DES MOINES, Iowa – Michael Jackson is getting a new tribute. And it's in butter.
Iowa State Fair organizers announced Tuesday that in addition to their annual butter cow statute, there would be one of the pop music icon. Jackson died Thursday at age 50.
Both the butter sculptures will be on display in a 40-degree cooler throughout the fair from Aug. 13 to 23 in Des Moines.
Organizers say Jackson has been to the Iowa State Fair. He performed there twice with the Jackson Five in 1971.
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On the Net:
Iowa State Fair: http://www.iowastatefair.org/

RIO DE JANEIRO – Signals from the black boxes of Air France Flight 447 are fading, weakening along with hopes of resolving what experts are calling one of history's most challenging plane crash investigations.
Emergency beacons attached to cockpit voice and data recorders are built to emit strong "pings" for 30 days after a crash before fading away, though experts said they could continue for as long as 45 days.
Wednesday marks Day 30 since the plane dropped out of the sky with 228 people on board in a remote area of the Atlantic far off Brazil's northeastern coast and from radar coverage. A burst of automated messages emitted by the plane before it fell gave rescuers only a vague location to begin their search.
"Without that starting point, the 'needle in the haystack' analogy would look like an easy assignment compared to this," said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. "This is the most difficult accident in terms of recovery operations that I've ever seen."
Those hunting for the two black boxes said the search will continue. On Tuesday, Martine del Bono, spokeswoman for the French air accident agency leading the investigation, said it "is continuing the search" as long as there is a "reasonable" chance of locating the black boxes. She gave no final deadline.
U.S. Air Force Col. Willie Berges, the Brazil-based commander of the American military forces supporting the effort, has said searchers are likely to keep looking for 12 to 15 days beyond the crash's 30-day mark. The Americans are operating two U.S. Navy pinger locators that are being towed by French-contracted ships. A French nuclear submarine is scouring a search area with a radius of 50 miles (80 kilometers) in the area where the plane is thought to have crashed.
The logistics of recovering debris and remains from the Air France flight are complicated by its disappearance 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) off Brazil's mainland. Investigators should have an easier time recovering debris and clues in the crash of a Yemeni Airbus 310 with 153 people on board that went down Tuesday just nine miles (14.5 kilometers) north of the Indian Ocean island-nation of Comoros.
The black boxes emit an electronic tapping sound that can be heard up to 1.25 miles (two kilometers) away. While searchers for the Air France plane have detected some noise in the deep ocean, they have heard nothing from the flight recorders.
The Airbus A330 jet went down in the middle of the Atlantic shortly after midnight June 1. The crash date had been reported as May 31, as it was 11:14 p.m. on Brazil's mainland when the plane sent its last automated messages. But as searchers found debris and those messages were made public, it was clear the plane had crossed into a new time zone — and a new day — before it went into the ocean.
Without the crucial evidence the black boxes contain, investigators may never be able to determine definitively why the jet fell — despite the recovery of a substantial amount of wreckage and the remains of 51 people.
"The most you can do is a detailed forensic analysis of what affected the recovered items," Goelz said. "That may or may not give you a picture of what went on. But it isn't going to go to the cause of the accident, it will go to what happened after the event occurred."
With the recorders still missing, investigators are focusing on the automated messages sent by the plane minutes before it lost contact. One indicates the plane was receiving incorrect speed information from external monitoring instruments, which could destabilize the plane's control systems. Experts have suggested those external instruments might have iced over. Air France has now replaced the monitors, called Pitot tubes, on all its Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft.
But the mystery of what really caused the crash continues, leaving aviation safety experts unclear about what needs to be changed to stop a similar catastrophe in the future.
"Any time you have an accident that remains a question mark, it is a problem for the whole aviation community," Goelz said. "The aviation community and the public want to know what happened so we can prevent it from happening again."
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Associated Press Writer Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.

LONDON – For men with fertility problems, some doctors are prescribing a very conventional way to have a baby: more sex.
In a study of 118 Australian men with damaged sperm, doctors found that having sex every day for a week significantly reduced the amount of DNA damage in their patients' sperm. Previous studies have linked better sperm quality to higher pregnancy rates.
The research was announced Tuesday at a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Amsterdam.
Dr. David Greening of Sydney IVF, a private fertility clinic in Australia, and colleagues looked at 118 men who had damaged sperm. Greening and colleagues told the men to have sex every day for a week. After seven days, the doctors found that in 81 percent of the men, there was a 12 percent decrease in the amount of damaged sperm.
Many fertility experts suggest men abstain from sex before their partners have in-vitro fertilization, to try to elevate their sperm counts.
Sperm quality can also be improved if men don't smoke, drink moderately, exercise, or get more antioxidants.
Since concluding the study, Greening says he now instructs all couples seeking fertility advice to start by having more sex. "Some of the older men look a little concerned," he said. "But the younger ones seem quite happy about it."
Experts think sex helps reduce the DNA damage in sperm by getting it out of the body quickly; if sperm is in the body for too long, it has a higher chance of getting damaged.
Some experts said that while Greening's research is promising, it doesn't prove that daily sex for men with fertility problems will actually produce more babies.
Greening said he and his colleagues are still analyzing the study data to determine how many women got pregnant.
"Looking at sperm DNA is just one part of the puzzle," said Bill Ledger, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Sheffield, who was not connected to the research. "Maybe this will improve pregnancy rates, but we still need to do more studies."
Ledger said instructing couples with infertility problems to have more sex could stress their relationship. "This may add even more anxiety and do more harm than good," he said. He said couples shouldn't feel pressured to adjust their sex lives just for the sake of having a baby.
Greening said the study's findings were ultimately very intuitive. "If you want to have a baby, our advice is to do it often."
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On the Net:
http://www.eshre.com

BAGHDAD (AFP) –
British energy giant BP and China's CNPC International Ltd were unveiled Tuesday as the first foreign firms in decades to win contracts to invest and develop in Iraq's war-battered energy sector.

The companies succeeded in their bid for the giant Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq, which has known reserves of 17.7 billion barrels, the oil ministry announced.

The contract was the first to be awarded in open tendering for six major oil fields and two gas fields, nearly four decades after Saddam Hussein's party nationalised the Iraqi energy sector.

"The companies accepted to be paid two dollars per barrel," said Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani.

Under the terms of the 20-year contract, BP and CNPC have six years to increase production at Rumaila to 2.85 million barrels per day.

However, several foreign companies rejected the terms laid down by the government and withdrew their offers for other smaller oil fields as well as a gas field.

China's CNOOC and Sinopec asked to be paid 25.4 dollars per barrel extracted from the Maysan oil field but the companies were offered only 2.3 dpb.

US energy giant ConocoPhillips, meanwhile, was offered four dollars per barrel to work in the Bai Hassan oil field whereas the company wanted 26.7 dpb from the Iraqi government.

Separately, no bids were received to work in the Mansuriya gas field, the largest of two unexploited sites offered under the tendering process.

Tuesday's bidding was the first opportunity for energy companies to plant a foot in the country since the Baath party nationalised the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1972, seven years before Saddam took power.

The process attracted offers from 31 firms including US and European giants ExxonMobil and Shell but also a swathe of Asian companies from China, India, South Korea and Indonesia.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki underlined at the session's opening that Iraq needs oil money to rebuild the country after three wars and more than a decade of debilitating economic sanctions.

"These contracts are needed for the reconstruction of Iraq," he said. "They are for the benefit of Iraqis and the companies."

The oil deposits, holding known reserves of 43 billion barrels of crude, are in southern and northern Iraq while the gas concessions are west and northeast of Baghdad.

Shahristani said earlier that the ministry's primary objective is to increase oil production from 2.4 million barrels per day to more than four million in the next five years.

Increasing production to that level will, according to him, pump an extra 1.7 trillion dollars into government coffers over the next 20 years.

Shahristani has said that only 30 billion dollars of that sum will go to the companies which have extracted the oil.

The rest "is a huge amount that would finance infrastructure projects across Iraq -- schools, roads, airports, housing, hospitals," he said, insisting that the country would retain control over its oil reserves.

Ahead of the bidding, however, some firms expressed doubts about the terms of the contracts being offered by Baghdad.

The foreign firms awarded deals will have to partner with Iraqi government-owned firms, principally the South Oil Company (SOC), and share management of the fields despite fully financing their development.

They will be paid a fixed fee per barrel, not a share of the profits, and the fee will only be paid once a production threshold set by the government is reached.

"This raises the question of the profitability of the contract," said a source involved in the bidding, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The companies are the ones investing, but have a big problem with the fact that management will be shared," the source said.