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LiveScience Staff

If you’re seeking employment, get a grip. A firm handshake is key to landing a job.

In a new study, scientists put 98 students through mock job interviews with businesspeople. The students also met with trained handshake raters who, unbeknownst to the students, rated their grips. Separately, the businesspeople graded each student’s overall performance and hireability. The two group’s scores were then compared.

Students who got high handshake marks were also rated most hireable.
“We’ve always heard that interviewers make up their mind about a person in the first two or three minutes of an interview, no matter how long the interview lasts,” said study leader Greg Stewart, associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Iowa. “We found that the first impression begins with a handshake that sets the tone for the rest of the interview.”

The study will be detailed in September in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

The real you

Steward thinks handshakes provide a glimpse of the real you.

“Job seekers are trained how to act in a job interview, how to talk, how to dress, how to answer questions, so we all look and act alike to varying degrees because we’ve all been told the same things,” he said. “But the handshake is something that’s perhaps more individual and subtle, so it may communicate something that dress or physical appearance doesn’t.”

Handshakes may be indicative of overall personality differences.

Stewart also found those with strong handshakes scored better with the interviewers in part because they also exhibited greater ease with small talk, eye contact and other social skills.
“We probably don’t consciously remember a person’s handshake or whether it was good or bad,” Stewart said. “But the handshake is one of the first nonverbal clues we get about the person’s overall personality, and that impression is what we remember.”
How to do it
Good handshakes involve a firm, complete grip, eye contact and vigorous up-and-down movement, Stewart advised.
This may work against women, however, because their grips tend to be not as strong. But other research finds women tend to be stronger in other nonverbal communication skills that seemed to offset their less brawny grips, Steward said.
And in the study, women who did have a strong handshake seemed to have an advantage over men.
“Those women seemed to be more memorable than men who had an equally strong handshake,” Steward said. “A really good handshake made a bigger impact on the outcome of the interview for the women than it did for the men.”
Liberal leaning
A similar study in the year 2000 found that people with a firm handshake were more extraverted and open to experience and less neurotic and shy than those with wimpy grips. That study, which involved students, handshake coders and surveys (but no businesspeople), was reported in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

It found that women who are more liberal, intellectual and open to new experiences had a firmer handshake and made a more favorable impression than women who were less open and had a less firm handshake.

For men, the opposite was revealed: More open men had a slightly less firm handshake and made a somewhat poorer impression than less open men.
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By KAREN TUMULTY
36 minutes ago
 
For all her talk about “full speed on to the White House,” there was an unmistakably elegiac tone to Hillary Clinton’s primary-night speech in Indianapolis. And if one needed further confirmation that the undaunted, never-say-die Clintons realize their bid might be at an end, all it took was a look at the wistful faces of the husband and the daughter who stood behind the candidate as she talked of all the people she has met in a journey “that has been a blessing for me.”

It was also a journey she had begun with what appeared to be insurmountable advantages, which evaporated one by one as the campaign dragged on far longer than anyone could have anticipated. She made at least five big mistakes, each of which compounded the others:
1. She misjudged the mood
That was probably her biggest blunder. In a cycle that has been all about change, Clinton chose an incumbent’s strategy, running on experience, preparedness, inevitability - and the power of the strongest brand name in Democratic politics. It made sense, given who she is and the additional doubts that some voters might have about making a woman Commander in Chief. But in putting her focus on positioning herself to win the general election in November, Clinton completely misread the mood of Democratic-primary voters, who were desperate to turn the page. “Being the consummate Washington insider is not where you want to be in a year when people want change,” says Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod. Clinton’s “initial strategic positioning was wrong and kind of played into our hands.” But other miscalculations made it worse:
2. She didn’t master the rules
Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game. That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state’s 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified - and let Penn know it. “How can it possibly be,” Ickes asked, “that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn’t understand proportional allocation?” And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don’t get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she’d be the nominee. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign now acknowledges privately:
3. She underestimated the caucus states
While Clinton based her strategy on the big contests, she seemed to virtually overlook states like Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas, which choose their delegates through caucuses. She had a reason: the Clintons decided, says an adviser, that “caucus states were not really their thing.” Her core supporters - women, the elderly, those with blue-collar jobs - were less likely to be able to commit an evening of the week, as the process requires. But it was a little like unilateral disarmament in states worth 12% of the pledged delegates. Indeed, it was in the caucus states that Obama piled up his lead among pledged delegates. “For all the talent and the money they had over there,” says Axelrod, “they - bewilderingly - seemed to have little understanding for the caucuses and how important they would become.”
By the time Clinton’s lieutenants realized the grave nature of their error, they lacked the resources to do anything about it - in part because:
4. She relied on old money
For a decade or more, the Clintons set the standard for political fund-raising in the Democratic Party, and nearly all Bill’s old donors had re-upped for Hillary’s bid. Her 2006 Senate campaign had raised an astonishing $51.6 million against token opposition, in what everyone assumed was merely a dry run for a far bigger contest. But something had happened to fund-raising that Team Clinton didn’t fully grasp: the Internet. Though Clinton’s totals from working the shrimp-cocktail circuit remained impressive by every historic measure, her donors were typically big-check writers. And once they had ponied up the $2,300 allowed by law, they were forbidden to give more. The once bottomless Clinton well was drying up.
Obama relied instead on a different model: the 800,000-plus people who had signed up on his website and could continue sending money his way $5, $10 and $50 at a time. (The campaign has raised more than $100 million online, better than half its total.) Meanwhile, the Clintons were forced to tap the $100 million - plus fortune they had acquired since he left the White House - first for $5 million in January to make it to Super Tuesday and then $6.4 million to get her through Indiana and North Carolina. And that reflects one final mistake:
5. She never counted on a long haul
Clinton’s strategy had been premised on delivering a knockout blow early. If she could win Iowa, she believed, the race would be over. Clinton spent lavishly there yet finished a disappointing third. What surprised the Obama forces was how long it took her campaign to retool. She fought him to a tie in the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests but didn’t have any troops in place for the states that followed. Obama, on the other hand, was a train running hard on two or three tracks. Whatever the Chicago headquarters was unveiling to win immediate contests, it always had a separate operation setting up organizations in the states that were next. As far back as Feb. 21, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe was spotted in Raleigh, N.C. He told the News & Observer that the state’s primary, then more than 10 weeks away, “could end up being very important in the nomination fight.” At the time, the idea seemed laughable.
Now, of course, the question seems not whether Clinton will exit the race but when. She continues to load her schedule with campaign stops, even as calls for her to concede grow louder. But the voice she is listening to now is the one inside her head, explains a longtime aide. Clinton’s calculation is as much about history as it is about politics. As the first woman to have come this far, Clinton has told those close to her, she wants people who invested their hopes in her to see that she has given it her best. And then? As she said in Indianapolis, “No matter what happens, I will work for the nominee of the Democratic Party because we must win in November.” When the task at hand is healing divisions in the Democratic Party, the loser can have as much influence as the winner. View this article on Time.com

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They eat from the same dishes and sleep in the same beds, but they seem to be operating in two different economies. From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs. You might even say American men are in recession, and American women are not.

What’s going on? Simply put, men have the misfortune of being concentrated in the two sectors that are doing the worst: manufacturing and construction. Women are concentrated in sectors that are still growing, such as education and health care.

This situation is hardly good news for women, though. While they’re getting more jobs, their pay is stagnant. Also, most share households — and bills — with the men who are losing jobs. And the “female” economy can’t stay strong for long if the “male” economy weakens too much.

The troubles for the American male worker, while exacerbated by the current slump, are hardly new. The manufacturing sector is in long-term decline, and construction goes through repeated booms and busts. Meanwhile women are graduating from college at higher rates than men. Some analysts even argue that men are less suited than women to the knowledge economy, which rewards supposedly female traits such as sensitivity, intuition, and a willingness to collaborate. “Men have tended to do better in the hierarchies, following orders and relying on positional power,” says Andy Hines, a futurist at the Washington (D.C.) consulting firm Social Technologies, who previously worked for Kellogg (NYSE:K - News) and Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW - News).

Problem Industries

Whether you buy that argument or not, it’s clear that right now men are in a bad spot. The share of all men aged 20 and over with jobs has fallen since last November, when private-sector employment peaked, going from 72.9% to 72.2% in April. For women the ratio rose, from 58.1% to 58.3%. The adult male unemployment rate has risen twice as much as the female jobless rate since November. Those figures from the BLS’ household survey are echoed in its separate survey of employers.

To see why, go sector by sector. Manufacturing is over 70% male and construction is about 88% male. Meanwhile the growing education and health services sector is 77% female. The government sector, which has remained strong, is 57% female. The securities business, which is filled with high-paying jobs, is likely to be the next sector to get whacked — and more than 60% of its workers are men.

Men are having a harder time than women getting back on track after losing a job. “For a man to move from a $20- or $30-an-hour union job to being a Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT - News) greeter is devastating,” says Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labor historian. Men also shy away from some of the growing fields, such as nursing. Only about 10% of nursing students nationwide are male, notes Harriet R. Feldman, dean of the Pace University School of Nursing. Some retired nurses are actually going back to work because their husbands have lost jobs, says Lois Cooper, vice-president for employee relations and diversity at staffing firm Adecco Group North America in Melville, N.Y.

The weakness of the male economy is squeezing people such as Brian Day, 45, a union carpenter in Ossian, Ind., who made about $35,000 in construction last year but only $1,500 so far in 2008. The family of five is living off his jobless benefits and the $35,000 salary of his wife, a supermarket supervisor. Says Day: “I feel guilty about it.” Jeff Bainter, 53, a railroad worker in Muncie, Ind., has enough seniority to keep his job but sees younger men getting the ax. He says there’s more security but lower pay in what his wife, Cynthiana, does for a living: medical billing.

Stubborn Pay Gap

The Presidential candidates haven’t figured out how to play the disparity between men and women. In BusinessWeek interviews, advisers for all three said they want to help everyone. Austan Goolsbee, chief economic adviser to Senator Barack Obama, said: “Because the unemployed are disproportionately men, they may especially benefit from Obama’s program to get us out of recession. But gender has nothing to do with the policy’s design.” Senator Hillary Clinton’s economic policy director, Brian Deese, said: “The goal is not to appeal to men more than women.”

One reason for the candidates to tread lightly is that even though men have done worse on jobs lately, they continue to earn more than women on average. Over three-quarters of people who earned over $100,000 last year were men, says Queens College political scientist Andrew Hacker. In fact, although the pay gap between men and women has been gradually narrowing, it actually widened a bit over the past year. Median usual weekly earnings for men grew 4.6% from the first quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2008, vs. 3.1% for women.

That might be evidence that the jobs women are landing aren’t necessarily good ones. Says Eileen Appelbaum, director of Rutgers University’s Center for Women & Work: “We had an expansion of jobs for home health aides, retail clerks, child-care workers. They’re low-wage, they’re dead-end, and they don’t have any benefits.”

Another reason politicians aren’t making hay of the plight of males is that they are well aware that women are in no mood for it. Working-class and lower-middle-class women in particular, whether or not their men have jobs, are feeling economically stressed, says Bill McInturff, a pollster for Senator John McCain. He adds, “In focus groups they talk about how ‘I’m taking care of my parents, his parents, buying groceries, taking kids to the doctor.’ These women are tired.”

There’s no easy remedy for what ails the male economy. Edward J. O’Boyle, senior research associate at the Mayo Research Institute in West Monroe, La., says part of the solution is reviving manufacturing — a gargantuan task. On construction, he favors financial reforms to even out the booms and busts.

Economists are debating whether the overall economy is in a recession. For men, the evidence is clear.

With Maggie Gilmour and Jing Zhou in Chicago and Jane Sasseen in Washington, D.C.

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By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
NEW YORK - A children’s story about a family of penguins with two fathers once again tops the list of library books the public objects to the most.

“And Tango Makes Three,” released in 2005 and co-written by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, was the most “challenged” book in public schools and libraries for the second straight year, according to the American Library Association.

“The complaints are that young children will believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle that is acceptable. The people complaining, of course, don’t agree with that,” Judith Krug, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The ALA defines a “challenge” as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.”

Other books on the ALA’s top 10 list include Maya Angelou’s memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” in which the author writes of being raped as a young girl; Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” long attacked for alleged racism; and Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass,” an anti-religious work in which a former nun says: “The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.”

Pullman’s novel, released in 1996, received new attention last year because of the film version starring Nicole Kidman.

Overall, the number of reported library challenges dropped from 546 in 2006 to 420 last year, well below the mid-1990s, when complaints topped 750. For every challenge listed, about four to five go unreported, the library association estimates.

“The atmosphere is a little better than it used to be,” Krug says. “I think some of the pressure has been taken off of books by the Internet, because so much is happening on the Internet.”

According to the ALA, at least 65 challenges last year led to a book being pulled.

In Louisville, Ky., a high school principal told 150 English students to drop “Beloved,” Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an ex-slave who has murdered her baby daughter. At least two parents had complained that “Beloved” includes depictions of violence, racism and sex.

In Burlingame, Calif., Mark Mathabane’s “Kaffir Boy,” a memoir about growing up poor and black in apartheid-era South Africa, was banned from an intermediate school after a parent complained about a two-paragraph scene in which men pay boys for sex.

___

On the Net:

http://www.ala.org

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by Marlowe Hood
PARIS (AFP) - Arguably the oddest beast in Nature’s menagerie, the platypus looks as if were assembled from spare parts left over after the animal kingdom was otherwise complete.
Now scientists know why. According to a study released Wednesday, the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal.

The task of laying bare the platypus genome of 2.2 billion base pairs spread across 18,500 genes has taken several years, but will do far more than satisfy the curiosity of just biologists, say the researchers.

“The platypus genome is extremely important, because it is the missing link in our understanding of how we and other mammals first evolved,” explained Oxford University’s Chris Ponting, one of the study’s architects.

“This is our ticket back in time to when all mammals laid eggs while suckling their young on milk.”

Native to eastern Australia and Tasmania, the semi-aquatic platypus is thought to have split off from a common ancestor shared with humans approximately 170 million years ago.

The creature is so strange that when the first stuffed specimens arrived in Europe at the end of the 18th century, biologists believed they were looking at a taxidermist’s hoax, a composite stitched together from the body of a beaver and the snout of a giant duck.

But the peculiar mix of body features are clearly reflected in the animal’s DNA, the study found.

The platypus is classified as a mammal because it produces milk and is covered in coat of thick fur, once prized by hunters.

Lacking teats, the female nurses pups through the skin covering its abdomen.

But there are reptile-like attributes too: females lay eggs, and males can stab aggressors with a snake-like venom that flows from a spur tucked under its hind feet.

The bird-like qualities implied by its Latin name, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, include webbed feet, a flat bill similar to a duck’s, and the gene sequences that determine sex. Whereas humans have two sex chromosomes, platypuses have 10, the study showed.

“It is much more of a melange than anyone expected,” commented Ewan Birney, who led the genome analysis at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge.

The animal also possesses a feature unique to monotremes — an order including a handful of egg-laying mammals — called electroreception.

With their eyes, ears and nostrils closed, platypuses rely on sensitive electrosensory receptors tucked inside their bills to track prey underwater, detecting electrical fields generated by muscular contraction.

“By comparing the platypus genome to other mammalian genomes, we’ll be able to study genes that have been conserved throughout evolution,” said senior author Richard Wilson, a researcher at Washington University.

In captivity, platypuses have lived up to 17 years of age.

In the wild, they feed on worms, insect larvae, shrimps and crayfish, eating up to 20 percent of their body weight every day.

Males grow to a length of 50 centimetres (20 inches) and weigh about two kilos (4.5 pounds), with females about 20 percent shorter and lighter.

The genome sequenced for the study belongs to a female specimen from New South Wales nicknamed Glennie and can be accessed at www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank.

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By Will Dunham
Mon May 5, 4:02 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new study provides some of the best evidence to date that breast-feeding can make children smarter, an international team of researchers said on Monday.
Children whose mothers breast-fed them longer and did not mix in baby formula scored higher on intelligence tests, the researchers in Canada and Belarus reported.

About half the 14,000 babies were randomly assigned to a group in which prolonged and exclusive breast-feeding by the mother was encouraged at Belarussian hospitals and clinics. The mothers of the other babies received no special encouragement.

Those in the breast-feeding encouragement group were, on average, breast-fed longer than the others and were less likely to have been given formula in a bottle.

At 3 months, 73 percent of the babies in the breast-feeding encouragement group were breast-fed, compared to 60 percent of the other group. At 6 months, it was 50 percent versus 36 percent.

In addition, the group given encouragement was far more likely to give their children only breast milk. The rate was seven times higher, for example, at 3 months.

The children were monitored for about 6 1/2 years.

The children in the group where breast-feeding was encouraged scored about 5 percent higher in IQ tests and did better academically, the researchers found.

Previous studies had indicated brain development and intelligence benefits for breast-fed children.

But researchers have sought to determine whether it was the breast-feeding that did it, or that mothers who prefer to breast-feed their babies may differ from those who do not.

The design of the study — randomly assigning babies to two groups regardless of the mothers’ characteristics — was intended to eliminate the confusion.

‘MOTHERS WHO BREAST-FEED … ARE DIFFERENT’

“Mothers who breast-feed or those who breast-feed longer or most exclusively are different from the mothers who don’t,” Dr. Michael Kramer of McGill University in Montreal and the Montreal Children’s Hospital said in a telephone interview.

“They tend to be smarter. They tend to be more invested in their babies. They tend to interact with them more closely. They may be the kind of mothers who read to their kids more, who spend more time with their kids, who play with them more,” added Kramer, who led the study published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

The researchers measured the differences between the two groups using IQ tests administered by the children’s pediatricians and by ratings by their teachers of their school performance in reading, writing, math and other subjects.

Both sets of scores were significantly higher in the children from the breast-feeding promotion group.

The study was launched in the mid-1990s. Kramer said the initial idea was to do it in the United States and Canada, but many hospitals in those countries by that time had begun strongly encouraging breast-feeding as a matter of routine.

The situation was different in Belarus at the time, he said, with less routine encouragement for the practice.

Kramer said how breast-feeding may make children more intelligent is unclear.

“It could even be that because breast-feeding takes longer, the mother is interacting more with the baby, talking with the baby, soothing the baby,” he said. “It could be an emotional thing. It could be a physical thing. Or it could be a hormone or something else in the milk that’s absorbed by the baby.”

Previous studies have shown babies whose mothers breast-fed them enjoy many health advantages over formula-fed babies.

These include fewer ear, stomach or intestinal infections, digestive problems, skin diseases and allergies, and less risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that women who do not have health problems exclusively breast-feed their infants for at least the first six months, with it continuing at least through the first year as other foods are introduced.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Stacey Joyce)
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By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer
41 minutes ago
 
WASHINGTON - On the rebound, Barack Obama left Hillary Rodham Clinton with fast-dwindling chances to deny him the Democratic presidential nomination after beating her in North Carolina and falling just short in an Indiana cliffhanger.

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Obama was on track to climb within 200 delegates of attaining the prize, his campaign finally steadying after missteps fiercely exploited by the never-say-die Clinton.

His campaign dropped broad hints it was time for the 270 remaining unaligned party figures known as superdelegates to get off the fence and settle the nomination.

It was in that arena — even more than in the scattered primaries left — that the Democratic hyperdrama was bound to play out.

“You know, there are those who were saying that North Carolina would be a game-changer in this election,” Obama told a roaring crowd in Raleigh, N.C., on Tuesday night, referring to Clinton’s hope that an upset there would recast the race in her favor.

“But today what North Carolina decided is that the only game that needs changing is the one in Washington, D.C.”

Clinton vowed to compete tenaciously for West Virginia next week and Kentucky and Oregon after that, and to press “full speed on to the White House.”

But she risked running on fumes without an infusion of cash, and made a direct fundraising pitch from the stage in Indianapolis. “I need your help to continue our journey,” she said.

And she pledged anew that she would support the Democratic nominee “no matter what happens,” a vow also made by her competitor.

Polarizing, protracted and often bitter, the contest is hardening divisions in the party, according to exit polls from the two states.

A solid majority of each candidate’s supporters said they would not be satisfied if the other candidate wins the nomination.

Fully one-third of Clinton’s supporters in Indiana and North Carolina went beyond mere dissatisfaction to say they would vote for Republican John McCain instead of Obama if that’s the choice in the fall.

Obama scored a convincing victory of about 14 points in North Carolina, where he’d been favored. Clinton squeezed out a narrow margin in Indiana after a long night of counting.

Racial divisions were stark.

In both states, Clinton won six in 10 white votes while Obama got nine in 10 black votes, exit polls indicated.

It was a slightly better performance than usual by Clinton among whites, while Obama’s backing from blacks was one of his highest winning percentages yet with that group.

Against the backdrop of disunity, pressure is certain to intensify on the superdelegates to declare themselves and lasso Democrats together for the fall campaign against McCain. They are not bound by results in primaries or caucuses.

“There is an eagerness in the party to get this done and move on,” said David Axelrod, chief Obama strategist. “There is no question that we can see the finish line.”

David Lutz, 53, of Trinity, N.C., who lives on his Army pension and flea market sales, paid tribute to Obama’s resilience in explaining why he switched from supporting Clinton in the final days.

“I finally got swayed Obama’s way,” he said. “He’s like a magician — he pulled a lot of good tricks out of his hat.”

A look at the night’s numbers:

_Obama won at least 69 delegates and Clinton at least 63 in the two states combined, with 55 still to be divided between the two candidates.

_Obama’s delegate total reached 1815.5 to 1,672 for Clinton in The Associated Press count, out of 2,025 needed to win the nomination.

_Obama won North Carolina 56-42, with returns from 99 percent of precincts.

_Clinton won Indiana 51-49, with returns from 99 percent of precincts.

And the races still ahead:

_28 delegates at stake in West Virginia in a week.

_103 delegates up for grabs a week later in Kentucky and Oregon.

_55 in Puerto Rico on June 1.

_31 in Montana and South Dakota on June 3.

On Tuesday, Clinton fell short of the Indiana blowout and the North Carolina upset that might have jarred superdelegates into her camp in a big way.

They have continued trickling toward Obama despite the fallout over his former pastor’s racially divisive remarks and Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania two weeks ago.

Obama sounded increasingly focused on the fall campaign.

“This primary season may not be over, but when it is, we will have to remember who we are as Democrats … because we all agree that at this defining moment in history — a moment when we’re facing two wars, an economy in turmoil, a planet in peril — we can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s third term,” he said.

Clinton was joined at her rally by her husband Bill, his face sunburned after campaigning in small-town North Carolina, and their daughter, Chelsea.

The New York senator stressed the issue that came to dominate the final days of the primaries in both states, her call for a summertime suspension of the federal gasoline tax. “I think it’s time to give Americans a break this summer,” she said.

Obama opposes the tax suspension, calling it a gimmick.

The impact of a long-running controversy over the Illinois senator’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was difficult to measure.

In North Carolina, six in 10 voters who said Wright’s remarks affected their votes sided with Clinton. A somewhat larger percentage of voters who said the pastor’s remarks did not matter supported Obama.

Obama and Clinton both planned to campaign in the next primary states starting Thursday, after a day in Washington. Obama headed to Chicago after his Raleigh speech before coming to the capital.

___

Associated Press writers Tom Raum in Raleigh, N.C., and Liz Sidoti in Indianapolis contributed to this report.
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Christopher Wanjek
LiveScience’s Bad Medicine Columnist
LiveScience.com
Tue May 6, 9:32 PM ET
 
Breastfeeding in the United States is at a 20-year high, with more than three out of four mothers now breastfeeding their infants at least occasionally, according to a report issued last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This has some breastfeeding advocates hoping they can scare the remaining 25 percent into submission with threats of how bottle-feeding is killing their babies.
Yes, yes, breastfeeding is superior to bottle-feeding. Just about every mother who prefers homemade soup over powdered soup mix gets this point. The problem is, the baby doesn’t always know.
Some babies refuse breastfeeding. Or, sometimes mothers cannot breastfeed for various reasons, such as from sore nipples or time constraints, with a demanding job or demanding toddlers running about their house while their newborn sister or brother needs to stay attached to a nipple for 30 minutes every two hours.
The campaigns touting the wonders of breastfeeding have been so successful that some women feel ashamed and guilty that they can’t breastfeed. Often they encounter breastfeeding Nazis - neighbors, co-workers, lactation specialists, or even random strangers, perhaps well-meaning - berating them over the use of a bottle.
That’s too bad, because these mothers are likely doing a wonderful job feeding their babies - a superior, job, in fact, if the baby just fusses at the teat.
Breastfeeding doesn’t suck
The science is convincing enough. In recent years, doctors have managed to associate breastfeeding with all things positive, such as higher IQ, lower rates of childhood obesity, and getting your child to make you gigantic construction-paper hearts with the words “my mother is better than the callous wench that bottle-fed you.”
In short, mother’s milk provides the best combination of vitamins, proteins, other nutrients and antibodies for the baby’s health and cognitive and physical development. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusive breastfeeding for at least the first six months of life, followed by at least another six months of partial breastfeeding. The World Health Organization recommends two years of breastfeeding. (The WHO board, mind you, is comprised mostly of men.)
Yet breastfeeding is a minor and certainly not exclusive factor for these touted health benefits, such as fewer illnesses or lower rates of obesity, diabetes and diarrhea. Intelligence, for example, is more associated with infant-adult interactions, such as reading - which a mother can do with her toddler while the infant is sucking down a bottle on his own.
Obesity and diabetes are largely lifestyle concerns, for if over 75 percent of children are being breastfed these days, clearly breastfeeding isn’t doing much to curb these epidemics. Diarrhea is usually a result of a food- or water-born parasite, more of a problem for infants in sub-Sahara Africa than in the United States.
Remember, bottle-feeding peaked after World War II, during a 30-year period when childhood obesity was a rarity and the mentally challenged bottle-fed baby boomers still managed to create a world filled with technological marvels.
Breastfeeding Nazis
Breastfeeding advocates have their work cut out for them. That 75-percent breastfeeding rate falls to about 30 percent at age six months.
Aside from being told they are evil, women who bottle-feed could benefit from understanding alternatives. Breast pumps, for example, work for some women who can pump milk at work and refrigerate for later. Lactation specialists can help when suckling becomes too painful.
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By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer
2 hours, 1 minute ago
 
WASHINGTON - A rising tide of late mortgage payments and home foreclosures poses considerable dangers to the national economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned anew Monday as he urged Congress to take additional steps to alleviate the problems.

“High rates of delinquency and foreclosure can have substantial spillover effects on the housing market, the financial markets and the broader economy,” Bernanke said in a dinner speech to Columbia Business School in New York. “Therefore, doing what we can to avoid preventable foreclosures is not just in the interest of lenders and borrowers. It’s in everybody’s interest,” he said.

Some 1.5 million U.S. homes entered into the foreclosure process last year, up 53 percent from 2006, Bernanke said. The rate of new foreclosures looks likely to be even higher this year, he said.

To provide more relief, Bernanke again called on Congress to give the Federal Housing Administration, which insures mortgages, more flexibility to help distressed borrowers at risk of losing their homes. He also again urged lawmakers to move ahead on legislation revamping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which finance mortgages. And, he called on the two mortgage giants to quickly raise new capital.

House leaders plan action on those and other housing measures this week.

“Conditions in mortgage markets remain quite difficult,” the Fed chief said. A copy of the speech was made available in Washington.

The reasons behind surging late payments and foreclosures can vary and that needs to be taken into account when developing solutions, Bernanke said. For instance, parts of New England, states in the Great Lakes, including Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, show increased mortgage delinquencies and “notable increases” in unemployment rates, he said.

California, Florida and parts of Colorado, on the other hand, saw delinquencies rise during a period when unemployment generally decreased but the value of homes declined, he said.

Mortgage companies are used to dealing with delinquencies related to life events, such as job loss or an illness, with the most common approaches being a temporary repayment plan or the folding of missed payments into the principal balance, Bernanke said.

“A widespread decline in home prices, by contrast, is a relatively novel phenomenon, and lenders and servicers will have to develop new and flexible strategies to deal with this issue,” Bernanke said.

The current housing crises has clobbered some borrowers home prices dropped. That left them with mortgages that are bigger than the value of their home. When that’s the primary problem, Bernanke said the best solution may be reducing the amount that the borrower owes on the loan or some other permanent modification to the loan.

Rising foreclosures add to the glut of unsold homes and that put more downward pressure on prices, aggravating the housing slump, he said. More rapid declines in house prices could have an “adverse impact” on the broader economy and the stability of the financial system, he said.

In his remarks, Bernanke did not talk about the interest rate policy or the state of the economy.

To help bolster the economy, the Federal Reserve last Wednesday cut a key interest rate by one-quarter percentage point to 2 percent and strongly hinted that it may take a breather in its rate-cutting campaign that started last September.

The Fed hopes that its powerful series of rate cuts — its most aggressive in decades — along with the government’s $168 billion stimulus package — including tax rebates that started flowing to bank accounts last week — will be sufficient to lift the country out of its slump in the second half of this year.

The mortgage meltdown started with problems with subprime mortgages — those made to people with tarnished credit. However, they have spread to more creditworthy borrowers.

The trio of crises — housing, credit and financial — have threatened to plunge the country into its first recession since 2001. The situation has roiled Wall Street, rattled consumers and has galvanized politicians in the White House, in Congress and on the campaign trail to come up with proposals to provide relief.

“The Realtor’s mantra is `location, location, location’ … local variation in housing and mortgage markets is considerable,” Bernanke said. “This variation is useful for understanding the sources of the increase in mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, and it should be taken into account as servicers and policymakers consider how best to avoid preventable foreclosures,” he said.
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By GREGORY KATZ, Associated Press Writer
Sun May 4, 7:05 PM ET
 LONDON - Documents released Monday show how the British government tried to send thousands of Palestine-bound Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide back to postwar Germany without inflaming world opinion.

Could it be done? The answer was no. It was just two years after the end of the war and the world was outraged by the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in what became known as the Holocaust.

Despite the best efforts of early spin doctors to portray the move in the most sympathetic light, the decision to turn away the more than 4,500 Jews on board the Exodus refugee ship turned into a humanitarian and public relations debacle for Britain.

The story is detailed in more than 400 pages of formerly secret documents at Britain’s National Archives made available to the public on Monday.

The Jews aboard the Exodus were trying to enter Palestine illegally during the tumultuous months in 1947 before the United Nations voted to create a Jewish homeland in part of Palestine.

Britain was still governing Palestine and the British government felt it had to keep the immigrants out to preserve the demographic balance between Arab and Jew. But Britain did not have a safe place to send the Jews from the Exodus, who were placed on three smaller British steamers.

After much agonizing, the British concluded that the only place they could send the Jews was to the British-controlled zone of postwar Germany, where the Jews could be placed in camps and screened for extremists.

After Germany, many of the passengers were eventually detained in military camps in Cyprus along with other Jews deported from Palestine. When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, the Exodus’ passengers were able to move there.

The Exodus’ ordeal focused world attention on the British blockade of Palestine and the plight of Jews fleeing Europe after World War II.

The documents show that diplomats and military officers knew that sending Jews back to Germany and putting them in camps so soon after the Holocaust would set off protests.

“These documents show the British perspective for the first time,” said Mark Dunton, contemporary history specialist at the National Archives. “It’s obvious in the files the British were sensitive to the claim they were putting Jews into concentration camps.”

A British diplomat in France sent a coded warning to the Foreign Office in London in August 1947.

“You will realize that an announcement of decision to send immigrants back to Germany will produce violent hostile outburst in the press,” he says.

He suggests an early measure of spin control — telling the press that the Jews will enjoy some freedoms even though they will be confined.

An unsigned cable from the Foreign Office on Aug. 19, 1947, explains that the decision to land the Jews in Germany has been made because it is the only suitable territory under British control that can handle so many people at short notice.

Three days later, a follow-up Foreign Office cable warns diplomats that they should be ready to “emphatically” deny that the Jews will be housed in former concentration camps after they are offloaded in Germany.

The Aug. 22 cable states that German guards will not be used to keep the Jews in the “refugee camps” and adds that British guards will be withdrawn once the Jews have been screened.

But security concerns were heightened on Aug. 30 when a secret telegram from the British Embassy in Washington warned of a possible terrorist attack by the Irgun and Stern gangs, two Zionist extremist groups determined to prevent the forced offloading of the Jews in Germany.

The Exodus passengers were successfully taken off the vessels in Germany, although a number were injured in confrontations with British troops that involved the use of batons and fire hoses.

An officer identified as Lt. Col. Gregson, in a formerly secret report, said he considered using tear gas to subdue the Jews but decided not to risk inflaming the situation.

“The Jew is liable to panic,” he wrote.

Security fears seemed justified after the Jews were removed when a large, homemade bomb with a timed fuse was found on one of the three ships. It was apparently rigged to detonate after the Jews had been removed, the cables indicate.

The postscript on the operation comes from the British regional commander who says that the disembarkation could be regarded as successful because it was carried out with only minimal casualties. But he says Britain’s reputation was damaged by the highly critical press coverage of OASIS, as the operation was known in diplomatic and military circles.

“It is impossible to deny that among the Hamburg population OASIS was one additional cause for reduction in British prestige,” he ruefully concludes.

___

Associated Press Writers Mark Lavie in Jerusalem and Meera Selva in London contributed to this article.
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