Peugeot Bets on a Different Kind of Hybrid

PARIS — What’s that car that just breezed past?

It’s the Hybrid Air — an experimental vehicle that the French automaker PSA Peugeot Citroën has been trumpeting lately as an exemplar of energy efficiency. While some skeptics doubt whether it is truly breakthrough technology, the Peugeot and Citroën concept cars containing it may prove to be some of the more intriguing models on display next week at the Geneva Motor Show.

Peugeot says a compact car like a Citroën C3 equipped with the technology will get about 100 kilometers per 2.9 liters, or 81 miles per gallon, in city driving. If so, that would be significantly more than existing hybrid electric vehicles like the Toyota Prius can achieve in stop-and-go traffic.

Peugeot, the second-biggest carmaker in Europe after Volkswagen, plans to begin rolling out Hybrid Air cars by 2015 or 2016.

Like a Toyota Prius, the Hybrid Air recovers energy each time the driver brakes or decelerates. But instead of using that braking energy to charge a battery, which then runs an electric motor — as in the Prius — the Hybrid Air has a reversible hydraulic pump that uses the braking energy to compress nitrogen gas in what looks like an oversized scuba tank. When the Hybrid Air driver next presses the accelerator, the compressed gas pushes hydraulic fluid, syringe fashion, through a gearbox to turn the wheels.

The energy stored in the nitrogen tank is small — equivalent to only about five teaspoons, or a couple dozen cubic centimeters, of gasoline — and enough to power the car only a few hundred meters before the standard gasoline motor takes over again. But repeated over the course of a day of city driving, Peugeot says, those extra teaspoons of energy add up to big improvement in gas mileage.

The idea of using so-called hybrid hydraulics to power a car has been around for a while, although Peugeot prefers to call it “hybrid air technology” because the energy is stored in the compressed gas, rather than the hydraulics. In the United States, Ford Motor and Chrysler have studied the approach with encouragement from the Environmental Protection Agency. UPS, the parcel service, has added several dozen hybrid hydraulic delivery vans to its alternative fuel fleet. Other companies are applying the technology to garbage trucks, which like UPS vans, are big, make frequent stops and stand to recover much of their wasted energy. The Indian auto company Tata has promised to produce a car powered solely by compressed air, although that uses a different technology than Peugeot’s approach.

Peugeot, with a 200-member Hybrid Air team led by Karim Mokaddem, an engineer, appears to be moving the fastest of any global automaker to bring the technology to the family car, while most of the industry has focused on hybrid electrics as the main alternative vehicles for reducing emissions and saving gasoline.

“The logic of an electric hybrid is completely different,” Andrés Yarce, another of the project leaders, said in Peugeot’s technical center in Carrières-sous-Poissy, near Paris. With an electric hybrid, “you let the vehicle run for a few kilometers, have the engine shut off, then run silently on an electric motor,” Mr. Yarce said. “It took time for people to grasp that the Hybrid Air works differently but gets the same results.”

When the car is ready for the market, Peugeot plans to price it below €20,000, or $26,000.

Mr. Mokaddem said the pricing was meant to make the Hybrid Air a viable option in emerging markets like China and India, where many hybrid electrics are too expensive for most consumers and too complex for local service and repair operations.

Peugeot says it can undercut hybrid electrics on price because its car does not require a special, expensive battery and electric motor that vehicles like the Prius use, although the Hybrid Air does employ a standard car battery. The hydraulic system also adds about 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds, to the weight of a conventional Citroën or Peugeot. And because of the heat generated by the energy transfer process, the designers have had to adapt the car’s cooling system.

The most obvious difference between the prototype Hybrid Air and an ordinary car is the presence of two air tanks (the second, smaller tank is a low-pressure receptacle) and a special gearbox that manages the energy handoffs between the hydraulics and the 1.2-liter standard gasoline engine. The designers say the setup left them room to keep a standard-size trunk and gas tank.

The accumulator, or pressurized nitrogen tank is 1.3 meters, or about 4 feet, long, with a volume of 20 liters, or 5.3 gallons, and a maximum pressure of 250 bar, or about 3,600 pounds per square inch.

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DNA science points to better treatment for acne

Ancient Egyptians were vexed by it, using sulfur to dry it out. Shakespeare wrote of its "bubukles, and whelks, and knobs, and flames o' fire."

Today, acne plagues us still. Doctors can cure some cancers and transplant vital organs like hearts, but they still have trouble getting rid of the pimples and splotches that plague 85% of us at some time in our lives — usually, when we're teenagers and particularly sensitive about they way we look.

But new research hints that there's hope for zapping zits in the future, thanks to advances in genetic research.

Using state-of-the-art DNA sequencing techniques to evaluate the bacteria lurking in the pores of 101 study volunteers' noses, scientists discovered a particular strain of Propionibacterium acnes bacteria that may be able to defend against other versions of P. acnes that pack a bigger breakout-causing punch.

As best as dermatologists can tell, zits occur when bacteria that reside in human skin, including P. acnes, feed on oils in the pores and prompt an immune response that results in red, sometimes pus-filled bumps. But the study subjects who had the newly discovered bacterial strain weren't suffering from whiteheads or blackheads, according to a report published Thursday in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

Someday, the realization that "not all P. acnes are created equal" might help dermatologists devise treatments that more precisely target bad strains while allowing beneficial ones to thrive, said Dr. Noah Craft, a dermatologist at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute who conducted the study with colleagues from UCLA and Washington University in St. Louis.

Doctors might prescribe probiotic creams that deliver "good" P. acnes to the face the same way a daily serving of yogurt helps restore healthy bacteria in the digestive tract.

"There are healthy strains that we need on our skin," Craft said. "The idea that you'd use a nuclear bomb to kill everything — what we're currently doing with antibiotics and other treatments — just doesn't make sense."

The research is part of a broad effort backed by the National Institutes of Health to characterize the so-called human microbiome: the trillions of microbes that live in and on our bodies and evolve along with us, sometimes causing illness and often promoting good health.

Most of the microbiome attention so far has gone to studying species in the gut, said study leader Huiying Li, an assistant professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine. But the NIH's Human Microbiome Project, which funds her research, also looks at microbial communities in the nasal passages, the mouth, the urogenital tract and the skin.

Li said she became interested in studying acne because the skin microbiome seemed particularly understudied.

The research team recruited 101 patients in their teens and 20s from dermatology clinics in Southern California. Among them, 49 had acne and 52 had "normal skin" and were not experiencing breakouts but had come to the clinics for other problems.

Doctors used adhesive pore strips to remove skin bacteria from patients' noses. The researchers then collected the waxy plugs — a combination of bacteria, oils, dead skin cells and other stuff — and used DNA to figure out which bacteria were present.

They found that the P. acnes species accounted for about 90% of the bacteria in pores, in both healthy patients and acne sufferers. Digging a little deeper into the DNA, they found that two particular strains appeared in about 20% of acne sufferers, while a third strain was found only in acne-free patients.

"Dogs are dogs, but a Chihuahua isn't a Great Dane," Craft said. "People with acne had pit bulls on their skin. Healthy people had poodles."

The team then sequenced the complete genomes — about 2.6 million base pairs apiece — of 66 of the P. acnes specimens to explore in more depth how the good and bad strains differed.

The two notable bad strains had genes, probably picked up from other bacteria or viruses, that are thought to change the shape of a microbe to make it more virulent. The researchers hypothesized that the foreign DNA, perhaps by sticking more effectively to human host tissues, may help trigger an inflammatory response in the skin: acne.

The good strain, on the other hand, contained an element known to work like an immune system in bacteria, Li said. Perhaps it allows this P. acne to fight off intruders and prevent pimples from forming.

Li said the researchers did not know why some people had the bad P. acnes strains and others did not, and whether genetics or environment played a bigger role.

Dr. Vincent Young, who conducts microbiome research at the University of Michigan Medical School but wasn't involved in the acne project, said advances in sequencing technology and analysis made the new study possible. In the past, he said, scientists wouldn't have tried to sequence dozens of genomes in a single species.

"They'd say, why waste the money?" he said. "Now you can do this in a couple of days."

Li and Craft — neither of whom suffered bad acne as teens — plan to keep up the work.

More research is needed to come up with super-targeted anti-microbial therapies, or to develop a probiotic cream for acne sufferers.

Craft continues collecting samples from patients' pores. He hopes to study whether twins share the same microbial profiles, how acne severity is reflected in bacteria populations, and how things change in a single patient over the course of a treatment regimen.

One of the study volunteers, 19-year-old UC Santa Cruz student Brandon Pritzker, said he would have loved to have treated his acne without affecting the rest of his body. When he took Accutane, he suffered back pain and mood shifts.

Now off the drug, Pritzker said he is at peace with his pimples. "I still have breakouts, but I figure I'm 19, that's the way it's going to be," he said.

But, he added, "it hindered my confidence at the time. Kids with clear skin are probably a little happier."

eryn.brown@latimes.com

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The Worthy Quest to Kill Off Checks in the Next 10 Years

In the 21st century, what could be more ridiculous than checks? Little pieces of paper upon which incredibly sensitive information is printed in a font from the punch-card era of computing. Sign your name and, voilà, the paper becomes money!

Aside from the obvious security problems, checks don’t fit well into today’s digital buying-and-selling infrastructure. For checks, verification depends on trust in a way that credit, debit, online transactions don’t (not to mention cash). At a time when most people shopped locally and personally knew the merchants they were buying from, checks made sense. Your signature was your word to your village that you were good for the money. Checks were a formalized version of a note saying “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

Today, how many gas stations, convenience stores, restaurants, pharmacies and any other shop take checks? Even if they do, it’s only grudgingly. Even with advances like mobile deposit-by-photo, a check transaction is simply more work.

There’s still at least one segment of the economy where checks are still prevalent — that is, unless Bill Clerico has his way. Clerico is the co-founder and CEO of WePay, another player in the crowded mobile payments space that has targeted a specific market he thinks will set his company apart. Dog walkers, maids, contractors, wedding photographers, landscapers, piano teachers: paying what Clerico describes as the millions of service-providing small businesses and self-employed workers with a check still tends to make sense. The dollar amounts tend to be too high for cash, and the transactions are relatively intimate: These are people who’ve put in time to do something for you. Often they’ve been to your home. They know your family. You’re likely to see them again.

In that context, taking a check seems more reasonable. But Clerico believes WePay offers a better option. Today the company is launching its first mobile app that allows independent service providers to invoice their clients directly from their phones. Those clients can then click to pay those invoices on the web through either a desktop or mobile site.

Until today, WePay only offered the invoicing option through its website, as well. Clerico says that sometimes led to the situation where service providers would use WePay on the web but rely on the card reader of competitor Square when taking payments in person. What’s more, he says many small business owners these days aren’t using desktops or laptops at all.

“They run their whole business off their iPhones,” he says.

As more small businesses move in that direction, the need for checks should shrink even more. The story will likely be not whether checks survive, but which platform succeeds at replacing them. Clerico believes WePay’s invoicing feature sets it apart from Square for his target market.

Regardless, Clerico predicts checks will be dead in a decade. “Checks,” he says, “aren’t good for anyone.”

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The New Old Age Blog: For the Elderly, Lists of Tests to Avoid

The Choosing Wisely campaign, an initiative by the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation in partnership with Consumer Reports, kicked off last spring. It is an attempt to alert both doctors and patients to problematic and commonly overused medical tests, procedures and treatments.

It took an elegantly simple approach: By working through professional organizations representing medical specialties, Choosing Wisely asked doctors to identify “Five Things Physicians and Patients Should Question.”

The idea was that doctors and their patients could agree on tests and treatments that are supported by evidence, that don’t duplicate what others do, that are “truly necessary” and “free from harm” — and avoid the rest.

Among the 18 new lists released last week are recommendations from geriatricians and palliative care specialists, which may be of particular interest to New Old Age readers. I’ve previously written about a number of these warnings, but it’s helpful to have them in single, strongly worded documents.

The winners — or perhaps, losers?

Both the American Geriatrics Society and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine agreed on one major “don’t.” Topping both lists was an admonition against feeding tubes for people with advanced dementia.

“This is not news; the data’s been out for at least 15 years,” said Sei Lee, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the working group that narrowed more than 100 recommendations down to five. Feeding tubes don’t prevent aspiration pneumonia or prolong dementia patients’ lives, the research shows, but they do exacerbate bedsores and cause such distress that people often try to pull them out and wind up in restraints. The doctors recommended hand-feeding dementia patients instead.

The geriatricians’ list goes on to warn against the routine prescribing of antipsychotic medications for dementia patients who become aggressive or disruptive. Though drugs like Haldol, Risperdal and Zyprexa remain widely used, “all of these have been shown to increase the risk of stroke and cardiovascular death,” Dr. Lee said. They should be last resorts, after behavioral interventions.

The other questionable tests and treatments:

No. 3: Prescribing medications to achieve “tight glycemic control” (defined as below 7.5 on the A1c test) in elderly diabetics, who need to control their blood sugar, but not as strictly as younger patients.

No. 4: Turning to sleeping pills as the first choice for older people who suffer from agitation, delirium or insomnia. Xanax, Ativan, Valium, Ambien, Lunesta — “they don’t magically disappear from your body when you wake up in the morning,” Dr. Lee said. They continue to slow reaction times, resulting in falls and auto accidents. Other sleep therapies are preferable.

No. 5: Prescribing antibiotics when tests indicate a urinary tract infection, but the patient has no discomfort or other symptoms. Many older people have bacteria in their bladders but don’t suffer ill effects; repeated use of antibiotics just causes drug resistance, leaving them vulnerable to more dangerous infections. “Treat the patient, not the lab test,” Dr. Lee said.

The palliative care doctors’ Five Things list cautions against delaying palliative care, which can relieve pain and control symptoms even as patients pursue treatments for their diseases.

It also urges discussion about deactivating implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, or ICDs, in patients with irreversible diseases. “Being shocked is like being kicked in the chest by a mule,” said Eric Widera, a palliative care specialist at the San Francisco V.A. Medical Center who served on the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine working group. “As someone gets close to the end of life, these ICDs can’t prolong life and they cause a lot of pain.”

Turning the devices off — an option many patients don’t realize they have — requires simple computer reprogramming or a magnet, not the surgery that installed them in the first place.

The palliative care doctors also pointed out that patients suffering pain as cancer spreads to their bones get as much relief, the evidence shows, from a single dose of radiation than from 10 daily doses that require travel to hospitals or treatment centers.

Finally, their list warned that topical gels widely used by hospice staffs to control nausea do not work because they aren’t absorbed through the skin. “We have lots of other ways to give anti-nausea drugs,” Dr. Widera said.

You can read all the Five Things lists (more are coming later this year), and the Consumer Reports publications that do a good job of translating them, on the Choosing Wisely Web site.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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DealBook: In Europe, Risks and Opportunities

BERLIN – Is Europe a risk or an opportunity?

As its economies struggle, private equity managers offer differing views about the region.

Speaking at the SuperReturn conference in Berlin, Henry R. Kravis, co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, said Europe was an attractive market, particularly the Continent’s southern countries, which have been hit by high unemployment and meager growth.

“I like Spain, they are doing a number of right things,” Mr. Kravis told a somewhat empty conference room early on Thursday morning after many private equity managers had attended late-night dinners the previous evening. “In Europe, there clearly are opportunities. I may be in the minority.”

Other private equity giants, including David M. Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, are also scouting for opportunities from Italy to Ireland despite concerns that the Continent may fall back into recession.

Lionel Assant, European head of private equity at the Blackstone Group, liked Spain because of its close ties to fast-growing Latin American markets and efforts to revamp its local labor market.

Not every manager is so bullish, however.

J. Christopher Flowers, whose private equity firm bought an insurance broker from the struggling Belgian bank KBC for 240 million euros ($315 million) in 2011, said the future of the euro zone remained a major risk.

Europe’s recovery prospects were hurt again this week after Italian national elections on Monday failed to provide a definitive winner. The political impasse prompted significant losses in the Continent’s stock markets as investors fretted about the future of one of Europe’s largest economies.

For Mr. Flowers, there are still some potential investment opportunities, including the pending forced sale of bank branches in Britain from the nationalized Royal Bank of Scotland. The United States, however, still remains his preferred region in which to invest.

“If a major economy like Spain defaults, we would prefer to be in Germany,” Mr. Flowers said. “If I had to pick one region, I would pick the U.S.”

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article contained an incorrect conversion of 240 million euros. It is the equivalent of $315 million, not $310.

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Race for L.A. city controller heats up

A previously low-profile race for Los Angeles city controller has begun to heat up as opponents of City Councilman Dennis Zine accuse him of "double dipping" the city's payroll and question why he is considering lucrative tax breaks for a Warner Center developer.

Zine, who for 12 years has represented a district in the southeast San Fernando Valley, is the better known of the major candidates competing to replace outgoing Controller Wendy Greuel.

The others are Cary Brazeman, a marketing executive, and lawyer Ron Galperin. Zine has raised $766,000 for his campaign, more than double that of Galperin, the next-highest fundraiser, and has the backing of several of the city's powerful labor unions.

He also has been endorsed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and several of his council colleagues. Galperin is backed by the Service Employees International Union, one the city's largest labor groups, and Brazeman is supported by retired Rep. Diane Watson and several neighborhood council representatives.

With the primary ballot less than a week away, Brazeman and Galperin have turned up the heat on Zine, hoping to push the race beyond the March 5 vote. If no one wins more than 50% of the ballots cast, the top two vote-getters will face a runoff in the May general election.

In a recent debate, Zine's opponents criticized him for receiving a $100,000 annual pension for his 33 years with the Los Angeles Police Department and a nearly $180,000 council salary. Brazeman and Galperin called it an example of "double dipping" that should be eliminated.

That brought a forceful response from Zine, who shot back that he gives a big portion of his police pension check to charities.

"I am so tired of hearing 'double dipping,' " he said. "I worked 33 years on the streets of Los Angeles. I have given over $300,000 to nonprofits that need it.... That's what's happened with that pension."

In the same debate, Brazeman accused Zine of cozying up to a Warner Center developer by pushing for tax breaks on a project that already has been approved. The nearly 30-acre Village at Westfield Topanga project would add 1 million square feet of new shops, restaurants, office space and a hotel to a faded commercial district on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

"The councilman proposed to give developers at Warner Center tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks even though it's a highly successful project," he said. "He wants to give it away."

City records show that less than a month after the development was approved in February 2012, Zine asked the council for a study looking at possible "economic development incentives" that could be given to Westfield in return for speeding up street and landscaping enhancements to the project's exterior.

The motion's language notes that similar tax breaks have been awarded to large projects in the Hollywood and downtown areas, and that "similar public investment in the Valley has been lacking." Westfield is paying for the $200,000 study.

Zine defended his decision before the debate audience, saying if the study finds that the city will not benefit, no tax breaks will be awarded. "If there's nothing there, then they get nothing," Zine said.

The controller serves as a public watchdog over the city's $7.3-billion annual operation, auditing the general fund, 500 special fund accounts and the performance of city departments. Those audits often produce recommendations for reducing waste, fraud and abuse.

But the mayor and the council are not obligated to adopt those recommendations, and as a result the job is part accountant, part scolder in chief. All the candidates say they will use their elective position not only to perform audits but also to turn them into action.

Their challenge during the campaign has been explaining how they will do that.

Zine, 65, says his City Hall experience has taught him how to get things done by working with his colleagues. He won't be afraid to publicly criticize department managers, he said, but thinks collaboration works better than being combative.

"You can rant and rave and people won't work with you," he said. "Or you can sit down and talk it out, and you can accomplish things."

Galperin, 49, considers himself a policy wonk who relishes digging into the details to come up with ways to become more efficient with limited dollars and to find ways to raise revenue using the city's sprawling assets. For instance, the city owns two asphalt plants that could expand production and sell some of its material to raise money to fix potholes, he said.

He's served on two city commissions, including one that found millions of dollars in savings by detailing ways to be more efficient. Zine is positioning himself as a "tough guy for tough times," but the controller should be more than that, Galperin said.

"What we really need is some thoughtfulness and some smarts and some effectiveness," he said. "Just getting up there and saying we need to be tough is not going to accomplish what needs to be done."

Brazeman, 46, started his own marketing and public relations firm in West Los Angeles a decade ago and became active in city politics over his discontent with a development project near his home. He has pushed the council to change several initiatives over the last five years, including changes to the financing of the Farmers Field stadium proposal that will save taxpayer dollars, he said.

As controller, he would pick and choose his battles, and, Brazeman said, be "the right combination of constructive, abrasive and assertive."

catherine.saillant@latimes.com

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The Strange Beauty of Historic Computers Brought Back From the Dead

When you open the door and walk into the room, it even smells like the 1960s. It reminds you of the old garage where your grandfather kept his twin Chevrolet Corvairs. But those aren't cars you smell. Those are computers.

This is the "1401 Room" on the first floor of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California — the room where Robert Garner and his motley crew of amateur technicians have spent the last decade reviving two of the massive IBM 1401 mainframe computers that littered the business world throughout the '60s and on into '70s.

As the door opens, you can see not only the 1401s themselves, but the mechanical punch-card machine where they take instructions from the outside world, the towering drives where they store data on spinning spools of tape, and even the desk-sized printer where they funnel information onto good old-fashioned paper. There's a gentle hum in the room. You can feel the heat coming off the machines. And, yes, you can smell them too. Garner says it's the odor of the oils used in some of the mechanical equipment, including the printer and the punch-card reader.

This assault on your senses is one of the chief reasons Garner and his cohorts have spent all these years restoring the two IBMs. They want to show a new generation what these machines were like -- and they want to show it as completely as possible. "This is the creation of a time machine," Garner says. "When people are here, experiencing this, it sparks their imagination. It transfers them back in time, but it also takes them forward in time. It makes them feel like they too can build new things."

Garner and his team also work on the IBMs because it's fun. "Though you might say that people who do this kind of thing are crazy — and you'd wouldn't be wrong — we enjoy doing it together," says Stan Paddock, another member of the group. But Garner is right: there's a larger payoff. And you feel it as soon as you step into the room.

In short, Garner and his team are historians — in the purest sense of the word. And thankfully, they're not alone.

At the Computer History Museum, volunteers have toiled to revive a wide range of artifacts from an earlier age of American computing, including the IBM 1620 and the DEC PDP-1. Across the Atlantic, in Great Britain, the Computer Conservation Society has sponsored an even longer list of restoration projects, overseeing the revival of such seminal machines as the WITCH (the world's oldest digital computer) and the Colossus (used to crack German codes during the Second World War). And then there are hobbyists like Bill Degnan, people across the globe who spend their free time rebuilding whatever old machines they can get their hands on — and occasionally flaunting their work at events like the Vintage Computer Festival.

Sadly, we can't show you what these machines smell like. Or what they sound like. Or what they feel like. But we can show you what they look like — or at least try. With the gallery of images above, we give you a few of our favorites.

Above

Behold, the 1401 Room. You can see the punch-card machine on the right, the tape drives against the wall at the back, the printer in the middle of the frame, and the 1401 itself on the left, with the blue stripe running across its top edge. This massive collection of machinery was the most popular business computer of the 1960s.

Robert Garner — a modern-day IBM researcher who has also worked for such tech giants as Xerox and Sun Microsystems — bootstrapped the restoration project in 2008 when the Computer Museum History acquired the remnants of a 1401 from an outfit in Germany. He sliped an ad into a Silicon Valley newsletter for IBM retirees, and soon, he had a team of technicians with the know-how to rebuild the thing.

A few years later, Garner was contacted by a man who who had a 1401 in his Connecticut home. This machine was built in 1961, but the man's family had used it to track expenses for the local country club through the mid-'90s. It was in slightly better shape than Garner's german 1401, so the museum bought it too.

If you're a Stanley Kubrick fan, the printer may look familiar. It's an IBM 1403, which makes a cameo in Kubrick's Cold War black comedy, Dr. Strangelove. There's a 1403 at the Air Force Base where Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper unilaterally launches a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and his second in command, played by Peter Sellers, doesn't realize what has happened until he finds a transistor radio tucked inside the lip of the printer.

If you visit the 1401 Room at Computer History Museum, you too will find a transistor radio — right where Sellers did.

Images: Computer History Museum

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Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal

VIENNA (Reuters) – A new film based on the story of Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.

Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a windowless cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped in 2006, causing a sensation in Austria and abroad. Priklopil committed suicide.

Kampusch had always refused to respond to claims that she had had sex with Priklopil, but in a German television interview on her 25th birthday last week said she had decided to reveal the truth because it had leaked out from police files.

The film, “3,096 Days” – based on Kampusch’s autobiography of the same name – soberly portrays her captivity in a windowless cellar less than 6 square metres (65 square feet) in area, often deprived of food for days at a time.

The emaciated Kampusch – who weighed just 38 kg (84 pounds) at one point in 2004 – keeps a diary written on toilet paper concealed in a box.

One entry reads: “At least 60 blows in the face. Ten to 15 nausea-inducing fist blows to the head. One strike with the fist with full weight to my right ear.”

The movie shows occasional moments that approach tenderness, such as when Priklopil presents her with a cake for her 18th birthday or buys her a dress as a gift – but then immediately goes on to chide her for not knowing how to waltz with him.

GREY AREAS

Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who plays the teenaged Kampusch, said she had tried to portray “the strength of someone’s soul, the ability of people to survive… but also the grey areas within a relationship that people don’t necessarily understand.”

The British actress said she had not met Kampusch during the making of the film or since. “It was a very isolated time, it was a bubble of time, and I wanted to keep that very focused,” she told journalists as she arrived for the Vienna premiere.

Kampusch herself attended the premiere, looking composed as she posed for pictures but declining to give interviews.

In an interview with Germany’s Bild Zeitung last week, she said: “Yes, I did recognize myself, although the reality was even worse. But one can’t really show that in the cinema, since it wasn’t supposed to be a horror film.”

The movie, made at the Constantin Film studios in Bavaria, Germany, also stars Amy Pidgeon as the 10-year-old Kampusch and Danish actor Thure Lindhardt as Priklopil.

“I focused mainly on playing the human being because… we have to remember it was a human being. Monsters do not exist, they’re only in cartoons,” Lindhart said.

“It became clear to me that it’s a story about survival, and it’s a story about surviving eight years of hell. If that story can be told then I can also play the bad guy.”

The director was German-American Sherry Hormann, who made her English-language debut with the 2009 move “Desert Flower”, an adaptation of the autobiography of Somali-born model and anti-female circumcision activist Waris Dirie.

“I’m a mother and I wonder at the strength of this child, and it was important for me to tell this story from a different perspective, to tell how this child using her own strength could survive this atrocious martyrdom,” Hormann said.

The Kampusch case was followed two years later by that of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian who held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

The crimes prompted soul-searching about the Austrian psyche, and questions as to how the authorities and neighbors could have let such crimes go undetected for so long.

The film goes on general release on Thursday.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, Editing by Paul Casciato)

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Global Health: After Measles Success, Rwanda to Get Rubella Vaccine

Rwanda has been so successful at fighting measles that next month it will be the first country to get donor support to move to the next stage — fighting rubella too.

On March 11, it will hold a nationwide three-day vaccination campaign with a combined measles-rubella vaccine, hoping to reach nearly five million children up to age 14. It will then integrate the dual vaccine into its national health service.

Rwanda can do so “because they’ve done such a good job on measles,” said Christine McNab, a spokeswoman for the Measles and Rubella Initiative. M.R.I. helped pay for previous vaccination campaigns in the country and the GAVI Alliance is helping financing the upcoming one.

Rubella, also called German measles, causes a rash that is very similar to the measles rash, making it hard for health workers to tell the difference.

Rubella is generally mild, even in children, but in pregnant women, it can kill the fetus or cause serious birth defects, including blindness, deafness, mental retardation and chronic heart damage.

Ms. McNab said that Rwanda had proved that it can suppress measles and identify rubella, and it would benefit from the newer, more expensive vaccine.

The dual vaccine costs twice as much — 52 cents a dose at Unicef prices, compared with 24 cents for measles alone. (The MMR vaccine that American children get, which also contains a vaccine against mumps, costs Unicef $1.)

More than 90 percent of Rwandan children now are vaccinated twice against measles, and cases have been near zero since 2007.

The tiny country, which was convulsed by Hutu-Tutsi genocide in 1994, is now leading the way in Africa in delivering medical care to its citizens, Ms. McNab said. Three years ago, it was the first African country to introduce shots against human papilloma virus, or HPV, which causes cervical cancer.

In wealthy countries, measles kills a small number of children — usually those whose parents decline vaccination. But in poor countries, measles is a major killer of malnourished infants. Around the world, the initiative estimates, about 158,000 children die of it each year, or about 430 a day.

Every year, an estimated 112,000 children, mostly in Africa, South Asia and the Pacific islands, are born with handicaps caused by their mothers’ rubella infection.

Thanks in part to the initiative — which until last year was known just as the Measles Initiative — measles deaths among children have declined 71 percent since 2000. The initiative is a partnership of many health agencies, vaccine companies, donors and others, but is led by the American Red Cross, the United Nations Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Unicef and the World Health Organization.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the source of the financing for the upcoming vaccination campaign in Rwanda. It is being financed by the GAVI Alliance, not the Measles and Rubella Initiative.

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DealBook: Regulators Block Ryanair’s Latest Attempt to Buy Aer Lingus

BRUSSELS — The European Commission on Wednesday blocked the third attempt by Ryanair to take over Aer Lingus, saying the tie-up of the two Irish airlines would damage competition and raise prices on air routes to Ireland.

The decision was widely expected after Ryanair — the largest budget carrier in Europe — said earlier that the commission would prohibit the deal, worth about 700 million euros or $900 million.

“The Commission’s decision protects more than 11 million Irish and European passengers who travel each year to and from Dublin, Cork, Knock and Shannon,” the European Union competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, said in a statement before a news conference.

Proposals made by Ryanair “were simply inadequate to solve the very serious competition problems which this acquisition would have created on no less than 46 routes,” Mr. Almunia said.

Shares of Ryanair were down 6 euro cents to 5.60 euros by early afternoon in Dublin; Aer Lingus stock was up 1 cent at 1.25 euros.

On Wednesday, Aer Lingus, which had rejected Ryanair’s offers, said that it welcomed the commission decision. Ryanair, which owns about 30 percent of Aer Lingus, reiterated that it would appeal the decision to the European Court of Justice.

Ryanair accused Mr. Almunia of protecting Aer Lingus, the Irish flag carrier, against a takeover by an upstart. The company also contends that the regulator applied a double standard because he approved the takeover by British Airways and Iberia of British Midland International last year under a simplified procedure.

“We regret that this prohibition is manifestly motivated by narrow political interests rather than competition concerns and we believe that we have strong grounds for appealing and overturning this politically inspired prohibition,” said Robin Kiely, a spokesman for Ryanair.

Prolonged litigation could have wider ramifications, making it more difficult for the Irish government to sell its 25 percent stake in Aer Lingus. Ireland agreed to sell that stake under the terms of an international bailout finalized in November 2010, although that agreement did not set a deadline for the sale.

The deal is the fourth Mr. Almunia has blocked since he took over the role of the region’s antitrust chief in February 2010. Earlier this year, the regulator thwarted U.P.S.‘s attempt to buy TNT Express.

The decision on Wednesday marks the latest chapter in years of acrimony between the commission and Ryanair’s pugnacious chief executive, Michael O’Leary, who has repeatedly criticized commission officials for decisions that curtailed his ambitions.

The enmity between Mr. O’Leary and the commission developed early last decade when the two sides began a running battle over whether Ryanair received illegal state subsidies that enabled the airline to open up routes to regional airports. Those airports were often some distance from major transport hubs, but still close enough to lure passengers away from more established carriers.

Last year, the commission announced new investigations into the effect of discounts Ryanair had received at the Lübeck-Blankensee airport in Germany and the Klagenfurt regional airport in Austria.

Mr. O’Leary has sharply criticized the commission for failing to do more to save money by booking its officials on low-cost airlines like his own. Ryanair also has said its arrangements with all E.U. airports comply with the bloc’s competition rules.

The E.U. competition authority blocked Ryanair’s first bid for Aer Lingus in 2007 on the grounds that the combined airline would have had a monopoly on too many routes. Back then, Mr. O’Leary accused the commission of bowing to political pressure from the Irish government, which opposed the deal. The airline abandoned a second attempt in 2009 because of opposition from the Irish government.

On Wednesday, Ryanair accused the commission of holding it to a higher standard than other airlines seeking mergers after it had offered ‘‘historic and unprecedented’’ concessions.

Among them: allowing two competitor airlines to serve Dublin, Cork and Shannon; giving those airlines more than half of the short-distance business that currently belongs to Aer Lingus; and agreeing to transfer airport slots in Britain to allow British Airways to serve Ireland from both Gatwick and Heathrow. Ryanair also had offered Flybe, a competitor, 100 million euros in funding to make it “a commercially profitable and viable entity” in Ireland.

On Wednesday, the commission spelled out the reasons behind its decision.

It said that both Ryanair and Aer Lingus had strengthened their positions in the Irish market since the commission refused the previous deal in 2007, and that the merger would have created an ‘‘outright monopoly’’ on 28 short-distance routes serving Ireland. The commission also said that there were such high barriers to entry to the Irish market that any new competitors would face too many challenges.

The commission’s “market investigation showed that there was no prospect that any new carrier would enter the Irish market after the merger, in particular by the creation of a base at the relevant Irish airports, and challenge the new entity on a sufficient scale,” it said in a statement. “Higher prices for passengers would have been the likely outcome,”

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