Uncle: Pistorius Is 'Numb With Shock as Well as Grief'

Oscar Pistorius is "numb with shock as well as grief" his uncle told reporters Saturday as the Olympian amputee spent his second night behind bars in a South African jail for the allegedly killing his model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

"All of us saw at firsthand how close [Steenkamp] had become to Oscar during that time and how happy they were," he said. "They had plans together and Oscar was happier in his private life than he had been for a long time," said Pistorius' uncle Arnold Pistorius.

The 26-year-old athlete, known as the "blade runner" because of the carbon-fiber blades he runs on, was charged Friday with premeditated murder.

Pistorius' family is "battling to come to terms with Oscar being charged with murder," Arnold Pistorius said, and still believe "there is no substance to the allegation."

Oscar Pistorius is suspected of shooting Steenkamp, 29, four times with a handgun early Thursday morning at his home in a gated community in Pretoria.

PHOTOS: Paralympic Champion Charged with Murder

Prosecutors dismissed the reports that Pistorious mistook her for an intruder.

If convicted, Pistorius could face at least 25 years in jail.

According to South African newspaper Beeld, Steenkamp was killed nearly two hours after police were called to Pistorius' home to respond to reports of an argument at the complex.

Police said they have responded to disputes at the sprinter's residence before, but did not say whether or not Steenkamp was involved.

Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images; Mike Holmes/The Herald/Gallo Images/Getty Images

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A memorial service for Steenkamp will be held in Port Elizabeth on Tuesday evening, reported SABC. Her body will be flown back for the service before being cremated, her family said.

"Her future has been cut short...I dare say she's with the angels," said Mike Steenkamp, Reeva Steenkamp's uncle.

Producers of the South African reality show Steenkamp competed in said the series will still premiere Saturday night on SABC as planned, but will now include a special tribute to the slain law school graduate whose modeling career was starting to take off.

RELATED: Reeva Steenkamp, Oscar Pistorius Girlfriend, Saw Self as 'Brainy, Blonde, Bombshell'

"This is the only time that you see the real Reeva," executive producer and director of "Tropka Island of Treasure" Samantha Moon told "Good Morning America." "She was kind and sweet and?so hard working.

"They will see the girl that we loved."

Meanwhile, the sprinter's sponsors ? including Nike, BT, Theirry Mugler, Oakley and Ossur, the Icelandic company that manufactures the prosthetic blades Pistorius races on ? are acting cautiously as the athlete awaits his bail hearing on Tuesday.

M-Net movies, a subscription-funded South African television channel has already pulled their ad campaign featuring Pistorius, tweeting, "Out of respect & sympathy to the bereaved, M-Net will be pulling its entire Oscar campaign featuring Oscar Pistorius with immediate effect."

Nike, who's ad featuring the double-amputee reads "I am the bullet in the chamber," released a statement saying the company is "continuing the monitor the situation closely."

Still, the athlete's' friends and colleagues said the murder charges have yet to sink in.

"When I heard, I was in shock and I'm just still trying to process it," Jamaican gold medal sprinter Usain Bolt told the Associated Press Friday night after the NBA All-Star celebrity game in Houston, Tex.

"I would just like to say, I have dated Oscar on and off for 5 YEARS, NOT ONCE has he EVER lifted a finger to me, made me fear for my life," his ex-girlfriend Jenna Edkins tweeted on Friday.

ABC News' Colleen Curry contributed to this report.

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EU agrees to test for horse DNA in food labelling row

BRUSSELS: The European Union agreed on Friday the immediate launch of tests for horse DNA in meat products to reassure nervous consumers that their food is safe and to halt the horsemeat scandal spreading across Europe.

The test programme will also look for the presence of phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory treatment for horses which is harmful to humans and by law supposed to be kept out of the food chain.

The crisis continued meanwhile to build Friday as Austria and Norway confirmed that ready-to-eat "beef" meals containing horsemeat had been found, stoking concerns many more cases in more countries will come to light after falsely-labelled meat was found in Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland.

The scandal has left governments scrambling to figure out how and where the mislabelling happened in the sprawling chain of production spanning a maze of abattoirs and meat suppliers across Europe.

In Britain, the Food Standards Agency said that 29 out of 2,501 beef products it has tested so far have been found to contain more than one percent horsemeat but stressed that these must be considered exceptions.

"The overwhelming majority of beef products in this country do not contain horse. The examples we have had are totally unacceptable but they are the exceptions," FSA chief executive Catherine Brown said.

Brown added that the results were "still far from the full picture" and that testing continued.

French meat-processing firm Spanghero, blamed by Paris for the growing scandal, insisted again it was not responsible. "I don't know who is behind this but it is not us," Spanghero boss Barthelemy Aguerre told Europe 1 radio.

The French government on Thursday charged that Spanghero knowingly sold 750 tonnes of horsemeat mislabelled as beef over a period of six months, 500 tonnes of which were sent to French firm Comigel, which makes frozen meals at its Tavola subsidiary in Luxembourg.

That meat was used to make 4.5 million products that were sold by Comigel to 28 different companies in 13 European countries.

NorgesGruppen, Norway's largest retailer, said Friday that horsemeat was found in frozen lasagne dishes made by Comigel and sold in its stores and Austria said horsemeat was found in beef tortelloni sold in Lidl supermarkets.

Danish authorities said Friday they were probing whether a slaughterhouse may have mixed horsemeat into meat marked as beef that was supplied to pizza makers.

Under the measures agreed in Brussels, EU officials and statements said the testing of "foods destined for the final consumer and marketed as containing beef" could start immediately in member states, with the European Commission paying 75 percent of the costs for the first month.

The DNA controls, "mainly at the retail level", will include 2,250 samples across the EU, ranging from 10 to 150 tests per member state.

The phenylbutazone test will require one sample for every 50 tonnes of horsemeat, with each of the bloc's 27 states required to carry out a minimum of five tests.

EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg, who proposed the plan at crisis talks on Wednesday, said he welcomed its swift approval and urged member states to keep up the momentum.

"I call on them to keep up the pressure in their efforts to identify a clear picture and a sequence of events," he said in a statement.

"Consumers expect the EU, national authorities and all those involved in the food chain to give them all the reassurance needed as regards what they have on their plates."

The test results will be reported to the European Commission by April 15 which will collate them in the EU's Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) so that they can be immediately used by member states.

- AFP/fa

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PM extols Sonia in Meghalaya rally

SHILLONG: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday urged the people of the poll-bound state to extend their support to AICC chief Sonia Gandhi even as he promised to empower tribal governing bodies and improve women's representation in decision-making administrative units in matrilineal Meghalaya.

"Under the guidance of Sonia Gandhi, the UPA has been working hard for inclusive development of not only the northeast but all states and communities of the country, especially the backward, scheduled tribes and castes," Singh, who mentioned the name of the AICC president at least four times during the course of his short speech, said.

He added it was because of Sonia Gandhi's "concern for ordinary men and women" that the Congress-led UPA had been voted to power by the people of the country for the second consecutive term. Referring to the RTE, RTI and MGREG Acts, the PM also claimed that under the UPA, generation of employment in the country had been at an "unprecedented scale".

"The Congress-led UPA government at the Centre has always recognized the special needs of the northeast, which has been receiving three to four times more central assistance than the rest of India," Singh said at an election meeting at the Polo Grounds here on Friday.

Heaping praises on the Congress-led government in the state, Singh, who was flanked by chief minister Mukul Sangma on the dais, certified the state government for having delivered "transparent governance" and having "utilized well" the resources made available to it "under various flagship programmes of the Congress."

Praising the "extreme beauty" of Meghalaya and in general of the northeast, which has rich natural resources and "highly talented" people, the PM said he felt a "strong emotional attachment" with the region. "It is my privilege to represent one of the northeastern states in Parliament," Singh, who represents Assam in the Rajya Sabha, said.

Claiming that Meghalaya was one of the "fastest growing" states in the country not only in economic terms but also in infrastructure development, Singh eulogized chief minister Sangma's pet project, the Integrated Basin Development and Livelihood Promotion Programme.

Observing that Meghalaya was emerging as a "big tourist destination", the PM said improvement in road, rail and air connectivity would attract a larger number of visitors to the state. He said the Shillong-Guwahati, Shillong-Tura and Shillong-Silchar roads were being widened and the projects likely to be completed in the first quarter of 2014.

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Why We Walk … and Run … And Walk Again to Get Where We're Going

You have to get to a bus stop to catch the once-an-hour express ... or to a restaurant to meet a friend ... or to a doctor's office. You've got maybe a half a mile to cover and you're worried you'll be late. You run, then you stop and walk, then run some more.

But wait. Wouldn't it be better to run the whole way?

Not necessarily.

A new study by an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State University tests the theory that people subconsciously mix walking and running so they get where they need to. The idea is that "people move in a manner that minimizes energy consumption," said the professor, Manoj Srinivasan.

Srinivasan asked 36 subjects to cover 400 feet (122 meters), a bit more than the length of a football field. He gave them a time to arrive at the finish line and a stopwatch. If the deadline was supertight, they ran. If they had two minutes, they walked. And if the deadline was neither too short nor too far off, they toggled between walking and running.

The takeaway: Humans successfully make the walk-run adjustment as they go along, based on their sense of how far they have to go. "It's not like they decide beforehand," Srinivasan said. (Get tips, gear recommendations, and more in our Running Guide.)

The Best Technique for "the Twilight Zone"

"The mixture of walking and running is good when you have an intermediate amount of time," he explained. "I like to call it 'the Twilight Zone,' where you have neither infinite time nor do you have to be there now."

That ability to shift modes served ancient humans well. "It's basically an evolutionary argument," Srinivasan said. A prehistoric human seeking food would want to move in a way that conserves some energy so that if food is hard to find, the hunter won't run out of gas—and will still be able to rev it up to escape predators.

The study, published on January 30 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, doesn't answer that question of how we make such adjustments.

Runners: Take a Break if You Need It

The mix of walking and running is also something that nonelite marathoners are familiar with. Covering 26.2 miles might take less of a toll if the runner stops running from time to time, walks a bit, then resumes a jogging pace. "You use less energy overall and also give yourself a bit of a break," Srinivasan noted. (Watch: An elite marathoner on her passion for running.)

One take-home lesson is: Runners, don't push it all the time. A walk-run mix will minimize the energy you expend.

Lesson two: If you're a parent walking with your kid, and the kid lags behind, then runs to catch up, then lags again, the child isn't necessarily trying to annoy you. Rather, the child is perhaps exhibiting an innate ability to do the walk-run transition.

Potential lesson three: The knowledge that humans naturally move in a manner that minimizes energy consumption might be helpful in designing artificial limbs that feel more natural and will help the user reduce energy consumption.

The big question for Manoj Srinivasan: Now that he has his walk-run theory, does he consciously switch between running and walking when he's trying to get somewhere? "I must admit, no," he said. "When I want to get somewhere, I just let the body do its thing." But if he's in a rush, he'll make a mad dash.

"Talk to you tomorrow," he signed off in an email to National Geographic News. "Running to get to teaching now!"

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Cruise Ship Now Faces Expected Wave of Lawsuits

Despite having their feet back on solid ground and are making their way home, passengers from the Carnival Triumph cruise ship are still fuming over their five days of squalor on the stricken ship and the cruise ship company is likely to be hit with a wave of lawsuits.

"I think people are going to file suits and rightly so," maritime trial attorney John Hickey told ABCNews.com. "I think, frankly, that the conduct of Carnival has been outrageous from the get-go."

Hickey, a Miami-based attorney, said his firm has already received "quite a few" inquiries from passengers who just got off the ship early this morning.

"What you have here is a) negligence on the part of Carnival and b) you have them, the passengers, being exposed to the risk of actual physical injury," Hickey said.

Click Here for Photos of the Stranded Ship at Sea

The attorney said that whether passengers can recover monetary compensation will depend on maritime law and the 15-pages of legal "gobbledygook," as Hickey described it, that passengers signed before boarding, but "nobody really agrees to."

One of the ticket conditions is that class action lawsuits are not allowed, but Hickey said there is a possibility that could be voided when all the conditions of the situation are taken into account.

One of the passengers already thinking about legal action is Tammy Hilley, a mother of two, who was on a girl's getaway with her two friends when a fire in the ship's engine room disabled the vessel's propulsion system and knocked out most of its power.

"I think that's a direction that our families will talk about, consider and see what's right for us," Hilley told "Good Morning America" when asked if she would be seeking legal action.

While she said that she does not want to be greedy or exploit the situation, she does not feel that Carnival's $500 compensation is enough for the trauma passengers suffered.

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"You talk about the emotional trauma and just last night, feeling what we went through last night while we were on land with our families and our insides just trembling," she said. "I don't think it begins to even say what is needed here."

In addition to the money, passengers will receive a full refund for the cruise, transportation expenses and vouchers for another cruise.

"We made our own nest [on deck] because we were just too terrified to go inside because of the smells and the germs, so we just banded together and made our own little nest and just survived," Hilley's friend Ann Barlow said.

Her friend Carolyn Klam said she got a stomach virus from drinking bad water once the power went out and friend Tammy Hilley said her cell phone was stolen this morning as the boat came into port.

"I think going back to our room was kind of traumatic and seeing that from day one we had no home, we were homeless," Hilley said. "We would go downstairs below deck and your feet could feel the sludge that you were walking through. The smells and the liquids draining from the ceiling and the stories of people sleeping in the hallways and the sanitary bags in the hallway, that was traumatic to just watch it start piling up."

The more than 4,000 passengers and crew began to disembark from the damaged ship around 10:15 p.m. CT Thursday in Mobile, Ala., amid cheers and tears. The last passenger left the ship at 1 a.m. CT, according to Carnival's Twitter handle.

Passenger Brandi Dorsett was thankful to be home, especially for her mother who was with her on the ship. Dorsett said she wasn't pleased with the doctor on staff.

"My mother is a diabetic, and they would not even come to the room because she cannot walk the stairs to help her with insulin. She hasn't had insulin in three days," Dorsett said.

The Carnival Triumph departed Galveston, Texas, last Thursday and lost power Sunday.

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After power went out, passengers texted ABC News that sewage was seeping down the walls from burst plumbing pipes, carpets were wet with urine, and food was in short supply. Reports surfaced of elderly passengers running out of critical heart medicine and others on board squabbling over scarce food.

"It's degrading. Demoralizing, and then they want to insult us by giving us $500," Veronica Arriaga said after disembarking the ship.

As the ship docked, passengers lined the decks of the Triumph, waving and whistling to those on shore. "Happy V-Day" read a homemade sign made for the Valentine's Day arrival, while another sent a starker message: "The ship's afloat, so is the sewage."

WATCH: Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill Apologizes to Passengers

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Postmaster takes case for five-day mail delivery to skeptical senators

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Mumbai attack movie hits cinemas on Mar 1

MUMBAI: Memories of the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008 still evoke fear among residents of the city.

And those old wounds are expected to reopen now that a Bollywood movie about the incident is set to hit the big screens.

India's financial capital came to a virtual standstill on 26 November 2008.

The attacks which lasted for four days drew widespread global condemnation.

The Pakistan-based terrorists, who were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, killed 164 people and wounded at least 308 in their wake.

But the undying spirit of the citizens of Mumbai helped the city crawl back to its feet soon after the carnage ended.

And now, Bollywood is all set to release a film which will depict the gruesome terror attacks that shook Mumbai nearly five years ago.

The movie "The Attacks of 26/11" will hit cinemas on 1 March.

A publicity event to launch the movie's music was held at the Gateway of India.

Around 200 students lit candles in memory of the 26/11 victims.

The event then continued at Café Leopold where two of the ten terrorists launched their initial strikes in the first wave of attacks on the city.

Film maker Ram Gopal Varma said: "I strongly believe as a film maker and as a human being that the attacks of 26/11 which happened in 2008 are not against any community in particular. I think it is an attack on human beings and committed by certain inhuman elements."

The mood was sombre as the film maker and lead actor showed off a few teasers from the movie.

The usually reclusive veteran Bollywood actor Nana Patekar, who plays the lead role in the film, shed his inhibitions and spoke to the media with unusual frankness.

He said: "I feel pained whenever I think about the attacks of 26/11. The film depicts the mindset of the terrorists who went on a carnage in Mumbai. We are trying to portray through our films what steps can be taken to prevent such types of attacks in future."

The owner of the Leopold was also present at the event, and has played himself in the film.

The music launch of the film has reignited the anger and bitterness in the minds of Indian citizens.

But as in 2008, the movie also shows the world that Mumbai and its people have picked up the pieces and are refusing to let fear of terror attacks get in the way of their daily lives.

- CNA/al

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Chopper scam: Ex-air chief SP Tyagi used to brief us on tender developments, claim middlemen

NEW DELHI: The alleged middlemen in the deal for VVIP helicopters have claimed that the then Air chief SP Tyagi used to brief them on the developments in the tender, according to Italian investigators.

Haschke and Gerosa have reportedly claimed that Tyagi would keep them updated on the tender for the 12 helicopters during their meetings, which are believed to have taken place six to seven times.

They have also claimed that they had managed to modify conditions of the tender, including reducing the flight ceiling from 18,000 to 15,000 feet, which made Augusta's AW- 101 eligible for the bid, according to a report filed by investigators in an Italian court.

"(Guido Ralph) Hashcke and (Carlo) Gerosa, through the Tyagi brothers, in turn through their cousin ACM SP Tyagi, managed first to change the tender details, in a way to favour, modifying the "operational ceiling" from 18,000 to 15,000 feet of altitude, thus allowing AgustaWestland spa (which otherwise could not have even submitted an offer) to take part in the tender," the report said.

"They managed to introduce a comparative flight trial with non-functional engine, thus facilitating AgustaWestland helicopters, the only ones which had three engines. In this way they managed to get the contract to AgustaWestland," it alleged.

Tyagi has denied any wrongdoing although he has admitted having met one of the alleged middlemen at the residence of his cousin. According to the investigators, 21 million euros (about Rs 150 crore) were paid as kickbacks under the cover of engineering contracts reportedly through companies IDS Tunisia and IDS India.

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Are Honeybees Losing Their Way?

A single honeybee visits hundreds, sometimes thousands, of flowers a day in search of nectar and pollen. Then it must find its way back to the hive, navigating distances up to five miles (eight kilometers), and perform a "waggle dance" to tell the other bees where the flowers are.

A new study shows that long-term exposure to a combination of certain pesticides might impair the bee's ability to carry out its pollen mission.

"Any impairment in their ability to do this could have a strong effect on their survival," said Geraldine Wright, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University in England and co-author of a new study posted online February 7, 2013, in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Wright's study adds to the growing body of research that shows that the honeybee's ability to thrive is being threatened. Scientists are still researching how pesticides may be contributing to colony collapse disorder (CCD), a rapid die-off seen in millions of honeybees throughout the world since 2006.

"Pesticides are very likely to be involved in CCD and also in the loss of other types of pollinators," Wright said. (See the diversity of pollinating creatures in a photo gallery from National Geographic magazine.)

Bees depend on what's called "scent memory" to find flowers teeming with nectar and pollen. Their ability to rapidly learn, remember, and communicate with each other has made them highly efficient foragers, using the waggle dance to educate others about the site of the food source.

Watch as National Geographic explains the waggle dance.

Their pollination of plants is responsible for the existence of nearly a third of the food we eat and has a similar impact on wildlife food supplies.

Previous studies have shown certain types of pesticides affect a bee's learning and memory. Wright's team wanted to investigate if the combination of different pesticides had an even greater effect on the learning and memory of honeybees.

"Honeybees learn to associate floral colors and scents with the quality of food rewards," Wright explained. "The pesticides affect the neurons involved in these behaviors. These [affected] bees are likely to have difficulty communicating with other members of the colony."

The experiment used a classic procedure with a daunting name: olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension reflex. In layman's terms, the bee sticks out its tongue in response to odor and food rewards.

For the experiment, bees were collected from the colony entrance, placed in glass vials, and then transferred into plastic sandwich boxes. For three days the bees were fed a sucrose solution laced with sublethal doses of pesticides. The team measured short-term and long-term memory at 10-minute and 24-hour intervals respectively. (Watch of a video of a similar type of bee experiment.)

This study shows that when pesticides are combined, the impact on bees is far worse than exposure to just one pesticide. "This is particularly important because one of the pesticides we used, coumaphos, is a 'medicine' used to treat Varroa mites [pests that have been implicated in CCD] in honeybee colonies throughout the world," Wright said.

The pesticide, in addition to killing the mites, might also be making honeybees more vulnerable to poisoning and effects from other pesticides.

Stephen Buchmann of the Pollinator Partnership, who was not part of Wright's study, underscored how critical pollinators are for the world. "The main threat to pollinators is habitat destruction and alteration. We're rapidly losing pollinator habitats, natural areas, and food-producing agricultural lands that are essential for our survival and well being. Along with habitat destruction, insecticides weaken pollinators and other beneficial insects."

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Tempers and Compensation on Cruise Ship Rising

The 4,000 passengers and crew aboard the stricken Carnival Triumph cruise ship will disembark after dark tonight from the fetid cruiser dubbed "the poop deck" on social media, according to officials.

"It will come in. It will not stop," Alabama State Port Authority Director Jimmy Lyons said at a news conference today. "We're going to do everything we can from our standpoint to ensure that this is as smooth as possible."

He estimated the ship would arrive between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. tonight.

Delighted passengers waved at media helicopters that flew out to film the ship and passenger Rob Mowlam told ABCNews.com by phone today that most of the passengers on board were "really upbeat and positive."

Nevertheless, when he gets off Mowlam said, "I will probably flush the toilet 10 times just because I can."

Mowlam, 37, got married on board the Triumph Saturday and said he and his wife, Stephanie Stevenson, 27, haven't yet thought of redoing the honeymoon other than to say, "It won't be a cruise."

Lyons said that with powerless "dead ships" like the Triumph, it is usually safer to bring them in during daylight hours, but, "Once they make the initial effort to come into the channel, there's no turning back."

Click here for photos of the stranded ship at sea.

Lt. Cmdr. Paul McConnell/U.S. Coast Guard/AP Photo

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"There are issues regarding coming into the ship channel and docking at night because the ship has no power and there's safety issues there," Richard Tillman of the Mobile Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau told ABCNews.com.

When asked if the ship could be disembarked in the dark of night, Tillman said, "It is not advised. It would be very unusual."

Carnival Cruise Senior Vice President of Marketing Terri Thornton, however, insisted during a news conference at the port of Mobile today, "Our understanding is it will be alongside this evening."

Thornton denied the rumors that there was a fatality on the ship. He said that there was one illness early on, a dialysis patient, but that passenger was removed from the vessel and transferred to a medical facility.

The U.S. Coast Guard is assisting now and there are multiple generators on board. And customs officials will board the ship while it is being piloted to port to accelerate the embarkation, officials said.

After eight miserable days at sea, the ship's owners have increased the compensation for what some on board are calling the vacation from hell.

All 3,143 passengers aboard the 900 foot colossus, which stalled in the Gulf of Mexico after an engine room fire early Sunday, were already being given a full refund for the cruise, transportation expenses and vouchers for a another cruise. Carnival Cruise Lines is now boosting that offer to include another $500 per person. Gerry Cahill, president and CEO of Carnival Cruise Lines, announced the additional compensation Wednesday.

"We know it has been a longer journey back than we anticipated at the beginning of the week under very challenging circumstances," he said in a statement. "We are very sorry for what our guests have had to endure. Therefore, in addition to the full refund and future cruise credit already offered, we have decided to provide this additional compensation."

Carnival also said that it has canceled a dozen planned voyages for the Triumph and acknowledged that the crippled ship had been plagued by other mechanical problems in the weeks before an engine-room fire left it powerless in the Gulf of Mexico.

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