Oil extends losses to near $70 as stocks sink

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Asian markets tumble on fears over Hungary 06.06.10

Oil extends losses to literal $70 as stocks sink 06.06.10

Overtreated: More medical care isn't everlastingly better 06.06.10

Regis' 3-run HR helps UCLA advance exceeding UC Irvine 06.06.10

(06-06) 22:00 PDT SINGAPORE, (AP) –

Oil prices fell to near $70 a barrel Monday in Asia, extending losses to the degree that regional stock markets sold-off amid fears Europe debt crisis is spreading.

Benchmark uncooked for July delivery was down $1.20 to $70.31 a barrel at midday Singapore time in electronic mercantile on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract lost $3.10 to settle at $71.51 in c~tinuance Friday.

Oil traders often look to stock markets as a gauge of overall investor saying, and most Asian bourses plummeted Monday, extending a rout that began Friday with a 3.2 percent drop in the Dow Jones industrial mean proportion.

Weak U.S. employment data for May and fresh fears that Hungary be obliged to slash government spending to avoid a debt default have undermined confidence in global economic growth and oil demand.

“Investors are fleeing riskier assets so they’re dumping stocks and oil,” said Victor Shum, each energy analyst at consultancy Purvin & Gertz in Singapore. “The market may have ~ing overreacting a bit, but the jobs report shows that the U.S. established order is still struggling.”

Some analysts point to falling U.S. unpremeditated inventories as a sign of improving crude demand and expect prices to recoil later this year.

“The shift in the market’s view of ship fundamentals has been too extreme,” Goldman Sachs said in a discharge. “We continue to expect crude oil prices to move into every $85 to $95 trading range in the second half.”

In other Nymex mercantile in July contracts, heating oil fell 1.92 cents to $1.9385 a four quarts and gasoline dropped 1.74 cents to $1.9779 a four quarts. Natural gas was up 0.3 cent at $4.80 by 1,000 cubic feet.

Brent crude was down 78 cents at $71.31 a barrel in successi~ the ICE futures exchange.

National intelligence director resigning

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Charles Dharapak / AP

FILE – In this Jan. 9, 2009 file photo, then President-elect Barack Obama listens as then-National Intelligence Director-dub Dennis Blair speaks during a news conference in Washington. A sway official says Blair is resigning.

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(05-20) 17:53 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) –

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair is resigning subordinate to pressure from the White House, ending a tumultuous 16-month tenure marked by intelligence failures and spy agency turf wars.

Blair, a retired Navy admiral, is the third director of national intelligence, a social rank created in response to public outrage over the failure to intercept the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

His departure underscores the deranging inside the Obama administration’s intelligence apparatus, rocked over the more than six months by a spate of high-profile terror attacks that revealed starting a~ national security lapses. And it comes two days after a pure Senate report criticized Blair’s office and other intelligence agencies with regard to new failings that, despite a top-to-bottom overhaul of the U.S. tidings apparatus after 9/11, allowed a would-be bomber to enter a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

In a message Thursday to his drudge force, Blair said his last day would be May 28.

“It is by deep regret that I informed the president today that I demise step down as director of national intelligence,” Blair said.

The patience became inevitable following a meeting between President Barack Obama and Blair forward Thursday afternoon, according to two senior congressional officials. During the encounter, the officials said, it became clear that Blair had “lost the boldness of the president.”

Obama made no reference to Blair’s flinty tenure in a brief statement Thursday night that did not be aware of his impending resignation.

“During his time as DNI, our intelligence common has performed admirably and effectively at a time of great challenges to our over-confidence, and I have valued his sense of purpose and patriotism,” the president related. “He and I both share a deep admiration for the men and women of our knowledge community, who are performing extraordinary and indispensable service to our nation.”

Two other government officials said several candidates already had been interviewed towards the national intelligence director’s job, which is to oversee the community’s 16 intelligence agencies.

“We have been interviewing several strong candidates to be his replacement,” one official said.

All the officials spoke on situation of anonymity because the announcement had not yet been made. Blair’s declination was first reported by ABC News.

Blair’s term in position was marred by turf battles with CIA Director Leon Panetta and Blair’s recognize controversial public comments in the wake of the abortive Christmas Day jetliner bombing.

The brace congressional officials said Blair had been on a losing streak as he squared off with Panetta last May over Blair’s strain to choose a personal representative at U.S. embassies to be his eyes and ears abroad, instead of relying on CIA condition chiefs, as had been past practice.

Blair issued a directive declaring his intention to select his own representatives overseas. Panetta followed up shortly accordingly with a note telling agency employees that station chiefs were restrain in charge — a move that some construed as insubordinate and a lick to Blair’s authority.

The skirmish ended up costing Blair the patronage of the president’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, who had been en~ to mediate.

In the failed Christmas Day attack, the Senate Intelligence Committee set that the National Counterterrorism Center was in a position to join intelligence that could have prevented it. As director of national notice, Blair oversaw the center.

One senior Senate staffer said it was visible Blair had been kept on the periphery of the FBI’s study into the Nigerian suspect in the attempted plane bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Blair’s later confirmation before Congress did not endear him to the White House, the officials before-mentioned, when he admitted that the elite interrogation team, the High-Value Interrogation Group, had not been officially deployed to point Abdulmutallab. Blair may have further damaged himself by admitting that he had not been consulted ~ward whether the HIG unit should have been used.

The HIG team was deployed following the Times Square bombing attempt this month, administration officials said this week.

Blair in like manner told Congress that Abdulmutallab continued to provide helpful information to investigators at a time whenever authorities had hoped to keep the bomber’s cooperation secret. With that advice divulged, FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed at the same hearing that Abdulmutallab was cooperating.

Blair was the primitive Obama administration official to describe the deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, final fall as an act of homegrown extremism. The administration had antecedently been reluctant to call the suspect, an Army psychiatrist, a homegrown terrorist or extremist.

By legal science, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, David Gompert, becomes the action director until the Senate confirms the president’s nominee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, called Blair a bring about public servant.

“I had high hopes for his willingness to work with Congress on a bipartisan basis to ensure that America’s instruction professional had the tools, resources and authorities they need to aid protect our homeland,” Hoekstra said Thursday.

Some Republican lawmakers have criticized the Obama president and cabinet for not keeping them in the loop on key intelligence matters, often signaling out Obama’s Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, during the time that being too secretive.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden in April raised the end as well.

“The fact that Director Blair was not nearly for example visible as John (Brennan) was in the aftermath of the December 25th substance is something that 100,000 people in the intelligence community, I’m as~d, took note of,” Hayden said during a panel discussion. “That was not a pious thing.”

Hayden and other intelligence experts are concerned that the general intelligence director position has never been given the authority it necessarily to effectively oversee the nation’s vast and sometimes fractious quickness system.

Hayden said Blair needed to be seen as the “primordial legitimate spokesman for what goes well and what goes ill ~ of the American intelligence community.”

The top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee blamed Blair’s submission on him being overshadowed by Attorney General Eric Holder. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., declared he heard about Blair’s resignation in news reports. Bond declared, “It must have been challenging to be forced on the sidelines ~ dint of. the attorney general but still catch all the blame for failings,” Bond related. “DNI Blair deserves this nation’s thanks for his long official function to our country.”

When Congress created the job in late 2004 since part of an intelligence overhaul, lawmakers intentionally kept the spy corypheus off the president’s Cabinet, adhering to the tradition that brightness officials should eschew politics.

___

Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman contributed to this relate.

RecreateMyNight.com

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In a nutshell: This situation allows friends to collect all the pictures, videos, status updates and thoughts from an epic night.

Cool factor: The site builds off your Facebook genial network and allows you and your friends to collaborate on a digital scrapbook. You’re furthermore supposed to be able to pull in content from YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.

Note: RecreateMyNight.com was built while a side project by social media gurus from MTV and ESPN.

This heading appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Bay Area business owners honored by Women Presidents’ Organization

not the least portion

Sonu Ratra

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Lori Matthews and Sonu Ratra are existence honored by the Women Presidents’ Organization as owners of two of the realm’s 50 fastest-growing woman-owned businesses.

Matthews, 54, owns San Francisco’s Isoflex, a four-character company that imports nonradioactive isotopes from Russia and distributes them to laboratories and research institutes around the world. The company’s gross revenue jumped from $7.3 the public in 2007 to $9.1 million in 2009.

Ratra, 38, is co-proprietor, with her husband Amar Panchal, of Sunnyvale-based Akraya, which places eminently-skilled consultants with corporate clients. Akraya – the Sanskrit word for mercantile relations – employs 30 people in the Bay Area and another 30 in India and popularly has about 220 consultants in the field. It grew from $20 the public in gross revenues in 2007 to $32.3 million in 2009.

The third edition of the annual list was released by the WPO, a nonprofit making with 1,400 members and 84 chapters, and American Express OPEN, the AmEx separation dedicated to small business. The group said the top 50 woman-owned firms generated $2.3 billion in combined glaring sales in 2009 and averaged 128 employees. WPO’s member firms medium $13 million in annual revenues and have 97 employees.

“There are 10 a thousand thousand women-owned businesses in the US that (employ) over 13 a thousand thousand people and generate nearly $2 trillion in annual sales,” Nancy Hood, defect president at American Express OPEN, said in a statement.

- Tom Abate

This moment appeared on page D – 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Yahoo’s site mirrors Facebook in latest facelift

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(06-06) 14:14 PDT SAN FRANCISCO, (AP) –

Yahoo Inc.’s latest facelift be disposed include a Facebook touchup.

As part of changes rolling out this week, Yahoo desire import personal updates from Facebook’s social network for users who straits a bridge between two of the world’s most popular websites. The Facebook join will need to be turned on by each Yahoo user.

The individual updates, known as a “news feed” in Facebook’s parlance, resoluteness be available throughout Yahoo’s website, including its front page and e-put in the post-office service. Other tools will empower people to automatically let their Facebook friends comprehend what they are doing and saying on Yahoo services such while its photo-sharing site, Flickr.

The additional tie-ins follow through up~ a makeover that Yahoo announced late last year in an essay to make its website more compelling.

Although Yahoo still commands a worldwide Internet assemblage of nearly 600 million, people have been hanging around for progressively shorter periods for the period of the past few years. One of the reasons is because race increasingly congregate on Facebook to share photos, video clips and science of harmonical sounds, discuss current events and bond with their families and friends.

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is betting that in addition of its visitors will stay on its website if they have power to simultaneously monitor what’s happening on Facebook. Keeping people on its locality longer would give Yahoo more opportunities to sell online ads and bring to mind its revenue growth after an extended slump that has sapped its earnings power and stock price.

Connecting with Facebook is just the rudimentary step in Yahoo’s attempt to establish its website as a civic hub. Later this summer, Yahoo intends to import personal updates posted on Twitter’s short-messaging service. And by the end of the year, Yahoo decree begin featuring widely played Internet games such as “Farmville,”"Mafia Wars” and “Fishville,” made ~ dint of. Zynga.

The increased emphasis on so-called “social media” could attain Yahoo more susceptible to the privacy backlashes that have plagued Facebook in newly come years. Yahoo is trying to ensure people don’t inadvertently portion any sensitive information by simplifying its privacy controls and urging visitors to write a critical notice of their settings.

As part of that process, Yahoo’s identify manage center has been renamed “Yahoo Pulse.” It had been called Yahoo Profiles before this its October 2008 debut.

The Facebook alliance is just the latest instance of Yahoo’s growing reliance on partnerships since the company hired Silicon Valley long practised Carol Bartz 17 months ago.

Yahoo’s search engine is in the case of adopting Microsoft Corp.’s technology. And the company recently indisputable to rely on IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s Match.com as its online dating love. Bartz is turning to outsiders to lower Yahoo’s overhead and make more intense its focus on its strengths in online news, sports, finance, pastime and e-mail.

Consumers more cautious about spending in April

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(05-28) 12:30 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) –

Consumers put on’t appear confident enough in the economy to open their wallets to a greater degree freely.

Their spending stalled in April. Without stronger job creation and higher pay, persons are less likely to up their spending in the months in advance and invigorate the recovery.

The flat level for consumer spending was the weakest showing in seven months, according to the Commerce Department fame. Personal incomes rose 0.4 percent, in line with expectations on the contrary not fast enough to help generate real growth.

Falling gas prices and cheaper service bills could make people feel better about spending more over the summer. So could historically mean mortgage rates. That would lead more people to refinance and retirement them with more disposable income.

But Nigel Gault, an economist at IHS Global Insight, before-mentioned employment will be key to supporting income growth in coming months.

“The consumer needs sustainable income support, so employment reports including next Friday’s testament be key signals of just how robust consumption will be upper the rest of 2010,” Gault said.

Economists are looking for 503,000 jobs to have existence added in May. That would be better than April’s 290,000 enlarge, the biggest one-month rise in four years. The May rise high is expected to include a sizable number of temporary census workers hired ~ means of the government.

Still, the April jobs report showed that 15.3 very great number people remain out of work. Economists say it will take at smallest five years for the economy to regain the nearly 8 a thousand thousand jobs wiped out during the recession.

In the mean time, besides people are holding on to their money. The savings rate rose 3.6 percent in April.

People are perception by touch a need to rebuild savings and reduce their debt loads and this order dampen consumer spending in coming months, said Sal Guatieri, an economist at BMO Capital Markets. But this force of ~ be offset somewhat by rising employment gains.

“Although consumers stalled in April, earlier vehemence and improving labor markets suggest they are merely down and not used up,” Guartieri said.

Consumer spending is closely watched because it accounts during the term of 70 percent of total economic activity.

The unchanged level of spending came after a 0.6 percent rise in March. It too was flat despite a 0.4 percent rise in April retail sales.

An early Easter holiday this year and attractive incentives offered through automakers contributed to the March increase in consumer spending.

Car buying has been tonic since late 2009. In April, sales of new cars and trucks rose 20 percent from a year earlier.

Lots haven’t been as busy in May. But industry experts say Memorial Day weekend briskness could boost monthly sales figures that are due next week. The automotive website Edmunds.com is forecasting some 18 percent increase for the month.

“This month hasn’t been specifically good for the car business so far, but we anticipate that the holiday weekend will more than make up for it,” Edmunds analyst Jessica Caldwell related.

Paul Taylor, chief economist with the National Automobile Dealers Association, reported auto sales should continue rising through the summer.

“Almost all of the relating to housekeeping incentives are favorable to higher new car sales as the summer unfolds,” Taylor declared. “Cars and trucks are simply (getting older), fuel prices are relatively low and low new car sales have made for a tight used car place of traffic … that makes a late-model used car less attractive compared with the new.”

Retailers who sell automotive replacement parts have been doing well, for the re~on that penny-pinching drivers opt to repair their cars themselves. On Tuesday, AutoZone Inc. reported third-quarter net income rose 17 percent on a 10 percent a~ in revenue.

“Customers continue to shop our stores in some cases disclosed of economic necessity, or simply to save money,” CEO Bill Rhodes told investors.

Major retailers reported profound first-quarter earnings over the past two weeks. But executives afore~ they are being cautious given the economic uncertainties. Business in May is under expectations because of cool weather and swings in the stock market, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.

“It’s soft a very volatile consumer environment,” Glenn Murphy, CEO of Gap Inc., told investors for the time of a conference call late last week. “I’m finding…that it’s righteous very difficult to predict patterns, week to week, weekday to weekends.”

Target Chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel said last week he expects turbulence throughout the rest of the year.

“There’s going to have existence good months, bad months and some ups and downs, and I meditate we’re seeing an environment where that kind of volatility and unpredictability is virtuous playing out in the consumer environment,” he said.

Even with the simpleton reading for April, economists expect consumer spending to grow at a honorable pace of around 3 percent in the current quarter. That would have ~ing down from spending growth of 3.5 percent in the first three months of the year, the strongest level in three years.

Tame increase could encourage more spending. Prices did not increase in April and are up blameless 2 percent over the past year, according to an inflation step tied to consumer spending. When excluding food and energy costs, prices were up precisely 1.2 percent in the past year.

___

AP Auto Writer Dan Strumpf and Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio contributed to this set forth from New York.

Global jitters – or glitch -batter U.S. market

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Just when it was looking safe to get back into the market, investors got some other jolt Thursday when unrest in Greece combined with a possible trading glitch caused a nearly 1,000-point intraday drop in the Dow Jones pertaining average.

The day got off to a rough start when U.S. investors woke up to further pictures of violent protests in Greece, where the Parliament was voting to recommend tax increases and spending cuts in exchange for a $140 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund and European Union.

At 11 a.m. Pacific time, the Dow was into disgrace about 160 points when it suddenly went into a coronary-inducing tailspin. By 11:45, it was on the ground almost 1,000 points and briefly dipped below the 10,000 point out. Then, just as abruptly, it turned around and ended the mercantile day at 10,520, down 347.80 points or 3.2 percent.

The bigness and speed of the sell-off startled even veteran traders. “I’ve not at all seen a trap-door like that,” said Howard Simons, a expert manaeuvrer with Bianco Research. “It takes a lot to get me amazed. I was amazed.”

‘Circuit rock-broken surge’

Although it was the Dow’s biggest intraday swing, it wasn’t enough to replace off the New York Stock Exchange’s “circuit breaker,” which halts mercantile if the Dow falls 1,050 points before 11:30 a.m.

However, the NYSE noticed potentially mistaken transactions in some companies, including Procter & Gamble, and briefly halted commercial in their shares.

In one of the day’s wackier events, Accenture’s U.S. shares traded round $42 most of the day but briefly plunged to a penny under the jurisdiction recovering to close at $41.09.

The NYSE, Nasdaq and other exchanges are talking by the Securities and Exchange Commission about whether certain erratic trades should exist canceled. Nasdaq said it had “no technology or system issues” Thursday afternoon nevertheless said it would cancel any trades that took place between 11:40 and noon that were 60 percent higher or decrease than the last trade at 11:40 or immediately before.

The New York Stock Exchange does not wait for to cancel any trades, a spokesman said.

It’s not sunny what caused the sudden sell-off. There were rumors it could be the subject of been set off by a trader at a large firm who mistakenly entered billions in lieu of millions on a transaction in futures linked to stock indexes.

Today, securities mercantile is dominated by computer programs that automatically buy and sell wide baskets of stocks when certain prices are hit. Much of this commercial takes place between large institutions, away from the main markets. It is cogitable that a large mistake could have a cascading effect.

“This is like hard science fiction, where machines wipe out everyone’s 401(k),” Simons before-mentioned.

Worried investors

That’s the last thing individual investors, still smarting from the utmost bear market, want to hear.

Ed Osborn, a principal with the cash management firm Bingham, Osborn & Scarborough, said his clients “are worried that it’s the differ of another collapse. They have been through some difficult times. Everybody is worried that it’s completely going to happen again.”

They are especially perplexed about Greece. “They put on’t have a good handle on it. You’re dealing through international finance in a far corner of the earth. They be possible to understand unemployment going up. You say ‘eurozone’ and they blank athwart,” Osborn said.

Without a bailout, investors fear that Greece won’t be able to refinance debt coming due this year. Costs on its misdoing are soaring. Even with a bailout, Greece might fail to implement the necessary austerity measures. If it does, those measures will contract growth and Greece still might not be able to repay its mounting trespass.

The bigger worry is that problems afflicting Greece will affect other unsettled European nations such as Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy, which are important markets for U.S. companies.

“Most of these countries have due and spending programs that are bigger than their economies can shield,” said Karl Mills, president of money management firm Jurika, Mills & Keifer.

These concerns receive caused the euro to fall 5 percent against the dollar this week and not remotely 12 percent this year. A stronger dollar can hurt U.S. exporters ~ means of raising the price of their goods overseas.

Some investors were hoping the European Central Bank would defend the markets by announcing it would buy the sovereign debt of tottering European nations, resembling to the way the Federal Reserve bought or guaranteed troubled U.S. shortcoming securities.

But European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet disappointed investors Thursday while he said the bank had not discussed this option.

“The U.S. regulation response to the credit crisis was massive, unambiguous and quick. They restored dependence in the whole system,” Mills said. “In Europe, the response has been scanty, incremental, ambiguous and slow.”

He said that’s partly because the European Central Bank represents sundry countries while the Fed represents just one.

Axel Merk, president of Merk Investments, said Europe has always been more reluctant than the United States to come by out of a financial jam by printing money. “Trichet said our focus is on price stability. And for the time being,” people believe him, he said.

Greece “is a huge wake-up call to the rest of the creation. Everybody spent too much. The bond markets are forcing countries to take sternness measures. They have to reduce government spending. And when they remodel spending, that reduces growth,” Merk said. “This isn’t a Greek or Portuguese or European conclusion. It’s a global issue.”

Net Worth usually runs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-post Kathleen Pender at kpender@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on serving-boy A – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Survey: Sexual satisfaction ebbs for 45-plus set

AP

In this December 2007 photo released ~ dint of. Tony Cost, Tony, 74, right, and Rosemary Cost, 68, pose toward a photo in Kennett Square, Pa. The Costs met in 2007 through the online dating service eHarmony and married in May 2008. (AP Photo/Tony Cost) NO SALES

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(05-06) 21:14 PDT New York (AP) –

Americans 45 and older are in a great degree more open to sex outside of marriage than they were 10 years past, but they’re engaging in sex less often and with in a ~ degree satisfaction, according to a major new survey by AARP.

What’s the point to be solved?

AARP’s sex and relationship expert, sociologist Pepper Schwartz, thinks monetary stress is a prime culprit.

“The economy has had an impinging on these people,” she said. “They’re more liberal in their attitudes, now they’re having sex less often. The only thing I comprehend that’s changed in a negative direction is financial worries.”

The supervise, being released Friday, is based on detailed questionnaires completed last year ~ the agency of 1,670 people 45 and over. The AARP, which represents 40 the masses Americans over 50, conducted similar surveys on sexual attitudes and practices in 1999 and 2004.

One of the most pronounced changes over the 10-year span dealt with sex externality of marriage. In the 1999 survey, 41 percent of the respondents declared nonmarital sex was wrong. That figure dropped to 22 percent in the modern survey.

Yet sexual activity — marital or not — seems to have existence less frequent overall for this age group. In the new scan, 28 percent said they had intercourse at least once a week, and 40 percent at smallest once a month — both categories were down roughly 10 percentage points from 2004.

Asked granting that they were satisfied with their sex lives, 43 percent in the just discovered survey said yes, down from 51 percent in 2004.

One cunning finding: Respondents who had a partner but weren’t married had sex other frequently and with more satisfaction than respondents who were married.

“These lengthy-term married couples may get a little less interested,” Schwartz reported. “Older people in nonmarried relations work harder at it and derive pleasure from it more.”

Schwartz, a professor at the University of Washington and maker of 16 books on relationships, said it was notable how likewise respondents in their 70s and 80s stressed that sex was of great weight to their quality of life.

“The big difference as people vale of years is not that sex becomes less important but that a sharer becomes less accessible,” she said.

Gender differences were pronounced in separate responses. Men think about sex and engage it more often than women, and are with reference to twice as likely as women (21 percent versus 11 percent) to grant entrance to to sexual activity outside their primary relationship.

With many older men well-suited to have multiple partners, Schwartz expressed concern that only 12 percent of the supervise’s sexually active single males reported using condoms. She cautioned that plane the elderly should not ignore the risk of sexually transmitted indisposition.

According to the survey, men are more than five times for the re~on that likely as women to say they think of sex at in the smallest degree once a day, and nearly three times as likely to argue they engage in self-stimulation at least once a week.

Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, a professor of remedial agent at the University of Chicago who has studied seniors’ relationships, related her research — not connected to the AARP — suggests that men are increasingly other satisfied with their sex lives, compared to women.

One possible rational faculty, she said, was the surge in use of erectile-dysfunction drugs ~ the agency of men. Comparable drugs to enhance older women’s sex lives acquire not yet emerged on a broad scale.

According to the AARP scan, 10 percent of the male respondents took medication to improve sexual functioning, and 23 percent reported sentient diagnosed for erectile dysfunction or impotence.

The survey asked respondents which would improve their sexual satisfaction. Twenty percent of the women and 37 percent of the men declared better health; 14 percent of the women and 26 percent of the men declared better personal finances.

One heartening development, Schwartz said, was that in addition older singles are venturing onto online dating services.

Epitomizing that tendency are Tony Cost, 74, and his wife, Rosemary, 68, of Cherry Hill, N.J., who met in 2007 from one side the online dating service eHarmony and married in May 2008.

Tony Cost before-mentioned he had been a widower for about three years before afflictive eHarmony.

“It was just a point in my life where I beyond a doubt I wanted to do more than just sit. I wanted to aspect for someone to share the rest of my life with,” he reported.

The couple said they exchanged 55 e-mails before their at the outset face-to-face meeting, a dinner at a restaurant that went ~ward for five hours as they chatted.

“It was like we’d known both other forever,” said Rosemary, who’d been divorced about 10 years control trying the online dating.

Speaking of his generation as a gross, Tony Cost said there’s more interest among divorced and widowed singles in discovery new partners.

“We’re living longer, we want to enjoy life,” he reported. “There are a number of incentives to take that first step and be advanced to out.”

The AARP said the survey had an error margin of in addition or minus 3.7 percentage points for questions answered by altogether respondents.

The AARP survey was administered in both English and Spanish, and included 630 Hispanic respondents — a bigger divide than in the general population in order to provide data ~ the sake of a separate upcoming report.

The Hispanic respondents reported a higher-than-medial sum level of health concerns, but the survey found, “Hispanics are additional sexually active and satisfied than the general population.”

___

On the Net:

www.aarp.org

Gates: New US intelligence chief ‘perfect fit’

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Carolyn Kaster / AP

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates management media aboard a U.S. Military aircraft, en route to Baku, Azerbaijan, from Singapore, Sunday, June 6, 2010.

(06-06) 07:09 PDT BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) –

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says President Barack Obama’s frugal for national intelligence director is the perfect fit because of his might to forge consensus among the nation’s spy agencies.

Obama’s excellent is James Clapper, who now works for Gates as the Pentagon’s notice chief.

Gates told reporters traveling with him from Singapore to Azerbaijan adhering Sunday that Clapper has shown that he can get along through civilian intelligence agencies.

The national intelligence director oversees 16 spy agencies.

Obama announced put ~ Saturday that he was nominating Clapper and he urged the Senate to bind him quickly. Some senators in both parties are questioning whether Clapper would have existence right for the job.

Texas gov. asks Obama to halt expected EPA actions

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Pat Sullivan / AP

In this April 16, 2010 photo, environmentalist Matt Tejada, executive director of AirAlliance Houston, talks outside an Exxon Mobil chemical breed in Baytown, Texas. Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest refinery, and sundry other facilities in Texas have been operating under permits never approved ~ dint of. the EPA.

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(05-28) 11:24 PDT HOUSTON (AP) –

Gov. Rick Perry took a jangle between state and federal environmental regulators to the country’s highest rule Friday, asking President Barack Obama to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from seizing over Texas’ air quality program.

A dispute that began as each environmental fight about granting permits to some of the nation’s largest refineries has freshly evolved into a political battle over state rights.

The argument reached a tipping sally earlier this week after the EPA’s regional director Al Armendariz threatened to transport Texas’ regulatory authorities by midsummer if it fails to comply through the Clean Air Act. Armendariz told The Associated Press his trust had already started hiring additional staff, in part to tackle Texas’ culpable air quality program.

If the EPA takes over, it will have existence replacing a successful program “with a less effective Washington-based, bureaucratic-led, require and control mandate,” Perry wrote to Obama. On Wednesday, he called the EPA’s propel a federal power grab.

The dispute is largely over Texas’ so-called flexible permits, which set a general limit on how much pollutants an entire facility can release. The federal Clean Air Act requires set forth-issued permits to set limits on each of the dozens of individual lengthening units inside a plant. The EPA says Texas’ system masks impurity and makes it impossible to regulate emissions and protect public freedom from disease.

Texas has been issuing the permits since 1994 even though it in no degree received the required federal approval. The EPA made clear at minutest five years ago it believed the permits violated federal air laws, omen Texas and industry it would take action. Industry, uncomfortable with the changeableness, sued the EPA in 2008, demanding the agency take action on this and several other programs that remained in limbo. The EPA has a court-ordered deadline of June 30 to act on the flexible permit program.

Armendariz has said the EPA is planning to reject the program. EPA documents obtained by the AP show the direction believes Texas’ program allows industry to release double the amount of abomination allowed by law.

There are 20 counties in Texas, including Houston and Dallas, that are adhering the EPA’s “dirty air” list. Several Democratic state legislators and environmental activists held a tidings conference on Friday, accusing Perry of turning a public health consummation into a partisan debate. They called on the EPA to answer the purpose everything in its power to ensure Texans breathe clean air.

But Perry insists Texas’ atmosphere quality has improved in recent years, partly due to the gentle permit program. In his letter, Perry told Obama that Texas had decreased azote oxide emissions by about 27 percent between 2000 and 2008. A federally regulated program that puts unnecessary limits on industry will harm a strong state economy — a harmful move in a recession, he added.

“In the interest of protecting open atmosphere quality gains, American jobs and domestic energy supplies, I respectfully and forcibly request that you stop EPA’s efforts to take over the Texas breeze quality program already delegated to our state as was allowed as being and contemplated in the federal Clean Air Act,” Perry wrote.