US leaker faces hard choices while in hiding

By Peter Enav and Kelvin K. Chan, AP, Jun 11, 2013

HONG KONG (AP)—Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who leaked top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs, has few options to stay one step ahead of the authorities while in apparent hiding.

One possibility is to seek asylum in a place that does not have an extradition pact with the United States—there are few in Asia alone, a short flight away from Hong Kong where he was last spotted, but none where he is guaranteed refuge.

On Tuesday the 29-year-old Snowden’s whereabouts were unknown, a day after he checked out of a trendy hotel in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong. But large photos of his face were splashed on most Hong Kong newspapers with headlines such as “Deep Throat Hides in HK,” and “World’s Most Wanted Man Breaks Cover in Hong Kong.”

The coverage is likely to increase the chances of him being recognized although he could still blend with the city’s tens of thousands of expatriates from the United States, Britain, Australia and Europe.

If and when the Justice Department charges him—and it’s not certain when that will be—its next step will likely be to ask the International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol, for a provisional request to arrest him pending extradition to the United States.

Assuming that Snowden is still in Hong Kong, the judicial proceedings for an extradition request could take a year, and once completed it would be up to Hong Kong’s leader, known as the chief executive, to decide on handing over Snowden, said Michael Blanchflower, a Hong Kong lawyer with three decades of experience in extradition cases.

But even if the chief executive allows the extradition, the fugitive can request a judicial review and those decisions could be appealed up through three court levels, Blanchflower said.

Although a semi-autonomous part of China, the former British colony has an independent justice system based on the British legal structure.

One option for Snowden would be to claim he is the object of political persecution, and fight the issue in the courts to avoid extradition. He could argue that he would be subject to cruel and humiliating treatment in the United States. Hong Kong changed its regulations six months ago to require that a court consider cruel and humiliating treatment and not simply torture when considering extradition requests.

It’s up to “the Chief Executive to determine whether the offence is one that’s of a political character, in which case the extradition is blocked,” said Hong Kong-based lawyer, Tim Parker.

However, the strategy carries considerable risk because the U.S. could simply provide diplomatic assurances that he would not be subject to cruel or humiliating treatment.

“At that point it would be difficult for Hong Kong to resist deporting him,” said Patricia Ho, a Hong Kong lawyer who specializes in asylum and refugee claims.

But as things stand now, there is nothing to prevent Snowden from traveling to a destination of his choice—to one of the handful of nearby jurisdictions or countries that do not have extradition treaties with the United States.

One of the Asian countries without an American treaty is China, though there is no guarantee Beijing would want to risk a confrontation with the United States by taking Snowden in, even if gained a windfall of sensitive American intelligence information in the process. Snowden himself has given no indication that he prepared to cooperate with any foreign intelligence service, including China’s.

Another Asian flight possibility for Snowden is the self-governing island of Taiwan, which split from China in 1949 after a protracted civil war, and since 1979, has not had formal diplomatic relations with the U.S.

In lieu of a formal extradition treaty, American extraction requests to Taiwan are examined on a case by case basis.

An official at the de facto U.S. Embassy in Taipei—the American Institute in Taiwan—said Taiwan has generally been cooperative on the extradition issue.

“Taipei has so far been pretty good on responding to our requests,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Beyond Taiwan and China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and North Korea are also theoretical destinations for Snowden, because they lack extradition treaties with the U.S. But the communist or authoritarian systems they share make them unlikely destinations for a man who has gone to considerable lengths to portray his decision to reveal National Security Agency surveillance programs as an act of conscience.

Outside of Asia, Snowden might also consider seeking asylum in countries like Iceland and Russia. According to the Kommersant Daily, Moscow has said it might provide asylum. But Russia is also an authoritarian nation, so there is no guarantee that Snowden would accept any offer that Moscow rendered.

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The Ghosts of Europe Past

By Brendan Simms, NY Times, June 9, 2013

CAMBRIDGE, England—THE cheerleaders of the European Union like to think of it as an entirely new phenomenon, born of the horrors of two world wars. But in fact it closely resembles a formation that many Europeans thought they had long since left to the dustbin of history: the Holy Roman Empire, the political commonwealth under which the Germans lived for many hundreds of years.

Some might take that as a compliment; after all, the empire lasted for almost a millennium. But they shouldn’t. If anything, today’s Europe still has to learn the lessons of the empire’s failures.

The similarities with the Holy Roman Empire—which at its greatest extent encompassed almost all of Central Europe—exist at many levels. Today’s European Council, at which the union’s member states gather, reminds one of the old Reichstag, where the representatives of the German cities and principalities met to deliberate matters of mutual concern.

And like the European project, which originated in a determination to banish war after 1945, the “modern” Holy Roman Empire, which was reformed by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, was intended to defuse the domestic German antagonisms that had culminated in the traumatic Thirty Years’ War.

But most similarities are less flattering. Both the European Union and the empire are characterized by interminable and inconclusive debate. The German phrase for delay, which translates as “shoving something onto the long bench,” stems from when imperial bureaucrats pushed their uncompleted paperwork farther and farther down a long bench in the Reichstag council chamber.

And like the European Union, which is rived by tensions between larger and smaller states, the Holy Roman Empire proved too weak to contain over-mighty members like Prussia and Austria. Fears of partition and collapse abounded. The Reichstag was paralyzed; the emperor was hamstrung by rival princes.

Granted, in a world of increasingly absolutist neighbors, the empire stood out in its respect for the law and a high degree of personal freedom. But the truly powerful states of the 18th and 19th centuries were those that learned from the empire’s mistakes.

The German experience was a cautionary tale for the American colonies after the Revolutionary War. They, too, were profoundly divided over how to defend themselves, and above all on the question of how the huge debt accumulated during the war should be repaid.

The existing Articles of Confederation were too weak for the task, and the founders cast about for alternative models. In the Federalist Papers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton looked at the federal system of the Holy Roman Empire, but they found it to be “a nerveless body, incapable of regulating its own members, insecure against external dangers, and agitated with unceasing fermentations in its own bowels.”

Instead, the patriots embraced the model of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, when the two kingdoms, formerly so divided, had come together by merging their debts, parliaments and collective efforts on the international stage.

The resulting American Constitution created a powerful executive presidency and a representative legislature and made possible the creation of a consolidated national debt, a national bank and eventually a strong military, all of which in time turned the United States into the superpower it is today. The Holy Roman Empire, by contrast, failed to reform and disintegrated after it was defeated by Napoleonic France in 1806.

Some 200 years later, this history has been forgotten. Today’s constant round of European summit meetings and reform initiatives remind one of nothing so much as the interminable and futile German “imperial reform debate,” and they are likely to have a similarly unhappy, if less spectacular, end.

Like the old empire, the union has become preoccupied with legality and procedure at the expense of participation and effectiveness. This renders the euro zone cumbersome in the face of competition from the east and causes the bond markets to doubt its creditworthiness. Indeed, everything that Madison and Hamilton wrote about the empire then is being echoed today in Washington, albeit sotto voce.

Fortunately, there is a solution from history. The euro zone faces the same choice as the Holy Roman Empire and American patriots of old: how to overcome discredited forms of confederation. Rather than digging themselves into a deeper recession and democratic deficit through austerity measures, the states in the common currency need to form a full and mighty union on Anglo-American lines. They must create a strong executive presidency elected by popular vote across the euro zone, a truly empowered house of citizens elected according to population and a senate representing the regions.

The existing sovereign debts should be federalized through a “Union Bond,” with a strict subsequent debt ceiling for the member state governments. There will have to be a single European military and one language of government and politics: English.

This is the only framework that will endow the euro zone with the democratic legitimacy to reassure the bond markets, underpin the implementation of good financial governance across the entire union and defend its interests and values on the world stage.

More than 200 years ago, the choice was between the Holy Roman Empire and Britain. The Americans opted wisely and prospered; the Germans continued to muddle through only to see their empire extinguished. History thus holds out both a great opportunity and a terrible warning for the euro zoners.

Brendan Simms is a professor of history at Cambridge University and the author, most recently, of “Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy From 1453 to the Present.”

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Outpost on Pampas Where Jews Once Found Refuge Wilts as They Leave

By Simon Romero, NY Times, June 9, 2013

MOISÉS VILLE, Argentina—At its height in the 1940s, this outpost on Argentina’s grasslands had four synagogues for a population of 5,000, a theater for Yiddish-language acting troupes, a newspaper filled with feverish debates about the creation of the state of Israel and saloons where Jewish gauchos galloping in from the pampas could nurse a drink alongside fellow cowhands.

Now, Moisés Ville, founded in 1889 by Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Czarist Russian empire, has only about 200 Jews among its 2,000 residents. The last regularly functioning synagogue lacks a rabbi. The Hebrew school halted classes this year because of the dwindling number of Jewish children. Some of the last remaining Jewish gauchos have swapped their horses for Ford pickup trucks, and they now ponder the future of their way of life.

“There are various types of gauchos: those who look for trouble; those who are valiant soldiers; those who meekly take orders,” said Arminio Seiferheld, 70, who owns a small herd of Braford cattle and lives in a modest house shaded by palm trees. His leathery skin attests to a lifetime spent roaming the plains in harsh weather.

“I’m the type of gaucho who is still here, a survivor in a place where we once thrived,” he said, dressed in bombachas, the loosefitting pants worn by Argentina’s horsemen. His parents, Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, made their way to Moisés Ville when it was a linchpin for more than a dozen Jewish farming colonies scattered across Argentina’s grassy plains, known as the pampas.

These days Moisés Ville, with many of its historical buildings boarded up, is not quite a heartbreak of a town, but it feels pangs as traditions continue to fade. Captured over the decades in writings and film, its rise and fall ranks among the most remarkable chapters in the history of Argentina’s Jews, who at 250,000 are Latin America’s largest Jewish population.

Alberto Gerchunoff, an Argentine writer who was born in what is now Ukraine in the 1880s but arrived here in 1889 as the child of a settler, described the culture of Argentina’s first rural Jewish settlements in short stories. Tragedy enveloped his early experience here, as it did for many other pioneers from Eastern Europe, when a gaucho killed his father.

His family moved to Entre Ríos, a province with a cluster of Jewish farming colonies, and he went on to write “The Jewish Gauchos,” a 1910 classic of Argentine literature about the travails of those making their way from oppressed European shtetls to the seemingly endless plains of Argentina, a ranching power that then ranked among the world’s richest nations.

Hearing about Argentina’s openness to large waves of immigrants from Europe, 136 families came here in 1889 from the Pale of Settlement, the area of the Russian empire where Jews were allowed to live. They thought they had been promised fertile land to till, but upon their arrival they were abandoned at an unfinished train station.

Throughout the first winter, the settlers begged for food from passers-by. Dozens of children died from diseases and exposure. “There was no cemetery yet, so their bodies were placed in kerosene cans,” said Eva Guelbert de Rosenthal, 66, the director of Moisés Ville’s small museum, which preserves the town’s history.

Reports of their plight reached Buenos Aires and, eventually, Europe. Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German-Jewish banker and philanthropist, bought land for the pioneers, establishing Moisés Ville as a precursor to a more ambitious colonization project with the aim of resettling Jews in places like Argentina, Canada, the Palestinian territories and the United States.

Financed by philanthropists, towns with names like Sonnenfeld, Lucien Ville (after the baron’s son) and Ingeniero Miguel Sajaroff began to dot the pampas. Lacking secondary schools in their new settlements, many parents sent their children to Moisés Ville’s boardinghouses. A school here for teachers of Hebrew trained educators from across Argentina until a decade ago.

Yiddish remained the dominant household language here for generations, spoken by everyone from gauchos to pharmacists and itinerant salesmen. One of Moisés Ville’s two libraries still holds hundreds of tomes in Yiddish by writers like Simon Dubnow, a Russian-Jewish historian, and Sholem Asch, a novelist born in Poland.

“An Israeli researcher recently came here and stood in awe of our books, explaining that their value was immeasurable,” said Analía Fischer, 51, a Hebrew teacher here who no longer has any students.

Ms. Fischer guided a visitor one recent morning into the 700-seat Kadima Theater, which was inaugurated in 1929 with a concert featuring a soprano from Moscow. Recent windstorms had torn holes in the theater’s roof, and rain had damaged the elegant structure, still perched above the plaza but rarely used now by anyone in Moisés Ville.

Since the 1950s, hundreds of Moisesvillenses, as the town’s residents are known, have emigrated to Israel. Many others moved to larger Argentine cities like Buenos Aires or Rosario. Some went to the United States or Europe, fleeing the wild swings in Argentina’s economy. Residents joke that they plant wheat but sow doctors, a way of explaining that opportunities elsewhere beckon educated, young people.

What is left is a town that appears ready to fade into history. Stars of David persist on weathered building facades. Octogenarians ramble down streets named in honor of Baron de Hirsch and Theodor Herzl, the Budapest-born writer who was the founder of modern Zionism.

Some of the older Jews of Moisés Ville shrug and look to the ground when asked about what comes next for their outpost. Young people, as they might well do in small towns anywhere, complain of the tedium. Large-scale soybean farms are steadily displacing cattle ranches, once the source of great tales, from the surrounding pampas.

But while many trends which seem irreversible, exceptions persist. Abel Gerson, 29, the only one of his three siblings to remain in Moisés Ville, smiles when describing what keeps him here. Bespectacled and clad in bombachas and a boina, the beretlike cap of the gauchos, he still raises cattle, reaching his herd in a battered Ford pickup.

“I grew up here, so I can’t really see myself doing anything as satisfying as this,” Mr. Gerson said. Then, as he departed toward the range, he waved and said, “Shalom.”

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Your Smartphone Works for the Surveillance State

By James Allworth, HBR, June 7, 2013

I was 10 years old when the Berlin Wall came down—old enough to grasp that something important was happening, but not really old enough to understand exactly what was happening. Like a lot of kids born around that age, the specter of communism has never seemed like that much of a threat. We would hear stories about how horrific life was living under conditions such as these; but only in the context of something that had already failed. It’s only through history and books or films that my generation has a grasp of what life must have been like.

Just recently, I had the chance to watch the German film, The Lives of Others, which won the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Not only is it a remarkable story, but it gave me the best glimpse I’ve had yet of what day-to-day life must have been like in a state like East Germany. The infamous East German secret police, the Stasi, managed to infiltrate every part of German life, from factories, to schools, to apartment blocks—the Stasi had eyes and ears everywhere. When East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was reported to have over 90,000 employees and over 170,000 informants. Including the part-time informants, that made for about one in every 63 East Germans collaborating to collect intelligence on their fellow citizens. You can imagine what that must have meant: people had to live with the fact that every time they said something, there was a very real chance that it was being listened to by someone other than for whom they intended. No secret police force in history has ever spied on its own people on a scale like the Stasi did in East Germany. In large part because of that, those two words—“East Germany”—are indelibly imprinted on the psyche of the West as an example of how important the principles of liberal democracy are in protecting us from such things happening again. And indeed, the idea that it would happen seems anathema to most people in the western world today—almost unthinkable.

And yet, here we are. In terms of the capability to listen to, watch and keep tabs on what its citizens are doing, the East German government could not possibly have dreamed of achieving what the United States government has managed to put in place today.

The execution of these systems is, as you’d expect, very different. The Germans relied upon people, which, even if not entirely effective, must have been absolutely terrifying: if for no other reason than you weren’t sure who you could and could not trust. There was always that chance someone was reporting back on you. It might have been a colleague. A neighbor. A shop keeper. A school teacher. Not knowing whether someone you couldn’t see was listening to what you had to say, or whether those that you could see might be passing it back to the authorities—that must have taken an incredibly heavy toll on people.

But as any internet entrepreneur will tell you, relying entirely on people makes scaling difficult. Technology, on the other hand, makes it much easier. And that means that in many respects, what has emerged today is almost more pernicious; because that same technology has effectively turned not just some, but every single person you communicate with using technology—your acquaintances, your colleagues, your family and your friends—into those equivalent informants.

Think about the proportion of our lives that are undertaken online and digitally. Every tweet, every interaction on Facebook, every photo on Instagram. You search for directions with a myriad of online mapping options. You check in your location on Foursquare. You review restaurants you’ve visited on Yelp. You speak to people all over the world using Skype. Every time you have a question, you type it into Google, or perhaps ask it on Quora. An increasing amount of your purchases are conducted on eBay or Amazon. You back up your laptop to the cloud. Almost everything you listen to or read is there too, or in iTunes. And while you might scoff at these as something that only early adopters use, even late adopters of digital technologies leave behind an incredibly detailed trail of their lives. Every minute you spend on the phone; in fact, every minute you carry it around in your pocket; every email you write; every instant message you send. Every transaction that passes through your credit card is recorded.

For an average person, with access to just one of these, you could piece together quite an interesting picture of a person’s life. Interviewed recently on the Charlie Rose Show, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, observed that for a lot of people, “email is the most intimate witness to our lives in some capacity. [It] knows a lot about our lives.” But that’s absolutely nothing compared to the portrait you could paint of somebody with access to a full range of all these services.

Which, we found out yesterday, is exactly what the NSA has.

But the technology alone isn’t the problem. There has been a dramatic shift in mentality, and it doesn’t take much to work out the date on which this happened: September 11, 2001.

Much has been said about what happened in the aftermath of that tragic event. The extent to which there was an extreme political response is understandable, if not entirely forgivable. What is more shocking, however, is that ten years on—with the risk of death being higher from a lightning strike than from a terrorist attack, and with the election of a President that had railed against “a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide”—the problem hasn’t got better at all.

In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s got worse. Way worse.

Well before the revelations of the last two days, there had been serious hints that things were going astray. Like the data center off in the desert of Utah, apparently part of a network capable of storing yottabytes of data (I don’t know about you, but I’d never even heard the term “yottabyte” before). A former employee of the NSA described the basic premise of the center as just to capture everything: “financial transactions or travel or anything… [and] the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time.” Similarly, the Verizon revelations shouldn’t come as that big a surprise; according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit, AT&T had provided the NSA “with full access to its customers’ phone calls, and shunted its customers’ internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center” as far back as 2006.

And you could even see symptoms of the problem overseas. Europe—yes, the former home of East Germany—bravely proposed a series of changes to its laws that would enshrine the privacy of its citizens. These proposals would strike most people as reasonable: a right to get information out of a provider in a form that could be taken to a rival provider, and a right to be forgotten by a provider. Who was opposed to this? Not China or Iran, concerned that its citizens might benefit from rules that would allow them to cover their footprints or that companies would have a much stronger incentive to protect users’ privacy. Instead, it was an all-American alliance: US technology firms, concerned that privacy might undercut their business models, and the US government, worried that their ability to surveil without issue might be disturbed. The scale of the lobbying effort to defeat these privacy regulations was so unprecedented that it caused EU Commissioner Viviane Reding to say that “I have not seen such a heavy lobbying operation.”

The government will undoubtedly argue that the way in which this surveillance is all being conducted is very different to how it would be used in a non-democratic state; that is in fact exactly the line taken in an exit interview by Alec J. Ross, the State Department’s outgoing senior adviser on innovation: “the truth of the matter is that there are laws and due process in the United States that protect our liberties to a degree that simply do not exist in 99% of the rest of the world.” The evidence points to the contrary, however. For example, over the past ten years, the Supreme Court has prevented any challenge to the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, relying on logic that could have been lifted straight out of Catch-22: to “properly challenge secret Government programs requires the very information the Government refuses to disclose”—in other words, nobody actually has the standing to challenge the policy. And even in the presence of evidence—for example, let’s say the Government erroneously had sent you documentation of the fact that you’re being warrantlessly wiretapped—then it will simply fall back on argument of sovereign immunity to have the case dismissed.

There’s not a thing that can be done about it.

Now, if this was an ideological principle—a deep and profound belief in transparency, and the disinfecting power of sunlight—then, again, at least it would be understandable. But it’s not that, either. Simultaneously, while doing everything it can to watch you, the government is taking another page out of the East German playbook—doing everything it can to stop you from watching it.

The Washington Post ran a special back in 2010 entitled “Top Secret America” that detailed the extent to which this was taking place. “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” There is an entire industry that is simply out of the view of the public. Information about what Government is doing—essential for people to be able to make an informed choice in a representative democracy—is simply buried within it. Over-classifying has been turned into an art form. Embarrassing information is increasingly being classified, so it never sees the light of day. In fact, just last year, US Government transparency has hit an all-time low: the government cited national security “to withhold information at least 5,223 times—a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama’s first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.”

The difficulty with which it is possible to pry open this world, and the consequences for doing so, are escalating rapidly, too. Whistleblowers are being strung up: say you leak information about government financial waste and mismanagement, well, you could find yourself being charged under the Espionage Act—the same statute used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B. In fact, this administration has launched more prosecutions of whistleblowers using this law than every previous administration combined. It has sought rules to allow federal agencies to fire employees without appeal if their work has some tie to national security. FBI investigations into leaks just so happen to be conducted in a way to ensure a chilling of the relationship between government officials and journalists. Then there’s the cases of Bradley Manning and John Kiriakou.

And while whistleblowers are being strung up, journalists are being hunted down, too. The DoJ secretly obtained two months of telephone records of AP journalists. Similarly, Fox News reporter James Rosen went from being a journalist to an “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in order to get a subpoena for his private email account. As the New Yorker pointed out, it was “unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets.”

And we haven’t even touched on the topic of Wikileaks. Despite it taking on the role of a publisher, using the power of the internet to avoid the requirement of a legacy print business, it wasn’t long after it started peeling back all these layers of secrecy that it was denounced by some as a terrorist organization. One might wonder how the East Germans would have reacted to such an organization? Perhaps Lenin, who had a 19-meter statue erected of him in the East German city of Leninplatz, might offer us some clues to as the way they would have thought about it: “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”

It’s a line of reasoning that befits a failed surveillance state. And yet today, is remains all too familiar.

Yesterday, when news of the PRISM program leaked into the public domain, two items struck me. The first, from the New York Times: “The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching… said that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.” And then, there was this, from the Washington Post: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”

Watching peoples’ ideas form as they type, in order to protect against someone who might become a terrorist in the future. George Orwell, eat your heart out.

The thing about that wall that cleft Berlin in half is that it didn’t just represent a means of keeping people from freely moving. It represented something much more—it was about ideas and principles. About the balance between security and freedom. About whether you were there to serve the state, or the state was there to serve you. What I can’t seem to shake is the feeling that somehow, the country most responsible for tearing that wall down has somehow managed to rebuild one in its own back yard.

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Study: Fast walkers stay ahead of the game

WTOP, 6/10/2013
WASHINGTON—Some folks like to take time to smell the roses, but walking quickly could mean you’ll be around longer to enjoy them.

Senior citizens who are the fastest walkers live longer than those with the slowest gaits, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and their collaborators.

The researchers crunched numbers from nine studies involving nearly 35,000 people.

Looking at the lives of slow and fast walkers who were 75 years old, only 19 percent of the slowest men and 35 percent of the slowest women lived another 10 years.

However, 87 and 91 percent, respectively, of the fastest walkers were still going.

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