Olympian Oscar Pistorius charged with murder

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — Paralympic superstar Oscar Pistorius was charged Thursday with the murder of his girlfriend who was shot inside his home in South Africa, a stunning development in the life of a national hero known as the Blade Runner for his high-tech artificial legs.

Reeva Steenkamp, a model who spoke out on Twitter against rape and abuse of women, was shot four times in the predawn hours in the house, in a gated community in the capital, Pretoria, police said.

Hours later after undergoing police questioning, Pistorius left a police station accompanied by officers. He looked down as photographers snapped pictures, the hood on his gray workout jacket pulled up, covering most of his face. His court hearing was originally scheduled for Thursday afternoon but has been postponed until Friday to give forensic investigators time to carry out their work, said Medupe Simasiku, a spokesman for the prosecution.

South Africans were shocked at the killing. But while Pistorius captured the nation's attention with his Olympic quest, police said there was a recent history of problems involving him. Police spokeswoman Brigadier Denise Beukes said the incidents included "allegations of a domestic nature."

"I'm not going to elaborate on it but there have been incidents (at Pistorius' home)," Beukes said. Police in South Africa do not name suspects in crimes until they have appeared in court but Beukes said that the 26-year-old Pistorius was at his home at the time of the death of Steenkamp and "there is no other suspect involved."

Pistorius' father, Henke, declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press, only saying "we all pray for guidance and strength for Oscar and the lady's parents."

Neither Pistorius' agent Peet van Zyl nor coach Ampie Louw could be reached while Pistorius' own cellphone went straight to voicemail.

Pistorius' former coach, Andrea Giannini, said he hopes it was "just a tragic accident." Giannini said he believed that Pistorius had been dating Steenkamp for "a few months."

"No matter how bad the situation was, Oscar always stayed calm and positive," Giannini told the AP in Italy. "Whenever he was tired or nervous he was still extremely nice to people. I never saw him violent."

Yet Pistorius had troubles in his personal life. In February 2009, he crashed a speed boat he was piloting on South Africa's Vaal River. Witnesses said he had been drinking before the crash and officers found alcoholic beverages in the wreckage, though they acknowledged at the time they hadn't conducted a blood test on the athlete. Pistorius broke his nose, jaw and several ribs in the crash, as well as damaged his eye socket and required some 180 stitches to his face.

In November, Pistorius also found himself in an altercation with a local coal mining millionaire over a woman, South African media reported. Eventually, the two men involved the South African Police Service's elite Hawks investigative unit before settling the matter.

Pistorius owned firearms and posted a photograph of himself at a shooting range in November 2011 to the social media website Twitter, bragging about his score.

"Had a 96% headshot over 300m from 50shots! Bam!" he tweeted.

Police said that earlier reports that Steenkamp may have been mistaken for a burglar by Pistorius did not come from the police. Several local media outlets initially reported that the shooting may have been accidental.

Capacity Relations, a talent management firm, earlier named model Steenkamp as the victim of the shooting. Police spokeswoman Lt. Col. Katlego Mogale told the AP that officers received a call around 3 a.m. after the shooting.

A 9 mm pistol was recovered and a murder case opened against Pistorius.

Pistorius enjoyed target shooting with his pistol and an online advertisement featuring him for Nike read: "I am a bullet in the chamber." An article in January 2012 in The New York Times Magazine described him talking about how he pulled a pistol to search his home when his alarm went off the night before an interview. At Pistorius' suggestion, he and the journalist went to a nearby target range where they fired at targets with a 9 mm pistol. At one point, Pistorius told the writer: "If you practiced, I think you could be pretty deadly."

Asked how often he went target shooting, Pistorius replied: "Just sometimes when I can't sleep."

Police have still not released the name of the woman, but the publicist for Steenkamp confirmed in a statement that the model was dead.

"We can confirm that Reeva Steenkamp has passed away," Steenkamp's publicist Sarit Tomlinson said. "Our thoughts and prayers go to the Steenkamp family, who have asked to have their privacy respected during this difficult time, everyone is simply devastated. She was the kindest, sweetest human being; an angel on earth and will be sorely missed."

Tomlinson said Steenkamp, known simply as Reeva, was one of FHM's (formerly For Him Magazine) 100 Sexiest Women in the World for two years running, appeared in countless international and national advertisements and was one of the celebrity contestants on the reality show "Tropika Island of Treasure," filmed in Jamaica.

She and Pistorius were first seen publicly together in November at an awards ceremony in Johannesburg. Later, she began mentioning the athlete in public messages on Twitter.

She also tweeted messages urging women to stand up against rape as well as her excitement about Valentine's Day. "What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow?" she tweeted. "It should be a day of love for everyone."

Pistorius made history in London last year when he became the first double-amputee track athlete to compete in the Olympic Games, propelling him to the status of an athletics superstar.

Having had both his legs amputated below the knee before his first birthday because of a congenital condition, he campaigned for years to be allowed to compete against able-bodied athletes. Having initially been banned because of his carbon fiber blades — which critics said gave him an unfair advantage — he was cleared by sport's highest court in 2008 and allowed to run at the top events.

He competed in the 400 meters and on South Africa's 4x400 relay team at the London Games, making history when his selection for South Africa's team was confirmed at the very last minute. He also retained his Paralympic title in the 400 meters in London.

South Africa's Sports Confederation and Olympic committee released a statement on Thursday saying they had been "inundated" with requests for comment but were not in a position to give out any details of the shooting. The International Paralympic Committee also said it wouldn't comment in detail apart from offering its condolences to the victim's family.

South Africa has some of the world's highest murder rates, with nearly 50 people killed each day in the nation of 50 million. It also has high rates of rape, other assaults, robbery and carjackings.

U.N. statistics show South Africa has the second highest rate of shooting deaths in the world, second only to Colombia.

"The question is: Why does this story make the news? Yes, because they are both celebrities, but this is happening on every single day in South Africa," said Adele Kirsten, a member of Gun Free South Africa. "We have thousands of people killed annually by gun violence in our country. So the anger is about that it is preventable."

___

Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa. Associated Press writer Michelle Faul contributed to this report from Johannesburg.

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Doctor and Patient: Afraid to Speak Up to Medical Power

The slender, weather-beaten, elderly Polish immigrant had been diagnosed with lung cancer nearly a year earlier and was receiving chemotherapy as part of a clinical trial. I was a surgical consultant, called in to help control the fluid that kept accumulating in his lungs.

During one visit, he motioned for me to come closer. His voice was hoarse from a tumor that spread, and the constant hissing from his humidified oxygen mask meant I had to press my face nearly against his to understand his words.

“This is getting harder, doctor,” he rasped. “I’m not sure I’m up to anymore chemo.”

I was not the only doctor that he confided to. But what I quickly learned was that none of us was eager to broach the topic of stopping treatment with his primary cancer doctor.

That doctor was a rising superstar in the world of oncology, a brilliant physician-researcher who had helped discover treatments for other cancers and who had been recruited to lead our hospital’s then lackluster cancer center. Within a few months of the doctor’s arrival, the once sleepy department began offering a dazzling array of experimental drugs. Calls came in from outside doctors eager to send their patients in for treatment, and every patient who was seen was promptly enrolled in one of more than a dozen well-documented treatment protocols.

But now, no doctors felt comfortable suggesting anything but the most cutting-edge, aggressive treatments.

Even the No. 2 doctor in the cancer center, Robin to the chief’s cancer-battling Batman, was momentarily taken aback when I suggested we reconsider the patient’s chemotherapy plan. “I don’t want to tell him,” he said, eyes widening. He reeled off his chief’s vast accomplishments. “I mean, who am I to tell him what to do?”

We stood for a moment in silence before he pointed his index finger at me. “You tell him,” he said with a smile. “You tell him to consider stopping treatment.”

Memories of this conversation came flooding back last week when I read an essay on the problems posed by hierarchies within the medical profession.

For several decades, medical educators and sociologists have documented the existence of hierarchies and an intense awareness of rank among doctors. The bulk of studies have focused on medical education, a process often likened to military and religious training, with elder patriarchs imposing the hair shirt of shame on acolytes unable to incorporate a profession’s accepted values and behaviors. Aspiring doctors quickly learn whose opinions, experiences and voices count, and it is rarely their own. Ask a group of interns who’ve been on the wards for but a week, and they will quickly raise their hands up to the level of their heads to indicate their teachers’ status and importance, then lower them toward their feet to demonstrate their own.

It turns out that this keen awareness of ranking is not limited to students and interns. Other research has shown that fully trained physicians are acutely aware of a tacit professional hierarchy based on specialties, like primary care versus neurosurgery, or even on diseases different specialists might treat, like hemorrhoids and constipation versus heart attacks and certain cancers.

But while such professional preoccupation with privilege can make for interesting sociological fodder, the real issue, warns the author of a courageous essay published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine, is that such an overly developed sense of hierarchy comes at an unacceptable price: good patient care.

Dr. Ranjana Srivastava, a medical oncologist at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia, recalls a patient she helped to care for who died after an operation. Before the surgery, Dr. Srivastava had been hesitant to voice her concerns, assuming that the patient’s surgeon must be “unequivocally right, unassailable, or simply not worth antagonizing.” When she confesses her earlier uncertainty to the surgeon after the patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava learns that the surgeon had been just as loath to question her expertise and had assumed that her silence before the surgery meant she agreed with his plan to operate.

“Each of us was trying our best to help a patient, but we were also respecting the boundaries and hierarchy imposed by our professional culture,” Dr. Srivastava said. “The tragedy was that the patient died, when speaking up would have made all the difference.”

Compounding the problem is an increasing sense of self-doubt among many doctors. With rapid advances in treatment, there is often no single correct “answer” for a patient’s problem, and doctors, struggling to stay up-to-date in their own particular specialty niches, are more tentative about making suggestions that cross over to other doctors’ “turf.” Even as some clinicians attempt to compensate by organizing multidisciplinary meetings, inviting doctors from all specialties to discuss a patient’s therapeutic options, “there will inevitably be a hierarchy at those meetings of who is speaking,” Dr. Srivastava noted. “And it won’t always be the ones who know the most about the patient who will be taking the lead.”

It is the potentially disastrous repercussions for patients that make this overly developed awareness of rank and boundaries a critical issue in medicine. Recent efforts to raise safety standards and improve patient care have shown that teams are a critical ingredient for success. But simply organizing multidisciplinary lineups of clinicians isn’t enough. What is required are teams that recognize the importance of all voices and encourage active and open debate.

Since their patient’s death, Dr. Srivastava and the surgeon have worked together to discuss patient cases, articulate questions and describe their own uncertainties to each other and in patients’ notes. “We have tried to remain cognizant of the fact that we are susceptible to thinking about hierarchy,” Dr. Srivastava said. “We have tried to remember that sometimes, despite our best intentions, we do not speak up for our patients because we are fearful of the consequences.”

That was certainly true for my lung cancer patient. Like all the other doctors involved in his care, I hesitated to talk to the chief medical oncologist. I questioned my own credentials, my lack of expertise in this particular area of oncology and even my own clinical judgment. When the patient appeared to fare better, requiring less oxygen and joking and laughing more than I had ever seen in the past, I took his improvement to be yet another sign that my attempt to talk about holding back chemotherapy was surely some surgical folly.

But a couple of days later, the humidified oxygen mask came back on. And not long after that, the patient again asked for me to come close.

This time he said: “I’m tired. I want to stop the chemo.”

Just before he died, a little over a week later, he was off all treatment except for what might make him comfortable. He thanked me and the other doctors for our care, but really, we should have thanked him and apologized. Because he had pushed us out of our comfortable, well-delineated professional zones. He had prodded us to talk to one another. And he showed us how to work as a team in order to do, at last, what we should have done weeks earlier.

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Cardinal Health Buys AssuraMed for $2 Billion

Cardinal Health, the second-largest distributor of prescription drugs, announced on Thursday that it was buying a large medical supplier in a $2 billion deal aimed at expanding the business into the growing area of home health care.

The medical supplier, the privately held AssuraMed, supplies products for home use to aid treatment of diabetes, wounds, incontinence and other conditions. It had revenue of $1 billion in 2012, Cardinal Health said.

AssuraMed, which has been owned by the private equity firms Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and Goldman Sachs’s GS Capital Partners, serves more than one million patients nationwide and sells more than 30,000 products.

In an interview, George S. Barrett, Cardinal’s chairman and chief executive, said the acquisition was aimed at taking advantage of a confluence of national trends: the aging population, which has led to an increase in patients with chronic conditions, and more treatment of those conditions at home or in nonhospital settings like doctors’ offices and outpatient clinics.

“One of the things that has become clear is we’re going to have to manage patients differently,” Mr. Barrett said. “It very strategically aligns with where we think health care is moving, and it’s a natural extension of our skill set.”

In a conference call with investors, Mr. Barrett said the home health care area was growing at nearly 7 percent and represented a market opportunity of about $16 billion.

The deal is expected to close in April and will be financed with a combination of $1.3 billion in senior unsecured notes and cash. Cardinal estimated the acquisition would add 2 to 3 cents to its earnings a share in 2013, and 18 cents a share by 2014.

Cardinal, based in Dublin, Ohio, had revenue of $108 billion in 2012, and ranks second in the drug-distribution market behind the McKesson Corporation, based in San Francisco. AssuraMed is based in Twinsburg, Ohio.

Shares in Cardinal closed up 56 cents, or 1.2 percent, at $46 on Thursday.

Cardinal was advised by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. Clayton Dubilier and GS Capital were advised by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.

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Amazon shares climb on Kindle e-book optimism

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc shares climbed more than 4 percent on Tuesday after an analyst note fueled optimism about the company’s Kindle e-book business.

The e-book market is a lot bigger than previously thought, and owners of Kindle e-readers and tablets are reading more e-books, Morgan Stanley‘s Scott Devitt, a leading Internet and e-commerce analyst, told investors in the research note.

Devitt estimated worldwide e-book unit sales of 859 million in 2012, up considerably from a previous estimate of 567 million. With almost 45 percent of the e-book market, Amazon likely sold 383 million e-books last year, compared with an earlier estimate of 252 million, the analyst added.

Amazon’s broader strategy is to sell mobile devices at or near cost and make money when consumers use the gadgets to buy digital content, including e-books, music, videos, apps and games.

Devitt said on Wednesday that the strategy may be working with e-books, one of Amazon’s oldest digital categories.

“We initially assumed that early adopters of eReader devices would be avid readers and, therefore, the marginal buyer would read less,” Devitt wrote.

However, data from a recent Amazon presentation show that consumers who bought a Kindle in 2011 read 4.6 times more e-books, on average, in the 12 months following their gadget purchase, compared with the 12 months before getting the device, the analyst noted.

Similar data from 2008 show consumers reading e-books 2.6 times as much after their Kindle device purchase, on average, according to Devitt.

The success of Amazon’s Kindle business is important because it is more profitable than some of the company’s other operations, Devitt said.

The Kindle business, which includes the gadgets and related digital content sales, generated about 11 percent of Amazon’s sales last year and 34 percent of the company’s consolidated segment operating income, or CSOI, Devitt estimated. The CSOI is a closely watched measure of Amazon’s profitability.

“The Kindle franchise is a profit pool that subsidizes investments in other growth initiatives,” Devitt wrote.

Amazon shares rose 4.1 percent to $ 269.30 in afternoon trading on Wednesday.

(Reporting By Alistair Barr; editing by Gunna Dickson)

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Kerry Says He Is Preparing Proposals on Syria Crisis

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that he had ideas about how to persuade President Bashar al-Assad to agree to a political transition in Syria and planned to raise them on his first foreign trip this month.

“We need to address the question of President Assad’s calculation currently,” Mr. Kerry said after a meeting with Jordan’s foreign minister, Nasser Judeh. “I believe there are additional things that can be done to change his current perception. I’ve got a good sense of what I think we might propose.”

Mr. Kerry did not say what proposals he had in mind. He is expected to travel to the Middle East and Europe, but the trip has not been formally announced.

“I can assure you my goal is to see us change his calculation, my goal is to see us have a negotiated outcome and minimize the violence,” Mr. Kerry said. “It may not be possible. I am not going to stand here and tell you that’s automatic or easily achievable. There are a lot of forces that have been unleashed here over the course of the last months.”

Mr. Kerry made a similar statement during his Senate confirmation hearing last month. Despite his caution that progress might not be possible, the effect of Mr. Kerry’s comments was to heighten expectations for his trip. Mr. Kerry is also expected to try to make headway on the issues dividing the Palestinians and the Israelis and set the stage for President Obama’s trip to Israel next month.

Mr. Kerry’s comment on Syria came a day after Mr. Obama said little about the Syria crisis in his State of the Union address. In that speech, Mr. Obama said he would keep pressure on the Syrian regime, but he did not voice confidence, as he had in his 2012 address, that Mr. Assad would soon be forced to relinquish power.

Mr. Kerry said that Mr. Obama would begin by listening to Israeli and Arab leaders and would not be bringing a major new proposal.

“The president is not prepared at this point in time to do more than listen to the parties, which is why he has announced he is going to go to Israel,” he said.

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Jacques Rogge to meet with wrestling leader

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — Facing a wave of criticism from around the world, IOC President Jacques Rogge will meet with the head of wrestling's governing body to discuss ways the sport can fight to save its place in the Olympics.

The IOC executive board dropped wrestling from the program of the 2020 Games on Tuesday, a decision which brought a sharp backlash from wrestling organizations and national Olympic bodies around the world — including the United States, Russia and Iran.

The move must still be ratified by the full International Olympic Committee in September, giving wrestling time to try to overturn a decision against a sport which dates back to the ancient Olympics and has been featured since the inaugural modern games in 1896.

Rogge said Wednesday he has been contacted by Raphael Martinetti, the Swiss president of international wrestling federation FILA, and was encouraged by the sport's resolve to make changes and fight for its place.

"We agreed we would meet at the first opportunity to have discussions," Rogge said at a news conference at the close of a two-day board meeting. "I should say FILA reacted well to this disheartening news for them.

"They vowed to adapt the sport and vowed to fight to be eventually included in the 2020 slot."

Wrestling, which remains on the program for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, still has a chance to stay on the list for 2020 — if it manages to respond decisively to the wakeup call and convince the IOC to reverse course.

"This is not the end of the day. The door is not closed," IOC Vice President Thomas Bach of Germany said. "It's good to see the reaction of FILA to say, 'OK we have understood, we have to do something and we will present a plan for the future of wrestling.' That is the right attitude."

Wrestling now joins seven other sports vying for one opening on the 2020 program: a combined bid from baseball and softball, karate, squash, roller sports, sport climbing, wakeboarding and the martial art of wushu.

The IOC executive board will meet in May in St. Petersburg, Russia, to decide which sport or sports to propose for 2020 inclusion. The final vote will be made at the IOC general assembly in September in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"The vote of yesterday is not an elimination of wrestling from the Olympic Games," Rogge said. "Wrestling will participate in the games in Rio de Janeiro. To the athletes who train now, I say, 'Continue training for your participation in Rio. Your federation is working for the inclusion in the 2020 Games.'"

Rogge was asked whether Tuesday's decision marked an end to wrestling's Olympic hopes.

"I cannot look into a crystal ball into the future," he said. "We have established a fair process by which the sport that would not be included in the core has a chance to compete with the seven other sports for the slot on the 2020 Games."

Rogge said he was fully aware of the strength of criticism leveled at the IOC for the move.

"We knew even before the decision was taken whatever sport would not be included in the core program would lead to criticism from the supporters of that sport," he said.

Still, complaints continued to pour in Wednesday from different parts of the world, uniting the U.S. and Iran on an issue in ways never imagined in diplomatic circles. The U.S. and Russia were also unlikely allies in the save-wrestling campaign.

Alexander Zhukov, head of the Russian Olympic Committee, said he would write to Rogge and "use all of our strength to persuade the IOC not to exclude wrestling from the Olympic program."

Wrestling has been one of Russia's strongest sports: Soviet and Russian wrestlers have won 77 gold medals.

In Tehran, Iranian wrestler Ali Reza Dabir, a gold medalist in 2000 Sydney Games, called wrestling "the identity" of the Olympics.

"Do we destroy our historical sites which are symbols of humanity?" he told The Associated Press. "No. Then, why should we destroy wrestling?"

The Wrestling Federation of India said it would do all that it can to reverse the decision, and the Olympic committee in Greece — the birthplace of the ancient and modern games — condemned "a decision that is clearly in total opposition to the history of the Olympic Games and of sports in general."

On Tuesday, U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun questioned the IOC decision "given the history and tradition of wrestling, and its popularity and universality."

There are potential scenarios that would work in wrestling's favor.

IOC officials said it's possible the executive board could decide in May to put three sports forward for consideration, including wrestling. Then it would be up to the assembly to approve wrestling or not.

If the board decides to keep wrestling off the list, the IOC assembly — which has resisted past attempts by the board to impose changes to the sports program — could reject the proposed list of 25 sports altogether. That would mean the current 26 sports, including wrestling, would stay and the whole process would go back to square one.

Modern pentathlon — a five-sport discipline dating back to the 1912 Games — had been widely expected to face removal from the program but lobbied successfully to save its status.

IOC member Richard Carrion of Puerto Rico, who served on the executive board for eight years, said such decisions are inevitably swayed by politics.

"Some people are better at lobbying than others," he told the AP. "There is a political dimension to this. There are people who have connections, who have this and that. We may like it or not, but in a multi-national organization like this decisions get made in ways that are not completely logical."

___ Associated Press writers Ali Akbar Dareini in Tehran, Jim Heintz in Moscow and Elena Becatoros in Athens contributed to this report.

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Phys Ed: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Fitness Tracker

Marathon, half-marathon, 10k and 5K training plans to get you race ready.

A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than working out almost daily.

For the new study, published this month in Exercise & Science in Sports & Medicine, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham gathered 72 older, sedentary women and randomly assigned them to one of three exercise groups.

One group began lifting weights once a week and performing an endurance-style workout, like jogging or bike riding, on another day.

Another group lifted weights twice a week and jogged or rode an exercise bike twice a week.

The final group, as you may have guessed, completed three weight-lifting and three endurance sessions, or six weekly workouts.

The exercise, which was supervised by researchers, was easy at first and meant to elicit changes in both muscles and endurance. Over the course of four months, the intensity and duration gradually increased, until the women were jogging moderately for 40 minutes and lifting weights for about the same amount of time.

The researchers were hoping to find out which number of weekly workouts would be, Goldilocks-like, just right for increasing the women’s fitness and overall weekly energy expenditure.

Some previous studies had suggested that working out only once or twice a week produced few gains in fitness, while exercising vigorously almost every day sometimes led people to become less physically active, over all, than those formally exercising less. Researchers theorized that the more grueling workout schedule caused the central nervous system to respond as if people were overdoing things, sending out physiological signals that, in an unconscious internal reaction, prompted them to feel tired or lethargic and stop moving so much.

To determine if either of these possibilities held true among their volunteers, the researchers in the current study tracked the women’s blood levels of cytokines, a substance related to stress that is thought to be one of the signals the nervous system uses to determine if someone is overdoing things physically. They also measured the women’s changing aerobic capacities, muscle strength, body fat, moods and, using sophisticated calorimetry techniques, energy expenditure over the course of each week.

By the end of the four-month experiment, all of the women had gained endurance and strength and shed body fat, although weight loss was not the point of the study. The scientists had not asked the women to change their eating habits.

There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.

However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.

The twice-a-week exercisers also were using more energy each day than they had been at first, burning almost 100 calories more daily, in addition to the calories used during workouts.

But the women who had been assigned to exercise six times per week were now expending considerably less daily energy than they had been at the experiment’s start, the equivalent of almost 200 fewer calories each day, even though they were exercising so assiduously.

“We think that the women in the twice-a-week and four-times-a-week groups felt more energized and physically capable” after several months of training than they had at the start of the study, says Gary Hunter, a U.A.B. professor who led the experiment. Based on conversations with the women, he says he thinks they began opting for stairs over escalators and walking for pleasure.

The women working out six times a week, though, reacted very differently. “They complained to us that working out six times a week took too much time,” Dr. Hunter says. They did not report feeling fatigued or physically droopy. Their bodies were not producing excessive levels of cytokines, sending invisible messages to the body to slow down.

Rather, they felt pressed for time and reacted, it seems, by making choices like driving instead of walking and impatiently avoiding the stairs.

Despite the cautionary note, those who insist on working out six times per week need not feel discouraged. As long as you consciously monitor your activity level, the findings suggest, you won’t necessarily and unconsciously wind up moving less over all.

But the more fundamental finding of this study, Dr. Hunter says, is that “less may be more,” a message that most likely resonates with far more of us. The women exercising four times a week “had the greatest overall increase in energy expenditure,” he says. But those working out only twice a week “weren’t far behind.”

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Cisco Tops Expectations With Rise in Profit of 44%

SAN FRANCISCO — Cisco Systems reported surprisingly strong results for its second quarter despite concerns about weak demand in some areas.

Cisco, the San Jose, Calif., networking giant, said that net income in the second quarter rose 44 percent to $3.1 billion, or 59 cents a share, from the year-ago quarter.

The company said revenue climbed 5 percent, to $12.1 billion.

Excluding certain items, such as tax gains and stock-compensation expenses, Cisco had earnings of 51 cents per share.

The results exceeded the expectations of Wall Street analysts, who had projected earnings of 48 cents a share and revenue of $12.06 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters.

“Cisco delivered record earnings,” John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive officer, said in a release accompanying the results. “We are making solid progress towards our goal of becoming the number-one information technology company in the world.”

Cisco has traditionally met, or slightly exceeded, Wall Street’s earnings expectations.

Over the past two years, Cisco has reorganized, paring down much of its consumer business and refocusing on new technology initiatives, such as cloud computing.

In December, Mr. Chambers announced plans to move Cisco from just selling gear that routes Internet data into the development of highly networked systems of sensors and data analysis machines. That plan, which involves working closely with large companies and governments, remains in its early stages.

Sales of regular networking equipment to government remains a key part of Cisco’s business. Analysts had been concerned that poor demand from governments, along with economic jitters in Europe, could hurt Cisco’s performance.

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Stop blaming video games for America’s gun violence

Recently, America’s attention has been understandably focused on the potential causes of increased violence – especially gun violence – particularly among children and youth, and how to stop it. Alongside gun-control proposals, some of which President Obama is likely to highlight in his State of the Union address tonight, much of that attention has looked at the potential of violent video games to cause or exacerbate the tendencies of youth to engage in real, harmful violence.

While I applaud increased vigilance on the part of parents in supervising their children’s behaviors and pastimes, a child playing a violent video game does not necessarily increase the likelihood that he or she will engage in real violence at that age or later in life.

Various reports and commentaries have documented the fact that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza’s video game playing included violent shooter games like Call of Duty, Counterstrike, and Starcraft. Some have cited that activity as a possible cause for his shooting massacre.

ANOTHER VIEW: Gabrielle Giffords and NRA are both right about one thing: US culture of violence

But if Lanza was playing Call of Duty 4, he was one of millions. On the Xbox 360 console alone, the game’s developer, Infinity Ward, has documented nearly 4.4 million online players, not counting players who use a PlayStation 3 or aren’t online. The statistics for Counterstrike are similar – an estimated 62,142 per day. And Starcraft is so popular in Korea, that it has professional leagues and an estimated online player population of around 50,000 each day.

Of those millions of players, few commit an act of violence, certainly not enough to say that, statistically, video game play is a principle cause – or even a significant cause – of real-world violent behavior.

So why are so many people blaming the video game industry?

It’s a phenomenon known as “cultural lag,” and it’s what causes us to be hesitant in adopting new technologies, trying new fads, and changing our social mores. Cultural lag can be a good thing – some new things are dangerous, come with high levels of risk, and can infinitely do more harm than good. But cultural lag also can inhibit the development of technologies and society because of irrational fears, which is what I’m seeing with recent criticism of the gaming industry.

Before video games, society blamed rock ‘n’ roll for violence and bad behavior among young people. Before rock ‘n’ roll, we blamed television. Before television, movies. Before movies, mystery novels, which were once known as “penny dreadfuls.” Before mystery novels, Shakespeare, who repeatedly was accused of producing violent, lecherous, and otherwise improper behavior in his audience.

In essence, as a society, we always will try to find out “why” bad things happen, but we aren’t actually very good at finding the answers. We look back at our past with rose-colored glasses and look forward into the future with trepidation.

We see our own childhoods as joyful and carefree, and when, as adults, we are exposed to the grim realities of our world, we wonder, “What happened?”. And then we try to explain the difference between the past that we remember and the present as we perceive it. When we do this, we very often look to technologies that did not exist 20, 30, or 40 years ago, and we think: That didn’t exist back then when things were “better,” therefore it must have some impact on why things have “gotten worse” now.

First of all, I am unconvinced that “things have gotten worse,” but even if we assume that they have, in blaming technologies like video games for real-life violence, we assume causation, where numerous studies show there is only correlation – at best. This is tantamount to assuming, as journalist Jeanine Celestin-Greer of Gamastura (a gaming journalism website) points out, that because Lanza drank Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew causes violent behavior.

In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher J. Ferguson, a psychologist at Texas A&M International University, claimed that the recent outcry against video games as the cause of “school shootings” in general is patently fallacious. He explains that among hundreds of studies on violence and video games, not a single one has proven conclusively a causal relationship between violent behaviors in the real world and violent video-game play. And yet, scholars and politicians who often have little to no experience playing video games themselves continue to suggest that this is the case.

Americans need to stop trying to blame something other than ourselves for the increase – if there is an increase – in violent behavior.

Video games, music, television, movies, novels, and Shakespeare don’t cause violence. Mental illness, psychological abuse, and physical abuse cause violence. Ideologies that reward and condone aggression, particularly in men, cause violence. Global genocide causes violence. The only conclusive evidence we do have is that it is real-life violence that causes real-life violence.

As long as we, as a society, condone violence in the name of nationalism, continue to minimize domestic violence and rape, and promote aggression as ideal masculinity, violence will continue to be a problem in our homes, on our streets, and in our schools. Critics will argue that the imagery and plots of video games do just that – and in turn, perpetuate those behaviors. Yes, video games reflect some of these highly problematic aspects of our society that contribute to a tolerance of violence. Just like movies and books. But they don’t cause it.

Remove video games from the equation and you will still have a commensurate level of violence.

And yes, video games can influence ideology, but they aren’t the only – or even the predominant – influence on society or an individual. In fact, video games can influence our ideologies in as many if not more positive ways than they do negative ones. Many recent games actually encourage players to play non-violently and reward players for humane treatment and good judgment.

So while video games are influencing us, and sometimes through violent images and play, many of them are pushing us to criticize the very violence that some people seem to believe they are causing.

OPINION: 6 reasons why President Obama will defeat the NRA and win universal background checks

The dialogue we need to have is about real violence, not virtual violence, and I sincerely hope that America’s leaders recognize this as we move forward in addressing the problem.

Kristin M.S. Bezio is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies. Her research explores the intersection of literature and leadership, looking at influences ranging from Shakespeare to video gaming.

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Putin Aims to Limit Officials’ Investments Abroad

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin introduced a draft law on Tuesday that would ban senior Russian officials from holding bank accounts or stocks outside Russia, the latest in a series of recent measures intended to insulate the country’s governance from foreign influences.

The draft law, which requires legislative approval, applies to a wide range of top officials, including lawmakers, ministers, top officials at the Central Bank and other state funds, and those whose work involves “the sovereignty or national security of the Russian Federation,” as well as their spouses and young children.

The change, though appealing to the broad public, would come as a jolt to many in Russia’s ruling class, who are both wealthy and deeply integrated into the West.

First presented in discussions on “nationalization of the elite,” the ban has been framed primarily as a way to guarantee officials’ loyalty to Russia, and also as a check on corruption, a topic on which the Kremlin knows that it is politically vulnerable. Commenting on a similar proposal by legislators last fall, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said officials with investments outside Russia “are not safe, in terms of being firm in defending the state’s interests.”

If the measure becomes law, as expected, officials will have three months to close their foreign accounts and sell their stock, or else face possible dismissal based on “lack of trust.” State auditors can initiate investigations into officials based on information provided by journalists, law enforcement bodies, political organizations and other sources.

The introduction of the draft law met with cheers from lawmakers, who have embraced a series of populist —some say reactionary — measures in the months since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency. An ultranationalist lawmaker, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, said foreign holdings marked government officials as members of a “fifth column.”

“They’ve bought half of Europe — the real estate, the accounts in all banks, they vacation there, their children study there, their relatives live there, they give birth there, they get medical treatment there,” he told a television reporter. “And it’s easy to influence them. A fifth column is formed here. One has to live at home, vacation at home, work and study. If you don’t like it, do not enter state service.”

A number of legislators said Tuesday that Mr. Putin’s measure could be broadened. Nikolai Levichev, of the party A Just Russia, suggested widening the circle of relatives who would come under scrutiny, noting that there are “multiple cases when a grown son or a niece of some governor or minister is a multimillionaire, in some cases invested in foreign banks.” In their proposal, some legislators had recommended banning Russians from owning real estate overseas as well, but Mr. Putin seems to have set that provision aside.

Foreign bank accounts have traditionally been used by officials as “an instrument for bribetaking,” noted Yevgeny Minchenko, a political analyst, in an interview with the Kommersant FM radio station. But the measure presented Tuesday leaves gaping loopholes, he said, because officials can still keep their money in accounts associated with offshore companies, or under the names of proxies or friends. “It’s clear that any law can be bypassed,” he said.

High-level corruption — and especially lavish spending by Russian officials overseas — has been a perennial theme for Mr. Putin’s critics, and some saw the measure presented on Tuesday as the president’s attempt to claim the issue as his own. Kirill Kabanov, chairman of the National Anticorruption Committee, a watchdog organization, said he believed that Mr. Putin had resolved to wrest control over the financial practices of the elite.

He said officials were being presented with a choice: either leave state service and retain foreign assets, or “stay in the real vertical — but if it becomes clear that in reality you are thinking about how to maintain your life in Côte d’Azur, you will be thrown out of the caste.”

“It’s not a secret to anybody that for many people, the motive for entering state service is to provide for a quiet life beyond the borders of our motherland at the expense of our budget,” he said.

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