished in the town of Yingxiu, near the earthquake’s epicenter. CNN cannot independently confirm the tallies.
The girl rescued at Muyu Middle School in Sichuan province was among 89 children pulled from the rubble alive. At least 201 students were killed when the building collapsed while many were napping, according to China.org. More than 100 children escaped from the school in Qingchuan County, and rescuers were searching for an unspecified number still believed to be trapped.
Wang Guangfen, a nurse, climbed under a cement slab to give the girl, He Cuiqing, medicine, while other rescuers carefully moved slabs until they could remove the girl.
“She appeared very fragile, and there were blood stains on her chest,” said China.org, quoting Wang. “But she was still conscious, and called me aunt when I reached her.”
Elsewhere in the stricken region, videotape showed a 3-year-old pulled out alive after more than 40 hours in rubble, and a pregnant woman safely rescued, as a small crowd cheered.
In other developments:
Video showed soldiers and relief teams swarmed over mountainsides and piles of debris in and near the epicenter of the quake in Sichuan province, looking for signs of life. Helicopters were flying overhead, some of them dropping food and other supplies.
Hours after 2,000 troops were dispatched to the Zipingpu dam upstream from the earthquake-hit Dujiangyan City, a probe revealed that the dam is stable and safe, Xinhua reported. It was not immediately clear what type of investigation was conducted. State-run media said earlier that the dam on Zipingpu Reservoir had “severe cracks.”
Twelve American eco-tourists who were thought to be missing Monday after the quake were able to contact their loved ones by cell phone to let them know they are alive, said an official with World Wildlife Fund, which sponsored the tour. But two Chinese WWF volunteers remain missing.
Fifteen British nationals have been reported missing near the panda preserve. “We have no reports so far of any casualties to British citizens, but we do remain very concerned about reports of some UK citizens being in the affected area,” said William Ehrman, British ambassador to China. “We are doing everything that we can to locate them.”
More than 30,000 people are “missing or out of reach” in Shifang, Xinhua reported. Citing local government, Xinhua said that the death toll in the city exceeded 2,500. Two chemical plants collapsed, trapping hundreds of people, Xinhua reported Monday. More than 80 tons of of ammonia leaked out, it said. A local official said there were no deaths. The news agency’s Wednesday report made no mention of the people it had said were trapped in the chemical plants.
Mianyang has become a massive refugee camp for survivors, Xinhua reported. Thousands of people uprooted around the region are taking shelter downtown at the city’s main sports gym and other facilities. Reports say 7,395 people have died and 18,645 are trapped in debris in the city. Among those trapped were about 1,000 students at a middle school
May
9
7 more cops pulled from Philly streets over taped beating
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PHILADELPHIA - Seven more police officers were taken off street duty Thursday as investigators look into the videotaped police beating of three shooting suspects during a traffic stop.
Thirteen of the estimated 15 officers on hand during the Monday incident have been taken off the streets as investigators pore over the television news footage, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey told a news conference Thursday.
The video shows officers kicking, punching and beating the men, who are all black. On his syndicated radio show Thursday, the Rev. Al Sharpton, compared it with the videotaped 1991 beating of black motorist Rodney King by a group of white Los Angeles police officers.
“I’ve not seen anything like that since Rodney King, and it’s worse than Rodney King, and we cannot allow our community to be under siege,” Sharpton said. “We’ve got to stop this nonsense in our community, acting like you got to be a certain level black to be treated within the law.”
But Ramsey denied the beating was racially motivated, saying at least one officer involved, a sergeant, is black.
“I know everybody’s trying to make this into a racial thing. I don’t believe it is,” Ramsey told The Associated Press later Thursday. “We just had a policeman murdered on Saturday … and emotions are running high,” he said about Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, 39, who was shot while responding to a bank robbery.
On Monday, police stopped the suspects’ car while investigating a triple shooting in the area. No weapons were found in the car or on the suspects, but officers said they had seen an occupant of the car shoot three people on a drug corner moments earlier, Ramsey has said.
The three suspects - Dwayne Dyches, Brian Hall and Pete Hopkins - each were charged with attempted murder and related counts in connection with the shooting, according to court records. Each was treated at a hospital and was being held Thursday in lieu of bail of $100,000 or more, Ramsey said.
An attorney for the three, D. Scott Perrine, has said his clients had nothing to do with the triple shooting and that the beating was totally unjustified.
The commissioner pledged to send the department’s preliminary investigation to prosecutors by next week. If prosecutors decline to file charges, he will deal with the officers involved internally, he said.
The Internal Affairs unit is still working to enhance the tape and identify all of the officers in the footage, a department spokesman said.
Following the slaying of Liczbinski, who was shot at least five times by a high-powered rifle, city and state officials called on Congress Thursday to reinstate a ban on assault weapons.
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Apr
27
Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery
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STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and scrambles onto the roof of a cattle car.
Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus “passports” that extended Sweden’s protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on, dumbfounded.
Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and gentle manner. Recruited and financed by the U.S., he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in Budapest’s ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a war criminal.
Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, days after the Soviets moved into Budapest, the 32-year-old Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, drove off under a Russian security escort, and vanished forever.
And because he was a rare flicker of humanity in the man-made hell of the Holocaust, the world has celebrated him ever since. Streets have been named after him and his face has been on postage stamps. And researchers have wrestled with two enduring mysteries: Why was Wallenberg arrested, and did he really die in Soviet custody in 1947?
Researchers have sifted through hundreds of purported sightings of Wallenberg into the 1980s, right down to plotting his movements from cell to cell while in custody. And fresh documents are to become public which might cast light on another puzzle: Whether Wallenberg was connected, directly or indirectly, to a super-secret wartime U.S. intelligence agency known as “the Pond,” operating as World War II was drawing to a close and the Soviets were growing increasingly suspicious of Western intentions in eastern Europe.
Speculation that Wallenberg was engaged in espionage has been rife since the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged in the 1990s that he had been recruited for his rescue mission by an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which later became the CIA.
About the Pond, little is known. But later this year the CIA is to release a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the National Archives in College Park, Md.
In February, the Swedish government posted an online database of 1,000 documents and testimonies related to Wallenberg’s disappearance. In a few months, independent investigators plan to launch a Web site with their nearly 20-year research into Russian archives and prison records. Russia is building a Museum of Tolerance that will feature once-classified documents on Wallenberg. And the CIA last year relaxed its guidelines to reveal details of its sources and intelligence-gathering methods in the case.
Despite dozens of books and hundreds of documents on Wallenberg, much remains hidden. The Kremlin has failed to find or deliver dozens of files, Sweden has declined to open all its books, and The Associated Press has learned as many as 100,000 pages of declassified OSS documents await processing at the National Archives.
The Russians say Wallenberg died in prison in 1947, but never produced a proper death certificate or his remains.
But independent research suggests he may have lived many years - perhaps until the late 1980s. If true, he likely was held in isolation, stripped of his identity, known only by a number or a false name and moving like a phantom among Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric institutions.
In 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified archives about Wallenberg.
“I think I found all the existing documents,” Nikonov e-mailed The Associated Press last month. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.
Nikonov’s conclusion: “Shot in 1947.”
Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.
The 2001 Swedish report said: “There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg,” and listed 17 unanswered questions.
The Russian report bluntly said, “Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947.” It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the “Smersh” counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case “resolved.”
Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging, analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to release missing files.
___
Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944. With the knowledge of his government, his task as first secretary to the Swedish diplomatic legation was a cover for his true mission as secret emissary of the U.S. War Refugee Board, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a belated attempt to stem the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.
In the previous two months, 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been shipped to Auschwitz for extermination. They were among the last of six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.
Of the 230,000 who remained in the Hungarian capital in mid-1944, 100,000 survived the war.
After the Red Army arrived in January, Wallenberg went to see the Russian military commander to discuss postwar reconstruction and restitution of Jewish property. Two days later he returned under Russian escort to collect some personal effects, then was never seen in public again.
And what did his country - or his influential cousins - do about it?
Looking back a half century later, the Swedish government acknowledged that its own passive response to the detention of one of its diplomats was astounding, and that it had missed several chances to win his freedom.
“The worst mistakes were done in the first two years,” said Hans Magnusson, the Swedish co-chairman of the 10-year investigation with the Russians. Sweden felt intimidated by the mighty Soviets and unwilling to challenge them, he said.
In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, prompting a memorandum from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier - at age 34.
As more testimony came in that Wallenberg was still alive, Stockholm periodically raised the issue with Moscow - but without results, said Magnusson, interviewed in the Netherlands where he is now ambassador.
Sweden could have pushed harder, he said, “but I doubt it would have achieved more.”
“It is inconceivable,” says Wallenberg’s half-sister, Nina Lagergren. “Here is a man sent out by the Swedish government to risk his life. He saved thousands of people - and he was left to rot.”
___
Some time around 1994, Susan Mesinai, who had by then been researching the Wallenberg case for five years, visited Lucette Colvin Kelsey, Wallenberg’s cousin, at her home in Connecticut. After lunch, Kelsey caught up with Mesinai as she got into the car and told her: “Raoul was working for the highest levels of government.”
“So I said to her, ‘How high? Do you mean the president?’ And she nodded her head,” Mesinai said, disclosing to AP a conversation she had kept confidential for 14 years.
Kelsey’s father, Col. William Colvin, had been the U.S. military attache in the Swedish capital around the time of World War I. Wallenberg spent vacations in the 1930s with the Colvin family while he earned a degree in architecture at the University of Michigan. Kelsey, who was a year younger than her cousin, died in 1996.
Rather than clarify anything, Kelsey’s cryptic remark only deepened the fog.
Wallenberg’s rescue mission inevitably placed him in a vortex of intrigue and espionage involving the Hungarian resistance, the Jewish underground, communists working for the Soviets, and British, U.S. and Swedish intelligence operations. He also had regular contact with Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis running the deportation of Jews.
Whether or not he himself was passing on intelligence, Russia had plenty of reason to suspect him of spying, either for the Allies or Germany - or both.
“Wallenberg had ties to all the major actors in Hungary,” says Susanne Berger, a German researcher who collaborated with the Swedish-Russian research project.
The Stockholm chief of the War Refugee Board, Iver C. Olsen, was also a key member of the 35-man OSS station in the Swedish capital, and it was he who recruited Wallenberg, who in turn kept the U.S. connection secret by sending his communications through Swedish diplomatic channels.
Olsen’s OSS personnel file - unpublished until the AP viewed it at the National Archives - revealed that the American was cited for using his position at the War Refugee Board “in gathering important information for the OSS and for the State Department.”
In 1955 Olsen denied to the CIA that Wallenberg ever spied for the OSS, and Mesinai and Berger offer a different likelihood: that the Swede was a source for the Pond, which was a rival to the OSS known only to Roosevelt and a few insiders in the War and State Departments.
A small clandestine intelligence-gathering operation, the Pond relied on contacts in private corporations and hand-picked embassy personnel. It worked closely with the Dutch electronics company N.V. Philips, “which had access to ‘enemy’ territory as well as a far-flung corporation intelligence apparatus in its own right,” said former CIA analyst Mark Stout who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.
So far, no evidence has emerged that Wallenberg worked for the Pond, and Stout said in an interview he had not seen Wallenberg mentioned in any papers he has reviewed.
But their circles of contacts intersected at several points, including members of the Hungarian resistance and possibly the Philips connection.
“The Pond was centered around President Roosevelt’s office and rumors of a special mission, intelligence or otherwise, for Raoul Wallenberg have persisted through the years,” said Berger, who suspects the Soviets knew about the agency.
It may have been just one more reason for Stalin to order his arrest, she said. Regardless of whether Wallenberg was involved, “the Pond’s activities clearly would have served to enhance Soviet paranoia about Allied activities and aims in Hungary.”
Hungarian historian Laszlo Ritter, of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said the Philips company also was providing cover for Britain’s MI6 intelligence service. One of its crucial agents in the Balkans was Lolle Smit, who was knighted after the war by both Britain and his native Holland.
One month before Wallenberg arrived, Smit fled Budapest for Romania, from where he continued to control his network, Ritter said, but he left his family behind.
Smit’s daughter, Berber Smit, worked with Wallenberg in his rescue efforts - and “had a romance with him,” according to her son, Alan Hogg.
Ritter said Hungarian war files show no direct tie between Wallenberg and Smit, or between the diplomat and British intelligence. At the same time, MI6 used the Swedish legation at least twice to smuggle out information, and helped give false papers to Jews and the anti-fascist resistance, he said.
When the OSS wanted to dispatch a radio to the Hungarian underground leader Geza Soos, it sent the transmitter with a Swedish intelligence officer and told him Wallenberg would know how to contact Soos.
Wallenberg’s very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust. Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.
The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him excluded - a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold War.
___
In December 1993, investigator Marvin Makinen of the University of Chicago interviewed Varvara Larina, a retired orderly at Moscow’s Vladimir Prison since 1946. She remembered a foreigner who was kept in solitary confinement on the third floor of Korpus 2, a building used both as a hospital and isolation ward.
Though it was decades earlier, the prisoner stood out in Larina’s memory. He spoke Russian with an accent and “complained about everything,” she said. He repeatedly griped that the soup was cold by the time Larina delivered it. Prison authorities ordered her to serve him first.
“This is very unusual,” Makinen said in an interview. Normally, such complaints would condemn an inmate to a punishment cell. “The fact that he wasn’t means he was a very special prisoner.”
When shown a gallery of photographs, Larina immediately picked out Wallenberg’s - one never published before, Makinen said.
She recalled he was in the opposite cell when another prisoner, Kirill Osmak, died in May 1960.
That was enough for Makinen and Chicago colleague Ari Kaplan to roughly pinpoint the cell of Larina’s foreigner. Creating a database of cell occupancy from the prison’s registration cards, they found two units opposite Osmak’s that were reported empty for 243 and 717 days respectively.
Normally, cells were left vacant for a week at most, Makinen said. The researchers concluded that those two cells likely held special prisoners, namelessly concealed in the gulag.
Mesinai and others reviewed hundreds of accounts over the decades of people who claimed to have seen or heard of someone who could have been Wallenberg. They established a pattern of sightings, even though many individual reports were considered unreliable, uncorroborated, deliberate hoaxes or cases of mistaken identity with other Swedish prisoners.
Some stories, like Larina’s, ring particularly true.
One compelling account came in 1961. Swedish physician Nanna Svartz asked an eminent Russian scientist about Wallenberg during a medical congress in Moscow. Lowering his voice, the Russian told her that Wallenberg was at a psychiatric hospital and “not in very good shape.”
The Russian, Alexandr Myasnikov, later claimed he had been misunderstood, but Svartz stood firm. His remark, she later reported, “came spontaneously. He went pale as soon as he said it, and appeared to understand that he had said too much.”
A few years later the Soviets sent out feelers for a possible spy swap. Envoys indicated Moscow was ready to “compensate” Sweden if it freed Stig Wennerstromm, a Swedish air force officer who had spied for the Kremlin for 15 years.
Though Wallenberg’s name was never mentioned, he was considered the only prize worth exchanging for such a high-value spy. The intermediary was Wolfgang Vogel, an East German lawyer who engineered many Cold War prisoner exchanges. But years of halfhearted negotiation ended in no deal.
___
Nina Lagergren keeps a small wooden box in the cellar of her comfortable Stockholm home. The Russians gave it to her in 1989 when she visited Moscow. It contains her half-brother’s diplomatic passport, a stack of currency, a Swedish license for the pistol he bought but never used, and two telephone diaries. Among the entries are Eichmann and Berber Smit, the daughter of the Dutch spy.
They also gave the family a copy of Wallenberg’s “death certificate,” handwritten and unstamped.
“They anticipated that I would get very moved and understand there was no more hope,” Lagergren said.
Instead it reinforced her belief that Wallenberg had lived beyond 1947 and perhaps was even then alive. “This proved we could go on,” she said. Today he would be 95, and she concedes he must be dead.
If indeed Wallenberg’s death in 1947 was a lie, the question remains: Why was he never freed?
The 2001 Swedish report speculated that the longer he was held, the harder it was for the Soviets to release him. Still, “it would have been exceptional to order the execution of a diplomat from a neutral country. It might have appeared simpler to keep him in isolation,” the report said.
The search continues.
Berger, the independent researcher, has submitted a new, detailed request to Moscow to release files on prisoners who shared cells with the missing diplomat and on other foreigners in the gulag; Mesinai hopes to study psychiatric facilities where Wallenberg may have been confined; Ritter, the Hungarian researcher, is tracing the British spy network of Lolle Smit; and historians are awaiting the release of the Pond papers.
Whatever any of this reveals, a 1979 State Department memo puts these questions into perspective: “Whether or not Wallenberg was involved in espionage during World War II is a moot point at this stage in history. His obvious humanitarian acts certainly outweigh any conceivable ’spy’ mission he may have been on
Source:
Apr
17
Earth’s Hum Sounds More Mysterious Than Ever
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Earth gives off a relentless hum of countless notes completely imperceptible to the human ear, like a giant, exceptionally quiet symphony, but the origin of this sound remains a mystery.
Now unexpected powerful tunes have been discovered in this hum. These new findings could shed light on the source of this enigma.
The planet emanates a constant rumble far below the limits of human hearing, even when the ground isn’t shaking from an earthquake. (It does not cause the ringing in the ear linked with tinnitus.) This sound, first discovered a decade ago, is one that only scientific instruments - seismometers - can detect. Researchers call it Earth’s hum.
Investigators suspect this murmur could originate from the churning ocean, or perhaps the roiling atmosphere. To find out more, scientists analyzed readings from an exceptionally quiet Earth-listening research station at the Black Forest Observatory in Germany, with supporting data from Japan and China.
Different types
In the past, the oscillations that researchers found made up this hum were “spheroidal” - they basically involved patches of rock moving up and down, albeit near undetectably.
Now oscillations have been discovered making up the hum that, oddly, are shaped roughly like rings. Imagine, if you will, rumbles that twist in circles in rock across the upper echelons of the planet, almost like dozens of lazy hurricanes.
Scientists had actually expected to find these kinds of oscillations, but these new ring-like waves are surprisingly about as powerful as the spheroidal ones are. The expectation was they would be relatively insignificant.
New thinking
This discovery should force researchers to significantly rethink what causes Earth’s hum. While the spheroidal oscillations might be caused by forces squeezing down on the planet - say, pressure from ocean or atmospheric waves - the twisting ring-like phenomena might be caused by forces shearing across the world’s surface, from the oceans, atmosphere or possibly even the sun.
Future investigations of this part of the hum will prove challenging, as “this is a very small signal that is hard to measure, and the excitation is probably due to multiple interactions in a complex system,” said researcher Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig, a geoscientist at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Still, a better understanding of this sound will shed light on how the land, sea and air all interact, he added.
Researcher Dieter Kurrle and Widmer-Schnidrig detailed their findings March 20 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
See Earth’s Hum
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Original Story: Earth’s Hum Sounds More Mysterious Than Ever
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Apr
6
Men Create More Housework for Women
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Having a husband creates an extra seven hours of housework each week for women, according to a new study. For men, tying the knot saves an hour of weekly chores.
“It’s a well-known pattern,” said lead researcher Frank Stafford, an economist at University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. “Men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor.”
He points out individual differences among households exist. But in general, marriage means more housework for women and less for men. “And the situation gets worse for women when they have children,” Stafford said.
Overall, times are a’ changing in the American home. In 1976, women busied themselves with 26 weekly hours of sweeping-and-dusting work, compared with 17 hours in 2005. Men are pitching in more, more than doubling their housework hours from six in 1976 to 13 in 2005.
Stafford analyzed time-diaries and questionnaires from a nationally representative sample of men and women over a 10-year period between 1996 and 2005. The federally-funded study showed that, compared with the single life, marriage meant more housework for both men and women.
“Marriage is no longer a man’s path to less housework,” Stafford said.
Single women in their 20s and 30s did the least housework, about 12 weekly hours, while married women in their 60s and 70s did the most - about 21 hours a week.
Men showed a somewhat different pattern, with older men picking up the broom more often than younger men. Single guys worked the hardest around the house, trumping all age groups of married men.
Having kids boosts house chores even further. With more than three kids, for instance, wives took on more of the extra work, clocking about 28 hours a week compared with husbands’ 10 hours.
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Original Story: Men Create More Housework for Women
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Apr
5
Sleep more to slim down, scientists say
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PARIS (AFP) - An extra hour between the sheets at night might be the key to shedding excess weight and fighting obesity, according to recent research.
“More sleep could be the ideal way of stabilising weight or slimming,” said neuro-scientist Karine Spiegel, of France’s INSERM, a public organisation dedicated to biological, medical and public health research.
While poor eating habits and lack of exercise clearly play a role in the global rise of obesity, recent data indicates that lack of sleep may also be a factor, and one that is often under-estimated.
Around 30 surveys carried out on wide population samples in seven countries have underlined a link between lack of sleep and excess weight or obesity in both children and adults, Spiegel said.
The first of the studies, carried out in 1992 in France, highlighted the problem in children and teenagers. Spiegel said the increase in obesity in the US in the second half of the 20th century corresponded with a mounting decrease in sleep.
Two key hormones produced at night which help regulate appetite were at play, she said.
Grehlin makes people hungry, slows metabolism and decreases the body’s ability to burn body fat, and leptin, a protein hormone produced by fatty tissue, regulates fat storage.
“We have shown that less sleep (two four-hour nights) caused an 18 percent loss of appetite-cutting leptin and a 28 percent increase of appetite-causing grehlin,” she said.
Such hormonal changes made people hungry for foods heavy in fats and sugars such as chips, biscuits, cakes and peanuts, she added.
The sleep loss caused a 23 to 24 percent increase in hunger, Spiegel said, translating into an extra 350 to 500 kilocalories a day, “which for a young sedentary adult of normal weight could lead to a major amount of added weight.”
It was unclear whether several years of sleep deprivation could lastingly harm the body’s ability to restore a balance between the two hormones.
A study released in Washington in February showed children lacking shut-eye faced a greater risk of becoming obese than kids who got a good night’s sleep.
Each extra hour of sleep cuts a child’s risk of becoming overweight or obese by nine percent, according to an analysis of epidemiological studies by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
By contrast, children who got the least sleep had a 92 percent higher chance of being overweight or obese than children who slept enough, said the study published in the journal Obesity.
“Our analysis of the data shows a clear association between sleep duration and the risk for overweight or obesity in children. The risk declined with more sleep,” said Youfa Wang, a senior author of the study.
“Desirable sleep behavior may be an important low cost means for preventing childhood obesity and should be considered in future intervention studies,” Wang said in a news release.
The researchers reviewed 17 published studies on sleep duration and childhood obesity.
Some research recommends that children under five years old sleep 11 hours or more a day, while children age five to 10 should get 10 or more hours of sleep, and children older than 10 should sleep at least nine hours.
Source: Yahoo News
Mar
31
Muslims more numerous than Catholics
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VATICAN CITY - Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world’s largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said Sunday.
“For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us,” Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican’s yearbook.
He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population - a stable percentage - while Muslims were at 19.2 percent.
“It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer,” the monsignor said.
Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims were put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data.
When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33 percent of the world population, Formenti said.
Spokesmen for the Vatican and the United Nations did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment Sunday.
Source: Yahoo News