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'Dramatic' Risks For Older Men Cited

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; A01

The blood test that millions of men undergo each year to check for prostate cancer leads to so much unnecessary anxiety, surgery and complications that doctors should stop testing elderly men, and it remains unclear whether the screening is worthwhile for younger men, a federal task force concluded yesterday.

In the first update of its recommendations for prostate cancer screening in five years, the panel that sets government policy on preventive medicine said that the evidence that the test reduces the cancer's death toll is too uncertain to endorse routine use for men at any age, and that the potential harm clearly outweighs any benefits for men age 75 and older.

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; 10:32 AM

MOSCOW, Aug. 5 -- Russian mourners braved heavy rain Tuesday to file past the body of former Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who lay in an open coffin at the Russian Academy of Sciences, flanked by an honor guard of four Russian soldiers.

"I admired him for his internal honesty and his willingness to stand up very intensively for his own views," said Gennady Malinka, 68, the general director of a small engineering company, who began to weep as he described his affection for the writer. "Of course nothing is eternal, but I hope every generation will have a person such as him."

He lived not by lies.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008; A18

ON FEB. 18, 1974, this newspaper published an essay, " Live Not by Lies," by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who with his writings and dauntless moral courage had shaken Soviet power as no other individual had done. Written six days earlier, probably hours before the Soviet secret police broke into his Moscow apartment, arrested him and sent him into what would be a 20-year exile in the West, the essay was an ardent call for truth-telling, for spurning the monstrous lies that bore the USSR aloft. "Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me," he wrote.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote the essay in response to the officially orchestrated campaign of vitriol that greeted the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago," his monumentally damning masterpiece on the vast network of Soviet labor camps and their tens of millions of victims. The book's impact on the moral legitimacy of the Soviet regime was so corrosive, and so irrefutable, that it can be said to have sown the first seeds of the Soviet Union's eventual collapse. Who again could doubt the rot that was at the system's core or the sinister cynicism of its leadership?

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; A04

ANCHORAGE -- In what might be the fullest realization of Barack Obama's pledge to run hard in parts of the country largely untouched by presidential campaigning, the Democrat's Alaska operation is making plans for organizers to hopscotch the state's vast and sparsely populated interior by bush plane, knocking on doors in remote outposts for their candidate.

"Go around, put up signs, shake some hands, see some of the important people in the village," said state representative and professional pilot Woodie Salmon (D), describing his own campaign tactics in a legislative district that includes 94 villages, 70 of which can be reached only by air. "Get things stirred up and leave again."

By Carrie Johnson, Marilyn W. Thompson and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 4, 2008; A03

As an FBI investigation increasingly focused on him as a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, Fort Detrick scientist Bruce E. Ivins enjoyed a security clearance that allowed him to work in the facility's most dangerous laboratories, to handle deadly biological agents, and to take part in broad discussions about the Pentagon's defenses against germ warfare.

On July 10, the day he was taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, for example, Ivins spent part of the afternoon at a sensitive briefing on a new bubonic plague vaccine under development at the Army's elite biological weapons testing center, according to a former colleague who talked with him there.

By Carrie Johnson, Marilyn W. Thompson and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 4, 2008; A03

As an FBI investigation increasingly focused on him as a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, Fort Detrick scientist Bruce E. Ivins enjoyed a security clearance that allowed him to work in the facility's most dangerous laboratories, to handle deadly biological agents, and to take part in broad discussions about the Pentagon's defenses against germ warfare.

On July 10, the day he was taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, for example, Ivins spent part of the afternoon at a sensitive briefing on a new bubonic plague vaccine under development at the Army's elite biological weapons testing center, according to a former colleague who talked with him there.

By Carrie Johnson, Marilyn W. Thompson and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 4, 2008; A03

As an FBI investigation increasingly focused on him as a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, Fort Detrick scientist Bruce E. Ivins enjoyed a security clearance that allowed him to work in the facility's most dangerous laboratories, to handle deadly biological agents, and to take part in broad discussions about the Pentagon's defenses against germ warfare.

On July 10, the day he was taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, for example, Ivins spent part of the afternoon at a sensitive briefing on a new bubonic plague vaccine under development at the Army's elite biological weapons testing center, according to a former colleague who talked with him there.

The guys at NASA have decided to extend the mission of the Phoenix Lander with another 30 days, meaning that the mission will end in late September instead of late August. The decision was made about the same time that scientists managed to get a sample of the Martian soil dug from about 2 inches below the surface of the planet in one of the Lander's 8 tiny TEGA ovens.

When heated, the sample started emitting water vapors, something that started quite a party back on Earth at the mission control. According to the ComputerWorld Magazine, William Boynton, one of the co-investigators on the mission said that “We've now touched [the ice] and tasted it, and I'd like to say that it tastes very fine. There were a lot of champagne corks popping in the downlink room last night. ”

Indicted Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska pleaded not guilty on Thursday to accusations of planning to conceal thousands of dollars worth of gifts from an oil-services company.

Under impeachment and observing that some of his Republican colleagues are slowly moving away from him, Ted Stevens is relying on promptness to prevent corruption accusations from prolonging until Election Day and bringing his political career to an end.

By Maureen Fan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 3, 2008; A20

BEIJING -- Three state-of-the-art Olympic media centers in Beijing have been equipped with rows of brand-new computers. Thousands of English-speaking volunteers stand at the ready, trained to offer Internet access with a smile.

Behind the scenes, their bosses on the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games are busy preparing daily news conferences and field trips to showcase all that China has to offer. There are lectures on how to protect the giant panda, briefings on the safety of Olympic Village food and opportunities to witness the gleaming urban development of Beijing.