The past may have finally caught up with a 97-year-old Nazi war criminal when Laszlo Csatary was taken into custody today in Budapest.

Csatary, who has been convicted in absentia and sentenced to death, was picked up early today, Bettina Bagoly, spokeswoman for the Budapest prosecutor, told ABC News.

The elderly former Nazi “was accused with committing war crimes,” according to a statement released by the prosecutor’s office.

Csatary will be taken before an investigative judge later today and the “prosecution office will initiate the house arrest,” the statement said.

Bagoly said the prosecutor’s office is still investigating allegations against Csatary, and the office statement indicated that the probe began in September 2011 at the instigation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel which specializes in hunting Nazi war criminals.

The prosecutor’s statement said they were warned by the Wiesenthal Center that Csatary “will leave the country as soon as he realizes that there is ongoing investigation in the case.”

The prosecutors said the investigation is complicated by the age of the crime and that it was committed in Slovakia, witnesses are in Israel, some of the legal papers are in Canada and the suspect is in Hungary.

Csatary has lived openly under his own name in Budapest in recent years. When the accusation against him became public this week and police visited his two homes in Budapest, Csatary was not there.

Csatary, the former police chief of a camp in the Slovakian city of Kosice, then part of Hungary, was described as a “particularly sadistic” Nazi official.

via Nazi War Criminal Laszlo Csatary Taken Into Custody in Budapest – ABC News.

The World War II generation may have passed down to their grandchildren the effects of chemical exposure in the 1940s, possibly explaining current rates of obesity, autism and mental illness, according to one researcher.

David Crews, professor of psychology and zoology at the University of Texas at Austin, theorized that the rise in these diseases may be linked to environmental effects passed on through generations. His research showed that descendants of rats exposed to a crop fungicide were less sociable, more obese and more anxious than offspring of the unexposed.

The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are part of a growing field of study that suggests environmental damage to cells can cause inherited changes and susceptibility to disease. Crews said his findings are applicable to humans.

“This, I think, is the first causal demonstration that environmental contamination may be the root cause of the great increase in obesity and the great increase in mental disorders,” Crews said in a telephone interview. “It’s as if the exposure three generations before has reprogrammed the brain so it responds in a different way to a life challenge.”

In the study, a group of rats were exposed once to vinclozolin, a common fungicide used to protect fruits and vegetables. This single contact altered how their genes were activated, and future generations also carried this change, though they never had been exposed to the chemical, Crews said.

via WWII Chemical Exposure May Pass Down Disease, Study Finds – Bloomberg.

It is a little-known but undisputed historical fact that Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. Though the Gutenberg Bible was certainly the first mass produced printed work, it was hardly the first printed book — nor was it even the first made using movable type. Chinese and Korean inventors had been producing printed books for centuries before Gutenberg was born.

One of the truisms of Western history is that a German guy named Gutenberg invented the printing press, changing the course of civilization forever. There is no doubt that Gutenberg’s printing press was a novel technology. But to say that he invented the printing press is like saying Steve Jobs or Bill Gates invented the computer. He certainly made it a commercially available device, but Gutenberg’s role was as a popularizer and entrepreneur. As a technology, the printing press has its origins in Asia, where it existed for centuries before making its way to the West. Gutenberg’s real genius was in adapting the technology for a Western market, capitalizing on a few quirks of the Roman alphabet to bring printed books to the mainstream.

via Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg's Bible.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy, The Dictator, features the antics of a fictional leader from North Africa. Admiral General Aladeen is an extreme representation, but why do real autocrats so often do strange things?

Cohen’s character lives in luxury in Wadiya, surrounded by an army of female bodyguards.

The film, on worldwide release this week, is about his travels to the US to address the United Nations.

The figure is clearly inspired by leaders like Muammar Gaddafi, killed after being ousted from power in Libya last year.

“Dictators can become self-delusional in a way, and think ‘whatever I do is ok’,” says Fred Coolidge, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado, who has profiled Kim Jong-il, Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler.

He believes that many such leaders may share a combination of personality disorder traits such as narcissism, paranoia and sadism.

A study of some of history’s most infamous autocrats sheds some light on what drives their strange behaviour.

via BBC News – The Dictator: Why do autocrats do strange things?.

During Brezhnev’s rule, the global influence of the Soviet Union grew dramatically, in part because of the expansion of the Soviet military during this time, but his tenure as leader has often been criticised for marking the beginning of a period of economic stagnation, overlooking serious economic problems which eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

via Leonid Brezhnev – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.