Another Step

Redeem Team takes another step

BEIJING (AP) The U.S. Olympic team stopped the pick-and-rolls - and just about everything else Greece tried.

These Americans that looked so lost two years at the world championship when this team was being formed appear to have found their Olympic defensive way.

Batting away balls or swatting shots on seemingly every possession late in the second quarter, the Americans broke open a close game and went on to a 92-69 victory Thursday night to clinch a spot in the medal round.

Their offense wasn't too shabby either as the Americans were able to find the range on jump shots when the Greeks went to a zone defense to slow them down.

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Rangers are toast

BOSTON – The playoff race is now just a faint memory, like a sleep-away camp from a summer long ago. It allows the Rangers to refocus on the original and more tangible goal for this season: developing young players, particularly young pitchers.

And after another night when the ERA shot up and another young pitcher (Luis Mendoza) had to hand the ball to manager Ron Washington before the game was even halfway over, and an 8-4 loss in Boston dropped them to just one game above .500, the Rangers are forced to consider the season's most important questions:

Are the young pitchers gaining the kind of experience from which they will grow or are they simply getting hammered?

"The question isn't whether they are making progress," assistant general manager Thad Levine said, choosing his words delicately, "it's whether they are making enough progress."

For the seventh time in 11 starts this year, Mendoza failed to make it through five innings. Washington came to get him after he allowed the first four batters of the fifth to reach base. The last batter he faced, rookie Jed Lowrie, lined a two-run double to give Boston an 8-0 lead.

It also pushed the starting rotation ERA to 5.69. The ERA has pushed higher on each day of the current road trip, during which the Rangers have won just once in five games and have seen their deficit in the wild-card standings bulge to nine games back of Boston

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Federer shocker

BEIJING -- Roger Federer's bid for his first Olympic singles medal ended Thursday night when he lost to American James Blake.

With the sort of lackluster performance once unthinkable for Federer, he was eliminated in the quarterfinals 6-4, 7-6 (2).

The upset was a stunner in that Blake had won only a single set in their previous eight matches. But the top-seeded Federer is battling a year-long slump that has left him stalled at 12 major titles, two shy of Pete Sampras' record.

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Julia Child the female James Bond?

Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

While Julia Child was cooking pheasants, she was also part of an international spy ring during World War II.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The full secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

Among the more than 35,000 OSS personnel files are applications, commendations and handwritten notes identifying young recruits who, like Child, Goldberg and Berg, earned greater acclaim in other fields -- Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and special assistant to President Kennedy; Sterling Hayden, a film and television actor whose work included a role in "The Godfather"; and Thomas Braden, an author whose "Eight Is Enough" book inspired the 1970s television series.

Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.