Pope Says He Will Be ‘Hidden To The World’ In Retirement

VATICAN CITY — Saying he would soon be “hidden to the world,” Pope Benedict XVI took his leave of parish priests and clergy of the Diocese of Rome on Thursday in a moving encounter during which he gave a personal, and incisive, recollection of the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops 50 years ago that set the Roman Catholic Church’s course for the future.

Benedict, who announced his resignation four days ago — the first pope to step down willingly in nearly 600 years — also indicated that he would not hold a public role once his resignation becomes official on Feb. 28.

“Though I am now retiring to a life of prayer, I will always be close to all of you and I am sure all of you will be close to me, even though I remain hidden to the world,” he told the assembly of hundreds of priests, who had greeted him with a long, standing ovation and some tears.

The pope will live in a convent inside Vatican City.

At a news briefing Thursday, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said Benedict’s longtime personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who was also named prefect of the papal household two months ago, would continue to work for him.

Father Lombardi said he saw no conflict of interest if Archbishop Gänswein served the current pope and his successor.

The prefect is responsible for logistical duties, and “in this sense it is not a profound problem, I think,” Father Lombardi said.

The nuns who currently tend to the pope will also live with the pontiff once he is no longer pope.

Father Lombardi also confirmed news reports that the pope had had an accident during a trip to Mexico last March, hitting his head in the middle of the night, but he denied that the episode had influenced the pontiff’s decision to retire.

Since his surprise announcement on Monday, which stunned the Roman Catholic world, there has been much closer public scrutiny of the pope’s health.

The 85-year-old pope — who has appeared increasingly frail in recent public appearances — said he felt he did not have the strength to continue in his ministry.

On Tuesday, the Vatican confirmed for the first time that the pope had had a pacemaker since his time as a cardinal and had its batteries changed three months ago.

“It didn’t impact on the trip or on his decision,” Father Lombardi said, pointing out that the pope had kept his appointments as scheduled.

The priests from the Rome diocese who attended Benedict’s audience said they felt they had witnessed a powerful moment in church history, one that also humanized a pope who has often seemed remote. “It moved me to see the pope smile,” said Don Mario Filippa, a priest in Rome. “He has found peace within himself.”

“It was a part of history,” said Father Martin Astudillo, 37, an Argentine priest who is studying in Rome. “This is a man of God who at the end of his public role transmits his vision of the church and relationship with the church,” he added. “We saw in a few words a real synthesis of his vision of the church and what he expects from whomever takes over.”

In his remarks, which touched on some of the thorniest issues of his papacy, Benedict also spoke about how the Second Vatican Council had explored ideas of “continuity” between Old and New Testaments, and of the relationship between the Catholic and Jewish faiths.

“Even if it’s clear that the church isn’t responsible for the Shoah, it’s for the most part Christians who did this crime,” Benedict said of the Holocaust, adding that this called for a need to “deepen and renovate the Christian conscience,” even if it’s true that “real believers only fought against” Nazi barbarism.

During the 45-minute reflection — or “chat” in his words — on the council, he also recalled the “incredible” expectations of bishops going into the gathering.

“We were full of hope, enthusiasm and also of good will,” he said.

But while the council made landmark decisions that would propel the church into the future, much got lost in the media’s interpretation of what transpired, he said, which led to the “calamities” that have marred recent church history.

The media reduced the proceedings “into a political power struggle between different currents of the church,” and they chose sides that suited their individual vision of the world, the pope said.

These messages, not that of the council, entered into the public sphere and that led in the years to “so many calamities, so many problems, seminaries closed, convents that closed, the liturgy trivialized,” the pope said.

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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 Gianni, said he hopes it was "just a tragic accident." Gianni 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," Gianni 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.

On Twitter, she 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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Well: The Well Flu Quiz

What surface is the most friendly to the flu virus? Where’s the best place to stand when you’re talking to a sick person? And how are Australians curbing germs in schools? To find out these answers and more, take the Well Flu Quiz.

With contributions from Laura Geggel and Tara Parker-Pope.

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DealBook: Berkshire and 3G Capital to Buy Heinz for $23 Billion

10:12 a.m. | Updated

Warren E. Buffett has found another American icon worth buying: H. J. Heinz.

Berkshire Hathaway, the giant conglomerate that Mr. Buffett runs, said on Thursday that it would buy the food giant for about $23 billion, adding Heinz ketchup to its stable of prominent brands.

The proposed acquisition, coming fast on the heels of a planned $24 billion buyout of the computer maker Dell and a number of smaller deals, heralds a possible reemergence in merger activity.  The number of deals and the prices being paid for companies are still a far cry from the lofty heights of the boom before the financial crisis.  But an improving stock market, growing confidence among business executives and mounting piles of cash held by corporations and private equity funds all favor a return to deal-making. 

Mr. Buffett is teaming up with 3G Capital Management, a Brazilian-backed investment firm that owns a majority stake in a company whose business is complementary to Heinz’s: Burger King.

Under the terms of the deal, Berkshire and 3G will pay $72.50 a share, about 20 percent above Heinz’s closing price on Wednesday. Including debt, the transaction is valued at $28 billion.

“This is my kind of deal and my kind of partner,” Mr. Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. “Heinz is our kind of company with fantastic brands.”

In many ways, Heinz fits Mr. Buffett’s deal criteria almost to a T. It has broad brand recognition – besides ketchup, it owns Ore-Ida and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce – and has performed well. Over the last 12 months, its stock has risen nearly 17 percent.

Mr. Buffett told CNBC that he had a file on Heinz dating back to 1980. But the genesis of Thursday’s deal actually lies with 3G, an investment firm backed by several wealthy Brazilian families, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

One of the firm’s principal backers, Jorge Paulo Lemann, brought the idea of buying Heinz to Berkshire about two months ago, this person said. Mr. Buffett agreed, and the two sides approached Heinz’s chief executive, William R. Johnson, about buying the company.

“We look forward to partnering with Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital, both greatly respected investors, in what will be an exciting new chapter in the history of Heinz,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement.

Berkshire and 3G will each contribute about $4 billion in cash to pay for the deal, with Berkshire also paying $8 billion for preferred shares. The rest of the cost will be covered by debt financing raised by JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Mr. Buffett told CNBC that 3G would be the primary supervisor of Heinz’s operations, saying, “Heinz will be 3G’s baby.”

The food company’s headquarters will remain in Pittsburgh, Heinz’s home for over 120 years.

Heinz’s stock was up nearly 20 percent in morning trading, at $72.51, closely mirroring the offered price. Berkshire’s class A stock was also up slightly, rising 0.64 percent to $148,691 a share.

Heinz was advised by Centerview Partners, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell. A transaction committee of the company’s board was advised by Moelis & Company and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

Berkshire’s and 3G’s lead adviser was Lazard, with JPMorgan and Wells Fargo providing additional advice. Kirkland & Ellis provided legal advice to 3G, while Berkshire relied on its usual law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson.

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At War Blog: How to Help Veterans Succeed in College

In 2004, I returned from a year in Iraq to finish my undergraduate degree at the University of Rhode Island. Since I took more than a year’s leave of absence to deploy, I was forced to reapply to the university. While writing another entrance essay to explain how I spent my “year off,” I wondered why my school didn’t have a peer support system for its students who are veterans.

In just a few years, the narrative for veterans on my campus and many others has changed dramatically because of the hard work of student-led veterans’ groups like the ones I met at the recent Student Veterans of America national conference in Orlando.

The conference showed me how student veterans continue to look out for the best interests of their comrades on campus, much like they did in the military. Plus, as college veterans’ groups grow in size and influence, they manage to affect positive change in their communities. In January, veterans at Clemson University commissioned a volunteer-led veterans’ resource center where veterans can receive transitional assistance, career guidance, and peer support. Meanwhile, veterans at Florida State University continue to push the state legislature to change archaic in-state tuition policies.

Over a few beers, veterans opened up about some of the challenges they faced when coming back to college, like immature classmates or closed-minded professors, but they also readily shared ways they worked to build understanding on campus through their organized veterans’ groups.

Unfortunately, the conference also reinforced a lingering concern that many of today’s student veterans must still choose their schools and navigate the complexities of college life on the fly when they arrive on campus.

As an article in the Education Life section of The New York Times details, many colleges have stepped up to offer in-depth counseling to incoming student veterans, with some going so far as to offer orientation programs and learning communities specifically for veteran undergraduates. The one flaw to this system, however, is that at this point, the veteran has already chosen an institution. What if he or she just isn’t academically or financially ready for college?

In 2010’s National Survey of Veterans, more than 40 percent of post-9/11 veterans reported that they were not aware of and did not understand their education benefits. Veterans should be armed with quality information before they start the application process. Once a veteran is on campus, it may be too late. Is this lack of up-front information perhaps driving misconceptions that veterans won’t succeed when they arrive on campus?

When I started college more than a decade ago, I missed orientation because of basic training. I then struggled to find good information on using my benefits from the G.I. Bill of Rights and had to write a personal check just to get my grades. As a 19-year-old student who lived in a dormitory with few financial obligations, I had the time and the leftover Army income to foot the bill and sort out the G.I. Bill later. Many veterans don’t have this luxury.

So who should be responsible for informing veterans about the nuances of higher education? Federal law dictates that some of the responsibility falls on the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Separating service members have access to the military transition assistance program, or TAP, and those who have left active duty are entitled to free educational counseling from the veterans department. The department offers the 1-888-GIBILL-1 hotline and the eBenefits online portal, but neither is equipped to answer in-depth questions on higher education, nor can they be used to register for counseling.

I recently participated in both the Department of Veterans Affairs counseling and T.A.P. To apply for counseling, I had to find a form online, print it and mail it to my closest veterans affairs office. Two months later, I received a letter from a department contractor, asking me to take aptitude and interest tests to determine my career goals. The bubble sheet exams confirmed that I worked in the right industry, so I was finally referred to a counselor who could meet one on one.

The counseling process helped answer my questions, but I found some of the steps unnecessary and confusing, which likely discourages other veterans from using it too. Nevertheless, it worked. Wouldn’t the department want to enroll more veterans?

The agency only has about $6 million each year to deliver G.I. Bill counseling. Last year the Congressional Budget Office analyzed a proposal to make it easier for veterans to apply for educational aid, but the cost would have been high. During the recent conference, I asked the audience if anyone knew that the department even offered educational counseling. Only a couple of veterans raised their hands.

T.A.P. is not particularly helpful for veterans looking for information about education benefits. When I attended the benefits briefing last spring, the instructor focused on other veterans programs, such as health care, home loans and disability compensation, fielding dozens of questions along the way. When education benefits finally came up, the instructor was fighting the clock and glossed over the material, apparently assuming that service members understood the nuances of the highly promoted benefit. But clearly they do not.

Some T.A.P. facilities do better than others, offering resources like guidance counselors for separating service members. But these innovations seem to be have been developed at the discretion of individual program facilitators, and service members must carve out personal time to use them.

Still, my outlook for current student veterans remains overwhelmingly positive. Not only are veterans and colleges stepping up to take care of their own, but policy makers in Washington have recognized deficiencies in programs and are finally taking steps to fix some of them.

Thanks to the Vow to Hire Heroes Act of 2011, the Pentagon is piloting new T.A.P. curricula geared toward college-bound veterans. Because of an April executive order, the Pentagon, Department of Veterans Affairs and other federal agencies are compiling student outcome information and developing ways to track student feedback from colleges that are eligible for GI Bill students. Finally, because of last month’s Improving Transparency of Education Opportunities for Veterans Act, Congress has required the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide more information on how veterans are faring at individual colleges, and department is looking to deliver more cost-effective counseling tools for student veterans.

With all of these changes afloat, the veterans community must keep the pressure on the Pentagon, Department of Veterans Affairs, Congress and schools to ensure that educational information is relevant and easy to access for student veterans.

The first four-year class of Post-9/11 G.I. Bill veterans will graduate this spring, and I look forward to following their successes after college. For those still serving who plan to use their benefits in the future, we have an opportunity to arm them with the best information to get the most out of their G.I. Bill.

We never send a new recruit to war without proper training and equipment. We should never send a veteran to college without reasonable guidance for what lies ahead.

Ryan Gallucci is the deputy legislative director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Washington, where he focuses on economic opportunity policy for veterans and maintains the VFW’s Capitol Hill blog. He deployed to Iraq as an Army Civil Affairs specialist in 2003 and 2004 before completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Rhode Island in 2006.

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IOC President Rogge to meet with wrestling leader

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — 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 2020 Olympics.

The IOC executive board removed wrestling from the program of the 2020 Games on Tuesday, cutting it from the list of 26 sports at last year's London Olympics.

The decision, which still must be ratified by the full IOC in September, has been widely criticized by wrestling organizations around the world.

Rogge said Wednesday he's been contacted by Raphael Martinetti, the president of international wrestling federation FILA, and was encouraged by the sport's determination to remain in the games.

"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 convince the IOC to reverse the board's decision.

Wrestling now joins seven other sports in applying 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.

IOC officials said it's possible the board could decide to put forward three sports for consideration, including wrestling.

"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 in the Olympics.

"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 backlash to the decision against wrestling, a sport which dates back to the ancient Olympics and featured in the inaugural modern games in 1896.

The head of the Russian Olympic Committee said Wednesday he would write to Rogge to appeal the IOC board's decision. Wrestling has been one of Russia's strongest sports: Soviet and Russian wrestlers have won 77 gold medals.

"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," Rogge said.

The board voted after reviewing a report by the IOC program commission that analyzed 39 criteria, including TV ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping policy and global participation and popularity. With no official rankings or recommendations contained in the report, the final decision by the 15-member board may have included political and sentimental factors.

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.

Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., the son of the former IOC president, is a vice president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union and a member of the IOC board.

FILA said Tuesday it was "greatly astonished" by the decision, adding that the federation "will take all necessary measures to convince the IOC executive board and IOC members of the aberration of such decision against one of the founding sports of the ancient and modern Olympic Games."

The last sports removed from the Olympics were baseball and softball, voted out by the IOC in 2005 and off the program since the 2008 Beijing Games. Golf and rugby will be joining the program at the 2016 Games in Rio.

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Phys Ed: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

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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DealBook: Big Banks Are Told to Review Their Own Foreclosures

Washington is seeking help from an unlikely group in its effort to distribute billions of dollars to struggling homeowners in foreclosure: the same banks accused of abusing homeowners with shoddy foreclosure practices.

In doing so, the regulators are trying to speed the process after a flawed, independent foreclosure review delayed relief for millions of borrowers, according to people briefed on the matter. But housing advocates worry that the banks, eager to end the costly process, could take shortcuts as they comb through loan files for potential errors, in some cases diverting aid from the neediest homeowners.

Regulators say they will check the work. And banks have already agreed to pay a fixed amount to troubled homeowners, creating another backstop.

According to officials involved in the process, who spoke anonymously because the matter is not public, the regulators had few alternatives.

Last month, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency scuttled the foreclosure review by independent consultants because it was marred by delays and inefficiency. Instead, the regulator struck a multibillion-dollar settlement directly with the nation’s largest banks, a deal that includes $3.6 billion in payments to aggrieved homeowners.

To accelerate the payments, the comptroller’s office decided to cut out the middlemen, the consultants, from the reviews. In a conference call last week, the government outlined a plan to use the lenders instead, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussion. Banks will now have to assess each loan for potential errors, which will help determine the size of the payments to homeowners.

The decision to tap the banks for support is the latest twist in the review of more than four million foreclosures, a process that has incensed lawmakers and ensnared the nation’s largest lenders. Regulators are eager to make the payments to homeowners, who have languished for more than a year.

In 2012, housing advocates, regulators and some bank executives suggested the government release an initial round of payments to homeowners, people briefed on the matter said. Such a move might have quelled suspicions among homeowners that the independent review was an empty promise, or worse, a fraud. But the effort went nowhere.

Now, the first payments to homeowners are not expected until late March.

For Judie Lee, 51, a paralegal who is battling to save her three-bedroom home in Lynn, Mass., it might not come in time. Ms. Lee says she submitted a request for aid more than six months ago after a series of botched loan modifications.

“We are in trouble,” said Ms. Lee, who said that she fell behind on her loan payments after losing a job in 2007.

Under the plan outlined last week, the banks will pore over loan files like Ms. Lee’s to identify the worst possible errors. Military personnel illegally foreclosed on, for example, will rank highest on the list. Borrowers who might be current on their loan payments — and therefore did not warrant a foreclosure — will be next.

Regulators will then decide how much money to pay each category of borrower. The worse the errors, the bigger the payout.

The plan, regulators say, offers a more equitable way to divide the money than paying the same amount to each homeowner.

The strategy, though, presents potential conflicts of interests. The banks, in haste to meet tight deadlines, could fail to provide an accurate portrayal of what went wrong. The loan files are also in disarray, officials say, complicating the task for banks.

“The whole process has been a slap in the face to homeowners and a slap on the wrist to banks,” said Isaac Simon Hodes, an organizer with the community group Lynn United for Change. “The latest development shows how there has been no accountability.”

Regulators say the lenders have no incentive to manipulate the reviews. Under the settlement, the banks committed to dole out a set amount. Bank of America must distribute $1.1 billion to homeowners. Wells Fargo owes more than $700 million. The costs will not change, regardless of what the banks find in the loan files in the coming weeks.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is running the review, also said it would perform regular checks on the banks’ work and make sure they adopt controls to prevent errors.

“Regulators will verify and test the work of servicers to slot borrowers into broad categories and then regulators will determine the amount of payment for each category,” explained Morris Morgan, the deputy comptroller in charge of supervising large banks.

By relying on the banks, regulators can part ways with the consultants.

Despite billing for roughly $2 billion in fees in the 14-month review, consultants examined only a sliver of the 500,000 complaints filed by homeowners, people involved in the matter said. Their efforts were stymied, in part, because regulators urged consultants to first scrutinize a random sample of the four million foreclosures before digging into specific homeowner complaints, the people involved said. The decision, the people said, may have undercut the scope of the settlement and potentially deprived homeowners of additional relief.

Consultants were also criticized for a faulty review process.

Some consulting firms, including the Promontory Financial Group, farmed out much of the work to contract employees. Others faced questions about their objectivity. The consultants, critics note, were paid billions of dollars by the same banks they were expected to police.

Some consultants say they sounded repeated alarms about the process. Last spring, a group of consulting firm executives met with comptroller officials in Washington to voice concerns that the reviews were too narrow, according to people with direct knowledge of the meetings.

Other people close to the review say consultants were only partly to blame for the problem. The review process, with its narrow focus, was created by the comptroller’s office in 2011, under previous leadership.

Now, some consultants feel spurned by the regulators’ decision to hand off the review.

“Why did you not trust the banks a month ago?” asked one consultant who spoke anonymously for fear of offending regulators. “And why do you solely rely on them now?”

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/13/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Banks Told To Review Their Own Foreclosures.

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India Ink: In Kashmir, Clashes and Dwindling Supplies As Curfew Continues

The Kashmir Valley is on the fourth day of a government-imposed shutdown begun immediately after the hanging of the militant Muhammad Afzal, also known as Afzal Guru, who comes from the town of Sopore in Baramulla district.

Many residents are running out of food and milk in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital. Meanwhile, dozens have been injured and at least one killed in protests against Mr. Afzal’s hanging, which happened secretly in Delhi on Saturday and was announced afterward.

Mr. Afzal, from the Jaish-e-Muhammad militant group, was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to death by a special court in 2002 for his role in planning an attack on India’s Parliament in December 2001.

Schools, colleges and most shops in Kashmir are closed by government order, and people have been asked to stay inside their homes. Rows of shops and restaurants were shuttered.

Vehicles have been banned from the streets, cable news channels have gone dark, Internet service on cellphones has been blocked and newspapers were not being delivered. Hospitals, pharmacies and emergency services remain open.

In Srinagar, the only people in the deserted streets were security forces.

Officials in the area said they were taking preventive measures. During the past decade, many Kashmiris have opposed the death sentence for Mr. Afzal, saying he was being unfairly accused of the crime. His wife had requested a pardon from the Indian government, but her plea was denied.

Many Kashmiris were also outraged that the government letter carrying the news of execution reached Mr. Afzal’s widow in Sopore only after he died. The central government said Tuesday that Mr. Afzal’s family could visit his grave at te Tihar Jail in Delhi, but a date has yet to be decided, according to the Press Trust of India.

The ban on the movement of people and vehicles was imposed under Section 144 of India’s criminal procedure code, the same section invoked after protests over the recent Delhi gang rape, which prohibits the assembly of more than four people.

It was invoked by a district magistrate to prevent “a law and order problem,” Suresh Kumar, principal secretary in Jammu and Kashmir’s Department of Home Affairs, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. 

Mr. Afzal’s death was mourned across the valley through organized street protests that involved stone pelting, in defiance of the ban.

Three civilians have died and many have been injured over the last four days, officials said. Some news reports attributed all three deaths to protest-related activities, but Mr. Kumar said only one man died of injuries caused by the police. The other two drowned when their boat capsized, an incident unrelated to the violence, he said.

Obair Mushtaq, from the Baramulla district, died after he was shot, his relatives said. Farooq Ahmed, his uncle, said Obair was 13.

Mr. Ahmed said that on Sunday evening, a handful of children, including his nephew, were throwing stones at a passing military convoy. “It was not aggressive. We were laughing at them,” he said, crying over the phone. “We can’t understand why there is so much fighting. Why are our children dying?”

A Kashmir police official told India Ink that 60 people have been injured since Saturday in clashes between police and civilians. Forty of those were security officials and 20 were civilians, he said. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that he feared for his life.

Additionally, there were about 60 incidents of stone pelting across the valley. “Most of the violence erupted in Sopore and Baramulla,” he said.

“People are not allowed to step out of their homes,” he added.Many residents described the past four days as the longest curfew since 2010, when the valley was shaken by mass pro-independence demonstrations. 

Manzoor Ahmed, who drives an auto-rickshaw, said that he hasn’t earned any money since the curfew was imposed on Saturday. “I haven’t stepped out of the house so I cannot even make the little money I do,” he said during a telephone interview. “The children cannot go to school.”

Mr. Ahmed said that his family was surviving on dal, a stew made of lentils, because there are no fresh vegetables available. “We have a backup supply of dal because we know things like this can happen,” he said.

In some areas, for a few hours in the evening, residents said they were allowed out of their homes to shop. Vegetables and milk are generally shipped into Srinagar, which is nestled in the mountains, from villages and other states during the winter months.

Mr. Mohammed, a hotel manager near the Dal Lake, who requested his first name not be used to avoid any retaliatory action, said that his hotel was running out of vegetables like peas and cauliflower, and guests were only being served beans and potatoes from storage. “The situation is quite bad,” he said.

For around two hours in the evening, a few stores selling basic groceries were open. But these shops have limited resources because the supply chain had been disrupted because of the ban on vehicles.

One businessman, who requested not be named to avoid possible retaliatory action by the police, said he hasn’t opened his crockery shop in downtown Srinagar in the past four days. “What choice do I have? They won’t let us step out,” he said. He estimated he has lost 60,000 rupees ($1,000) since Saturday.

The hanging of Mr. Afzal came as Kashmiris were planning protests to mark the death of Maqbool Bhatt, a pro-Kashmir independence leader who was hanged on Feb. 11, 1984. His death is considered the spark for two decades of unrest. Both men are buried at Tihar Jail in Delhi.

“Maqbool Bhatt inspired the insurgency while Afzal Guru was the product of it,” said Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a law professor at Kashmir University. 

He warned that Mr. Afazal’s hanging and the subsequent curfew would make the Kashmiri people’s “alienation with the government more deep rooted.”

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IOC drops wrestling from 2020 Olympics

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — IOC leaders dropped wrestling from the Olympic program on Tuesday, a surprise decision that removes one of the oldest Olympic sports from the 2020 Games.

The IOC executive board decided to retain modern pentathlon — the event considered most at risk — and remove wrestling instead from its list of 25 "core sports."

The IOC board acted after reviewing the 26 sports on the current Olympic program. Eliminating one sport allows the International Olympic Committee to add a new sport to the program later this year.

Wrestling, which combines freestyle and Greco-Roman events, goes back to the inaugural modern Olympics in Athens in 1896.

"This is a process of renewing and renovating the program for the Olympics," IOC spokesman Mark Adams said. "In the view of the executive board, this was the best program for the Olympic Games in 2020. It's not a case of what's wrong with wrestling, it is what's right with the 25 core sports."

Adams said the decision was made by secret ballot over several rounds, with members voting each time on which sport should not be included in the core group. IOC President Jacques Rogge did not vote.

Wrestling was voted out from a final group that also included modern pentathlon, taekwondo and field hockey, officials familiar with the vote told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the voting details were not made public.

The board voted after reviewing a report by the IOC program commission report that analyzed 39 criteria, including television ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping policy and global participation and popularity. With no official rankings or recommendations contained in the report, the final decision by the 15-member board was also subject to political, emotional and sentimental factors.

The international wrestling federation, known by the French acronym FILA, is headed by Raphael Martinetti and is based in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. Calls to the federation for comment were not immediately returned.

Wrestling featured 344 athletes competing in 11 medal events in freestyle and seven in Greco-Roman at last year's London Olympics. Women's wrestling was added to the Olympics at the 2004 Athens Games.

Wrestling will now join seven other sports in applying for inclusion in 2020. The others are a combined bid from baseball and softball, karate, squash, roller sports, sport climbing, wakeboarding and wushu. They will be vying for a single opening in 2020.

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 session, or general assembly, in September in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

It is extremely unlikely that wrestling would be voted back in so soon after being removed by the executive board.

"Today's decision is not final," Adams said. "The session is sovereign and the session will make the final decision."

The last sports removed from the Olympics were baseball and softball, voted out by the IOC in 2005 and off the program since the 2008 Beijing Games. Golf and rugby will be joining the program at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Previously considered under the closest scrutiny was modern pentathlon, which has been on the Olympic program since the 1912 Stockholm Games. It was created by French baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, and combines fencing, horse riding, swimming, running and shooting.

Klaus Schormann, president of governing body UIPM, lobbied hard to protect his sport's Olympic status and it paid off in the end.

"We have promised things and we have delivered," he said after Tuesday's decision. "That gives me a great feeling. It also gives me new energy to develop our sport further and never give up."

Modern pentathlon also benefited from the work of Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., the son of the former IOC president who is a UIPM vice president and member of the IOC board.

"We were considered weak in some of the scores in the program commission report but strong in others," Samaranch told the AP. "We played our cards to the best of our ability and stressed the positives. Tradition is one of our strongest assets, but we are also a multi-sport discipline that produces very complete people."

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