FRANCE: Son of Equatorial Guinea dictator’s decadent life seized

The href="http://exchange:81/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/world/europe/for-obiangs-son-high-life-in-paris-is-over.html?_r=2%26ref=world" target="_blank">New York Times reveals the decadent life of the top family of this African newly oil-rich country.

For years, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue seemed to lead a charmed life, visiting his five-story pied-à-terre here on the chic Avenue Foch two or three times a year, choosing among 11 supercars, ordering bottles of Romanée-Conti Burgundies and watching movies in his home cinema.

But the police seized the property this month (having taken his $2 million wine collection earlier this year) as part of a corruption investigation involving Mr. Obiang’s father, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny, impoverished but oil-rich West African state.

Known in France as the case of the ill-gotten gains, it was originally brought in 2007 by two nongovernmental organizations and an association of Congolese citizens abroad. They filed a criminal complaint accusing Mr. Obiang and two other African heads of state, Omar Bongo of Gabon and Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, of embezzling state money to buy properties in France illegally.

“We didn’t wish to target the Obiang clan particularly,” said William Bourdon, a lawyer who leads one of the groups that brought the suit, Sherpa, which defends the victims of economic crimes “But their looting of public funds is quite spectacular.” The suit was joined by Survie, an organization that opposes neocolonialism, and the Fédération des Congolais de la Diaspora.

The building at 42 Avenue Foch is thought to be worth as much as $180 million; it was bought by the younger Mr. Obiang, the eldest son of the president, but then sold in 2011 to the state of Equatorial Guinea. The building has 101 rooms, including a Turkish bath, a hair salon, two gym clubs, a nightclub and a movie theater.

The mansion was described in the newspaper Le Parisien as a treasure trove decorated with furniture worth as much as $50 million, including bathrooms with televisions and gold- and jewel-encrusted fixtures and dinner tables “always set to welcome unexpected guests.”

In September, the French police seized 11 luxury cars belonging to Mr. Obiang’s son, including two Bugatti Veyrons, among the most powerful and expensive cars in the world; a Maybach; an Aston Martin; a Ferrari Enzo; a Ferrari 599 GTO; a Rolls-Royce Phantom; and a Maserati MC12.

“We would never see the Obiangs,” said a neighbor who did not want to give his name, “but I was struck by their incredible collection of cars.”

This year, police officers confiscated roomfuls of expensive goods, including bottles of Château Pétrus, among the world’s most expensive wines, and a $3.7 million clock.

According to the newspaper Le Monde, the Obiang art collection here included a Degas and five works by Rodin.

In 2009, Somagui Forestal, the forestry company owned by Mr. Obiang’s son ”” who was also minister of agriculture and forestry at the time ”” bought 109 lots for more than $22 million at the auction of the private art collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. The lots, which decorated the Paris mansion, included a 16th-century vermeil elephant by Christoph II Ritter.

In addition to the investigation of Mr. Obiang, French judges issued an international arrest warrant for his son in July, accusing him of misuse of public money and company assets, breach of trust and money laundering, the proceeds of which were used to buy French property. Mr. Obiang recently appointed his son second vice president of Equatorial Guinea in an effort to provide him diplomatic immunity. In a similar move last year, shortly after the seizure of the cars, Mr. Obiang named his son a permanent delegate to Unesco. (After months of debate and hand-wringing at Unesco, a science prize sponsored by Equatorial Guinea title="Times article" href="http://exchange:81/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/world/africa/over-protests-unesco-approves-prize-financed-by-dictator.html" target="_blank">was awarded in July.)

The country itself, a tiny former Spanish colony of about 720,000 people, became very wealthy in the 1990s after oil was discovered, with per capita income, when currency differences are accounted for, exceeding $50,000 (compared with $43,800 in the United States). But little of that has trickled down. The reason, Western governments and the nongovernmental organizations say, is rampant corruption, much of it benefiting Mr. Obiang, his family and his allies.

The younger Mr. Obiang, 41, is known for his extravagant living and his taste for women, yachts and expensive cars. The magazine Paris Match recently described him as a “frustrated singer” who several years ago founded TNO Entertainment, a hip-hop label derived from his initials. He once recorded an album under the name Teddy Bear.

Emmanuel Marsigny, the younger Mr. Obiang’s lawyer, rejects the charges brought against Mr. Obiang. “He earned money in accordance with the laws of Equatorial Guinea,” Mr. Marsigny said, “even if those don’t comply with international standards.”

An effort to annul the seizure of Mr. Obiang’s Paris belongings because of his recently acquired official titles was rejected by a French court in March.

The younger Mr. Obiang is also facing civil forfeiture complaints in the United States. “While his people struggled, he lived the high life, purchasing a Gulfstream jet, a Malibu mansion and nearly $2 million in Michael Jackson memorabilia,” Lanny A Breuer, an assistant attorney general, said in a statement in October In June, the Justice Department said that the younger Mr. Obiang had spent $315 million on properties and luxury goods from 2004 to 2011.

Mr. Marsigny said that the French investigation against the Obiang clan was an attempt to “misuse the existing legal framework” and that the economic picture in Equatorial Guinea had brightened, with the country now enjoying “double-digit growth.”

Mr. Bourdon of Sherpa said the investigation in France against the three presidents had recently led to police searches of Mr. Bongo’s and Mr. Sassou-Nguesso’s French properties. The newspaper Libération reported that Mr. Bongo had 33 properties in Paris, 70 French bank accounts and 9 luxury cars worth nearly $2 million, and that Mr. Sassou-Nguesso had 16 French properties and 111 bank accounts

France, which retains significant military and economic interests in its former African colonies, has long been a haven for corrupt African heads of state, who in the past have been an important source of campaign financing.

The current investigation, Mr. Bourdon said, is a result of France’s recent effort to break with the traditional system, often referred to as Françafrique.

France’s newly elected president, François Hollande, said last year in a campaign speech that France would “repudiate” the “toxic air” of Françafrique, which Nicolas Sarkozy, the president at the time, had said he would also do. In an interview this year with the French diplomatic review Politique Internationale, Mr. Sarkozy called for a “balanced, uninhibited and transparent” relationship with Africa. But there have also been persistent reports of continued illegal financing of campaigns by African states and rulers, all of them denied.

The seizure of Mr. Obiang’s property this month is a major blow, Mr. Bourdon said, against “a culture of impunity that we thought would last forever.”

JAPAN/CHINA: Rocky diplomatic relations between the two leading countries

The href="http://exchange:81/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2012/0825/1224322962527.html" target="_blank"> Irish Times covers this story.

There could hardly be a less conspicuous spot for a conflict between Asia’s two greatest powers: a seven-square-mile group of unloved, goat-infested rocks uninhabited since the second World War.

Yet, a series of tit-for-tat landings by Chinese and Japanese nationalists has Tokyo and Beijing at diplomatic loggerheads and some openly discussing military options to defend what Japan calls the Senkaku Islands in the South China Sea.

A flotilla of Japanese neonationalists sailed for the islands last weekend, wading ashore to plant hinomaru flags and shout slogans for accompanying journalists.

Hong Kong activists who staged the same stunt a week previously on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in the second World War came home this week to a heroes’ welcome.

They have pledged to return to what they call the Diaoyus in October with more supporters.

That puts Tokyo in a serious bind. Japan deported the first batch of Chinese visitors last week, swatting away demands from conservatives to prosecute them for illegal trespass. Those demands will grow with another incursion, along with pressure to defend the islands militarily.

Lawmaker Akihisa Nagashima, a special adviser to Japanese prime minister Yoshihiko Noda, is among many politicians who want the government to toughen up.

“We should consider the use of a policing force, including the self-defence forces, to respond to the escalation of the situation,” he said last week.

Neither side wants the dispute to slide into military conflict. Japan in any case would have little chance of prevailing, at least without the help of its US ally, against the increasingly powerful Chinese armed forces, said Ukeru Magosaki, a former Japanese foreign ministry diplomat. “Japan is required to make a calm assessment of prevailing conditions,” he wrote recently.

Unsurprisingly, diplomats on both sides are reportedly furiously working behind the scenes to stop the dispute from worsening.

Any strategy will, however, require facing down hardliners. Japanese neoconservatives such as Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara argue that China is bent on Asian domination and “colonising” Japan.

He triggered the latest flap in April by launching a plan to buy the islands from their private Japanese owners, prompting Noda to announce their nationalisation. Ishihara said this week that the Japanese activists who (illegally) landed on the islands were “completely right”.

China and Taiwan have the stronger historical and geographic claims to the territory, which is 2,000km (1,243 miles) from Tokyo, and less than 200km (124 miles) from Taiwan’s coast. Japan took control in the 1890s after winning the Sino-Japan war.

The islands came under US jurisdiction from the end of the second World War until 1972 and were among the many issues swept under the rug by successive US and Japanese administrations. The China-Japan Joint Declaration of 1972 was widely expected in Taiwan and China to hand over jurisdiction to Beijing and planted the seeds of this summer’s conflict when it did not.

Debate rages about the true value of the rocks. The area around the Senkakus/Diaoyus is routinely described as “rich” in resources but that assessment is much disputed. “The hydrocarbon reserves are not very significant at all,” said James Manicom, a visiting researcher at the Ocean Policy Research Foundation in Tokyo.

In an interview last year with the National Bureau of Asian Research, he added: “If the two sides were really desperate for energy, presumably they would recognise that the fastest way to access the resources is to exploit them, rather than argue over them.”

Some observers therefore conclude that the conflict is rooted in politics, not oil or fish. To China, the Diaoyus are a symbol of Japanese colonialism, swiped as the spoils of war during a period of national weakness The day after Noda’s announcement of Japan’s nationalisation plan, a Chinese government spokesman called the islets “sacred territory”.

The fact that conservatives such as Ishihara routinely deny Japanese war crimes against China helps inflame tensions and ensure the Chinese further dig in their heels.

For Japanese nationalists, the rocks are a line in the sand against the rising maritime might of its increasingly powerful neighbour.

“China is becoming a very strong power. We have to protect our national interest,” says Hiroyuki Kurihara, a spokesman for the family that owns four of the five islands.

The Kuriharas, who are reportedly in financial difficulty, say they have long feared that a private buyer could be a front for a Chinese corporation or owner.

If, as expected, Japan’s government completes negotiations with the Kuriharas and buys the islands it will become directly responsible for what happens to them. In the meantime, Tokyo will repeat the mantra that they are Japanese and therefore the dispute can only be dealt with under domestic law, ignoring precedents for diplomatic negotiation and accommodation.

In the late 1970s, China’s vice-premier, Deng Xiaoping, agreed to shelve the dispute during negotiations with Japan. Deng said the “next generation” might have the wisdom to resolve the conflict. So far he appears he was wrong.

EGYPT: New direction for their foreign policy is raises a few Western eyebrows

href="http://exchange:81/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-schenker-egypt-ties-to-china-20120824,0,3749138.story" target="_blank">LA Times covers how Egypt’s presidential visits could be marking a potentially unpaliative direction

Next week, Egypt’s Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, will visit China at the invitation of President Hu Jintao. He will seek investments there that will enable Egypt to “dispense of loans and aid,” according to Morsi’s party vice chairman. From China, Morsi will travel to Tehran to attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit. Just two months after coming to power, Morsi is pursuing a rapprochement with Tehran and articulating a newfound ambition to jettison billions in U.S. foreign assistance dollars and financing from Western financial institutions. Taken together, these steps suggest that Morsi’s Egypt may be headed for a foreign policy shift rivaling the scope of President Anwar Sadat’s expulsion of the Soviets in 1972 and subsequent reorientation to the West.

Cairo’s burgeoning rapprochement with Tehran is the most obvious of Morsi’s foreign policy pivots. An Egyptian president hadn’t visited Iran since the 1979 revolution, and the clerical regime there continues to celebrate Sadat’s assassination. While the notion of a major long-standing U.S. ally self-identifying as “non-aligned” is odious, it was perhaps more tolerable for Washington during the tenure of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Given the heightened tension over Iran’s nuclear program, the timing of the Morsi visit seems deliberately provocative.

More problematic for the U.S., is Egypt’s outreach to China. Concerned about the effect of Egypt’s new policy of intentionally downgrading ”” and potentially even severing ”” ties with its peace partner Israel, Morsi appears to be engaged in hedging. Much like post-revolution Iran, China could be a willing partner for an Islamist Egypt.

China has not fared particularly well in the so-called Arab Spring. In addition to losing billions of dollars in energy sector investments in Libya, Beijing’s ongoing support for the Bashar Assad regime’s ruthless repression of the popular uprising has engendered the animosity of millions of Syrians. Beijing’s vetoes of United Nations Security Council resolutions against Syria has made burning Chinese flags a popular pastime among the anti-Assad opposition, and when the regime is finally dispatched, the Middle Kingdom’s economic and political interests in Syria will suffer.

Although an Islamist Egypt beset by insecurity and a failing economy might seem of little value to the Chinese, upgraded ties with the troubled nation would provide China with a foothold on the Mediterranean, and include, hypothetically, a port. Morsi’s Egypt might also be amenable to offering Chinese warships priority access to the Suez Canal, as the U.S. has traditionally been afforded. This privilege would be particularly appealing to China, which increasingly sees a need to protect its investments in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Another potential perquisite for China would be access to American technology in Egypt. According to an August 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, Egypt “had more potential Section 3 [Arms Export Control Act] violations than any country in the world.” The leaked cable expressed specific concern with a visit that year by a Chinese military official to an Egyptian F-16 aircraft base.

And these violations occurred during the Mubarak administration, which maintained ”” apart from difficulties with the Bush administration ”” strong strategic relations with Washington. Absent the constraints of close ties to the U.S., it’s difficult to imagine that Morsi’s Egypt would be more protective of U.S. military technology.

The benefits for China of improved ties with Egypt are clear. But Morsi also sees advantages in diversifying Egypt’s sources of assistance. At the most basic level, China’s foreign policy is based solely on perceived national interest alone, and as such, unlike the United States, Beijing will have no qualms about Morsi’s increasing limitations on press freedoms, restrictions on freedom of speech, constraints on women’s rights or the ill treatment of minorities. At the same time, China is flush with cash, and Egypt will again be ripe for foreign investment when and if security is reestablished.

No doubt, Morsi’s effort to recalibrate Egypt’s foreign policy orientation away from the West is not without problems. Beijing is not altruistic, so investment will be more likely than loans or grants. And should Cairo need credit, it will probably have to raise it from the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, which will have onerous requirements, and will be none too pleased with Egypt’s move toward Tehran.

If Morsi gets his way, improved bilateral ties to Beijing will embolden, if not enable, Cairo to downgrade Egypt’s ties to Washington. Of course, with the Muslim Brotherhood at the helm ”” and with increased domestic repression and unmitigated hostility toward Israel ”” this trajectory was perhaps inevitable. But Egypt’s shift toward China further complicates the relationship with the U.S. and U.S. policymaking in the Middle East. Alas, based on Morsi’s new foreign policy tack, Cairo’s transformed relations with Beijing promise to be just one of a litany of U.S. concerns with Egypt.

NEW ZEALAND: The accidental millionaire has been jailed

The href="http://exchange:81/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19364838" target="_blank">BBC reports on this story.

A New Zealand man who fled to China after millions of dollars were accidentally put in his bank account has been jailed for four years and seven months.

Hui “Leo” Gao left for China in 2009 after Westpac Bank mistakenly gave him a NZ$10m ($7.5m; £4.65m) overdraft. His former girlfriend, Kara Hurring, received nine months’ home detention. The pair, dubbed the “accidental millionaires”, were sentenced at a court in Rotorua.

The trial ended a saga that has grabbed international attention.

They were caught last year after being on the run for more than two years. Gao, 31, pleaded guilty to seven charges of theft totalling NZ$6.7m in June He was arrested and extradited from Hong Kong in December.

He said in court that he would not be able to pay back the money, New Zealand media reported. Hurring, 33, was found guilty of money laundering, attempted fraud and theft in May. She was arrested after returning to New Zealand in February 2011 and convicted in a Rotorua court after a four-day trial.

She pleaded not guilty, saying Gao had told her he won the lottery. She was also ordered to pay reparations of about NZ$11,800 to the bank. Westpac did not comment on the sentencing. Reports said the bank has recovered NZ$2.9m but is still seeking NZ$3.79m.

In 2009, Gao had asked the bank for a NZ$100,000 overdraft to help support his struggling garage. The bank found out about the error days after transferring the millions into Gao’s business account. But by then, police said, the couple had transferred more than half of the money into other accounts and then fled to Hong Kong. They allegedly went on a gambling spree in Macau and southern China last year.

The couple are reported to have separated soon after they arrived in China. Hurring returned to New Zealand after having a baby.

They have been on bail at different addresses before the sentencing, reports said, and their young son is believed to be with family in China. Hurring has a daughter from another relationship.

ISRAEL: Sperm counts are worryingly low

The href="http://exchange:81/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-israel-sperm-20120816,0,601440.story?page=2" target="_blank">LA Times reports on this unusual story about the future generations of Israel.

The founder of the Tel Aviv-based specialty firm raves about his product with the same gusto distillers reserve for their top-notch scotch. He’s particularly proud of his “premium” line. Sure, it costs a bit more, but it’s targeted at a more discriminating client.

Dr. Jacob Ronen is in the sperm business. Among other things, as head of Cryobank Israel, the country’s largest private sperm bank, he guarantees that his stable of superior donors includes only tall, twentysomething ex-soldiers whose sperm has passed rigorous genetic testing.

But finding such super sperm isn’t as easy as it used to be. Only 1 in 100 donors makes the cut. A decade ago, it was 1 in 10.

And it’s not just first-rate sperm that’s in short supply. All of Israel’s half a dozen or so sperm banks are scrambling to keep their liquid-nitrogen freezers stocked.

Simply put, the quality of Israeli sperm is falling at an alarming rate, and no one’s sure exactly why.

Fertility is a major issue in Israel, where memories of the Holocaust genocide are fresh, and having children is an entrenched part of Judaism. There’s also a political aspect, because birthrates among Arabs in Israel have at times been as much as double those of Jews, triggering a population race that some believe could one day affect who controls the land.

So the drop in the quality of sperm is raising some red flags, even though the cause remains a mystery. Speculative theories range from the mundane (carrying cellphones in front pockets) to the far-fetched (depleted uranium from exploded munitions). Some Israeli scientists are looking seriously at naturally occurring hormones, particularly estrogen, in Israel’s water and milk and suggest that it’s a mark of the country’s aggressive dairy farming methods.

The white-coated director of the Hadassah Sperm Bank, Ruth Har-Nir, hunches over a microscope to view a freshly donated specimen and begins to methodically count each squiggly swimmer magnified on the slide.

She is checking the quality of a prospective donor, a young graduate student hoping to earn some extra cash. Though sophisticated lab machines could be used to analyze potency, Har-Nir says the old-fashioned method works best.

After a quick scan, she sits up straight and shakes her head. The number of spermatozoa darting around each tiny grid on the slide is two to four, well below the minimum six required, and nowhere near the 10 to 20 per grid that indicates the kind of healthy concentration the bank likes to see.

Also, rather than surging forward, some of the little guys flit left and right or just stall out, suggesting a weak motility.

“Under no circumstances can we accept sperm of this quality,” she says. In the previous three weeks, her bank tested six candidates and rejected all. “This is the trend,” she adds.

When Har-Nir helped launch the sperm bank in 1991, she says, it turned away about a third of the applicants for low quality. Using the same standard today, it would reject more than 80%. Though the bank relaxed its criteria, it still vetoes about two-thirds.

Har-Nir first noticed the problem a decade ago when she began rejecting more and more sperm from otherwise healthy young men. She shared her observations with local fertility doctors and their research has confirmed her suspicion.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the concentration of sperm samples collected by the bank dropped 37% from 106 million cells per milliliter to 67 million, according to Dr. Ronit Haimov-Kochman, a leading Israeli infertility researcher at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center.

Though declining sperm quality is an international phenomenon, the change in Israel is occurring at nearly twice the pace as other developed countries, Haimov-Kochman said. If current trends continue, she said, by 2030 the concentration of sperm from Israeli donors will drop below 20 million cells per milliliter, which many international health experts define as abnormal.

So far, there’s no evidence that declining sperm quality is resulting in fewer babies. The birthrate of Israel’s Jewish population has risen in recent decades, thanks largely to the increase in the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who tend to have large families.

Haimov-Kochman estimated that infertility rates in Israel have risen from 10% to 15% over the last 15 years, but says that’s in line with international trends. But she said male infertility ”” once believed to be the cause about half the time, just as in the U.S. ”” is now suspected in 70% of the cases here.

Most worrisome, she added, is that research so far has focused on sperm-bank donors, mostly students who are younger and healthier than the general population.

If this is happening to the guys on our A-team, we might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

Sperm banks are struggling to cope. Rather than rely on walk-ins as they once did, they use marketing campaigns, posters in college sports centers and Facebook pages to attract virile candidates. The going rate for a donation has doubled over the last decade to about $270.

“The decline has been dramatic,” Cryobank’s Ronen said. “It’s a shame. We see these macho, beautiful guys come to give donations, but then we’re embarrassed to have to tell them that their sperm quality is so low they may actually end up coming back as a client.”

He’s capitalized on that, though, by offering to freeze sperm of young men with borderline quality who want to set aside a reserve in case their potency declines with age.

Har-Nir says her bank sometimes refers men with the most serious deficiencies for counseling or medical advice. But she emphasizes that rejection by the sperm bank doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t be able to have children naturally. It just means that their sperm isn’t, well, commercial quality.

Even with the drop in sperm quality being well documented, the cause remains unclear and the theories controversial. Some scientists fear that Israelis are being overexposed to female hormones.

“People in Israel are getting quite a load of estrogen,” said Laurence Shore, a retired hormone and toxicology researcher at the Kimron Veterinary Institute near Tel Aviv. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to expose children to such high levels of estrogen.”

He said that no studies so far have determined that estrogen levels in Israel are harming humans, adding that exposure may be too low for that. But he said it might be a factor in the sperm decline.

His research has found Israeli milk and associated products such as butter and cheese can contain 10 times as much estrogen as products from other countries because of Israel’s aggressive milk-production practices.

Israel is a world leader in producing milk, pumping twice as much from its cows as other parts of the world, he said. That’s partly because cows here are milked up to their eighth month of pregnancy, when natural estrogen levels in the milk soar, according to Shore. In nature, he said, cows usually stop giving milk to their own young when they are three months pregnant with a new calf.

Even though many other nations have adopted similar milking practices, Shore said, Israel is one of the first and most aggressive, so it could be seeing the effect sooner.

Haimov-Kochman is looking into water quality. As a tiny nation with a shortage of water, Israel reclaims much of its used water and sewage, which is processed, used in agriculture and may find its way back into groundwater.

The water, she says, has been found to contain traces of ethinyl estradiol, a synthetic estrogen used in birth control pills, which gets into the water through the urine of women taking the pills.

“You can’t clean this from the water,” she said.

Haimov-Kochman is also studying the effect of phthalates, chemicals used in plastic products that are suspected of affecting male reproductive development.

“But I can’t prove any of this,” she said.

Industry and government scientists dismiss fear about Israel’s water and milk as unfounded, saying levels are too small to affect humans.

“Only a tiny part of the total estrogen produced by the cows ends up in the milk,” said Dr. Stefan Soback, director of the Ministry of Agriculture’s National Residue Control Laboratory. “It is not sufficient to determine estrogen content in milk in order to claim physiological effects to somebody that consumes it.”

Haimov-Kochman worries that the government is not taking what’s happening seriously enough. She met with government officials a few years ago to discuss her findings, but there was no follow-up, she said.

“I don’t see any urgency about this from the government,” she said. “ title="In Vitro Fertilization" href="http://exchange:81/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.latimes.com/topic/health/medical-procedures-tests/in-vitro-fertilization-HEPAS0000077.topic" target="_blank">IVF [in vitro fertilization] is such a robust tool it can overcome bad sperm, so that’s reducing the pressure. But to me, it’s like putting your head in the sand.”

Meanwhile, sperm banks are struggling to stay afloat.

Said Haimov-Kochman, “If something isn’t done about this, Israel might find that its sperm banks can no longer survive.”