Since last September he has collected 2,300 names and sent them to the banks in two batches but has yet to get a reply "There are so many misunderstandings", he said. "We need more time."The historians to be appointed by parliament will also take time on their research. They are expected to report their findings next year - 52 years after the end of the war.Letters, page 15. The US government has joined the growing international hunt for hidden Nazi gold. It is expected to demand that Swiss banks over-ride their strict rules of secrecy in the search for assets stolen from Holocaust victims. Officials in the US State Department, US Treasury and the Department of Commerce confirmed yesterday that they began an investigation six months ago after the World Jewish Congress discovered that Swiss banks may have received more than $7bn (pounds 4.5bn) in stolen Jewish assets in World War Two. Pressure is building in the US for a full accounting by Switzerland of its relationship with the Nazi government and its practice of accepting what were clearly stolen goods, according to secret US Intelligence documents obtained by the congress.

"We know the Swiss have accounts which contain stolen Jewish property," Elan Steinberg, its executive director, said. "We don't know exactly who it belongs to but it clearly is not the Swiss banks."The US government's investigation, assisted by the congress, is focusing on a secret fund that would be worth $2bn in today's money. The fund was established to help finance the resurrection of the Nazi party after the war. The US and the congress suspect that some money in that fund, stolen from Holocaust victims, may have been funnelled to prominent manufacturers such as Volkswagen, Leica, Zeiss and Krupp Steel. The congress is awaiting answers from all those companies in response to inquiries it made in June.The congress found out about Swiss complicity in "cloaking" stolen Jewish assets after being given full access to the American national archive, which includes all US intelligence gathered on the matter during the war. One secret US document opened for the first time this week revealed that some of the gold discovered by the Allies in 1945 at a salt mine, totalling more than 800 ingots, was obtained from melting down the gold fillings of Holocaust victims."That fact alone is enough for us to push this inquiry until we have the full truth," Steinberg said.Red Cross officials in Switzerland may also have been involved, he added..

Politics has always been dirty work, and nowhere more so than in Russia. But even the cleaners were appalled about just how filthy a business it has become behind the stately walls of the Duma, the nation's parliament. So outraged were they by having to clean up on the morning after the night before that they fired off memos to their supervisors which paint a horrifying picture of life within the cauldron of Russia's infant democracy. Excerpts which were published by the popular newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets claim that, while the Duma shapes the laws by day, by night it becomes the venue for sex and drinking sessions.Despite numerous security guards and metal detectors at the building's giant doors, not far from the Kremlin, crime flourishes within."Door knobs, locks, toilet paper, soap, glasses, cups, electrical hand dryers, telephones, mirrors - all disappear with horrible rapidity," said the paper, pronouncing the legislature a "foul place". Lavatory-roll dispensers have been stolen so often they are not replaced.One cleaner complained that she had been ordered to clear up faeces in a hall. Sofas appear to be doomed - chunks of leather have been cut out of them "as if someone was making a jacket", the paper said.Accounts of brawls, gun-toting parliamentarians and all-night boozing sessions have emerged before from the Duma, whose short history has been dotted by outbreaks of wild behaviour, including occasional fisticuffs on the floor of the chamber.But this time the problem appears not so much to be the 450 members of parliament as their 10,000 or so assistants. There is no restriction to the number of aides an MP can have, and many work for nothing.They have swelled to such a number that the Moscow city authorities have complained that the public transport system can no longer cope.Nor, it seems, can the Duma's cleaners.

Officials quoted yesterday quibbled about the details of their allegations but few disputed they were true.. Less than two months before a general election, Romanian parliamentarians have outraged human-rights activists by seeking to recriminalise homosexuality between consenting adults. An overwhelming majority of MPs in the lower house would like to see the reintroduction of legislation originally passed under the Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, by which homosexuals could face up to five years in jail. The London-based human rights group, Amnesty International, condemned the proposed new law as "a backwards step" which, if ratified, would be "the worst such law in Europe".Other opponents say the law flies in the face of the Romanian government's promise to bring its legislation on homosexuals into line with more liberal European norms following its accession to the Council of Europe in 1993. A Taliban commander told Afghan Islamic Press, a news service based in Pakistan, that the rebels had taken Jalallabad, capital of Nangarhar province, and its airport from forces loyal to President Burhanuddin Rabbani. At its instigation, hundreds of thousands of Romanians have signed petitions calling for a return of the ban.Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, all other countries in the region have decriminalised homosexuality.. The balance of power in Afghanistan's 18-year civil war may have tilted decisively following the reported fall yesterday of Jalallabad, the country's main eastern town, to the rebel Taliban militia.