Euro gains despite US economic data; yen loses






NEW YORK: The US dollar slipped against the euro Thursday despite encouraging US data on housing and jobs, while the yen slumped to new multi-year lows on speculation of new easing.

The euro benefited from more positive remarks from regional leaders and solid results of a Spanish bond auction, analysts said.

"The Euro rallied to 1.3376 as the European Central Bank and European Union President Herman Van Rompuy stirred hopes of seeing the euro-area return to growth in 2013, but optimism surrounding the single currency may fail to materialize as the debt crisis continues to drag on the real economy," said David Song of DailyFX.

Also helping was strong investor enthusiasm at a US$4.5 billion Spanish bond auction, pushing the troubled government's borrowing costs lower.

At 2200 GMT the euro was at US$1.3375, compared to US$1.3286 late Wednesday.

The US dollar failed to get a boost from a strong fall in weekly jobless claims, a sign of the pace of layoffs, and a rebound in housing starts in December, showing sustained strength in the housing sector.

The yen meanwhile fell to a fresh 30 month low. The dollar topped the 90 yen level briefly before slipping back to 89.86 yen, compared to 88.37 a day earlier.

The euro rose to 120.20 yen, its best level since April 2011, up from 117.42 Wednesday.

David Gilmore of Foreign Exchange Analytics, said speculation was rising that the Bank of Japan could add to stimulus measures in its next policy meeting on January 21-22.

The British pound fell to US$1.5992 from US$1.6006, while the US dollar gained to 0.9322 Swiss francs from 0.9309 francs.

- AFP/jc



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MHA inquiry finds PCR response could have swifter in Nirbhaya case

NEW DELHI: An inquiry by the home ministry into allegations made by Nirbhaya's friend about the "tardy" response of Delhi Police in reaching her to hospital has found that the response time could indeed have been better.

The inquiry report by Veena Kumari Meena, a joint secretary in the home ministry, also said Dinesh Yadav, operator of the bus on which the gang rape took place, had been blatantly flouting norms by plying not only the rogue bus despite repeated challans, but was also running several other buses in his fleet without valid permits.

Sources in the government told TOI that Meena noted that though the PCRs responded to the distress call made on Nirbhaya's behalf within "reasonable" time and, as per PCR logs, left the spot within 15 minutes, this time could have been cut further had the police "reacted better" to the emergency.

Though exact details of the report are still awaited, sources hinted that the inquiry faulted Delhi Police for failing to immediately rush the victims to hospital despite the first PCR having reached the spot at 10.27 pm, by the police's own account. According to the Delhi Police, the control room received a call about the incident at 10.21 pm on December 16. PCR van Z-54 was assigned the call but another PCR, E-74, reached the spot on its own at 10.27 pm. Z-54 was there at 10.29 pm.

Z-54 finally left the spot with Nirbhaya and her friend at 10.39 pm, after arranging bed-sheets from a nearby hotel to cover them.

Nirbhaya's friend had, in an interview to a news channel, alleged that the PCRs which reached the spot wasted crucial time in arguing over jurisdiction and that the police were reluctant to shift an injured Nirbhaya to the PCR.

However, joint commissioner of police Vivek Gogia denied this, saying, "There was no issue over jurisdiction as PCR vans do not operate under police stations."

The inquiry was set up on January 7 to assess the alacrity of Delhi Police as well as the response of Safdarjung Hospital staff to the December 16 rape. Meena was asked to identify lapses and fix responsibility.

The terms of reference also included examining how the rogue bus continued to ply on Delhi roads despite being challaned several times, and to study the responsiveness of Dial 100 helpline.

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Opinion: Lance One of Many Tour de France Cheaters


Editor's note: England-based writer and photographer Roff Smith rides around 10,000 miles a year through the lanes of Sussex and Kent and writes a cycling blog at: www.my-bicycle-and-I.co.uk

And so, the television correspondent said to the former Tour de France champion, a man who had been lionised for years, feted as the greatest cyclist of his day, did you ever use drugs in the course of your career?

"Yes," came the reply. "Whenever it was necessary."

"And how often was that?" came the follow-up question.

"Almost all the time!"

This is not a leak of a transcript from Oprah Winfrey's much anticipated tell-all with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, but instead was lifted from a decades-old interview with Fausto Coppi, the great Italian road cycling champion of the 1940s and 1950s.

To this day, though, Coppi is lauded as one of the gods of cycling, an icon of a distant and mythical golden age in the sport.

So is five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil (1957, 1961-64) who famously remarked that it was impossible "to ride the Tour on mineral water."

"You would have to be an imbecile or a crook to imagine that a professional cyclist who races for 235 days a year can hold the pace without stimulants," Anquetil said.

And then there's British cycling champion Tommy Simpson, who died of heart failure while trying to race up Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France, a victim of heat, stress, and a heady cocktail of amphetamines.

All are heroes today. If their performance-enhancing peccadillos are not forgotten, they have at least been glossed over in the popular imagination.

As the latest chapter of the sorry Lance Armstrong saga unfolds, it is worth looking at the history of cheating in the Tour de France to get a sense of perspective. This is not an attempt at rationalisation or justification for what Lance did. Far from it.

But the simple, unpalatable fact is that cheating, drugs, and dirty tricks have been part and parcel of the Tour de France nearly from its inception in 1903.

Cheating was so rife in the 1904 event that Henri Desgrange, the founder and organiser of the Tour, declared he would never run the race again. Not only was the overall winner, Maurice Garin, disqualified for taking the train over significant stretches of the course, but so were next three cyclists who placed, along with the winner of every single stage of the course.

Of the 27 cyclists who actually finished the 1904 race, 12 were disqualified and given bans ranging from one year to life. The race's eventual official winner, 19-year-old Henri Cornet, was not determined until four months after the event.

And so it went. Desgrange relented on his threat to scrub the Tour de France and the great race survived and prospered-as did the antics. Trains were hopped, taxis taken, nails scattered along the roads, partisan supporters enlisted to beat up rivals on late-night lonely stretches of the course, signposts tampered with, bicycles sabotaged, itching powder sprinkled in competitors' jerseys and shorts, food doctored, and inkwells smashed so riders yet to arrive couldn't sign the control documents to prove they'd taken the correct route.

And then of course there were the stimulants-brandy, strychnine, ether, whatever-anything to get a rider through the nightmarishly tough days and nights of racing along stages that were often over 200 miles long. In a way the race was tailor-made to encourage this sort of thing. Desgrange once famously said that his idea of a perfect Tour de France would be one that was so tough that only one rider finished.

Add to this the big prizes at a time when money was hard to come by, a Tour largely comprising young riders from impoverished backgrounds for whom bicycle racing was their one big chance to get ahead, and the passionate following cycling enjoyed, and you had the perfect recipe for a desperate, high stakes, win-at-all-costs mentality, especially given the generally tolerant views on alcohol and drugs in those days.

After World War II came the amphetamines. Devised to keep soldiers awake and aggressive through long hours of battle they were equally handy for bicycle racers competing in the world's longest and toughest race.

So what makes the Lance Armstrong story any different, his road to redemption any rougher? For one thing, none of the aforementioned riders were ever the point man for what the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has described in a thousand-page report as the most sophisticated, cynical, and far-reaching doping program the world of sport has ever seen-one whose secrecy and efficiency was maintained by ruthlessness, bullying, fear, and intimidation.

Somewhere along the line, the casualness of cheating in the past evolved into an almost Frankenstein sort of science in which cyclists, aided by creepy doctors and trainers, were receiving blood transfusions in hotel rooms and tinkering around with their bodies at the molecular level many months before they ever lined up for a race.

To be sure, Armstrong didn't invent all of this, any more than he invented original sin-nor was he acting alone. But with his success, money, intelligence, influence, and cohort of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers-and the way he used all this to prop up the Lance brand and the Lance machine at any cost-he became the poster boy and lightning rod for all that went wrong with cycling, his high profile eclipsing even the heads of the Union Cycliste Internationale, the global cycling union, who richly deserve their share of the blame.

It is not his PED popping that is the hard-to-forgive part of the Lance story. Armstrong cheated better than his peers, that's all.

What I find troubling is the bullying and calculated destruction of anyone who got in his way, raised a question, or cast a doubt. By all accounts Armstrong was absolutely vicious, vindictive as hell. Former U.S. Postal team masseuse Emma O'Reilly found herself being described publicly as a "prostitute" and an "alcoholic," and had her life put through a legal grinder when she spoke out about Armstrong's use of PEDs.

Journalists were sued, intimidated, and blacklisted from events, press conferences, and interviews if they so much as questioned the Lance miracle or well-greased machine that kept winning Le Tour.

Armstrong left a lot of wreckage behind him.

If he is genuinely sorry, if he truly repents for his past "indiscretions," one would think his first act would be to try to find some way of not only seeking forgiveness from those whom he brutally put down, but to do something meaningful to repair the damage he did to their lives and livelihoods.


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Biden Confirms Support for Second Amendment


Jan 17, 2013 6:41pm







gty joe biden mayors nt 130117 wblog Biden Confirms Support for Second Amendment, Says He Owns Two Shotguns

Alex Wong/Getty Images


One day after President Obama unveiled the administration’s plan to curb gun violence, Vice President Joe Biden today defended their intentions, answering critics who have spoken out against the plan for potentially infringing on the Second Amendment rights of Americans.


“The president and I support the Second Amendment,”  Biden said definitively.


Biden, who’s led the task force on gun violence since the December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, noted that he owns guns.


“I have two shotguns, a 20-gauge and a 12-gauge shotgun,” he said. Later in the speech he said his son Beau was a better shot than he is but that is because Beau is in the Army.


Biden spoke today before the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors’ meeting in Washington, D.C. Not everyone in the audience, Biden noted today, agrees with recommendations the White House put forward yesterday. But he defended the administration’s move to push this issue, at one point addressing the roomful of mayors as if he were speaking to them individually, saying that “murder rates in both of our towns are …  well beyond … what’s remotely tolerable for a civilized circumstance.”


“We’re going to take this fight to the halls of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to take it beyond that. We’re going to take it to the American people. We’re going to go around the country making our case, and we’re going to let the voices, the voice, of the American people be heard. ”


Biden again noted that there will not be consensus across the nation, given cultural differences among the states. In many states, he added, hunting is  “big deal.”


But, he quipped, addressing the use of high-capacity magazines in hunting, “As one hunter told me, if you got 12 rounds — you got 12 rounds, it means you’ve already missed the deer 11 times. You should pack the sucker in at that point. You don’t deserve to have a gun, period, if you’re that bad.”


High-capacity ammunition magazines “leave victims with no chance,” Biden said.


He summed up saying, “Recognizing those differences doesn’t in any way negate the rational prospect of being able to come up with common-sense approaches how to deal with the myriad of problems that relate to gun ownership.”


Biden said the “time is now” to make these changes and scoffed at some alternative strategies, like the proposal from the NRA for an armed guard to be placed in every school.


“We don’t want rent-a-cops in schools armed,” he said. “We don’t want people in schools who aren’t trained like police officers.”









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Ken Salazar, and his bolo tie, let loose



It’s unlikely that his successor, whomever that may be, will face similar constraints, so the new guy (or gal?) will cost a bit more.


But there’s reason for those who fear for the nation’s debt to take heart. According to the Loop’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, the federal purse will still come out way ahead in the changing of the Cabinet guard during President Obama’s second term. That’s because we’ll wind up saving millions when we no longer have to pay for CIA Director Leon Panetta
to fly back and forth from Washington to his California home.

It’s not clear what the final tally will be for Panetta’s cross-country commute — made on a military jet, a mode of transportation required for his sensitive security-crucial position — but it was estimated at $800,000 back in April of last year, and the bill has been steadily growing since then.

Panetta announced this month that he’s stepping down. Ka-ching!

Makes the Salazar savings seem like a drop in the bucket.


That song again?

How can you tell when budget season is approaching? It’s when you start getting missives from the agencies explaining why their work is absolutely essential and costs taxpayers peanuts.

For example, we got a “fact sheet” from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development titled “Ten Things You Should Know About the State Department.”

“We create American jobs,” the handout says, and “directly support 20 million U.S. jobs” by promoting open markets and such. They also provide emergency aid to Americans abroad, try to “make the world a safer place,” work to improve global health, development and the like.

The department has put out this information in the past, but it doesn’t seem to get through. The polls consistently show that strong majorities of Americans favor cutting aid programs and think foreign aid is up to 25 percent of the budget. (Actually, the cost for State and USAID combined is about 1 percent of the budget, the fact sheet says.)

As defense secretary, Robert Gates
drew laughs when he quoted his predecessor Condoleezza Rice as saying that “we have more people in military bands than they have in the Foreign Service.” The bands cost an estimated $500 million a year.

So maybe if the Foreign Service officers practiced and got better at playing tubas and timbales, they could wow visiting congressional delegations and boost the budget?


Across the pond

Think you know who the next U.S. ambassadors to Ireland and the United Kingdom will be?

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Cricket: Warne faces new ban






SYDNEY: Australian veteran Shane Warne is facing a new ban for an alleged breach of the spirit of the game in a domestic Twenty20 match, Cricket Australia said Thursday.

The bowling great apologised last week after a foul-mouthed rant against West Indian all-rounder Marlon Samuels that earned him a ban and a fine in Australia's Big Bash League.

But in Wednesday night's semi-final Warne, the official Melbourne Stars skipper, was not listed as captain for the match they lost against Perth Scorchers.

Cricket Australia said they had recently sent a memo to BBL teams about the captaincy role.

"If a team's official captain is selected but not named as captain, this will be considered against the spirit of cricket and may attract a code of behaviour charge," CA said.

"Warne has been reported for breaching CA's code of behaviour," it said.

The time and date of Warne's hearing was yet to be fixed.

The 43-year-old spinner, who was banned for one match and fined A$4,500 over the Samuels row, claimed 708 Test wickets in a celebrated career.

But he has also courted controversy, notably when he was fined for accepting money from a bookmaker and sent home from the 2003 World Cup for taking a banned diuretic.

- AFP/jc



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Pak commerce minister’s India visit under cloud

NEW DELHI: Economic engagement can be carried forward in an environment of peace and stability and it is for Pakistan to realize where the well-being of its economy lies, commerce minister Anand Sharma said on Wednesday.

Sharma said the incident along the Line of Control was "horrific, unacceptable and highly provocative", but he did not announce any scrapping of trade ties or a pause in the trade dialogue.

India and Pakistan have made considerable progress in normalizing trade and economic relations. The two countries have held several rounds of discussions while Sharma has led a high profile business delegation to Pakistan. The two sides have also vowed to boost economic ties and Islamabad had promised to accord Most Favoured Nation status to India. Although it has missed the December deadline, expectations are that Pakistan will fulfil its promise shortly.

Pakistani trade minister Makhdoom Amin Fahim is expected to take part in a conference in Agra later this month. Officials say Pakistan is expected to announce full MFN status to India during his visit but the heightened tension between the two nuclear-armed neighbours has cast doubts on the trip.

"As of now, we have not given any consideration to this matter in a negative sense, because, yes what has happened is horrific, it is unacceptable, highly provocative," Sharma said. He added, "And this is for Pakistan to realize that where the well-being of the economies of the countries lies. Economic engagement can be enhanced in an environment of peace and stability and anything which undermines that environment is not conducive."

Sharma said economic engagement was the only way forward to peace and stability. "And there is no other way forward for this region. So it is for Pakistan to take action and hold those who are responsible for this horrific act not only accountable but to punish them. That would be in Pakistan's own interest, not only for bilateral relations but its global image as a responsible nation state," he added.

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6 Ways Climate Change Will Affect You

Photograph by AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

The planet keeps getting hotter, new data showed this week. Especially in America, where 2012 was the warmest year ever recorded, by far. Every few years, the U.S. federal government engages hundreds of experts to assess the impacts of climate change, now and in the future.

From agriculture (pictured) to infrastructure to how humans consume energy, the National Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee spotlights how a warming world may bring widespread disruption.

Farmers will see declines in some crops, while others will reap increased yields.

Won't more atmospheric carbon mean longer growing seasons? Not quite. Over the next several decades, the yield of virtually every crop in California's fertile Central Valley, from corn to wheat to rice and cotton, will drop by up to 30 percent, researchers expect. (Read about "The Carbon Bathtub" in National Geographic magazine.)

Lackluster pollination, driven by declines in bees due partly to the changing climate, is one reason. Government scientists also expect the warmer climate to shorten the length of the frosting season necessary for many crops to grow in the spring.

Aside from yields, climate change will also affect food processing, storage, and transportation—industries that require an increasing amount of expensive water and energy as global demand rises—leading to higher food prices.

Daniel Stone

Published January 16, 2013

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NRA President Defends Ad Attacking Obama


Jan 16, 2013 6:40pm







ap nra david keene ll 121220 wblog NRA President Defends Ad Attacking Obama, Vows Battle Ahead

Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP Photo


In an interview with ABC News this evening, NRA President David Keene said the gun-rights lobby is aggressively preparing for “battle” with the White House and Congress over President Obama’s sweeping new proposals to curb gun violence.


Keene criticized Obama’s announcement today, surrounded by four children from around the country, for “using kids to advance an ideological agenda.” And he expressed cautious confidence that few of the legislative measures would ultimately pass.


“It’s going to be very tough for the president to accomplish some of these things, but that doesn’t mean he can’t do it if he really turns it on,” Keene told ABC.


“All bets are off when a president really wants to go to war with you,” he said. “We’re gonna be there and we’re gonna fight it.”


INFOGRAPHIC: Guns in America: By The Numbers


Keene said passage of the 1994 assault weapons ban remains fresh in the minds of NRA leaders, noting that initial widespread congressional opposition gradually gave way to a narrow margin in favor, thanks in part to pressure from then-President Bill Clinton.


NRA members would hold accountable any politicians who “sell them out to some pie-in-the-sky scheme such as the president is proposing,” he said.


The group launched a new “Stand and Fight” advocacy campaign Tuesday night, opposing Obama’s gun control measures, anchored by a controversial new TV ad that began airing online and on the Sportsman Channel.


The ad calls President Obama an “elitist hypocrite” for sending his daughters to a private school with armed guards while questioning whether all other U.S. schools should have the same security measures. The White House blasted the ad as “repugnant and cowardly.”


“When the question is the protection of children, which is what this is all about… it’s perfectly legitimate to ask why some children should be protected and other children should not be protected,” Keene said, defending the ad.


“We were not talking about the president’s kids. We were talking about an elite class who criticizes others in their desire to be safe while making sure that they and their families and their children are always protected.


“We’re not talking about the Secret Service protection the president’s children enjoy — they ought to have that wherever they go,” he added.


PHOTOS: Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting


Keene also ribbed Obama for using children as “props” for his announcement:  “We didn’t line them up on a stage and pat them on the shoulder while we were urging somebody to take our position,” he said.


The NRA has acknowledged some areas of common ground for curbing gun violence included the Obama proposal — namely beefed up resources for mental health care, better background check data and increased presence of school resource officers (police) at public schools.


But Keene said many of those steps were just “fig leaves.”


“What the president did is say … ‘I care about armed security.’ He can check off that box on the Gallup polls. He can say to the people concerned about it, ‘It’s part of my package.’ … He said the problem of severely, mentally ill — we’re going to study it.”


Obama called for federal aid to states for the hiring of up to 1,000 new resource officers and school counselors.  Currently, there are armed resource officers at 28,000 U.S. schools.


“That’s a drop in the ocean in terms of the problem,” Keene said. “It’s simply a fig leaf so he can pursue an anti-gun agenda. It has less to do with security and more to do with gun.”



SHOWS: Good Morning America World News







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The age-old truth: Stress gives presidents more than a few gray hairs

Why presidents age quickly

Presidents face unabated, unfathomable stress. “You see it over a term,” said Ronan Factora, a physician specializing in geriatric medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “It’s a good study of chronic stress on a person’s overall health.”

Obama and his national security team monitor the hit on Osama bin Laden. (Pete Souza/White House; Photo altered to obscure a classified document.)

Changes in skin or hair are gradual, he said. “If you do have a stressful event, nothing is going to happen right away.” Nothing visible anyway. Inside the body, the pituitary gland jolts the adrenal gland, just above the kidneys. Hormones start coursing. Adrenaline cranks up heart rates and blood pressure. Cortisol, another hormone from the same gland, causes inflammation and preps the body for converting sugars into energy.

“It’s not intended that people would be chronically exposed to these levels,” said Sherita Golden, a physician at the Johns Hopkins Medical Bloomberg School of Public Health. Cortisol strains the circulatory system, battering artery walls. The hormone also thins the skin, makes muscles waste and bones lose mass. The immune system weakens, and viruses that cause colds and cold sores take hold. Sleep turns fitful.

“Your cognition slows, you may feel more depressed, your ability to concentrate goes down,” Factora said. “And it just builds on itself — a real cascade.”

The only known cure

There is one known treatment: exercise. “It is the best benefit a physician can recommend,” Factora said. “There is no drug that can present as many benefits as exercise can.”

Obama plays basketball

Obama plays basketball during his 2008 campaign. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Obama is a fiend for exercise. In hour-long workouts, he has been known to hit treadmills hard, weight train with arms and legs, build quickness through “plyos” or plyometrics — exercises that involve explosive movements. He also throws footballs, shoots basketballs and thwacks at golf balls.

His predecessors exercised, too, some of them fiercely. George W. Bush ran till his aging knees made cycling a better option. Presidents Carter and Bill Clinton jogged, while Ronald Reagan rode horses and split logs with such vigor, he once cut his thigh. President Gerald Ford performed a daily exercise regimen while still in his robe and PJs.

Good exercise leads to better thinking, brain-mapping has shown. “Exercise actually brings more blood flow,” explained Linda Fried, an epidemiologist and geriatrician at Columbia University. “Parts of the brain are activated and they’re associated with complex thinking and problem-solving.” Workouts also force a president to — truly, finally, deeply — rest. Only then can the relaxed brain start to make creative associations.

Infirmity and vice

The job has compounded certain human frailties. Most famous perhaps is the lethal case of pneumonia that 68-year-old William Henry Harrison caught at his inauguration. Woodrow Wilson’s stroke certainly limited his leadership of the country, and Franklin D. Roosevelt worked around the problems related to his polio more ably than might have been expected.

But daily habits also affect presidential well-being in lesser-known ways. Dwight D. Eisenhower was so dedicated to his form of exercise that he played 800 rounds of 18 holes over eight years as president, according to Evan Thomas, the author of “Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.” Then, in 1955, Eisenhower had a heart attack, and two years later, a stroke. Intestinal surgery came in between, all as he was staving off nuclear war and realigning Southeast Asia.

“Toward the end,” Thomas said, “he was taking an extra sleeping pill at night” — the powerful, old-school kind, with barbiturates. And that was on top of a nightly scotch, never more than five ounces, except when it was, Thomas said. “A couple of times he says to his doctor, ‘Let’s get drunk.’ ”

To the best of the public’s knowledge, recent presidents have not exacerbated their stress through bad behaviors such as drinking. Obama, however, confirmed that he had to kick a cigarette habit of unknown intensity at some midpoint in his first term.

The side effects of smoking might show up as those lines in his face, the doctors said. While sun exposure can also make a face look withered, Obama’s darker skin has melanin to alleviate UV ray damage. That same coloring, however, can make his white hair look more pronounced.

A special lot

Obama had a fitness test on Jan. 12, and the White House said the results would be released by February. His previous physical was in October 2011; it showed that he had added one pound since his February 2010 physical (his 2011 weight: 181, very good for a man who was then 50 and 6-foot-1).

Like all presidents since 1992, Obama has been under constant medical watch: a military physician is on hand wherever a president goes. Burton Lee,whom the first President Bush brought to the White House to monitor his health, agreed with Mariano that presidents are a special lot. They push their bodies and minds, and thus they develop a greater capacity to fight off infection. They shake enough hands to fell a lesser creature, he said.

But the mental intrusions — the sense that someone needs something from the president every moment of every day — are as insidious as the germs. “It’s just a phenomenally demanding job,” he said. “You never get one minute off.”

Despite the extraordinary stress levels, many recent presidents have lived well beyond normal life expectancy. Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford died at 93; Jimmy Carter and the George H.W. Bush are 88. Doctors are coming to understand that stress may have an upside. “Human beings need some degree of stress to keep their systems tuned,” Fried said. “Some people enjoy the stimulation of it and the excitement and couldn’t live without it.”

Plus, human minds literally seek reasons to live. “Many people, as they get older, deeply care about future generations and the world’s survival,” Fried said. “If they have a chance to make a difference, that keeps people healthy.”

As Texas governor, George W. Bush was an avid runner, and sometimes invited journalists to pant alongside. But as president, Bush's knees literally got weak, and mountain biking became a better option, always on agent-protected terrain like his ranch in Crawford, Texas, or the Secret Service training site in Greenbelt. A teetotaler, the president went to bed early and exercised often, which helped stave off stress. Between meals, as a candidate, Bush famously chomped Cheetos, and as president, never lost his hankering for good Tex-Mex cooking.

On many occasions, Bill Clinton's physician found it difficult to determine whether he was super-stressed or full-on infirm. They proved the two basic conditions of presidential life.

“We were worried about Clinton when he was being impeached,” she recalled. “He looked like he had it all together, but we worried.” All she and her colleagues could do was ask; all he would say was “I’m tired.”

Mariano could still clearly envision both the first President Bush and Clinton pushing on, with bags under their eyes, to the next campaign event. “One factor Bill Clinton had in his favor: he could power-nap,” she said. When his helicopter went up, his eyelids would go down. Then upon landing, he announce, “OK, I’m ready! Showtime!”

After a bout of heart disease, cardiac surgery and a new commitment to vegan dieting, Clinton has regained strength — if not weight. Doctors were hesitant to attribute his ailment to all that cortisol damaging his circulatory system. “We don’t have a genetic twin of President Clinton,” said Factora, and that twin would have to rest for the eight years Clinton did not in order to qualify as an experimental control.

The first President Bush didn’t just work out, he worked out vigorously,” said his physician Lee, citing four-mile runs and ball games with Marines at Camp David. Once he even played tennis with Pete Sampras. “He broke the Stairmaster at Camp David, he pounded it till it didn’t work,” Lee recalled. “If I’m on it for five minutes, you have to take me out on a stretcher.”

Like appearance, endurance is highly individual; one person crumbles in circumstances where another thrives. Plus, what one person actively avoids, another embraces. “The one thing I noticed is that presidents have very unusual personalities,” Lee said. “Each is a different person, but for all, there is no easy day.”

While abstemious in an era when other statesmen chain-smoked cigars, Abraham Lincoln saw his legendary strength dwindle. At the start, the hale president was an able horseman who wrestled soldiers and challenged them to strength tests. One such test required a three-foot axe to be held out from his body with one hand, which is much harder than it sounds, said David Von Drehle, the author of “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year.”.

By the time of his death, the president had been wracked by insomnia and lost interest in food. He arrived at the White House as a sinewy 6-foot-4, 180-pound strongman. In the course of four years, he dropped 30 pounds. “He was sunken-eyed and grizzled, nothing like that bright-eyed lawyer of Springfield,” said Von Drehle. Lincoln sat for a famous series of portraits, and “by the last set of photographs, he looks 75 years old, but he’s 56.”

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