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Show Western Wats Western Wau has increased wages, and we are 5tiU wilding to work around your schedule. We still offer weekSy pay, a fun work environment, and we'll 9iive you time off for school! events, tests, and holiday*. Call Cody 753-1303 or appty online at ^ur¥eynetwork.cornjapplication- Who killed Beethoven? Viennese pathologist says Beethoven's physician inadvertently poisoned composer BY GEORGE JAHN Associated Press Writer It'/ excitinj to b e o couple. If you ore ready to announce on en5a5ment or a recent marria5e, let otnen know. ItV a* e a ^ ai 50105 to your computer. Qick 00 WEDDING NEW5 @ www.utaUate*man.com and fill in your info. O f *end to offi'ceCfflftotejmon.uiu.edu. Publijhed both online and in The 5tatejman. Now, that'; good new! Drivers wanted. Wed., Aus. 29, 20071 Special Features Paee 24 VIENNA, Austria (AP) — Did someone kill Beethoven? A Viennese pathologist claims the composer's physician did — inadvertently overdosing him with lead in a case of a cure that went wrong. Other researchers are not convinced, but there is no controversy about one fact: The master had been a very sick man years before his death in 1827. Previous research determined that Beethoven had suffered from lead poisoning, first detecting toxic levels of the metal in his hair and then, two years ago, in bone fragments. Those findings strengthened the belief that lead poisoning may have contributed — and ultimately led — to his death at age 57. But Viennese forensic expert Christian Reiter claims to know more after months of painstaking work applying CSI-Iike methods to strands of Beethoven's hair. He says his analysis, published last week in the Beethoven Journal, shows that in the final months of the composer's life, lead concentrations in his body spiked every time he was treated by his doctor, Andreas Wawruch, for fluid inside the abdomen. Those lethal doses permeated Beethoven's ailing liver, ultimately killing him, Reiter told The Associated Press. "His death was due to the treatments by Dr. Wawruch," said Reiter, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Vienna's Medical University. "Although you cannot blame Dr. Wawruch — how was he to know that Beethoven already had a serious liver ailment?" Nobody did back then. Only through an autopsy after the composer's death in the Austrian capital on March 26,1827, were doctors able to establish that Beethoven suffered from cirrhosis of the liver as well as edemas of the abdomen. Reiter says that in attempts to ease the composer's suffering, Wawruch repeatedly punctured the abdominal cavity — and then sealed the wound with a lead-laced poultice. Although lead's toxicity was known even then, the doses contained in a treatment balm "were not poisonous enough to kill someone if he would have been healthy," Reiter said. "But what Dr. Wawruch clearly did not know that his treatment was attacking an already sick liver, killing that organ." Even before the edemas developed, Wawruch noted in his diary that he treated an outbreak of pneumonia months before Beethoven's death with salts containing lead, which aggravated what researchers believe was an existing case of lead poisoning. But, said Reiter, it was the repeated doses of the lead-containing cream, administered by Wawruch in the last weeks of Beethoven's life, that did in the composer. Analysis of several hair strands showed "several peaks where the concentration of lead rose pretty massively" on the four occasions between Dec. 5,1826, and Feb. 27, 1827, when Beethoven himself documented that he had been treated by Wawruch for the edema, said Reiter. "Every time when his abdomen was punctured ... we have an increase of the concentration of lead in the hair." Such claims intrigue others who have researched the issue. "His data strongly suggests that Beethoven was subjected to significant lead exposures over the last 111 days of his life and that this lead may have been in the very medicines applied by his doctor," said Bill Walsh, who led the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago that found large amounts of lead in Beethoven's bone fragments. That research two years ago confirmed the cause of years of debilitating disease that ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ™ likely led to his death — but did not Research more Info @ tie his demise www.sjsu.edu/depts/ ! to Wawruch. beethoven/ "I believe that Beethoven's death may have been caused by this application of lead-containing medicines to an already severely lead-poisoned man," '; Walsh said. Still, he added, samples from hair analysis are not normally considered as reliable as from bone, which showed high levels of lead concentration over years, instead of months. With hair, "you have the issue of contamination from outside material, shampoos, residues, weathering problems. The membranes on the outside of the hair tend to deteriorate," he said, suggesting more research is needed on the exact composition of the medications given Beethoven in his last months of his life. As for what caused the poisoning even before Wawruch's treatments, some say it was the lead-laced wine Beethoven drank. Others speculate that as a young man he drank water with high concentrations of lead at a spa. "We still don't know the ultimate cause," Reiter said. "But he was a very sick man — for years before his death." The Beethoven Journal is published by the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California. Idaho senator pleads guilty to disorderly conduct Must be 18 with clean driving record. Have own car. Flexible hours. Perfect for student! To apply, meet with Ray, 874 so. Main, Smithfield, 563-6387. Hourly wage plus tips! Also, gas reimbursement. A Great Job! Broadway-style Single S Mingle or ate Wed. Sept 5. USU Ballroom M£ MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho pleaded guilty this month to misdemeanor disorderly conduct after being arrested at the Minneapolis airport. A Hennepin County court docket showed Craig pleading guilty to the disorderly conduct charge Aug. 8, with the court dismissing a charge of gross misdemeanor interference to privacy. The court docket said the Republican senator paid $575 in fines and fees. He was put on unsupervised probation for a year. A sentence of 10 days in the county workhouse was stayed. Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, which first reported the case, said on its Web site Monday that Craig was arrested June 11 by a plainclothes officer investigating complaints of lewd conduct in a men's restroom at the airport. Craig said in a statement issued by his office that he was not involved in any inappropriate conduct. "At the time of this incident, I complained to the police that they were misconstruing my actions," he said. "I should have had the advice of counsel in resolving this matter. In hindsight, I should not have pled guilty. I was trying to handle this matter myself quickly and expeditiously." Craig, 62, is married and in his third term in the Senate. He is up for re-election next year. He was a member of the House for 10 years before winning election to the Senate in 1990. He has been one of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's top Senate supporters, serving as a Senate liaison for the campaign since February. As word spread of Craig's guilty plea, a Romney campaign spokesman, Matt Rhoades, said in a statement: "Senator Craig has stepp'ed down from his role with the campaign. He did not want to be a distraction and we accept his decision." Sidney Smith, a Craig aide in Boise, said Monday afternoon that the senator was "in the (Boise) area" but was declining to give interviews. Minneapolis airport police declined to provide a copy of the arrest report after business hours Monday. Roll Call, citing the report, said Sgt. Dave Karsnia made the arrest after an encounter in which he was seated in a stall next to a stall occupied by Craig. Karsnia described Craig tapping his foot, which Karsnia said he "recognized as a signal used by persons wishing i to engage in lewd conduct." Roll Call quoted the Aug. 8 police report , as saying that Craig had handed the arresting officer a business card that identified him as , a member of the Senate. "What do you think about that?" Craig is alleged to have said, according to the report. 't Last fall, Craig called allegations from a gay-rights activist that he's had homosexual ; relationships "completely ridiculous." j Mike Rogers, who bills himself as a gay [ activist blogger, published the allegations on his Web site, http://www.blogactive.com, in October 2006. Craig hasn't said if he plans to run for a fourth term in 2008. An announcement was expected this fall. His spokesman, Smith, was uncertain if Craig's guilty plea would affect ! his re-election plans. : "It's too early to talk about anything about that," Smith told The Associated Press. ; J. Kirk Sullivan, chairman of the Idaho \ Republican Party, declined to comment on j the situation, saying he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Craig. Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Fred Frommer in Washington, and John Miller in Boise, Idaho, contributed. Social: Too much networking can leave one alientated, some say [] continued from page 3 syndrome (i.e., if you wants to see a pal's Facebook entry, you too must belong to Facebook; to gawk at his Flickr photos, you too must Flick).<I> </I> Pulse users can stream everything from Amazon wish lists TEXTBOOKS or PLAYSTATION to del.icio.us Web markers directly into Pulse accounts. To Wellman's point, they can also separate which groups of people receive which types of information. Another futurist prediction 'fa^^':i| involves vertical social networking — think really juiced-up message boards — in which users meet via genuine common interests rather than simply mass friend-collect. But that type of "let's nerd out by meeting others on the Thomas Kinkade social network" experience has its own pitfalls. Maybe Thomas Kinkade fans and dog lovers and Beautiful People — who can join a network where admission is based on looks — should be forced to occasionally disconnect} from each other and meet doghating ugly people, just like IRL. That's how real social networks have prevented us from getting too myopic, from living in apartment buildings where the only permissible artwork is ... Thomas Kinkade, painter of light. In some ways, we're dragged back to that Internet-causes-isolation theory again by the very sites that were designed to prove that it didn't. If hours in the day are limited, and we're spending more of them on social networking sites, then are we ultimately losing either breadth or depth in the way we interact with other people? Or are we just rethinking what it means to be connected, accepting that we'll trade Facebook pokeswith 3,456 people but then find our apartments on Craigslist? Until someone figures all of this out, and discovers how to prevent social networking sites from becoming the death of social networking, what does Jason Calacanis, that exhausted networking guru, plan to do? For starters, this: "If you really went to get in touch with me, give me a call." |