Madeline Neumann, 11, died in 2008 from undiagnosed diabetes at her home in Weston, Wisconsin. Her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, were convicted in separate trials of second-degree reckless homicide.

The couple's lawyers appealed the convictions. They contended that state law allowed the Neumanns, who identify themselves as Pentecostal Christians, to treat the girl's illness with prayer and protected them from being charged with child abuse.

The Neumanns' attorneys also alleged in part that jury instructions were erroneous.

In a 6-1 decision, the justices ruled that state laws on child abuse and reckless homicide "provide sufficient notice that the parents' conduct could have criminal consequences if their daughter died."

The justices also ruled that the jury instructions were correct.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

were predicted to release some antimatter particles among the deluge of charged particles spat out during these eruptions. But this is the first time researchers have observed antimatter coming from the sun.

Antimatter particles have the same mass and other characteristics as their regular-matter counterparts, but they have opposite charge. When the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, there was probably about as much matter as , scientists think. Somehow, collisions with matter destroyed most of the antimatter (when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate), leaving a slight surplus of matter, which became the planets, stars and galaxies in our universe. []

Studying natural sources of antimatter in the universe today may help researchers understand why antimatter lost that battle to matter all those eons ago.

"That such particles are created in solar flares is not a surprise, but this is the first time their immediate effects have been detected," scientists wrote in a statement from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the home institution of study leader Gregory D. Fleishman, who will present the findings this week at the 44th meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society in Bozeman, Mont.

The study detectedcalled positrons the antimatter partners to the mundane electrons that populate normal atoms. Powerful processes on the surface of the sun had ejected the particles, speeding them up to near light speed. Interactions of atomic nuclei, which the solar flare had accelerated, likely created the positrons.

Solar flares erupt on the sun when pent up magnetic energy is released, causing the sun to brighten and pour out powerful radiation.

To detect the positrons, Fleishman and his colleagues used NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and observations from Japan's Nobeyama Radioheliograph to study the polarization, or orientation, of radio light emitted by solar flares.

The researchers found that the light was polarized in different directions at lower frequencies, where normal matter dominates, compared to higher frequencies, where more antimatter is expected. This effect is just what the scientists expected based on the opposite charges of matter and antimatter.

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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - British actor Idris Elba may be best known as an enterprising Baltimore drug lord on the HBO series "The Wire," but he has a growing presence in sci-fi films and will play South African anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela in his first biopic.

Elba, who starred in 2011's action-adventure "Thor" and 2012 sci-fi film "Prometheus," will next be seen as a general in Guillermo del Toro's epic sci-fi disaster film "Pacific Rim," out in U.S. theaters on Friday.

The London-born actor will star alongside Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day and Ron Perlman in the film about a battle between giant alien monsters who ravage Earth and giant man-made robots known as Jaegers.

Elba, 40, talked to Reuters about working with Del Toro, portraying Mandela and how music features into his career.

Q: What drew you to the character of Stacker Pentecost in "Pacific Rim?"

A: (Del Toro) has got a real big imagination. He is a kid in a man's body that has been given all these visual toys to bring his imagination to life. When you look at "Pan's Labyrinth," which is so delicate and so provoking ... for me, it was being able to work with a master filmmaker like him.

Q: Del Toro said he put the cast through their paces in the giant Jaeger simulators. How grueling were those scenes?

A: It was just very tough to have to be put in the big massive simulator all day long ... it was really, really tough. In actuality, if there was a real Jaeger program ... we would all be the most qualified to do it.

Q: For this film, Del Toro said he specifically chose to cast actors more known more for their cult TV shows than film. What do you think of his choice of actors?

A: The days of movie stars, so to speak, is just behind us. What is a movie star? We've got people on the Internet that are bigger than television stars. I think the landscape is changing a little bit ... Before there were movie stars. There were people who were just actors and they said their lines and they became movie stars because people liked them. For me, I think that's the healthy way to make film.

Q: You play Nelson Mandela in the upcoming film "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom." What did the role mean to you and did you meet Mandela when preparing?

A: It meant so much to me, it's such a massive opportunity to be part of a true legend's life, and more importantly, the film re-educates people on this legend.

I never met Mr. Mandela because he was very ill, so our interpretation of him was without his personal influence. But the script is such a good script, and obviously it comes from his book, and the book speaks for itself.

Q: Did you feel any pressure in playing Mandela?

A: This is the first real biopic I've done, and there's no real difference in the process, but it's Mr. Mandela. So that's huge, everyone knows who he is and what he sounds like, and I look nothing like him.

If I get judged, which I will, about my performance or how I sound or how I look, I think people miss the point. The point is that this is called "Long Walk to Freedom," this is the book about his life and it's his own words.

Q: How do you want people to remember Mandela from the film?

A: That he's a man. He's a human being. I think we forget that, that he is human.

Q: You have a music career on the side as DJ Big Driis. You put out your own EP (extended play recording) and featured in Jay Z's 2007 album "American Gangster." What does music mean to you?

A: My music stuff is always a part. What it's become for me recently is that it's a reset between all the stuff I do. I go back to it to kind of remember who ... I am. It's really the one point of my life that I get to be creative without any pressure.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Paul Simao)

German world time trial champion Martin, who suffered concussion in a mass crash on the race's first stage, blasted round the flat 33-km course in 36 minutes 29 seconds.

Froome, adorned in the race leader's yellow jersey, was the last man down the start ramp and was two seconds quicker than Martin at 22km.

But the Team Sky rider could not maintain the pace pedaling into a headwind over the latter part of the stage and finished 12 seconds down on Martin, with Belgian Thomas De Gendt third.

Froome, Olympic time trial bronze medalist, was the big winner of the day, though, gaining two minutes on his nearest rival in the race standings and now leads Spain's Alejandro Valverde by 3:25.

Bauke Mollema of the Netherlands remains third overall 3:37 back with twice Tour champion Alberto Contador fourth at 3:54.

(Editing by Alison Wildey)

After the NBA's prized big man Howard chose to leave the Lakers in favor of the Houston Rockets last week, Los Angeles began the process of recouping by agreeing to a one-year deal with a new seven-footer.

The 31-year-old Kaman will ink a contract worth approximately $3.2 million, according to local reports, when free agents can officially sign on Wednesday.

"I am going to be going back to LA and it's to play for the Lakers! I am excited about this move and can't wait to play!" Kaman posted on his Twitter feed.

Entering his 11th season, Kaman has career averages of 11.8 points and eight rebounds and just completed a one-year campaign with the Dallas Mavericks.

He was an All Star in 2010 while playing for the Los Angeles Clippers.

(Writing by Jahmal Corner in Los Angeles. Editing by Patrick Johnston)

After nine hectic days of racing over 1,513 kilometers (940 miles), the Tour luxuriates in its first rest day on Monday. The pause allows the contenders for victory in Paris on July 21 to lick their wounds and regroup after Froome knocked them dizzy and grabbed the race lead with a triumphant first day of climbing in the Pyrenees on Saturday. But they'll also be ruing the opportunity they collectively wasted the very next day on Sunday to hurt Froome right back.

On what may well prove to have been one of the toughest and decisive days of this 100th Tour, and certainly one of the most tactical and interesting, Froome's rivals isolated him from his Sky teammates and forced him to ride alone one man against many up four consecutive climbs as jagged as sharks' teeth. But they could not make Froome crack.

"That was one of the hardest days that I've ever had on a bike," the 2012 Tour runner-up said after defending his yellow jersey.

The rival who harassed Froome most, with successive squirts of acceleration on the last climb, was Nairo Quintana. The lesson the Colombian drew from this drama amid pine forests and peaks with stubborn patches of snow was: "That we can break down his team a little, but that he can defend himself and is very strong."

Sky's impressive climbing on Saturday was in some respects reminiscent of the way Lance Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team would exhaust his rivals. But the way Sky wilted on Sunday definitely was not. Doped up on hormones, blood transfusions and other performance-enhancers, Armstrong's teammates rarely looked human like this. This Tour is the first since Armstrong was stripped last year of his seven titles for serial doping.

Seemingly drained by their monster efforts a day earlier, Froome's support riders quickly burned out. The day started badly for Sky when Peter Kennaugh crashed. He was treated for grazes and continued. It also ended less than ideally when Vasili Kiryienka rode in too slowly and missed the time cut, depriving Froome of his services for the Tour's last two weeks.

"It's quite nice to see that they're human," Froome said of his teammates. "I think it's quite understandable considering the amount of work they did."

For some rivals, Sky's difficulties on Sunday reinforced suspicions that the team isn't as strong as in 2012, when Bradley Wiggins and Froome finished one and two on the podium in Paris. Some riders were surprised that Sky wore itself out so quickly trying to control Stage 9.

"They are not unbeatable," said Jakob Fuglsang, the Dane who finished second behind stage winner Daniel Martin. "They blew themselves up one by one."

Martin's Garmin-Sharp team was particularly aggressive, with different riders distinguishing themselves with their go-get racing at different parts of the 168.5-kilometer (105-mile) slog from Saint-Girons to Bagneres-de-Bigorre.

"We were attacking without even thinking about it," said the Irish rider whose uncle, Stephen Roche, won the 1987 Tour. "When you look back, it's kind of crazy. But we wanted to really make the race exciting. We really enjoy racing our bikes."

For Froome, the day was far less enjoyable. Richie Porte, his lieutenant who rode furiously Saturday to come in second at the Ax 3 Domaines ski station behind Froome, got left behind by the pace on Sunday's second climb, to the Col de Mente.

That left Froome without help for the next 125 kilometers (77 miles) and three more climbs in temperatures once again into the 30s Celsius (above 90 Fahrenheit).

Looking around, Froome could see no friendly faces, just his main rivals ganging up on him and all with teammates to support them. Their eyes were hidden by their sunglasses, but their intentions were not.

Yet each of the four times Quintana spurted ahead on the final climb, through pines on a mountain-hugging road to the Hourquette d'Ancizan pass, Froome furiously whirred his pedals to stay with him. Two-time champion Alberto Contador and Alejandro Valverde, Spaniards who have both served doping bans, stayed with this battle but couldn't surge ahead of it themselves.

Froome said he went into that last climb "thinking 'OK, this is where they are going to put me under pressure'" but was expecting worse.

"They did go for me. I mean, Quintana it's not easy to follow Quintana in the climbs. He's a light little Colombian who can fly uphill, so to cover his attacks definitely wasn't easy," he said. "But yeah, I was quite ready for more attacks, and I'm quite glad there weren't."

Contador said: "The only times he was really tested was by the attacks by Nairo Quintana, who only tried a little and didn't try it with much conviction. But I think this is good because he (Froome) had to respond and we hope we can take advantage of that later."

With Porte rolling in nearly 18 minutes behind the leaders, Valverde moved up to second overall. But his deficit to Froome remained unchanged: 1 minute, 25 seconds.

Bauke Mollema and Laurens Ten Dam, both from the Netherlands, are 1:44 and 1:50 behind Froome, respectively. Teammates Contador and Roman Kreuziger stayed 1:51 behind. Quintana is still 2:02 off the lead.

The next test for contenders for the overall title is Wednesday's time trial to Mont-Saint-Michel, a walled medieval masterpiece in Normandy given World Heritage status by UNESCO.

"Froome is very strong in the time trial," said Contador. "But we have to see how we all recover after the first nine days when he gave it his all."

___

Associated Press Writer Jamey Keaten and AP Sports Writer Joseph Wilson in Barcelona, Spain, contributed to this report.

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on the for-some-reason-unforeseen roadblock.

Estimates for the additional costs insurers might charge vary. The Oregon School Boards Association puts it at $2,500 annually for each armed staff member. An administrator in that state suggests an additional $5,000 a year for arming and training one staff member. Some insurers, like , say the risk is so great that they won't provide any insurance at all. In Texas, where liability lawsuits face strong legal discouragements, the insurance has been less of an issue.

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One of the initial criticisms of the NRA's plan for trained, armed guards paid for by the federal government was that it was prohibitively costly. A research team at Cleveland State Universityunder two scenarios: either having one guard per school or a number of guards scaled to the school's population. The researchers then calculated the annual cost based on estimates of $75,000 or $90,000 in salary, benefits, training, and equipment.

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The costs to districts, if the estimates from the Oregon schools are correct, are also substantial nationally. If each school has one staff member trained and equipped with a weapon, that would total $7,500 per school per year, under its valuations. Or, broken down by school type and category of cost:

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That's $740 million for public schools and $250 million for private — nearly a billion dollars of additional cost. If the schools can get insurance at all. Of course, that cost is both negotiable (the article notes a Texas district that saved costs in that way) and, unlike the NRA proposal, absorbed on a district-by-district basis.

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If you figure that more than one teacher might be armed, those costs go up quickly. Using the Cleveland State data, we took a look at how much it would cost to insure one out of every ten teachers, assuming a school has a teacher-to-student ratio of one-to-30. Under that scenario, the cost for all schools tops $1.1 billion—for insurance alone.

Debate aside, the insurance industry—an industry predicated on reducing the likelihood that something costly will happen — doesn't seem to consider the idea of putting armed people in school s a good one.

“I haven’t seen evidence yet that suggests people are determining that arming teachers is a recommended way to manage risk,” she said. “Far from it.”

Which doesn't suggest that insurance premiums for gun-toting middle school teachers are likely to come down any time soon.

Photo: A fourth grade teacher learns how to use a Magnum. (AP)

An inquiry into Cyprus' financial practices led by three former Supreme Court judges has been limited by their refusal to delve into areas which could become subject to lawsuits, such as possible failures in corporate governance and acquisitions.

"The issues raised (by judges) can be resolved by inquiries which will be handled by criminal investigators," said Ionas Nicolaou, Cyprus's Justice Minister.

Cypriot authorities were forced to seize uninsured deposits at its two main banks in March to qualify for 10 billion euros in aid from international lenders, the first time bank savers were singed in the euro zone crisis. Islanders still live under capital controls, also a first in the history of the euro zone.

Problems on Cyprus, which joined the euro zone in 2008, snowballed into the winding-down of Cyprus's Laiki Bank under a mountain of debt and a large chunk of deposits exceeding 100,000 euros being converted to equity to prop up Bank of Cyprus.

The scope of the inquiries covers the expansion into Greece, corporate governance, and why Cypriot banks bought large quantities of Greek bonds.

Cypriot banks lost about 4.5 billion euros ($5.81 billion)when European Union leaders agreed in late 2011 to a Greek debt writedown, designed to make that country's debt burden more sustainable.

They will also assess regulatory supervision, decisions by banks to write off loans, the soundness of fiscal policies, the conditions under which the bailout was negotiated, and whether central bank regulations were followed by commercial banks.

An independent assessment into banking practices last week said Cyprus's banking crisis was caused by a lack of coherent national policy.

($1 = 0.7744 euros)

(Writing By Michele Kambas; editing by Elizabeth Piper)

Complaints over the election in Baja and other states have led the conservative National Action Party to suggest it could pull out of an agreement known as the Pact for Mexico that has become a centerpiece of Pena Nieto's administration.

"It is now up to all candidates and political parties to abide by the decision expressed by citizens at the polls," Pena Nieto said Monday, adding that the vote "confirms the strength and validity of our democracy, but also makes clear there are areas of opportunity to perfect the system."

The preliminary count from Baja California, with about 97 percent of the vote, showed National Action's Francisco "Kiko" Vega ahead with a nearly 3 percentage point lead. But because of technical errors, that count "should not be considered reliable," said election council spokeswoman Helga Casanova. The more thorough official count will begin Wednesday and conclude Sunday.

Vega, who ran in a coalition with the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, had earlier claimed victory, as did the PRI's candidate, Fernando Castro Trenti.

Baja California is especially important to National Action, which has held the governorship since 1989, when its victory was the first recognized opposition win in Mexico's modern history a democratic milepost for a country dominated by Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, from 1929 to 2000.

National Action lost the presidency itself to the PRI last year, but its leaders joined other major parties in signing the pact to cooperate with Pena Nieto in passing education and telecommunications reform laws. Important challenges remain in tax and energy reform.

But National Action officials allege the PRI is returning to its strong-arm tactics of the past, undermining their ability to cooperate.

"We are seeing two realities," National Action leader Gustavo Madero said.

"The Pact for Mexico is very civilized, very advanced policy, but on the other hand, when there are elections, it's back to acting like the 1970s or 80s," Madero said, referring to an era when the PRI ruled through vote fraud and handouts.

Pena Nieto urged continuing support for the pact, saying his government is committed to "continue the dialogue and agreements with all political forces to achieve the reforms needed to consolidate Mexico's democracy."

PRI leader Cesar Camacho brushed off criticisms of Sunday's election, saying the voting in most states appeared to be fair. He alleged that some voters were being intimidated in National Action-led Baja California and that someone had thrown a gasoline bomb at the home of a PRI municipal candidate.

Elections were also held Sunday for state legislators and mayorships in 13 other states after violence-marred campaigns. At least nine candidates, party officials or their family members were killed and others reported being kidnapped or shot at in the runup to the vote.

A young political activist was shot to death on election day in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz and Camacho claimed that he was a PRI supporter.

The causes of most of the attacks are still uncertain. Some fear that drug gangs are asserting their power. Others fear that candidates are being targeted by their rivals.

In local races, the PRI appeared to be winning the mayorship of the border city of Tijuana, while National Action was ahead in Mexicali, the Baja California state capital. Further east along the border, National Action was ahead in the cities of Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros.

To the south, National Action led in the colonial city of Oaxaca, while the PRI claimed to have won the mayorship of the resort city of Cancun.

In the Veracruz state capital of Xalapa, Morris a cat whose owners ran him as a write-in candidate for mayor to illustrate disgust with the country's politicians may have won several thousand votes. While electoral authorities simply list write-in votes in a column labeled "unregistered," and don't break down who they were for, there were about 3,400 votes in the column by early Monday. That was about 3.5 percent of the votes counted up to that point. No other city in the state showed anywhere near that level of unregistered votes.

The cat's campaign managers his owners asserted in a statement that his real number of votes may have been 8 percent or more of the total, because many precincts also appear to have listed votes for the cat as "void," a column that included about 5,400 more votes, rather than "unregistered." That would have placed the black-and-white feline in fourth place in the race, ahead of six other candidates.

Hundreds of voters sent photos of their ballots to the cat's web site, showing their voting cards marked "Morris" and "Morris The Cat."

Largely beyond the public spotlight, the decades-old pursuit of bones and other MIA evidence is sluggish, often duplicative and subjected to too little scientific rigor, the report says.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the internal study after Freedom of Information Act requests for it by others were denied.

The report paints a picture of a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military-run group known as JPAC and headed by a two-star general, as woefully inept and even corrupt. The command is digging up too few clues on former battlefields, relying on inaccurate databases and engaging in expensive "boondoggles" in Europe, the study concludes.

In North Korea, the JPAC was snookered into digging up remains between 1996 and 2000 that the North Koreans apparently had taken out of storage and planted in former American fighting positions, the report said. Washington paid the North Koreans hundreds of thousands of dollars to "support" these excavations.

Some recovered bones had been drilled or cut, suggesting they had been used by the North Koreans to make a lab skeleton. Some of those remains have since been identified, but their compromised condition added time and expense and "cast doubt over all of the evidence recovered" in North Korea, the study said. This practice of "salting" recovery sites was confirmed to the AP by one U.S. participant.

JPAC's leaders authorized the study of its inner workings, but the then-commanding general, Army Maj. Gen. Stephen Tom, disavowed it and suppressed the findings when they were presented by the researcher last year. Now retired, Tom banned its use "for any purpose," saying the probe went beyond its intended scope. His deputy concurred, calling it a "raw, uncensored draft containing some contentious material."

The AP obtained two internal memos describing the decision to bury the report. The memos raised no factual objections but said the command would not consider any of the report's findings or recommendations.

The failings cited by the report reflect one aspect of a broader challenge to achieving a uniquely American mission accounting for the estimated 83,348 service members still listed as missing from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

This is about more than tidying up the historical record. It is about fulfilling a promise to the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and sons and daughters of the missing. Daughters like Shelia Reese, 62, of Chapel Hill, N.C., who still yearns for the father she never met, the boy soldier who went to war and never returned.

She was 2 months old when heartbreaking word landed at her grandmother's door a week before Christmas 1950 that Pfc. Kenneth F. Reese, a 19-year-old artilleryman, was missing in action in North Korea. To this day, the military can't tell her if he was killed in action or died in captivity. His body has never been found.

"It changed my whole life. I've missed this man my whole life," she says.

She's not alone.

Reese is among 7,910 unaccounted for from Korea, down from 8,200 when the war ended 60 years ago this month.

A sense of emptiness and unanswered questions haunted many families of the missing throughout the second half of the 20th century, when science and circumstance did not permit the almost exact accounting for the dead and the missing that has been achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the government's efforts have provided closure for hundreds of families of the missing in recent years, many others are still waiting.

Over time, the obscure government bureaucracies in charge of the accounting task have largely managed to escape close public scrutiny despite clashing with a growing number of advocacy groups and individuals such as Frank Metersky, a Korean War veteran who has spent decades pressing for a more aggressive and effective U.S. effort.

The outlook for improvement at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, he says, is not encouraging.

"Today it's worse than ever," he says.

People disagree on the extent of the problem. But even the current JPAC commander, Air Force Maj. Gen. Kelly K. McKeague, says he would not dispute those who say his organization is dysfunctional.

"I'd say you're right, and we're doing something about it," McKeague said in a telephone interview last week from his headquarters in Hawaii. He said changes, possibly to include consolidating the accounting bureaucracy and putting its management under the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, are under consideration.

The internal report by Paul M. Cole was never meant to be made public. It is unsparing in its criticisms:

In recent years the process by which JPAC gathers bones and other material useful for identifications has "collapsed" and is now "acutely dysfunctional."

JPAC is finding too few investigative leads, resulting in too few collections of human remains to come even close to achieving Congress's demand for a minimum 200 identifications per year by 2015. Of the 80 identifications that JPAC's Central Identification Laboratory made in 2012, only 35 were derived from remains recovered by JPAC. Thirty-eight of the 80 were either handed over unilaterally by other governments or were disinterred from a U.S. military cemetery. Seven were from a combination of those sources.

Some search teams are sent into the field, particularly in Europe, on what amount to boondoggles. No one is held to account for "a pattern of foreign travel, accommodations and activities paid for by public funds that are ultimately unnecessary, excessive, inefficient or unproductive." Some refer to this as "military tourism."

JPAC lacks a comprehensive list of the people for whom it's searching. Its main database is incomplete and "riddled with unreliable data."

"Sketch maps" used by the JPAC teams looking for remains on the battlefield are "chronically unreliable," leaving the teams "cartigraphically blind." Cole likened this to 19th century military field operations.

Absent prompt and significant change, "the descent from dysfunction to total failure ... is inevitable," Cole concluded.

He directed most of his criticism at the field operations that collect bones and other material, as opposed to the laboratory scientists at JPAC who use that material to identify the remains. Cole is a management consultant and recognized research expert in the field of accounting for war remains; he still works at JPAC.

More broadly, the government organizations responsible for the accounting mission, including the Pentagon's Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, or DPMO, which is in charge of policy, have sometimes complicated their task by making public statements that their critics view as disingenuous or erroneous.

The head of DPMO, for example, retired Army Maj. Gen. W. Montague Winfield, said last month at a public forum that the U.S. government has "no evidence" that U.S. servicemen taken prisoner in North Korea during the 1950-53 war were later moved to the former Soviet Union against their will and never returned.

Washington made a detailed case in writing to Moscow in 1993 that such transfers did happen, and the AP has obtained a videotape produced by U.S. officials and given to the Russians at the same time to support the U.S. case.

The tape, which has never before been made public, was provided to the AP by a former government official who was not authorized to release it. It says that based on interviews and other research, U.S. investigators believe "10s if not 100s" of American POWs were transferred to the territory of the former Soviet Union. In some cases they were moved to Russia through rail transfer points in China, the tape asserts.

"Certainly we understand that these operations were never meant to see the light of day," the film says.

The Russian government has repeatedly denied it received American POWs from Korea.

Mark Sauter, a private researcher and co-author with John Zimmerlee of "American Trophies and Washington's Cynical Attitude," an e-book about POWs to be published this month, found in government archives a U.S. intelligence report from August 1955, two years after the war, calling for a bigger intelligence effort to learn about such POW transfers.

"Continued and numerous fragmentary intelligence reports give credence to possible detention of a large number of American POWs in China, Manchuria, U.S.S.R., and North Korea," it said. It cited one "significant report" describing "a large number of U.S. POWs being shipped into U.S.S.R. by rail" from northeast China.

Accounting for the nation's war dead has been a politically charged issue for decades. The debate is not about the practicality of the mission, which some might question, but how it should be pursued.

Sometimes overlooked amid the squabbling is the emotional toll on the families of the missing. They are often bewildered by the bureaucracy and left to watch hope wear away with the passage of time.

In 1975, more than two decades after Pfc. Kenneth F. Reese was declared missing in Korea, his widow, Chris Tench, who had by then remarried, described her feelings in her local newspaper, the Gastonia (N.C) Gazette.

She wrote that initially she was relieved to realize that the policeman who delivered the news about Reese on Dec. 18, 1950, was saying that her husband was missing, not dead. He might turn up alive, she recalled thinking.

Later she thought differently.

"No, missing isn't dead," she wrote. "It's worse than dead."

___

Follow Robert Burns on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/robertburnsAP