'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius weeps as he faces murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee revered in South Africa for overcoming his disability to compete in the London Games last year, wept in court Friday as he faced a murder charge in connection with the fatal shooting of his girlfriend.

During the proceedings in Pretoria, Gerrie Nel, one of the National Prosecuting Authority’s most senior advocates, said he would argue the killing of model and law graduate Reeva Steenkamp was premeditated murder, the most serious category of offense under South African law.

Nel is known for prosecuting high-profile cases, including winning the conviction of former police chief and Interpol boss Jackie Selebi on corruption charges.

Pistorius, nicknamed the "Blade Runner" because of the carbon-fiber prosthetic legs he uses to compete, did not enter a formal plea and was remanded into custody at Brooklyn police station in Pretoria until Tuesday, when his bail application is to be heard.

Under South African law, a suspect charged with such a high-level offense would have to prove exceptional circumstances to be granted bail.

In a packed courtroom, members of Pistorius' family struggled to pass through a media scrum and to find seats. The hearing coincided with "Black Friday," a day when people were being urged to wear black to protest rapes and violence against women.

[Updated, 8:35 a.m. Feb. 15: The family and Pistorius' management company later issued a statement denying that the athlete had murdered his girlfriend, saying: "The alleged murder is disputed in the strongest possible terms."

Some details of Pistorius' argument and the state's case are expected Tuesday.]

The famed athlete's court appearance came as South African media reported that he shot Steenkamp, his girlfriend of several months, four times through a bathroom door.

Under South African law, a person who fatally shoots an intruder has to prove he or she had a reasonable fear that the intruder posed a real threat to his or her life.

South Africa has one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the world, with killings of women by intimate partners the leading cause of female homicide in the country. About 57% of female homicide victims were killed by their partners in 2009, according to a report last year by the Medical Research Council.

One-third of female homicides were committed by partners with a history of prior violence against their partners, according to the report.

Friends of Steenkamp and Pistorius mourned the incident on social media.

"Drained, confused, I just can't wrap my head around things," one of Pistorius’ close friends, Alex Pilakoutas, posted on Twitter.

Darren Fresco, who described himself as one of Steenkamp’s best friends said he was hoping to wake from a nightmare and hear her infectious laughter again.

"We were just goofing off the other day talking to each other in only the way that we could to each other. My heart is on the verge of exploding with the pain of such a sudden loss of one of my best friends," Fresco, who said he was one of the last people to exchange tweets with Steenkamp, posted on Facebook.

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robyn.dixon@latimes.com

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Why Almost Everyone in Russia Has a Dash Cam

How is it possible that a dozen different motorists around the Russian city of Chelyabinsk were able to capture video of a massive meteor flying through the sky? Because almost everyone in Russia has a dash-mounted video camera in their car.

The sheer size of the country, combined with lax — and often corrupt — law enforcement, and a legal system that rarely favors first-hand accounts of traffic collisions has made dash cams all but a requirement for motorists.

“You can get into your car without your pants on, but never get into a car without a dash cam,” Aleksei Dozorov, a motorists’ rights activist in Russia told Radio Free Europe last year.

Do a search for “Russia dash cam crash” in YouTube — or even better, Yandex.ru, the county’s equivalent of Google — and you’ll find thousands of videos showing massive crashes, close calls and attempts at insurance fraud by both other drivers and pedestrians. And Russian drivers are accident prone. With 35,972 road deaths in 2007 (the latest stats available from the World Health Organization), Russia averages 25.2 traffic fatalities per 100,000 people. The U.S., by comparison, had 13.9 road deaths per 100,000 people in the same year, despite having six times more cars.

A combination of inexpensive cameras, flash memory and regulations passed by the Interior Ministry in 2009 that removed any legal hurdles for in-dash cameras has made it easy and cheap for drivers to install the equipment.

And it’s turned into an online phenomenon.

YouTube content policing means some of the most disturbing videos get pulled from U.S. video sites almost immediately, but as Marina Galperina reported at Animal New York last year, sites like the Ru CHP LiveJournal community are filled with disturbing videos of profanity-laden fist-fights, massive crashes and gruesome deaths, all captured on camera and shared for the world to see.

But then there are times like today, when dash cams catch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor falling from the sky, from every possible angle — something that couldn’t have happened just a few years ago.

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Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie venture into winemaking

(Reuters) – Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have gone into the wine business, helping to produce a rose called Miraval from their French estate and putting their names on the label, wine website Decanter.com reported.

The movie star couple have been working with French winemaker Marc Perrin starting with the 2012 harvest, the website said. The Miraval wine will be on the market in March, and white wines will begin arriving by the end of this summer.

“They … want to ensure they are making the best Provence wines they can,” Perrin told Britain-based Decanter.com. on Wednesday.

“They were present at the blending sessions this year, and are relooking at everything from the installations in the winery – where we have already switched to stainless steel tanks – to reworking the labels across the range of wines,” he added.

The back label of the Miraval wine carries the names Jolie-Pitt and Perrin.

Pitt and Jolie began renting Chateau Miraval in Correns, southern France, about four years ago and later bought the property, which has about 148 acres of vines.

The Miraval wine was formerly called Pink Floyd because the British rock band recorded their 1979 album “The Wall” in a studio on the estate, Decanter.com said.

Pitt last year unveiled a high-end collection of furniture that he helped create with designer Frank Pollaro. He has also worked with architects to create affordable quality housing for victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Xavier Briand)

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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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Economix Blog: What Makes Manhattan Cost So Much?

You’ve probably heard the stat before: The cost of living is twice as high in New York as it is in the rest of the country. In the Council for Community and Economic Research’s latest cost of living report, we find out exactly what that means, and what the biggest distortions are.

The council collects price data from 307 urban areas. It found that for the first three quarters of 2012, the after-tax cost for a professional/managerial standard of living in Manhattan was 225.4 percent of that for the nation. That made Manhattan once again the most expensive place to live. In second place was Brooklyn (178.6 percent of the national average), followed by Honolulu (167 percent), San Francisco (163.4 percent) and San Jose, Calif. (153.4 percent).

By far, the biggest culprit in driving up Manhattan’s cost of living was housing. The organization’s index of housing costs is 455.2 percent of the national average. The other cost of living categories were also higher in Manhattan than in the rest of the country, by the cost differential was not nearly as great.

Category	Manhattan Price as a Percentage of National Average
Composite	225.6%
Grocery	149.9%
Housing	455.2%
Utilities	129.0%
Transportation	123.5%
Health	129.4%
Miscellaneous	148.5%

Here is a selection of the average price data from some of the 60 specific categories they track:

Item	Manhattan Average Price	National Average Price
Chunk Light Tuna	$1.53	$0.99
Whole Milk	$2.34	$2.26
Soft Drink	$2.00	$1.56
Apartment Rent	$3,902.10	$869.83
Dentist Visit	$106.18	$84.93
Lipitor	$189.42	$178.23
Pizza	$10.88	$8.99
Toothpaste	$4.08	$2.52
Dry Cleaning	$13.70	$11.01
Man’s Dress Shirt	$40.91	$26.05
Movie	$13.33	$9.19
Veterinary Services	$99.53	$45.53

As with any cost-of-living index, the comparisons are imperfect. For example, some of the items that the Council for Community and Economic Research includes in its index are much pricier in Manhattan than elsewhere, but probably don’t enter Manhattanites’ daily expenses too frequently — things like tennis balls, bowling or even gasoline.

There’s another major issue when comparing costs of living in different cities: a lot of the amenities of various cities are not captured by the prices of individual goods. Stores and restaurants are open later in New York, for example. There are probably more top-notch restaurants in Manhattan than just about anywhere else in the United States. These amenities might push other prices (like rents, or for that matter goods sold in stores that have to pay high rents) higher, so that it’s not a true apples-to-apples comparison to look at prices in Manhattan against those in Buffalo or Toledo. Economists disagree about how to adjust for these factors when calculating cost-of-living comparisons.

One new paper by Rebecca Diamond (a Harvard Ph.D. student who is one of the stars on this year’s economic job market) tries to take into account the value of these hidden higher amenities. Her research suggests that when you weigh rising amenities against rising costs in some of the highest-skilled cities in America, it actually turns out that higher-skilled people who have access to these better amenities have an even better standard of living than the standard cost-of-living adjustment would show. She also finds that welfare inequality between higher-skilled and lower-skilled workers is greater than the already-wide wage gap alone suggests.

Another recent paper (by Jessie Handbury of Wharton) also tries to take the relative tastes of rich versus poor people into account. It finds that New York is indeed an expensive place to live if you’re poor, but in a way is actually a relatively cheap place to live if you’re rich and have standard rich-person tastes (e.g., Whole Foods might be the only place in town for to buy organic free-range chicken in a place like Little Rock, Ark., whereas there’s more price competition for high-end food in New York).

One final note: The pricing figures from the Council for Community and Economic Research are different from those in the Consumer Price Index reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau’s monthly report reflects spending patterns for all urban consumers and for urban wage earners and clerical workers, and has data from only a couple of dozen broad metropolitan areas (as opposed to the 307 geographically narrower urban areas).

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Oscar Pistorius remains in jail facing murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who made history last year as the first double amputee runner to compete in the Olympics using prosthetic blades, will spend the night in jail Thursday after he was charged with murder in the death of his girlfriend at his house, prosecutors said.

The National Prosecuting Authority said Pistorius would remain in custody until his hearing Friday, when police intend to oppose bail.

Reeva Steenkamp, a 30-year-old model, died after being shot several times in the head and arm in Pistorius’ house in an upscale suburb in Pretoria.

PHOTOS: Pistorius in the London Olympics

Pistorius was ushered from the home by police Thursday morning with a gray hoodie covering his head and obscuring most of his face.

South Africans were in shock about the accusation against Pistorius, who became a hero during his long battle for the right to compete in the Olympics. After a controversy on whether the blades he uses to walk and run gave him an advantage in races, Pistorius was granted the right to compete in the London 2012 Olympic Games.

South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of murder and violent crime, and many South Africans keep guns at home to guard against intruders.

The Afrikaans-language newspaper Beeld suggested that Pistorius mistook his girlfriend for a burglar and killed her accidentally.

However, a police spokeswoman, Brig. Denise Beukes, said police were “surprised” at reports the killing was accidental, adding that that version hadn’t come from police, according to the South African Press Assn.

"I confirm there had been previous incidents of a domestic nature at his place,” said Beukes, adding that police couldn’t comment on the decision to oppose bail.

Beukes said police had interviewed neighbors who heard sounds at Pistorius’ home earlier in the evening, and also at the time the incident reportedly took place.

Pistorius’ father, Henke Pistorius, said his son was sad. But the older Pistorius said he didn’t know the facts.

“I don’t know nothing. It will be extremely obnoxious and rude to speculate,” he said in a radio interview. “If anyone makes a statement, it will have to be Oscar.”

An advertisement for Nike, one of Pistorius’ major sponsors, was removed from his official website Thursday. It had shown the athlete in a green lycra athletic suit and the slogan, “I am the bullet in the chamber."

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Animals' Love Lives Look a Lot Like Ours

For most of the 20th century, animals weren’t allowed to have emotions. Your dog didn’t actually love you—it (and it was an “it” back then) was just a stimulus–response machine conditioned to act a specific way in a specific situation. Scientists who said otherwise—that animals actually had minds capable of thoughts and emotions—were accused of “anthropomorphizing” and ridiculed by their peers. Even researchers as famous as chimp specialist Jane Goodall spent years sitting on evidence that animals could do more than just salivate at the sound of a bell.

But over time, that bias waned. Just consider the first sentence (and the title) of Virginia Morell’s new book, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures: “Animals have minds.”

“Not so long ago,” she writes later, “I would have hedged these statements.” After six years of reporting in 11 different countries, the longtime science journalist arrived at the same conclusion that scientists like Goodall have known for a long while: that animals feel. And strongly, it turns out.

But how complex are these emotions? Fear and panic are one thing; but do animals lust, even love? We went to Morell for some answers. Animals might not celebrate Valentine’s Day, but their relationships still look a lot like ours. Here are some of her favorite examples.

Parrot porn, anyone? That’s what Morell was treated to in Venezuela, where scientists are studying the calls of green-rumped parrotlets. One of their racier findings? Little birds be bangin’ like mammals: pushing, clawing, clutching, thrusting. But that’s not all. These parrots lead soap opera–ready lives.

“They were very, very fun to watch,” Morell said.

In one of her favorite stories, a parrot widow gets remarried to a neighbor, only to have her new husband leave her a day later for his first wife. Bad General Parrotreus! All that drama is meticulously documented in a field log, which Morell calls “a parrotlet version of Desperate Housewives.”

Photo: Male (right) and female (left) green-rumped parrotlets. Ninoska Zamora/Flickr.

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Actor Steve Martin is first-time dad at age 67

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actor, writer and comedian Steve Martin has become a dad for the first time at age 67 – and managed to keep it secret from the media for more than a month.

Martin and his second wife, Anne Stringfield, 41, “are new parents and recently welcomed a child,” a spokeswoman for the actor said on Wednesday.

The spokeswoman gave no details, including the sex of the child or the date of birth. But the New York Post cited unidentified sources as saying the baby arrived in December.

The multi-talented Martin, whose career as a writer and performer dates back more than 45 years, has played a father in movies such as “Parenthood,” Cheaper by the Dozen,” and “Father of the Bride.”

Martin, who has hosted the Oscars ceremony three times, married Stringfield, a former writer at the New Yorker magazine, in 2007. His eight-year marriage to British actress Victoria Tennant ended in divorce in 1994.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey: Editing by Jill Serjeant and Peter Cooney)

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U.S. Approves First Method to Give the Blind Limited Vision

The F.D.A. Approves a Bionic Eye:
The Argus II allows Barbara Campbell, who lost her sight 20 years ago, to see the world through patterns of light. Scientists hope it is the beginning of even more treatments.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.”

With it, people with certain types of blindness can detect crosswalks on the street, burners on a stove, the presence of people or cars, and sometimes even oversized numbers or letters.

The artificial retina is a sheet of electrodes surgically implanted in the eye. The patient is also outfitted with a pair of glasses with an attached camera and a portable video processor. These elements together allow visual signals to bypass the damaged portion of the retina and be transmitted to the brain. The F.D.A. approval covers this integrated system, which the manufacturer calls Argus II.

The approval marks the first milestone in a new frontier in vision research, a field in which scientists are making strides with gene therapy, optogenetics, stem cells and other strategies.

“This is just the beginning,” said Grace Shen, director of the retinal diseases program at the National Eye Institute, which helped finance the artificial retina research and is supporting many other blindness therapy projects. “We have a lot of exciting things sitting in the wings, multiple approaches being developed now to address this.”

With the artificial retina or retinal prosthesis, a blind person cannot see in the conventional sense, but can identify outlines and boundaries of objects, especially when there is contrast between light and dark — fireworks against a night sky or black socks mixed with white ones in the laundry.

“Without the system, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all, and if you were in front of me and you moved left and right, I’m not going to realize any of this,” said Elias Konstantopolous, 74, a retired electrician in Baltimore, one of about 50 Americans and Europeans who have been using the device in clinical trials for several years. He said it helps him differentiate curbs from asphalt roads, and detect contours, but not details, of cars, trees and people. “When you don’t have nothing, this is something. It’s a lot.”

The F.D.A. approved Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products, to treat people with severe retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited diseases in which photoreceptor cells, which take in light, deteriorate.

The first version of the implant had a sheet of 16 electrodes, but the current version has 60. A tiny camera mounted on eyeglasses captures images, and the video processor, worn on a belt, translates those images into pixelized patterns of light and dark. The processor transmits those signals to the electrodes, which send them along the optic nerve to the brain.

About 100,000 Americans have retinitis pigmentosa, but initially between 10,000 and 15,000 will likely qualify for the Argus II, according to the company. The F.D.A. says that up to 4,000 people a year can be treated with the device. That number represents people who are older than 25, who once had useful vision, have evidence of an intact inner retinal layer, have at best very limited light perception in the retina, and are so visually impaired that the device would prove an improvement. Second Sight will begin making Argus II available later this year.

But experts said the technology holds promise for other people who are blind, especially those with advanced age-related macular degeneration, the major cause of vision loss in older people, affecting about two million Americans. About 50,000 of them are currently severely impaired enough that the artificial retina would be helpful, said Dr. Robert Greenberg, Second Sight’s president and chief executive.

In Europe, Argus II received approval in 2011 to treat a broader group of people, those with severe blindness caused by any type of outer retinal degeneration, not just retinitis pigmentosa, although it is currently only marketed in Europe for that condition. In the U.S., additional clinical trials need to be completed before the company can seek broader FDA approval.

Eventually, Dr. Greenberg said, the plan is to implant electrodes not in the eye, but directly into the brain’s visual cortex. “That would allow us to address blindness from all causes,” he said.

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David Leonhardt, Washington Bureau Chief, Answers Readers’ Questions

David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, is answering readers’ questions about the economic landscape and President Obama’s prospects to enact the ambitious legislative agenda he laid out in his State of the Union address.

Mr. Leonhardt is the author of the e-book, “Here’s the Deal: How Washington Can Solve the Deficit and Spur Growth,” published by The Times and Byliner. Previously, he wrote the paper’s Economic Scene column.

Below are answers to selected readers' questions.

Q.
When the debt was the largest in history as a percent of GDP, in 1946, we had 27 years of mostly deficit spending. The debt in dollars doubled. But we had prosperity. Why don't we do that today?

— Len Charlap, Princeton, NJ

A. You're right that a country can have deficits and still pay down its debt, so long as the deficits are small enough and economic growth fast enough. And you're right that some government spending plays a crucial role in creating economic growth. The most important programs seem to be investments -- in education, scientific research, roads, bridges and the like -- that the private sector won't do on its own.

The Internet, the radio, the jet engine, much of biotechnology and the technique for extracting a form of natural gas known as shale gas all owe their beginnings to federal spending. This history is a major theme in "Here's the Deal."

But government spending and debt most certainly do not ensure prosperity. Federal debt is already high. The projections showing that annual deficits will fall in the next few years depend on some assumptions that may prove rosy. And as more baby boomers retire and health costs keep rising, projected deficits are projected to rise again, sharply, in coming decades.

As heartening as the recent progress on the deficit may be, the country still faces substantial long-term fiscal problems. If we don't deal with them, we are likely to have an economy that looks nothing like the prosperous economy after World War II.

Q.
Congressional Republicans recently decided against using the debt limit as a lever to force President Obama to enact spending cuts he wouldn't otherwise go along with. Is there any indication that Republicans will agree to a longer-term extension once the current limit is reached?

A. It's hard to know, but it's possible that the debt-ceiling fights will not continue. In the past, the extension of the debt ceiling tended to be an opportunity for the party that didn't hold the White House to grandstand about the deficit and debt. (President Obama, somewhat famously, did so in 2006.) In the end, though, the extension tended to pass without any concessions from the president.

In 2011, Congressional Republicans successfully negotiated such concessions from Mr. Obama. In recent months, he made clear that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling again, citing the economic damage from the uncertainty over the last extension. Republicans have gone along, at least temporarily.

Polls suggest the last fight hurt Republicans more than Democrats, which suggests Republicans may ultimately agree to a long-term extension or simply a series of short-term extensions. On the other hand, they were indeed able to win some spending cuts in 2011, so some in the party continue to see the debt ceiling as a powerful tool.

The most cliched last line in journalism -- the kicker, as we say -- is: Time will tell. I can't think of another kicker here.

Q.
Why has the administration given so much focus to gun control in the past few weeks? With a Republican majority in the House and the fact that many Democrats would also vote against advanced gun control measures, would this kind of legislation have a chance of passing the House or the Senate?

A. Unlike past mass shootings, the killings in Newtown, Conn., shifted the national debate. Public opinion changed modestly, and Democrats who favor more gun control became more willing to push for it.

As you note, most Republicans and some Democrats oppose sweeping new measures, which is why an assault-weapons ban still seems unlikely. But some other measures may be able to win overwhelming support from Democrats and enough from Republicans to pass both the House and Senate. The two leading candidates are an expansion of criminal background checks on people buying guns and a new federal trafficking law to block criminal purchases.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 85 percent of Americans favor background checks. Support at so high of a level, combined with national attention to the issues, has the potential to create a majority in both houses of Congress.

Q.
The Wall Street macro indexes e.g. S&P500, DOW, are at or around historical highs. However I do not see corresponding growth in GDP let alone increase in employment rate to underpin this rally.
What is driving this and where is the money coming from? How does this benefit "middle America"?

— Arthur CHAN, Wilmington, DE

A. First, the indexes themselves are not at or near record highs when viewed properly. When adjusted for inflation, the Standard & Poor 500 index was more than 30 percent higher in 2000 than it is today. Including the value of dividends, the S&P was still about 5 percent higher in 2000 than now. And taking into investment costs, which nearly everyone pays, the gap would be substantially more than 5 percent.

I say this not to be an inflation nerd (though I am) but to make the point that the stock market is not in fact more valuable than it’s ever been. When Wall Street proclaims, “record high!” and we in the media repeat the claim, we’re presenting a false picture of reality. Stocks are still not as valuable as they were at the peak of the dot-com bubble.

Your larger point, though, is dead on. The S&P 500 (including dividends and inflation) is about 18 percent higher than it was five years ago, which is roughly when the recession began. The overall economy has not fared nearly so well. Gross domestic product was only about 2 percent larger at the end of last year than five years earlier. The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent, up from 5 percent five years ago.

For a complex stew of reasons – including, but not limited to, government assistance for the financial sector since 2007 – American companies and financial firms have recovered more quickly from the crisis than most of the rest of the economy.

Q.
What are President Obama's plans to lure high-tech manufacturing back to the United States?
He courts Silicon Valley and named Apple during his State of the Union, but Steve Jobs famously said manufacturing will never return for logistical reasons. Tim Cook, despite the return of a single Mac line, appears to have little desire to change the company's strategic plan.

A. My colleague Annie Lowrey responds:

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