Citi Changes Terms of Executive Bonuses

Citigroup responded to anger about the size of its executive pay packages on Thursday by changing the way it calculates the bonuses given to top executives.

Starting with last year’s compensation, a portion of the bonuses paid out to Citi’s executives will now be linked to the company’s performance relative to that of other big banks.

Citi has been a prominent symbol in the debate over the scale of executive compensation on Wall Street. The changes announced Thursday come less than a year after Citigroup shareholders voted against a $15 million pay package for Vikram S. Pandit, then the bank’s chief executive.

After that vote, Citi’s chairman, Michael O’Neill, took the reins of a five-member group last April assigned to review executive pay. “When our shareholders spoke last year about Citi’s compensation structure, we listened,” Mr. O’Neill said in a regulatory filing.

The change in the compensation structure was prompted by a desire to “more strongly connects compensation with performance,” Mr. O’Neill said in the filing.

Nell Minow, a shareholder advocate at GMI Ratings, said that “it’s a huge step forward from terrible, which is what it was.”

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Cyprus Trial Offers a Rare Look Inside Hezbollah

LIMASSOL, Cyprus — In a little-watched trial in a small courtroom here on Wednesday, a 24-year-old man provided a rare look inside a covert global war between Israel and Iran, admitting that he is an operative of the militant group Hezbollah, for which he acted as a courier in Europe and staked out locations in this port city that Israelis were known to frequent.

Breaking with the group’s ironclad discipline and practiced secrecy, the operative, Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, described being handled by a masked man he knew only as Ayman. He told of doing simple tasks at first: picking up a couple of bags in Lyon, France, taking a cellphone, two SIM cards and a mysterious package wrapped in newspaper from Amsterdam to Lebanon.

When he was arrested last July, he had a small red notebook with the license plate numbers of two buses ferrying Israelis to vacation spots in the vicinity.

He claimed that none of this was related to planning an attack, as prosecutors have charged. One of the plates, LAA-505, reminded him of a Lamborghini sports car, he said, while the other, KWK-663, reminded him of a Kawasaki motorcycle.

Yet, less than two weeks after he was taken into custody, a bomb blew up alongside a bus at the airport in Burgas, Bulgaria, killing five Israeli tourists and the Bulgarian driver — an attack similar to the one he seemed to be planning, experts say, and one that the Bulgarian authorities later tied to Hezbollah.

Mr. Yaacoub’s testimony offered unaccustomed insights from an active Hezbollah member into the militant group’s secret operations. But it carried potentially greater significance for the European Union, which has thus far resisted following Washington’s lead in declaring the group a terrorist organization. Experts say that a conviction here would substantially raise the pressure on the bloc for such a designation.

“Foreign ministries around Europe are watching this quite closely because many Europeans, particularly the Germans, have laid such a stress on courtroom evidence being the basis for a designation,” said Daniel Benjamin, until December the top counterterrorism official at the State Department, who visited Cyprus last year after the arrest.

Security experts also suspect that Mr. Yaacoub was playing a small but potentially deadly role in a much broader shadow war that has produced what some Israeli and American intelligence officials say were nearly a dozen plots by Iran and Hezbollah against Israel and its allies abroad.

“The evidence seems quite compelling that what he was doing was conducting surveillance for a bombing that would parallel almost exactly what happened in Bulgaria,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the program on counterterrorism and intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of a forthcoming book on Hezbollah’s global footprint.

In written testimony read in Greek by his interpreter, as he sat quietly beside her, Mr. Yaacoub described how he would be picked up in a van to meet with his handler, Ayman, and used code words to confirm his identity. “I never saw the face of Ayman because he was always wearing a mask,” Mr. Yaacoub said.

He said he was trained in the use of weapons and had acted as a courier for the group inside the European Union; with his Swedish passport, Mr. Yaacoub was an ideal candidate for such missions. He also acknowledged staking out the locations where Israelis appeared in large numbers — a parking lot behind a Limassol hospital and a hotel called the Golden Arches.

But Mr. Yaacoub was adamant that he was not participating in a plot to kill Israeli tourists. “Even if they asked me to participate in a terrorist action, I would refuse,” he said. “I could never do that. I’m only trained to defend Lebanon.”

Cyprus has traditionally had strong ties to Israel, but even more so to the Arab world. The island was widely considered a safe place to do business, even informally viewed as something of a cease-fire zone for the region’s conflicts, said Petros Zarounas, an expert in international relations in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital.

“They considered it neutral ground where everyone will have access to Cyprus soil, to feel safe, secure, quiet,” he said.

But recently the island nation has grown closer to Israel, deepening economic ties. Like Bulgaria, Cyprus is a popular tourist destination, with nearly 40,000 Israelis visiting in 2012.

Officials in Cyprus have tried to keep the case as low-key as possible, declining in most instances to comment or to release documents. “It’s a very serious and delicate case,” the justice minister, Loucas Louca, said shortly after Mr. Yaacoub was arrested. “I don’t want to make a statement because any publicity could harm the case.”

The prosecution and the defense have both declined to comment before a verdict is reached, expected to be sometime in March. But a preliminary ruling by the three-judge panel last week found that the prosecutor had provided enough evidence to proceed on all eight counts, including four charges of conspiracy to commit a felony, two charges of participating in a criminal organization, one of participating in the preparation of a crime and a charge of covering it up.

Andreas Riris contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of a Web summary on this article misspelled the surname of the defendant. He is Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, not Yaccou.

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Police add more confusion to Oscar Pistorius case

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — The prosecution case against Oscar Pistorius began to unravel Wednesday with revelations of a series of police blunders and the lead investigator's admission that authorities have no evidence challenging the double-amputee Olympian's claim he killed his girlfriend accidentally.

Detective Hilton Botha's often confused testimony left prosecutors rubbing their heads in frustration as he misjudged distances and said testosterone — banned for professional athletes in some cases — was found at the scene, only to be later contradicted by the prosecutor's office.

The second day of what was supposed to be a mere bail hearing almost resembled a full-blown trial for the 26-year-old runner, with his lawyer, Barry Roux, tearing into Botha's testimony step by step during cross examination.

Police, Botha acknowledged, left a 9 mm slug from the barrage that killed Reeva Steenkamp inside a toilet and lost track of illegal ammunition found inside the house. And the detective himself walked through the crime scene without wearing protective shoe covers, potentially contaminating the area.

Authorities, Roux asserted, were selectively taking "every piece of evidence to try to extract the most possibly negative connotation and present it to the court."

The case has riveted South Africa, with journalists and the curious crowding into the brick-walled courtroom where Pistorius, dubbed the Blade Runner for his prosthetic legs, faces a charge of premeditated murder in the Valentine's Day slaying.

Pistorius says he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder and shot her out of fear, while prosecutors say he planned the killing and attacked her as she cowered behind a locked bathroom door.

The day seemed to start out well for the prosecution, with Botha offering new details of the shooting that appeared to call into question Pistorius' account of the moments leading up to the 29-year-old model's death.

Ballistic evidence, he said, showed the bullets that killed her had been fired from a height, supporting the prosecution's assertion that Pistorius was wearing prosthetic legs when he took aim at the bathroom door. The athlete has maintained he was standing only on his stumps, and felt vulnerable and frightened as he opened fire from a low position.

Projecting a diagram of the bedroom and bathroom, prosecutor Gerrie Nel said it showed Pistorius had to walk past his bed to get to bathroom and could not have done so without seeing that Steenkamp was not asleep there.

"There's no other way of getting there," Nel said in disputing Pistorius' claim that he had no idea Steenkamp was no longer in bed when he pumped four bullets into the bathroom door, striking her with three.

Botha backed the prosecutor up, saying the holster for Pistorius' 9 mm pistol was found under the left side of the bed, where Steenkamp slept, and it would have been impossible for Pistorius to get the gun without checking to see if she was there.

"I believe that he knew that Reeva was in the bathroom and he shot four shots through the door," the detective said.

Botha described how bullets struck Steenkamp in the head and shattered her right arm and hip, eliciting sobs from Pistorius, who held his head in hands.

However, when asked if Steenkamp's body showed "any pattern of defensive wounds" or bruising from an assault, Botha said "no." He again responded "no" when asked if investigators found anything inconsistent with Pistorius' version of events, though he later said nothing contradicted the police version either.

Testimony began with the prosecutor telling the court that before the shooting, a neighbor heard "nonstop" shouting between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. at Pistorius' upscale home in a gated community in the capital, Pretoria.

However, Botha later said under cross examination that the witness was in a house 600 yards (meters) away, possibly out of earshot. He cut that estimate in half when questioned again by the prosecutor, as confusion reigned for much of his testimony.

At one point, Botha told the court that police found syringes and two boxes of testosterone in Pistorius' bedroom — testimony the prosecution later withdrew, saying it was too early to identify the substance, which was still being tested.

"It is not certain (what it is) until the forensics" are completed, Medupe Simasiku, a spokesman for South Africa's National Prosecution Agency, told The Associated Press. It's not clear if it was "a legal or an illegal medication for now."

The defense also disputed the claim. "It is an herbal remedy," Roux said. "It is not ... a banned substance."

Still, Botha offered potentially damaging details about Pistorius' past, saying the athlete was once involved in an accidental shooting at a restaurant in Johannesburg and asked someone else "to take the wrap."

The runner also threatened men on two separate occasions, Botha said, allegedly telling one he'd "break his legs."

The detective said police found two iPhones in Pistorius' bathroom and two BlackBerrys in his bedroom, and none had been used to phone for help. Guards at the gated community did call the athlete, Botha said, and all he said was: "I'm all right," as he wept uncontrollably.

Roux later suggested that a fifth phone, not collected by the police, was used by Pistorius to call for help.

The question now is whether Botha's troubled testimony will be enough to convince Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair to keep Pistorius in prison until trial. While Pistorius faces the harshest bail requirements under South African law, the magistrate has said he would consider loosening them based on testimony in the hearing. Final arguments were scheduled for Thursday.

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Gerald Imray reported from Johannesburg. Associated Press writer Michelle Faul in Johannesburg contributed to this report.

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Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP. Gerald Imray can be reached at www.twitter.com/geraldimrayAP.

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Well: Effects of Bullying Last Into Adulthood, Study Finds

Victims of bullying at school, and bullies themselves, are more likely to experience psychiatric problems in childhood, studies have shown. Now researchers have found that elevated risk of psychiatric trouble extends into adulthood, sometimes even a decade after the intimidation has ended.

The new study, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry on Wednesday, is the most comprehensive effort to date to establish the long-term consequences of childhood bullying, experts said.

“It documents the elevated risk across a wide range of mental health outcomes and over a long period of time,” said Catherine Bradshaw, an expert on bullying and a deputy director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins University, which was not involved in the study.

“The experience of bullying in childhood can have profound effects on mental health in adulthood, particularly among youths involved in bullying as both a perpetuator and a victim,” she added.

The study followed 1,420 subjects from Western North Carolina who were assessed four to six times between the ages of 9 and 16. Researchers asked both the children and their primary caregivers if they had been bullied or had bullied others in the three months before each assessment. Participants were divided into four groups: bullies, victims, bullies who also were victims, and children who were not exposed to bullying at all.

Participants were assessed again in young adulthood — at 19, 21 and between 24 and 26 — using structured diagnostic interviews.

Researchers found that victims of bullying in childhood were 4.3 times more likely to have an anxiety disorder as adults, compared to those with no history of bullying or being bullied.

Bullies who were also victims were particularly troubled: they were 14.5 times more likely to develop panic disorder as adults, compared to those who did not experience bullying, and 4.8 times more likely to experience depression. Men who were both bullies and victims were 18.5 times more likely to have had suicidal thoughts in adulthood, compared to the participants who had not been bullied or perpetuators. Their female counterparts were 26.7 times more likely to have developed agoraphobia, compared to children not exposed to bullying.

Bullies who were not victims of bullying were 4.1 times more likely to have antisocial personality disorder as adults than those never exposed to bullying in their youth.

The effects persisted even after the researchers accounted for pre-existing psychiatric problems or other factors that might have contributed to psychiatric disorders, like physical or sexual abuse, poverty and family instability.

“We were actually able to say being a victim of bullying is having an effect a decade later, above and beyond other psychiatric problems in childhood and other adversities,” said William E. Copeland, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center.

Bullying is not a harmless rite of passage, but inflicts lasting psychiatric damage on a par with certain family dysfunctions, Dr. Copeland said. “The pattern we are seeing is similar to patterns we see when a child is abused or maltreated or treated very harshly within the family setting,” he said.

One limitation of the study is that bullying was not analyzed for frequency, and the researchers’ assessment did not distinguish between interpersonal and overt bullying. It only addressed bullying at school, not in other settings.

Most of what experts know about the effects of bullying comes from observational studies, not studies of children followed over time.

Previous research from Finland, based on questionnaires completed on a single occasion or on military registries, used a sample of 2,540 boys to see if being a bully or a victim at 8 predicted a psychiatric disorder 10 to 15 years later. The researchers found frequent bully-victims were at particular risk of adverse long-term outcomes, specifically anxiety and antisocial personality disorders. Victims were at greater risk for anxiety disorders, while bullies were at increased risk for antisocial personality disorder.

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Sony Unveils PlayStation 4, Aiming for Return to Glory

For the Sony Corporation, a tech industry also-ran, the moment of reckoning is here.

The first three generations of PlayStation sold more than 300 million units, pioneered a new style of serious gaming and produced hefty profits. PlayStation 4, introduced by Sony on Wednesday evening, is a bold bid to recapture those glory days of innovation and success.

The first new PlayStation in seven years was touted by Sony as being like a “supercharged PC.” It has a souped-up eight-core processor to juggle more complex tasks simultaneously, enhanced graphics, the ability to play games even as they are being downloaded, and a new controller designed in tandem with a “stereo camera” that can sense the depth of the environment in front of it.All of that should make for more compelling play for the hard-core gamers at the heart of the PlayStation market. The blood in “Killzone: Shadow Fall,” shown to an audience of 1,200 at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, looked chillingly real.

The device, whose price was not immediately announced, will go on sale before the end of the year.

With PlayStation 4, serious gaming is about to become much more social. A player can broadcast his gameplay in real time, and his friend can peek into his game and hop in to help. Also, they will now be able to upload recordings of themselves playing and send them to their hardcore friends, who will possibly want to watch when they are not playing themselves.

The new features, however, cannot hide the fact that PlayStation 4 is still a console, a way of playing games on compact discs that was cool when cellphones were the size of toasters and browsers were people in libraries. It was a couple of lifetimes ago, or so it seems.

Much of the excitement in gaming has shifted to the Web and mobile devices, which is cheap, easy and fast. Nintendo’s new Wii, introduced in November, has been a disappointment. Microsoft’s Xbox, the third major console, is racing to turn into a home entertainment center as fast as it can.

“Today marks a moment of truth and a bold step forward for PlayStation,” Andrew House, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, told the crowd. He said the new device “represents a significant shift of thinking of PlayStation as merely a box or console to thinking as a leading authority on play.”Fine words, but the new PlayStation will have an uphill battle. Sales of consoles from all makers peaked in 2008, when about 55 million units were sold according to the research firm I.D.C. By last year, that was down to 34 million.

For 2014, Lewis Ward, I.D.C.’s research manager for gaming, forecasts a recovery to about 44.5 million.

“From peak to peak, we’ll be down about 10 million,” he said. “There was attrition to alternative gaming platforms like tablets, but the trough was exacerbated by the 2008-2009 recession. It did not permit as many people to buy who under normal economic conditions would have bought a console.”

That was reflected in Sony’s miserable financial results. The company has lost money for the last four years, hampered not only by slower console sales but also by a range of unexciting electronic products, a strong yen and the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Analysts have made dire comments about the one-time powerhouse’s viability. But Sony seems to have bottomed out, helped by a yen that has now weakened. Sony executives said earlier this month that they expected a profit in 2013.

Sony’s new chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, has a longtime personal connection to the PlayStation franchise and is making it one of the core elements of a more tightly focused company. Mr. Hirai became well-known for some of his more confident statements about the PlayStation, particularly a 2006 swipe at Microsoft: “The next generation doesn’t start until we say it does.”

Sony has teamed up with Gaikai, the online gaming company it bought last year, to store PlayStation content in the cloud. PlayStation 4 games can be streamed to the PlayStation Vita, Sony’s portable gaming device, among other features.

“The architecture is like a PC in many ways, but super-charged to bring out its full potential as a gaming platform,” said Mark Cerny, Sony’s lead system architect.

James L. McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, said that in order for the PlayStation 4 to succeed, Sony needed to think beyond gaming. The console will have to provide other types of digital content and services, like video conferencing, third-party apps and a TV service to create a deeper, long-term relationship with the customer.

By comparison, Apple, the world’s leading consumer electronics maker, does not just sell hardware. It also has an ecosystem of digital content including apps, music, movies and e-books to make people coming back for more Apple gear every year. Apple generally takes an enviable 30 percent cut of all media it sells. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are making similar moves to create ecosystems.

“Then and only then can Sony hope to learn enough about its users to overcome its own bias toward preferring to design products in response to engineering principles rather than customer needs,” Mr. McQuivey said.

Sony shares, which have risen by nearly a third this year, were little changed Wednesday before the event.

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Pistorius Denies Murdering Girlfriend

PRETORIA, South Africa — Early on Feb. 14, Oscar Pistorius says, he heard a strange noise coming from inside his bathroom, climbed out of bed, grabbed his 9-millimeter pistol, hobbled on his stumps to the door and fired four shots.

“I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder, let alone premeditated,” Mr. Pistorius said in an affidavit read Tuesday to a packed courtroom by his defense lawyer, Barry Roux. “I had no intention to kill my girlfriend.”

Prosecutors painted a far different picture, one of a calculated killer, a world-renowned athlete who had the presence of mind and calm to strap on his prosthetic legs, walk 20 feet to the bathroom door and open fire as his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, cowered inside, behind a locked door.

“The applicant shot and killed an unarmed, innocent women,” Gerrie Nel, the chief prosecutor, said in court on Tuesday. That, Mr. Nel argued, amounted to premeditated murder, a charge that could send Mr. Pistorius to prison for life.

In court, Mr. Pistorius, a Paralympic track star who competed against able-bodied athletes at the London Olympics despite having lost both his lower legs as an infant, wept uncontrollably as Mr. Roux gave the runner’s account of the fateful early morning. At one point, Magistrate Desmond Nair called a recess to allow Mr. Pistorius, who was sobbing loudly, his face contorted, to regain his composure.

“My compassion as a human being does not allow me to just sit here,” Magistrate Nair said.

As the defense and prosecution laid out their competing versions of the shooting, some details were beyond dispute.

Mr. Pistorius and Ms. Steenkamp were alone in the house, having spent the evening there. Around 3 a.m., Mr. Pistorius shot Ms. Steenkamp through the bathroom door, fatally wounding her. He broke down the door and carried her down the stairs, where she died in the foyer of his upscale home in a highly secured compound.

The young woman, a model, was cremated Tuesday on the other side of the country in her hometown, Port Elizabeth. Her family and friends mourned her and called for the authorities to deal harshly with Mr. Pistorius.

“There’s a space missing inside all the people that she knew that can’t be filled again,” her brother, Adam Steenkamp, told reporters after the memorial service.

In court, Mr. Pistorius is seeking bail on the charge of premeditated murder, but he faces an uphill battle. Magistrate Nair ruled Tuesday that the case would be treated as the most serious kind of offense, which means bail will be granted only if the defense can prove extraordinary circumstances requiring it.

The court proceedings, though they concerned only whether Mr. Pistorius would receive bail, offered the first real glimpse into what unfolded at his home on the day of the shooting.

In his affidavit, Mr. Pistorius said that he and Ms. Steenkamp had decided to stay in for the night. He canceled plans with his friends for a night on the town in Johannesburg, while she opted against movies with one of her friends. They had a quiet evening, he said. She did yoga. He watched television. About 10 p.m., they went to sleep.

In the early morning hours, he said, he woke up to move a fan from the balcony and to close the sliding doors in the bedroom.

“I heard a noise in the bathroom and realized that someone was in the bathroom,” he said. “I felt a sense of terror rushing over me.”

He had already said in the affidavit that he feared South Africa’s rampant violent crime, and later added that he was worried because there were no bars on the window to the bathroom. Construction workers had left ladders in his garden, he said.

“I believed someone had entered my house,” he said in the affidavit. “I grabbed my 9-millimeter pistol from underneath my bed. On my way to the bathroom I screamed words to the effect for him/them to get out of my house and for Reeva to phone the police. It was pitch dark in the bedroom, and I thought Reeva was in bed.”

Walking on his stumps, he heard the sound of movement inside the toilet, a small room within the bathroom.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.

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Pistorius: Lover caught in tragedy or killer?

PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — Oscar Pistorius portrayed himself as a lover caught in tragedy, wielding a pistol and frightened as he stood only on his stumps, then killed his girlfriend after mistaking her for an intruder on Valentine's Day.

Prosecutors, however, said the double-amputee Olympian committed premeditated murder, planning the slaying, then firing at Reeva Steenkamp as she cowered behind his locked bathroom door with no hope of escape.

"She couldn't go anywhere," Prosecutor Gerrie Nel told a packed courtroom Tuesday. "It must have been horrific."

Weeping uncontrollably, Pistorius listened as his words were read out in court by his attorney during the opening of a two-day bail hearing, his first public account of the events surrounding the shooting death of Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model and reality TV star who had spoken out against violence against women.

"I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder, let alone premeditated murder, as I had no intention to kill my girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp," Pistorius said in the sworn affidavit. "I deny the aforesaid allegation in the strongest terms."

It was the first time that the prosecution and Pistorius provided details of their radically divergent accounts of the killing, which has shocked South Africans and fans worldwide, who idolized the 26-year-old track star known as the Blade Runner for overcoming his disability to compete in last summer's London Olympics.

Nel said Pistorius committed premeditated murder when he rose from his bed after a fight with Steenkamp, pulled on his prosthetic legs and walked about 20 feet from his bedroom to the locked toilet door and pumped it with four bullets, three of which hit the model.

That contradicted the runner's statement, read aloud by defense attorney Barry Roux, who described how the couple spent a quiet night together in the athlete's upscale home in a gated community in the capital of Pretoria, then went to sleep around 10 p.m.

Sometime before dawn, Pistorius said he awoke, and walking only on his stumps, pulled a fan in from an open balcony and closed it. That's when he said he heard a noise and became alarmed because the bathroom window, which had no security bars, was open and workers had left ladders nearby.

"It filled me with horror and fear," Pistorius said in the statement.

"I am acutely aware of violent crime being committed by intruders entering homes," he said. "I have received death threats before. I have also been a victim of violence and of burglaries before. For that reason I kept my firearm, a 9 mm Parabellum, underneath my bed when I went to bed at night."

Too frightened to turn on a light, Pistorius said, he pulled out his pistol and headed for the bathroom, believing Steenkamp was still asleep "in the pitch dark" of the bedroom.

"As I did not have my prosthetic legs on and felt extremely vulnerable, I knew I had to protect Reeva and myself," he said, adding that he shouted to Steenkamp to call the police as he fired at the closed toilet door.

It was then, Pistorius said, that he realized Steenkamp was not in bed.

He said he pulled on his prosthetic legs and tried to kick down the toilet door before finally giving up and bashing it in with a cricket bat. Inside, he said he found Steenkamp, slumped over but still alive. He said he lifted her bloodied body and carried her downstairs to seek medical help.

But it was too late. "She died in my arms," Pistorius said.

"We were deeply in love and I could not be happier," the athlete said. "I know she felt the same way. She had given me a present for Valentine's Day but asked me only to open it the next day."

Pistorius broke down in sobs repeatedly as his account was read, prompting Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair to call a recess at one point.

"Maintain your composure," the magistrate said. "You need to apply your mind here."

"Yes, my lordship," Pistorius replied, his voice quivering.

Nair adjourned the case until Wednesday without ruling on whether Pistorius would be granted bail. However, he said the gravity of the charge — which carries a mandatory life sentence — meant the athlete's lawyers must offer "exceptional" reasons for bail to be granted, making his release unlikely.

Roux, the defense attorney, said there was no evidence to substantiate a murder charge. "We submit it is not even murder. There is no concession this is a murder," he said.

The prosecutor disagreed.

"It is our respectful argument that 'pre-planning' or premeditation do not require months of planning," Nel said. "If ... I ready myself and walk a distance with the intention to kill someone, it is premeditated."

Hundreds of miles from the Magistrate's Court, a memorial service was held for Steenkamp in the south coast city of Port Elizabeth. Six pallbearers carried her coffin, draped with a white cloth and covered in white flowers, into the church for the private service and cremation.

Relatives recalled how the model with a law degree had campaigned against domestic violence and had planned to don black for a "Black Friday" protest in honor of a 17-year-old girl who was recently gang-raped and mutilated.

What "she stood for, and the abuse against women, unfortunately it's gone right around, and I think the Lord knows that statement is more powerful now," said her uncle, Mike Steenkamp.

South Africa has some of the world's worst rates of violence against women and the highest rate in the world of women killed by an intimate partner, according to a study by the Medical Research Council, which said at least three women are killed by a partner every day in the country of 50 million.

Since the shooting, several of Pistorius' sponsors have dropped him. On Tuesday, Clarins Group, which owns Thierry Mugler Perfumes, said it would withdraw all advertising featuring the Olympian. A cologne line with the company, called A(asterisk)Men, bears his image.

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Associated Press writer Michelle Faul in Johannesburg and AP photographer Schalk van Zuydam in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, contributed to this report.

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Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP. Gerald Imray can be reached at www.twitter.com/geraldimrayAP.

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DNA Analysis, More Accessible Than Ever, Opens New Doors

Matt Roth for The New York Times

Sam Bosley of Frederick, Md., going shopping with his daughter, Lillian, 13, who has a malformed brain and severe developmental delays, seizures and vision problems. More Photos »

Debra Sukin and her husband were determined to take no chances with her second pregnancy. Their first child, Jacob, who had a serious genetic disorder, did not babble when he was a year old and had severe developmental delays. So the second time around, Ms. Sukin had what was then the most advanced prenatal testing.

The test found no sign of Angelman syndrome, the rare genetic disorder that had struck Jacob. But as months passed, Eli was not crawling or walking or babbling at ages when other babies were.

“Whatever the milestones were, my son was not meeting them,” Ms. Sukin said.

Desperate to find out what is wrong with Eli, now 8, the Sukins, of The Woodlands, Tex., have become pioneers in a new kind of testing that is proving particularly helpful in diagnosing mysterious neurological illnesses in children. Scientists sequence all of a patient’s genes, systematically searching for disease-causing mutations.

A few years ago, this sort of test was so difficult and expensive that it was generally only available to participants in research projects like those sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. But the price has plunged in just a few years from tens of thousands of dollars to around $7,000 to $9,000 for a family. Baylor College of Medicine and a handful of companies are now offering it. Insurers usually pay.

Demand has soared — at Baylor, for example, scientists analyzed 5 to 10 DNA sequences a month when the program started in November 2011. Now they are doing more than 130 analyses a month. At the National Institutes of Health, which handles about 300 cases a year as part of its research program, demand is so great that the program is expected to ultimately take on 800 to 900 a year.

The test is beginning to transform life for patients and families who have often spent years searching for answers. They can now start the grueling process with DNA sequencing, says Dr. Wendy K. Chung, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Columbia University.

“Most people originally thought of using it as a court of last resort,” Dr. Chung said. “Now we can think of it as a first-line test.”

Even if there is no treatment, there is almost always some benefit to diagnosis, geneticists say. It can give patients and their families the certainty of knowing what is wrong and even a prognosis. It can also ease the processing of medical claims, qualifying for special education services, and learning whether subsequent children might be at risk.

“Imagine the people who drive across the whole country looking for that one neurologist who can help, or scrubbing the whole house with Lysol because they think it might be an allergy,” said Richard A. Gibbs, the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s gene sequencing program. “Those kinds of stories are the rule, not the exception.”

Experts caution that gene sequencing is no panacea. It finds a genetic aberration in only about 25 to 30 percent of cases. About 3 percent of patients end up with better management of their disorder. About 1 percent get a treatment and a major benefit.

“People come to us with huge expectations,” said Dr. William A. Gahl, who directs the N.I.H. program. “They think, ‘You will take my DNA and find the causes and give me a treatment.' ”

“We give the impression that we can do these things because we only publish our successes,” Dr. Gahl said, adding that when patients come to him, “we try to make expectations realistic.”

DNA sequencing was not available when Debra and Steven Sukin began trying to find out what was wrong with Eli. When he was 3, they tried microarray analysis, a genetic test that is nowhere near as sensitive as sequencing. It detected no problems.

“My husband and I looked at each other and said, ‘The good news is that everything is fine; the bad news is that everything is not fine,' ” Ms. Sukin said.

In November 2011, when Eli was 6, Ms. Sukin consulted Dr. Arthur L. Beaudet, a medical geneticist at Baylor.

“Is there a protein missing?” she recalled asking him. “Is there something biochemical we could be missing?”

By now, DNA sequencing had come of age. Dr. Beaudet said that Eli was a great candidate, and it turned out that the new procedure held an answer.

A single DNA base was altered in a gene called CASK, resulting in a disorder so rare that there are fewer than 10 cases in all the world’s medical literature.

“It really became definitive for my husband and me,” Ms. Sukin said. “We would need to do lifelong planning for dependent care for the rest of his life.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 19, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a medicine taken by two teenagers who have a rare gene mutation. The drug is 5-hydroxytryptophan, not 5-hydroxytryptamine.

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Dell’s Revenue Falls 11 Percent

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dell Inc on Tuesday reported a 31 percent drop in profit, hurt by a shrinking consumer business, as investors weighed founder Michael Dell's offer to buy out the world's No.3 maker of personal computers.

Michael Dell, teaming up with private equity firm Silver Lake and software maker Microsoft, is offering $13.65 a share to buy out the company, but at least four of its largest investors are opposed to the $24.4 billion deal.

The founder and CEO did not join in management discussion of the results in a conference call with analysts, given his participation in the buyout. Dell executives also did not comment on the buyout.

Analysts said Dell's rapidly shrinking business and murky prospects in a declining PC market may make the buyout a more attractive option for investors tired of waiting for a turnaround.

Since news of the proposed buyout emerged in January, the stock has gained almost 30 percent - a rally that analysts say may evaporate should the deal fall through.

On Tuesday, the company said sales across every business line, except servers and networking, declined in the fiscal fourth quarter. Revenue from servers and networking climbed 18 percent, driven by its datacenter business and revenue from recently acquired companies such as Quest Software and Sonic Wall.

Overall, however, revenue slid 11 percent.

"There isn't anything really to be super excited about," Brian Marshall, analyst with ISI Group, said, adding that declining revenue and profit doesn't bode well for the company.

"The (buyout) deal makes sense. It will go through," he said. "They will probably have to pay a little more than $13.65 to get it done but at the end of the day there aren't a lot of options out there."

The company gave no financial forecast for fiscal 2014 or the fiscal first quarter, citing the proposed buyout.

The company reiterated that it plans to file a proxy statement with the U.S. securities regulators on the merger agreement but made no other reference to the buyout in its earnings release.

Shareholders representing almost 14 percent of Dell shares not held by Michael Dell have now said they will vote against the deal. The billionaire, who created the computer maker from his college dorm room in 1984, holds a roughly 16 percent stake and needs a majority of shareholders - excluding him - to vote for the deal.

Some are holding out hope for a higher offer. Peter Misek, analyst with Jefferies, said a bumped-up offer of about $15 per share was a "fair price."

"The better-than-expected results means that's the fair thing to do, in our opinion, is to raise the bid to a price where current shareholders reap some of the rewards while the take-private consortium enjoys the prospect of a respectable return," Misek said.

SLIDING PC SALES

Dell posted net income of $530 million, or 30 cents a share, in its fiscal fourth quarter on revenue of $14.3 billion. That came in slightly higher than the average analyst estimate of revenue of $14.12 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Excluding certain items, it earned 40 cents a share, compared to an average forecast for 39 cents.

Shares of the company edged 0.5 percent higher in after-hours trade to $13.87, from a close of $13.805 on the Nasdaq.

Dell has said it plans to stick to its current turnaround strategy to diversify away from personal computers following the buyout.

The company, once regarded as a model of innovation in the early 2000s for pioneering online ordering of custom-configured PCs, missed the big industry shift to tablet computers, smartphones and high-powered consumer electronics such as music players.

It is also had to defend its market share against hard-charging Asian rivals like Lenovo.

Dell has lost 40 percent of its value since last year's peak and is trying to reinvent itself as a seller of services to corporations - an internal overhaul that some analysts say may be better conducted away from public scrutiny.

The company, was also hurt by the slide in holiday-season sales of personal computers for the first time in more than five years despite the launch of Microsoft Corp's new Windows 8 operating system.

Dell's worldwide PC shipments fell nearly 21 percent to 9.48 million in the last three months of 2012 from 11.97 million in the same period a year ago, according to IDC.

The bright spot for Dell was its growing sales of its enterprise solutions and services revenue, which rose 6 percent to $5.2 billion, and accounted for 34 percent of revenue for fiscal year.

In contrast, consumer revenue plummeted 24 percent to $2.8 billion, underscoring the plight of the broader PC market while sales to large corporations declined 7 percent to $4.7 billion in the quarter.

Dell said it was seeing growth in tablets and low-end desktops and notebooks. It ended fiscal 2013 with $15.3 billion in cash and investments.

(Reporting by Poornima Gupta; Editing by Dale Hudson, Bernard Orr)

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For His Second Act, Japanese Premier Plays It Safe, With Early Results

Toru Hanai/Reuters

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose policies have sent the Tokyo stock market up, will visit Washington this week.

TOKYO — Since taking office less than two months ago, Japan’s outspokenly hawkish new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has been in what some political analysts are calling “safe driving mode.” He has carefully avoided saying or doing anything to provoke other Asian nations, while focusing instead on wooing voters with steps to revive the moribund domestic economy.

So far, his approach seems to be working. His plans for public-works projects, stimulus measures called “Abenomics,” have sent the Tokyo stock market surging along with Mr. Abe’s own approval rating, which is now at 71 percent, according to the latest poll by Yomiuri Shimbum. On Friday, he will seek to build on his strong start when he meets President Obama at a Washington summit meeting aimed at improving relations with the United States, which regards Japan as its most important ally in Asia.

Mr. Abe, 58, has said he wants to be what Japan has not seen in almost a decade: a steady-handed leader who lasts long enough in office to actually get things done. Analysts say his success hinges on whether he can lead his Liberal Democratic Party to victory in Upper House elections in July, and end the split Parliament that undermined many of his predecessors.

What is less clear is what he will do if he wins that election. One trait that makes Mr. Abe a bit of an enigma, some analysts say, is that he seems to have two sides: the realist and the right-wing ideologue. In analysts’ view, if he does jettison some of his current caution, for instance by trying to revise Japan’s antiwar Constitution to allow a full-fledged military instead of its current Self-Defense Force, he risks provoking a standoff with China over disputed islands, and possibly isolating Japan in a region still sensitive to its early-20th-century militarism.

“In his first six weeks, he has done everything he can to show he is a moderate,” said Andrew L. Oros, director of international studies at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. “But after July, he might feel he has a freer rein to do things that he thinks are justified.”

Part of the problem, Mr. Oros and others say, is that Mr. Abe faces conflicting political pressures. His base in the governing party’s most conservative wing expects bold steps to end what it sees as Japan’s overly prolonged displays of contrition for World War II. But he must also convince the broader public that he is a coolheaded, competent steward of a declining nation that also depends on China for its economic future.

There is also the ghost of his past failure. The last time he was prime minister, six years ago, he stepped down amid criticism that he had been “clueless” for having pursued a nationalistic agenda of revising the Constitution and history textbooks, and for not doing more to reduce unemployment and spur the economy.

This time, Mr. Abe is acting with the determined carefulness of a man given a second chance. He has focused on extricating Japan from its recession with steps that have quickly buoyed the country’s economy, the world’s third-largest. Since being named prime minister after his party’s election victory in December, Mr. Abe has promised $215 billion in public works spending to create jobs and promote growth.

He has also publicly pressured the central bank, the Bank of Japan, to move more aggressively to end years of corrosive price declines known as deflation — threatening, for example, to amend the law on the bank’s independence if it does not reach its target of 2 percent inflation. The bank’s governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, announced this month that he would step aside to allow Mr. Abe to appoint a new chief who will work more closely with the government by pumping more money into the economy to prompt banks to lend more and companies to spend more.

“Mr. Abe has clearly learned the lessons of his past failure,” said Norihiko Narita, a political scientist at Surugadai University, near Tokyo. “And the biggest lesson is that voters care more about the economy.”

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