WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
Five U.S. senators have written to antitrust regulators asking the agency to look into allegations that CVS inappropriately used its pharmacy benefits business to win clients and squeeze smaller competitors.

Other groups have already complained to the Federal Trade Commission about the CVS drugstore chain's 2007 purchase of Caremark, which specialized in pharmacy benefits, saying that the merger has meant higher prices for consumers in some cases.

In letters to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, the five senators cited instances where patients who did not use a CVS pharmacy were required to make a higher co-pay and asked for a probe into whether the company engaged in anti-competitive conduct.

"We have been informed that CVS pharmacists receive notification in their electronic prescription processing system if a consumer has filled prescriptions in a non-CVS pharmacy," wrote Senators Mark Pryor, a Democrat, and Roger Wicker, a Republican.

"In these situations, the CVS pharmacist is instructed to ... possibly attempt to transfer all prescriptions to the CVS pharmacy," they wrote.

Senators Byron Dorgan, Russell Feingold and Amy Klobuchar, all Democrats, wrote that their constituents had complained that they had, for example, been told that they could only fill a limited number of prescriptions outside of the CVS system.

"Pharmacies in rural America are already struggling to keep their doors open, and we are concerned that the end result of this merger will be more Main Street pharmacies going out of business," the three warned, in asking the FTC to "reexamine" the merger.

CVS rejected the assertions.

"Our integrated pharmacy and PBM operations provide greater choice and more convenience for customers and patients, improve health outcomes, and lower overall health care costs for plan sponsors and participants. Any suggestions that our business practices are anti-competitive or that we are violating antitrust laws are totally false," it said in a statement.

Independent pharmacists have already asked for a firewall to be erected between CVS's retail pharmacy business and its pharmacy benefits business. CVS has more than 6,900 stores.

The FTC had no immediate comment.

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Richard Chang)

SYDNEY (Reuters) –
A flea-bitten dog rescued from a squalid backyard is to be reunited with her owners 1,000 miles away -- nine years after she disappeared.

The dog, Muffy, was found sleeping on a tattered piece of cardboard in a backyard in Melbourne with a bad skin condition and matted coat by the RSPCA after an anonymous call.

RSPCA Victoria spokesman Tim Pilgrim said Muffy was found to have been microchipped which did not fit at all with the circumstances so they decided to try to track down the dog's owners whom they found in Brisbane.

"It's amazing that the original owners had microchipped her as it wasn't that common nine years ago and it is amazing that she had come 2,000 km from home," Pilgrim told Reuters.

"We are advising people to get their pets microchipped so we can have some more happy endings like this one."

He said Muffy was believed to have been at that house in Melbourne for about one year after being found as a stray but no one knew where she had been for the previous eight years.

Muffy will be flown home to Brisbane next week to be reunited with her owners who were delighted to hear that their lost pet had finally been found.

NEW DELHI – Rights activists lashed out Friday at local officials who allowed hundreds of infants to be dropped from the roof of a mosque in western India in the belief that the fall — which ends when the babies are caught in a bedsheet — would ensure good health and prosperity for their families.
The ritual at the Baba Umer Durga, a Muslim shrine, is believed to have been followed for nearly 700 years, and each year hundreds of people, both Hindus and Muslims, take part in the ritual.
Local officials told television news stations there had been no reports of injuries.
The infants, mostly under two years old, were dangled Thursday from the roof of the shrine near Sholapur, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Mumbai, before being dropped about 50 feet (15 meters) onto a bedsheet held aloft by parents and other believers.
Television channels showed the babies screaming as they were shaken in the air before being dropped.
With high child mortality rates, especially in India's rural areas, many people resort to rituals which they believe can ensure their children's health.
Child rights activists expressed outrage after the Headlines Today television channel showed the babies being dropped.
"This shows the complete failure of the local administration to prevent this practice and to create awareness about children's health," said Ranjana Kumari, a civil rights activist in New Delhi.
"It is also a reflection of the lack of access to health services, that forces people to behave in this irrational manner," Kumari told the AP.
India's National Commission for Protection of Child's Rights issued a notice Thursday to the local administration in Sholapur and has begun investigations into the practice.

Usain Bolt, the triple Olympic gold medal sprinter from Jamaica, predicted this week that he could break his own world record of 9.69 seconds in the 100 meter sprint with a time as low as 9.54 seconds. He claimed his coach told him its possible, so he believes him. His coach, Glen Mills, may have just finished reading some new research coming out of Duke University that showed sprinters and swimmers who are taller, heavier but more slender are the ones breaking world records.

At first glance, it may not make sense that bigger athletes would be faster. However, Jordan Charles, a recent engineering grad at Duke, plotted all of the world record holders in the 100 meter sprint and the 100 meter swim since 1900 against their height, weight and a measurement he called "slenderness."

World record sprinters have gained an average of 6.4 inches in height since 1900, while champion swimmers have shot up 4.5 inches, compared to the mere mortal average height gain of 1.9 inches.

During the same time, about 7/10 of a second have been shaved off of the 100-meter sprint while over 14 seconds have come off the 100-meter swim record.

What's going on

Charles applied the "constructural theory" he learned from his mentor Adrian Bejan, a mechanical engineering professor at Duke, that describes how objects move through their environment.

"Anything that moves, or anything that flows, must evolve so that it flows more and more easily," Bejan said. "Nature wants to find a smoother path, to flow more easily, to find a path with less resistance," he said. "The animal design never gets there, but it tries to be the least imperfect that it can be."

Their research is reported in the current online edition of the Journal of Experimental Biology.

For locomotion, a human needs to overcome two forces, gravity and friction. First, an athlete would need to lift his foot off the ground or keep his body at the water line without sinking. Second, air resistance for the sprinter and water resistance for the swimmer will limit speed.

So, the first step is actually weight lifting, which a bigger, stronger athlete will excel at. The second step is to move through the space with the least friction, which emphasizes the new slenderness factor.

By comparing height with a calculated "width" of the athlete, slenderness is a measurement of mass spread out over a long frame. The athlete that can build on more muscle mass over a aerodynamic frame will have the advantage.

The numbers

In swimming, legendary Hawaiian champion Duke Kahanamoku set the world record in 1912 with a time of 61.6 seconds with a calculated slenderness of 7.88. Some 96 years later, Eamon Sullivan lowered the world mark to 47.05 seconds at a slenderness factor of 8.29.

As the athletes' slenderness factor has risen over the years, the winning times have dropped.

In 1929, Eddie Tolan's world-record 100 meter sprint of 10.4 seconds was achieved with a slenderness factor of 7.61. When Usain Bolt ran 9.69 seconds in the 2008 Olympics, his slenderness was also 8.29 while also being the tallest champion in history at 6-feet 5-inches.

"The trends revealed by our analysis suggest that speed records will continue to be dominated by heavier and taller athletes," said Charles. "We believe that this is due to the constructal rules of animal locomotion and not the contemporary increase in the average size of humans."

So, how fast did the original Olympians run? Charles used an anthropology finding for Greek and Roman body mass and plugged it into his formula.

"In antiquity, body weights were roughly 70 percent of what they are today," Charles said. "Using our theory, a 100-meter dash that is won in 13 seconds would have taken about 14 seconds back then."

Bolt puts his prediction to the test next month at the track and field world championships in Berlin. His main competition is Asafa Powell, the previous world record holder, who is shorter and has a slenderness factor of 7.85. My money is on the Lightning Bolt.

5 Myths About the Male Body
Caveman vs. Modern Human: Who Would Win Olympic Gold?
Why Old Athletes Come BackDan Peterson writes about sports science at his site Sports Are 80 Percent Mental. His Science of Sports column appears weekly on LiveScience.

Original Story: Taller Athletes Are Faster, Study FindsLiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology. We take on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and deliver short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style. Check out our science videos, Trivia & Quizzes and Top 10s. Join our community to debate hot-button issues like stem cells, climate change and evolution. You can also sign up for free newsletters, register for RSS feeds and get cool gadgets at the LiveScience Store.