Television Review: ‘The Bible’ Mini-Series on the History Channel

Mark Burnett, an impresario of reality television, has surely encountered the question before: How do you make viewers believe what they’re seeing? Did those “Survivor” contestants really eat that stuff? Would any of these seemingly intelligent “Apprentice” candidates actually want to work for Donald Trump?

Mr. Burnett and his wife, Roma Downey, gave themselves a chance to tackle the ultimate make-me-believe-it challenge when they decided to produce “The Bible,” a 10-hour dramatization that begins on Sunday on History. Instead of embracing this challenge, they ducked it, serving up a rickety, often cheesy spectacle that is calculated to play well to a certain segment of the already enlisted choir but risks being ignored or scorned in other quarters.

The mini-series certainly seems unlikely to be much of a recruitment tool for Christianity, putting the emphasis on moments of suffering rather than messages of joy, and not just when it comes time for the Crucifixion. In this heavy-handed treatment, having Jesus born in a manger is not enough; the arrival also has to occur during what looks like a typhoon. Because why have a moderate amount of hardship when you can have an excess of it?

The feelings behind the series may be sincere — Ms. Downey has said that she and her husband “felt called to do this” — but the approach here actually shows a lack of faith in the power of the biblical stories. The real Bible is a layered, often lyrical epic in which personal journeys are intertwined with collective ones, and human failings bump up against human strivings.

Mr. Burnett and Ms. Downey, their actors (Ms. Downey herself is one) and especially their adapters don’t have nearly the skill to translate such a thing to the small screen in a way that does justice to its complexity. The best they can do is a black-and-white simplification in which villains often come across as laughable caricatures because the creators are so eager to make sure that everyone realizes that they’re villains.

Mel Gibson, of course, already proved that there is a substantial audience for a suffering-heavy treatment of Christianity with “The Passion of the Christ.” But Mr. Gibson’s movie had the advantage of a narrow focus. By taking on the entire Bible, even at 10 hours in length, Mr. Burnett and Ms. Downey force themselves into a clumsy “Bible’s greatest hits” approach.

This doesn’t serve the source material — so rich in interconnections across time — very well, and it doesn’t make for very involving television. Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel and the other great biblical figures aren’t really developed in a way that illuminates them or makes them linger in our minds; they are simply called forth to perform a set piece or two. It’s like a trip through a Christian theme park. “Next stop on the tour, ladies and gentlemen: the Noah’s ark tableau, followed by the Daniel in the lion’s den diorama.”

That might be tolerable if effort had gone into providing some connective tissue to relate the scenes organically. Instead a bland narration fills the gaps between them, covering leaps of decades or even centuries, not to mention some of Christianity’s pivotal tenets. It is the narrator who announces that God has given Moses the great laws of life, the Ten Commandments, a curiously momentous thing to leave to a voice-over.

The result is a mini-series full of emoting that does not register emotionally, a tableau of great biblical moments that doesn’t convey why they’re great. Those looking for something that makes them feel the power of the Bible would do better to find a good production of “Godspell” or “Jesus Christ Superstar.” And those thinking that the ancient miracles might be better served by the special effects available in 2013 than they have been in previous versions should prepare for disappointment. The Red Sea parts no more convincingly here than it did for Charlton Heston in 1956.

The Bible

History, Sunday nights at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Produced for History by Lightworkers Media and Hearst Entertainment & Syndication. Created by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey; Mr. Burnett, Ms. Downey and Richard Bedser, executive producers; Dirk Hoogstra and Julian P. Hobbs, executive producers for History; Keith David, narrator; Hans Zimmer, composer.

WITH: Roma Downey (Mother Mary), Diogo Morgado (Jesus Christ), Darwin Shaw (Peter), Sebastian Knapp (John), Amber Rose Revah (Mary Magdalene), Greg Hicks (Pilate) and Simon Kunz (Nicodemus).

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Comings and goings at 'Downton Abbey' next season

NEW YORK (AP) — Shirley MacLaine will be returning to "Downton Abbey" next season, and opera star Kiri Te Kanawa is joining the cast.

MacLaine will reprise her role as Martha Levinson, Lord Robert Crawley's freewheeling American mother-in-law, Carnival Films and "Masterpiece" on PBS said Saturday. MacLaine appeared in episodes early last season.

New Zealand-born soprano Te Kanawa will play a house guest. She will sing during her visit.

Other new cast members and characters include:

— Tom Cullen as Lord Gillingham, described as an old family friend of the Crawleys who visits the family as a guest for a house party (and who might be the one to mend Lady Mary Crawley's broken heart).

— Nigel Harman will play a valet named Green.

— Harriet Walter plays Lady Shackleton, an old friend of the Dowager Countess.

— Joanna David will play a guest role as the Duchess of Yeovil.

— Julian Ovenden is cast as aristocrat Charles Blake.

"The addition of these characters can only mean more delicious drama, which is what 'Downton Abbey' is all about," said "Masterpiece" executive producer Rebecca Eaton.

Meanwhile, the producers have confirmed that villainous housemaid Sarah O'Brien won't be back. Siobhan Finneran, who played her, is leaving the show.

These announcements come shortly after the third season's airing in the United States. It concluded with the heartbreaking death of popular Matthew Crawley in a car crash, leaving behind his newborn child and loving wife, Lady Mary Crawley.

Matthew's untimely demise was the result of the departure from the series by actor Dan Stevens, who had starred in that role.

The third season also saw the shocking death of Lady Sybil Branson, who died during childbirth. She was played by the departing Jessica Brown Findlay.

Last season the wildly popular melodrama, set in early 20th century Britain, was the most-watched series on PBS since Ken Burns' epic "The Civil War," which first aired in 1990. The Nielsen Co. said 8.2 million viewers saw the "Downton" season conclusion.

"Downton Abbey," which airs on the "Masterpiece" anthology, won three Emmy awards last fall, including a best supporting actress trophy for Maggie Smith (the Dowager Countess), who also won a Golden Globe in January.

In all, the series has won nine Emmys, two Golden Globes and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the ensemble cast, which is the first time the cast of a British television show has won this award.

Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter and Brendan Coyle are among its other returning stars.

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Online:

http://www.pbs.org/downton

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U.S. Judges Offer Addicts a Way to Avoid Prison

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Emily Leitch of Brooklyn, with her son, Nazir, 4, was arrested for importing cocaine but went to “drug court” to avoid prison.

Federal judges around the country are teaming up with prosecutors to create special treatment programs for drug-addicted defendants who would otherwise face significant prison time, an effort intended to sidestep drug laws widely seen as inflexible and overly punitive.

The Justice Department has tentatively embraced the new approach, allowing United States attorneys to reduce or even dismiss charges in some drug cases.

The effort follows decades of success for “drug courts” at the state level, which legal experts have long cited as a less expensive and more effective alternative to prison for dealing with many low-level repeat offenders.

But it is striking that the model is spreading at the federal level, where judges have increasingly pushed back against rules that restrict their ability to make their own determination of appropriate sentences.

So far, federal judges have instituted programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. About 400 defendants have been involved nationwide.

In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday, Judge John Gleeson issued an opinion praising the new approach as a way to address swelling prison costs and disproportionate sentences for drug trafficking.

“Presentence programs like ours and those in other districts mean that a growing number of courts are no longer reflexively sentencing federal defendants who do not belong in prison to the costly prison terms recommended by the sentencing guidelines,” Judge Gleeson wrote.

The opinion came a year after Judge Gleeson, with the federal agency known as Pretrial Services, started a program that made achieving sobriety an incentive for drug-addicted defendants to avoid prison. The program had its first graduate this year: Emily Leitch, a Brooklyn woman with a long history of substance abuse who was arrested entering the country at Kennedy International Airport with over 13 kilograms of cocaine, about 30 pounds, in her luggage.

“I want to thank the federal government for giving me a chance,” Ms. Leitch said. “I always wanted to stand up as a sober person.”

The new approach is being prompted in part by the Obama administration, which previously supported legislation that scaled back sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. The Justice Department has supported additional changes to the federal sentencing guidelines to permit the use of drug or mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration for certain low-level offenders and changed its own policies to make those options more available.

“We recognize that imprisonment alone is not a complete strategy for reducing crime,” James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Drug courts, re-entry courts and other related programs along with enforcement are all part of the solution.”

For nearly 30 years, the United States Sentencing Commission has established guidelines for sentencing, a role it was given in 1984 after studies found that federal judges were giving defendants widely varying sentences for similar crimes. The commission’s recommendations are approved by Congress, causing judges to bristle at what they consider interference with their judicial independence.

“When you impose a sentence that you believe is unjust, it is a very difficult thing to do,” Stefan R. Underhill, a federal judge in Connecticut, said in an interview. “It feels wrong.”

The development of drug courts may meet resistance from some Republicans in Congress.

“It is important that courts give deference to Congressional authority over sentencing,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, a member and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. He said sentencing should not depend “on what judge happens to decide the case or what judicial circuit the defendant happens to be in.”

At the state level, pretrial drug courts have benefited from bipartisan support, with liberals supporting the programs as more focused on rehabilitation, and conservatives supporting them as a way to cut spending.

Under the model being used in state and federal courts, defendants must accept responsibility for their crimes and agree to receive drug treatment and other social services and attend regular meetings with judges who monitor their progress. In return for successful participation, they receive a reduced sentence or no jail time at all. If they fail, they are sent to prison.

The drug court option is not available to those facing more serious charges, like people accused of being high-level dealers or traffickers, or accused of a violent crime. (These programs differ from re-entry drug courts, which federal judges have long used to help offenders integrate into society after prison.)

In interviews, the federal judges who run the other programs pointed to a mix of reasons for their involvement.

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Economix Blog: Bernanke Defends Stimulus as Necessary and Effective

The Federal Reserve’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, picked an unusual time to offer his most recent defense of the Fed’s campaign to stimulate the economy: 7 p.m. on a Friday night in San Francisco, 10 p.m. back home on the East Coast.

The basic message was the same as Mr. Bernanke delivered to Congress earlier this week: The Fed regards its current efforts as necessary and effective, and the risks, while real, are under control.

“Commentators have raised two broad concerns surrounding the outlook for long-term rates,” Mr. Bernanke told a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “To oversimplify, the first risk is that rates will remain low, and the second is that they will not.”

If rates remain low, it may drive investors to take excessive risks. If rates jump, investors could lose money – not least the Fed.

Regarding the first possibility, Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed was keeping a careful eye on financial markets. But he noted that rates were low in large part because the economy was weak, and that keeping rates low was the best way to encourage stronger growth. “Premature rate increases would carry a high risk of short-circuiting the recovery, possibly leading — ironically enough — to an even longer period of low long- term rates,” he said.

At the other extreme, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed could “mitigate” any jump in rates by prolonging its efforts to hold rates down, for example by keeping some of its investments in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities.

Three more highlights from the question-and-answer session after the speech.

1. Mr. Bernanke, asked about the outlook for the Washington Nationals, responded by accurately quoting the “Las Vegas odds” of a World Series appearance: 8/1.

2. Although the decision may be made under a future chairman, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed should continue to offer “forward guidance” — predicting its policies — even after it concludes its long effort to revive the economy.

“Providing information about the future path of policy could be useful, probably would be useful, under even normal circumstances,” he said in response to a question. “I think we need to keep providing information.”

3. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bernanke often is asked to reflect on the financial crisis. He offered something a little different than his normal response on Friday night.

“In many ways, in retrospect, the crisis was a normal crisis,” he said. “It’s just that the intuitional framework in which it occurred was much more complex.”

In other words, there was a panic, and a run, and a collapse – but rather than a run on bank deposits, the run was in the money markets. Improving the stability of those markets is something regulators have yet to accomplish.

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Chinese TV Special on Executions Stirs Debate

In a live television broadcast that was part morality play, part propaganda tour de force, the Chinese government on Friday displayed four foreign drug traffickers, convicted of murdering 13 Chinese sailors two years ago, being led to their executions.

Although the two-hour TV special came to an end shortly before the men were put to death by lethal injection, the program became an instantly polarizing sensation, with viewers divided on whether the program was a crass exercise in blood lust or a long-awaited catharsis for a nation outraged by the killings. Some critics said the program recalled the days when condemned prisoners were paraded through the streets before being shot.

“Rather than showcasing rule of law, the program displayed state control over human life in a manner designed to attract gawkers,” Han Youyi, a professor of criminal law, wrote on his microblog account. “State-administered violence is no loftier than criminal violence.”

One prominent rights lawyer insisted that the show, on the national broadcaster CCTV, violated the Chinese criminal code by making a spectacle of the condemned.

The program largely focused on Naw Kham, the Burmese ringleader of a drug gang, who was accused of orchestrating the brutal execution of the sailors in October 2011 as they sailed down the Mekong in Myanmar and then making the crime appear to be drug-related. In China, a nation where millions work overseas, often in dangerous corners of the world, the killings were especially unsettling.

Last April, six men accused in the killings, including Naw Kham, were apprehended in Laos by a team of investigators that included officers from China, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar. Naw Kham and his accomplices were convicted last November during a two-day trial in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. The men, including a Laotian, a Thai and a third of “unknown nationality,” reportedly confessed to the crime. The two men who escaped execution received long prison terms.

Last month, a Chinese public security official told a newspaper that Beijing had considered using a drone strike to kill Naw Kham but later decided to capture him alive.

Given the considerable viewership on Friday, that decision proved to be a good one.

The program included interviews with triumphant police officers, images of the condemned men in shackles and the sort of blustery talking heads that would be familiar to American cable television audiences. The graphic elements that flashed behind the CCTV news anchor included the tagline “Kill the Kingpin.”

In one segment, Liu Yuejin, director general of the central government’s Narcotics Control Bureau, cast the executions as not only an important victory for a newly confident China but also for ethnic Chinese across the globe. “In the past, overseas Chinese dared not say they were of Chinese origin,” he said. “Now they can hold their heads high and be themselves.” 

Supporters of the program were many, and enthusiastic. One blogger suggested that death by lethal injection was too lenient, adding “These beasts should be pulled apart by vehicles.” 

Shortly before the men were led from their cells to the van that would take them to the death chamber, a reporter asked Naw Kham to talk about his family and then taunted him by showing photos of the victims’ grieving relatives. “I want to raise my children and have them educated,” Naw Kham said with a faint smile on his face. “I don’t want to die.”

Shi Da and Patrick Zuo contributed research.  

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Lindsay Lohan driving case returns to LA court

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lindsay Lohan's attorney returns to court Friday for a hearing in the actress's latest criminal case, as discussions continue about a possible plea deal before trial.

The 26-year-old isn't required to attend the hearing.

The hearing is intended to take care of any issues before a March 18 trial on misdemeanor charges that Lohan lied to police about a June car crash and was driving recklessly.

Attorney Mark Heller also plans to meet with prosecutors Friday to try to negotiate a plea deal. He wants to delay the case so Lohan can pursue psychotherapy and perform community service.

Lohan was on probation at the time of the accident and she faces jail time if a judge determines she violated her sentence in a 2011 theft case.

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The New Old Age Blog: Why Can’t I Live With People Like Me?

“Aging in place” is the mantra of long-term care. Whether looking at reams of survey data, talking to friends or wishing on a star, who among us wouldn’t rather spend the final years — golden or less so — at home, surrounded by our cherished possessions, in our own bed, no cranky old coot as a roommate, no institutional smells or sounds, no lukewarm meals on a schedule of someone else’s making?

That works best, experts tell us, in dense cities, where we can hail a cab at curbside, call the superintendent when something breaks and have our food delivered from Fresh Direct or countless takeout restaurants. We’d have neighbors in the apartment above us, below us, just on the other side of the wall. Hearing their toilets flush and their children ride tricycles on uncarpeted floors is a small inconvenience compared to the security of knowing they are so close by in an emergency.

Urban planners, mindful that most Americans live in sprawling, car-reliant suburbs, are designing more elder-friendly, walkable communities, far from “real” cities. Houses and apartments are built around village greens, with pockets of commerce instead of distant strip malls. Some have community centers for congregate meals and activities; others share gardens, where people can get their hands in the warm spring dirt long after they can push a lawn mower.

All of this is a step in the right direction, despite the Potemkin-village look of so many of them. But it doesn’t take into account those who are too infirm to stay at home, even in cities or more manageable suburban environments. Some are alone, others with a loving spouse who by comparison is “well” but may not be for long, given the rigors of care-taking. It doesn’t take into account people who can’t afford a home health aide, who don’t qualify for a visiting nurse, who have no adult children to help them or whose children live far away.

But by now, aging in place, unrealistic for some, scary or unsafe for others and potentially very isolating, has become so entrenched as the right way to live out one’s life that not being able to pull it off seems a failure, yet another defeat at a time when defeats are all too plentiful. Are we making people feel guilty if they can’t stay at home, or don’t want to? Are we discouraging an array of other solutions by investing so much, program-wise and emotionally, in this sine qua non?

Regular readers of The New Old Age know that I am single, childless and terrified of falling off a ladder while replacing a light bulb, breaking a hip and lying on the floor, unattended, until my dog wails so loudly a neighbor comes by to complain. A MedicAlert pendant is not something that appeals to me at 65, but even if I give in to that, say at 75, I’m not sure my life will be richer for digging my heels in and insisting home is where I should be.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about the alternatives. I know enough to distinguish between naturally-occurring-retirement communities, or NORCs (some of which work better than others); age-restricted housing complexes (with no services); assisted living (which works fine when you don’t really need it and not so fine when you do); and continuing care retirement communities (which require big upfront payments and extensive due diligence to be sure the place doesn’t go belly up after you get there).

What I find so unappealing about all these choices is that each means growing old among people with whom I share no history. In these congregate settings, for the most part, people are guaranteed only two things in common: age and infirmity. Which brings us to what is known in the trade as “affinity” or “niche” communities,” long studied by Andrew J. Carle at the College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Mr. Carle, who trains future administrators of senior housing complexes, was a media darling a few years back, before the recession, with the first baby boomers approaching 65 and niche communities that included services for the elderly — not merely warm-weather developments adjacent to golf courses — expected to explode. In newspaper interviews as recently as 2011, Mr. Carle said there were “about 100 of them in existence or on the drawing board,” not counting the large number of military old-age communities.

Mr. Carle still believes that better economic times, when they come, will reinvigorate this sector of senior housing, after the failure of some in the planning stages and others in operation. In an e-mail exchange, Mr. Carle said there were now about 70 in operation, with perhaps 50 of those that he has defined as University Based Retirement Communities, adjacent to campuses and popular with alumni, as well as non-alumni, who enjoy proximity to the intellectual and athletic activities. Among the most popular are those near Dartmouth, Oberlin, the University of Alabama, Penn State, Notre Dame, Stanford and Cornell.

At the height of the “affinity” boom, L.G.B.T.-assisted living communities and nursing homes were all the rage, seen as a solution to the shoddy treatment that those of different sexual orientations in the pre-Stonewall generation experienced in generic facilities. A few failed, most never got built and, by all accounts, the only one to survive is the pricy Rainbow Vision community in Sante Fe, N.M.

A handful of nudist elder communities, and ones for old hippies, also fell by the wayside, perhaps too free-spirited for the task. According to Mr. Carle, despite the odds, at least one group of RV enthusiasts has added an assisted-living component to what began as collections of transient elderly, looking only for a parking spot and necessary water and power hook-ups for their trailers. Native Americans have made a go of an assisted-living community in Montana, and Asians have done the same in Northern California.

But professional affinity communities, which I find most appealing, are few and far between.

The storied Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, a sliding-scale institution in the San Fernando Valley since 1940, survived near-closure in 2009 as a result of litigation, activism by the Screen Actors Guild and the local chapter of the Teamsters, and news media pressure. Among film legends who died there — along with cameramen, back-lot security guards and extras — were Mary Astor, Joel McCrea, Yvonne De Carlo and Stepin Fetchit.

New York State’s volunteer firefighters are all welcome to a refurbished facility in the Catskill region that offers far more in the way of care and activities, including a state-of-the-art gym, than when I visited there five years ago. At that time, the residents amused themselves by activating the fire alarm to summon the local hook and ladder company, which didn’t mind a bit.

Then there is Nalcrest, the retirement home for unionized letter carriers. Even as post offices nationwide are preparing to eliminate Saturday service, and snail mail becomes an artifact, the National Association of Letter Carriers holds monthly fees around the $500 mark, is located in central Florida so its members no longer have to brave rain and sleet to complete their appointed rounds, and bans dogs, the bane of their existence.

So why not aged journalists? We surely have war stories to embroider as we rock on the porch. Perhaps a mimeograph machine to produce an old-fashioned, dead-tree newspaper, which some of us will miss once it has given way to Web sites like this one. Pneumatic tubes, one colleague suggested, to whisk our belongings upstairs when we can no longer carry them. Other colleagues wondered about welcoming both editors and reporters. How can these two groups, which some consider natural adversaries, complain about each others’ tin ears or missed deadlines if we’re not segregated?

I disagree. The joy of this profession is its collaboration. We did the impossible day after day when young. We belong together when old.

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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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South African Police Drag Man, Who Later Dies

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — His hands are tied to the rear of a police van while his body lay behind it, on the ground. The van speeds off, dragging the slender man along the pavement as a crowd of onlookers shouts in dismay and at least one videotapes the scene. He is later found dead in a police cell.

It's a gut-wrenching video, made all the more disturbing by the fact that the men who carried out the abuse were uniformed South African police officers and the van was a marked police vehicle. The Daily Sun, a South African newspaper, posted video the footage Thursday and it was quickly picked up by other South African news outlets and carried on the Internet. It sparked immediate outrage.

Some of those in the crowd who watched the scene unfold in a township east of Johannesburg shouted at the police and warned that it was being videotaped. The police did not seem at all concerned as they tied Mido Macia, a 27-year-old taxi driver from neighboring Mozambique, to the back of a police vehicle, his hands behind his head, his buttocks on the ground. At least three policemen participated in the incident. Macia was found dead in a police cell late Tuesday in the Daveyton township east of Johannesburg.

The Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the police watchdog agency, said Thursday that a murder probe is underway and that Macia suffered head and other injuries, including internal bleeding.

The graphic footage renewed concerns about brutality, corruption and other misconduct by a national police force whose reputation has suffered in recent years amid reports that many officers lack training. Some have been charged with committing the crimes they are supposed to prevent, including rape and murder.

"We are going to film this," several onlookers shouted in Zulu as the police tormented Macia. One bystander can be heard on the videotape shouting in Zulu: "What has this guy done?"

At first, Macia, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, is dragged along the road by the vehicle at slow speed, the footage shows. He awkwardly tries to keep step even though he is almost horizontal above the ground. Then the van stops, two policemen pick up the legs of the taxi driver and drop them to the ground as the van picks up speed and drives off, beyond the view of the camera.

The police watchdog agency said the incident started just before 7 p.m. on Tuesday when the cab driver was allegedly obstructing traffic with his vehicle. Then, Macia allegedly assaulted a constable and took his weapon before he was overpowered, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate said in a statement.

Macia was found dead over two hours later by another policeman, according to the watchdog agency.

In a statement, the police force said National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega "strongly condemned" what happened. The statement said people are "urged to remain vigilant and continue to report all acts of crime irrespective of who is involved."

Phiyega has sought to upgrade the reputation of the South African police. Last month, Phiyega told a group of police officials the standing of the force "has been severely but not irreparably tarnished over the past several years."

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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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Several Dead in Switzerland Shooting, Police Say

BERLIN (AP) — A shooting at a wood-processing company in central Switzerland on Wednesday left three people dead and seven wounded, some of them seriously, prosecutors said.

The shooting occurred shortly after 9 a.m. at the premises of Kronospan, a company in the small town of Menznau, west of Lucerne.

Three people were killed, among them the suspected assailant, police in Lucerne said in a statement. A further seven were wounded, several of them seriously. Officials gave no further details.

The local Neue Luzerner Zeitung newspaper cited a witness as saying that the shooter opened fire in the company canteen. It was not immediately clear who the shooter was, what the motive might have been or whether the assailant worked for the company.

According to the local town council, Kronospan has some 450 employees.

"At the moment we're all in a state of shock," Urs Fluder, a manager at Kronospan, told Radio Pilatus, a local station. "We will see that the families are properly informed," he added.

Gun ownership is widespread in Switzerland, thanks to liberal regulation — a 2012 referendum to tighten controls failed — and a long-standing tradition for men to keep their military rifles after completing compulsory military service.

An estimated 2.3 million firearms are owned by the country's 8 million people.

But gun crime is relatively rare, with just 24 gun killings in 2009, which works out to a rate of about 0.3 per 100,000 inhabitants. The U.S. rate that year was about 11 times higher.

Still, there have been several high-profile incidents over the years, including the killing of 14 people at a city council meeting in Zug, not far from Lucerne, in 2001.

Last month a 33-year-old man killed three women and wounded two men in a southern Swiss village.

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Greek man charged in NY Dali theft pleads guilty

NEW YORK (AP) — A Greek man has admitted to stealing a Salvador Dali painting from a New York City gallery, only to return it in the mail.

Phivos Istavrioglou pleaded guilty on Tuesday following his arrest in the theft of a work titled "Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio."

Prosecutors say the fashion industry publicist walked into the Manhattan gallery in June, put the painting valued at about $150,000 in a shopping bag and walked out. He anonymously mailed the piece back to the United States from Greece after seeing news coverage of the theft.

Under the plea deal, Istavrioglou avoids additional jail time if he remains incarcerated until his formal sentencing on March 12. He also must pay more than $9,000 in restitution.

His lawyer said it was a stupid thing to do.

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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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DealBook: Banks Fear Court Ruling in Argentina Bond Debt

A fierce battle between the government of Argentina and hedge funds and other investors led by a group of hedge funds has already led to the seizure of a naval ship and dragged in the United States Treasury. Now a federal appeals court is hearing the dispute, and how it rules could have a major impact on world debt markets.

The investors — including the hedge fund tycoon Paul E. Singer — sued Argentina seeking payment for $1.3 billion relating to bonds that the country defaulted on in 2001. On Wednesday, the case comes before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has already sided with the hedge funds on their main arguments.

But the issue that the appeals court is still undecided about is perhaps the most important. It involves devising a method to pressure Argentina to pay up on the disputed bonds. And that has left the investors who hold a majority of Argentina’s foreign debt vulnerable, as well as the banks that process the payments to those investors.

While the hedge funds have grabbed the headlines — winning a temporary court order to seize an Argentine naval ship docked in Ghana, for example — most of the other holders of Argentina’s nearly $100 billion in defaulted debt agreed over the last decade to accept new bonds, taking big losses in the process. The country has since faithfully paid on the exchange bonds.

At the same time, Argentina has vehemently repeated that it will not pay the hedge funds and other holders of its old debt and has passed laws forbidding the government from paying anything to the bondholders who didn’t participate in the exchanges.

But last year, Judge Thomas P. Griesa of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled that if Argentina wanted to pay the holders of the restructured debt, it would have to pay the hedge funds and other holders of the defaulted debt, too. The judge included third-party banks in his injunction, and prohibited them from processing payments to holders of the exchange bonds unless all debt holders were paid.

Large banks, investors and the United States Treasury Department have objected to the judge’s order. In short, they say, using the sanction could cause financial losses for innocent bystanders and lead to unnecessary disruption in the bond markets.

“They are trying to block the payments system,” said Vladimir Werning, executive director for Latin American research at JPMorgan Chase. “This is unprecedented in the New York jurisdiction.”

In an e-mail, Kevin Heine, a spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which handles bond payments, said the ruling, “will create unrest in the credit markets and result in cascades of litigation, which is precisely the opposite effect that an injunction should have.”

A ruling in favor of the hedge funds would also have ripple effects throughout the debt markets.

“Any time you have something that can change of balance of power, it can matter beyond Argentina,” said Robert Kahn, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite the legal worries, investors have so far been keen to hold higher-yielding emerging markets debt, given that interest rates are so low. Apart from Argentine bonds, debt issued by developing countries has performed strongly.

Unlike Argentina, some countries have held their noses and cut deals with holdouts in the past to get on with important economic overhauls, most recently Greece on certain smaller foreign-law bonds.

And in the years since Argentina’s default, most sovereign bonds have special clauses in them that make it much harder for holdouts to succeed. These are called collective action clauses, which state that if a certain majority of bondholders agree to take losses in a bond restructuring, those losses would be forced on all bondholders, even would-be holdouts who don’t agree.

But large amounts of bonds, those issued more than 10 years ago, do not have collective action clauses. And those that do have the clauses may not act as intended if the holdouts win their Argentina case, said Mr. Werning of JPMorgan.

Right now, a bond with a collective action clause might get restructured if 75 percent of the holders agree to it. If Judge Griesa’s ruling is upheld, more bondholders might be reluctant to enter a restructuring and the required majority might not be achieved. Bondholders might not enter the restructuring because they fear holdout litigation depriving them of payments later on.

“This could adversely affect the level of participation in a swap,” Mr. Werning said.

Still, others contend that the market for sovereign debt may be improved if the judge’s ruling is upheld, with the sanction on payments banks mostly intact. Countries like Argentina, they say, have taken advantage of the fact that there is no bankruptcy regime in the sovereign debt market to allow creditors to recoup money in a default. Indeed, Judge Griesa has said the Argentina case is partly about creating safeguards for creditors in the absence of bankruptcy regime.

But Anna Gelpern, a professor at the Washington College of Law at the American University, said that if the federal court’s rulings are upheld, it might just end up underscoring the limitations of the American courts’ power.

“What if Argentina still doesn’t settle? How does the court look then?” she said. “It can only isolate Argentina and Argentina seems content to be isolated.”

While there is a chance that the appellate court’s decision could be appealed to the United States Supreme Court, it is more likely that its ruling will be the final word on the lower court order.

According to that order, if a bank chose to channel payments from Argentina to the owners of the restructured debt, the bank would not be in compliance with his order. A payments bank, Bank of New York Mellon in the case of Argentine exchange bonds, would then decline to process the exchange bond payments, and the bonds could fall into default, inflicting big losses on their holders.

Some market specialists have raised the prospect that Argentina could keep paying the exchange bondholders by avoiding payments banks that operate in the United States. It could, for instance, swap the exchange bonds for new instruments registered under Argentine law that make payments through an Argentine entity.

But the court may decide that, in such a situation, the exchange bondholders themselves would be breaking its injunction. One of the things the appeals court is looking into is how to determine which third parties should sit outside the reach of the district court’s ruling.

It is not just hedge funds who are hoping to gain from an affirmation of the lower court ruling. This group also includes many individual investors, who are now feeling more optimistic about getting their money back as the case comes before the appeals court.

“We are hopeful the ruling will stay as issued,” said Horacio Vázquez, who helps lead a group in Buenos Aires that represents bondholders.

A version of this article appeared in print on 02/26/2013, on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Banks Fear Court Ruling In Argentina Bond Debt.

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Horse Meat in European Beef Raises Questions on U.S. Exposure

The alarm in Europe over the discovery of horse meat in beef products escalated again Monday, when the Swedish furniture giant Ikea withdrew an estimated 1,670 pounds of meatballs from sale in 14 European countries.

Ikea acted after authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in its meatballs. The company said it had made the decision even though its tests two weeks ago did not detect horse DNA.

Horse meat mixed with beef was first found last month in Ireland, then Britain, and has now expanded steadily across the Continent. The situation in Europe has created unease among American consumers over whether horse meat might also find its way into the food supply in the United States. Here are answers to commonly asked questions on the subject.

Has horse meat been found in any meatballs sold in Ikea stores in the United States?

Ikea says there is no horse meat in the meatballs it sells in the United States. The company issued a statement on Monday saying meatballs sold in its 38 stores in the United States were bought from an American supplier and contained beef and pork from animals raised in the United States and Canada.

“We do not tolerate any other ingredients than the ones stipulated in our recipes or specifications, secured through set standards, certifications and product analysis by accredited laboratories,” Ikea said in its statement.

Mona Liss, a spokeswoman for Ikea, said by e-mail that all of the businesses that supply meat to its meatball maker  issue letters guaranteeing that they will not misbrand or adulterate their products. “Additionally, as an abundance of caution, we are in the process of DNA-testing our meatballs,” Ms. Liss wrote. “Results should be concluded in 30 days.”

Does the United States import any beef from countries where horse meat has been found?

No. According to the Department of Agriculture, the United States imports no beef from any of the European countries involved in the scandal. Brian K. Mabry, a spokesman for the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said: “Following a decision by Congress in November 2011 to lift the ban on horse slaughter, two establishments, one located in New Mexico and one in Missouri, have applied for a grant of inspection exclusively for equine slaughter. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (F.S.I.S.) is currently reviewing those applications.”

Has horse meat been found in ground meat products sold in the United States?

No. Meat products sold in the United States must pass Department of Agriculture inspections, whether produced domestically or imported. No government financing has been available for inspection of horse meat for human consumption in the United States since 2005, when the Humane Society of the United States got a rider forbidding financing for inspection of horse meat inserted in the annual appropriations bill for the Agriculture Department. Without inspection, such plants may not operate legally.

The rider was attached to every subsequent agriculture appropriations bill until 2011, when it was left out of an omnibus spending bill signed by President Obama on Nov. 18. The U.S.D.A.  has not committed any money for the inspection of horse meat.

“We’re real close to getting some processing plants up and running, but there are no inspectors because the U.S.D.A. is working on protocols,” said Dave Duquette, a horse trader in Oregon and president of United Horsemen, a small group that works to retrain and rehabilitate unwanted horses and advocates the slaughter of horses for meat. “We believe very strongly that the U.S.D.A. is going to bring inspectors online directly.”

Are horses slaughtered for meat for human consumption in the United States?

Not currently, although live horses from the United States are exported to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico. The lack of inspection effectively ended the slaughter of horse meat for human consumption in the United States; 2007 was the last year horses were slaughtered in the United States. At the time financing of inspections was banned, a Belgian company operated three horse meat processing plants — in Fort Worth and Kaufman, Tex., and DeKalb, Ill. — but exported the meat it produced in them.

Since 2011, efforts have been made to re-establish the processing of horse meat for human consumption in the United States. A small plant in Roswell, N.M., which used to process beef cattle into meat has been retooled to slaughter 20 to 25 horses a day. But legal challenges have prevented it from opening, Mr. Duquette said. Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico opposes opening the plant and has asked the U.S.D.A. to block it.

Last month, the two houses of the Oklahoma Legislature passed separate bills to override a law against the slaughter of horses for meat but kept the law’s ban on consumption of such meat by state residents. California, Illinois, New Jersey, Tennessee and Texas prohibit horse slaughter for human consumption.

Is there a market for horse meat in the United States?

Mr. Duquette said horse meat was popular among several growing demographic groups in the United States, including Tongans, Mongolians and various Hispanic populations. He said he knew of at least 10 restaurants that wanted to buy horse meat. “People are very polarized on this issue,” he said. Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, disagreed, saying demand in the United States was limited. Italy is the largest consumer of horse meat, he said, followed by France and Belgium.

Is horse meat safe to eat?

That is a matter of much debate between proponents and opponents of horse meat consumption. Mr. Duquette said that horse meat, some derived from American animals processed abroad, was eaten widely around the world without health problems. “It’s high in protein, low in fat and has a whole lot of omega 3s,” he said.

The Humane Society says that because horse meat is not consumed in the United States, the animals’ flesh is likely to contain residues of many drugs that are unsafe for humans to eat. The organization’s list of drugs given to horses runs to 29 pages.

“We’ve been warning the Europeans about this for years,” Mr. Pacelle said. “You have all these food safety standards in Europe — they do not import chicken carcasses from the U.S. because they are bathed in chlorine, and won’t take pork because of the use of ractopamine in our industry — but you’ve thrown out the book when it comes to importing horse meat from North America.”

The society has filed petitions with the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration, arguing that they should test horse meat before allowing it to be marketed in the United States for humans to eat.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated how many pounds of meatballs Ikea was withdrawing from sale in 14 European countries. It is 1,670 pounds, not 1.67 billion pounds.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the last year that horses were slaughtered in the United States. It is 2007, not 2006.

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DealBook: Banks Fear Court Ruling in Argentina Bond Debt

A fierce battle between the government of Argentina and hedge funds and other investors led by a group of hedge funds has already led to the seizure of a naval ship and dragged in the United States Treasury. Now a federal appeals court is hearing the dispute, and how it rules could have a major impact on world debt markets.

The investors — including the hedge fund tycoon Paul E. Singer — sued Argentina seeking payment for $1.3 billion relating to bonds that the country defaulted on in 2001. On Wednesday, the case comes before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has already sided with the hedge funds on their main arguments.

But the issue that the appeals court is still undecided about is perhaps the most important. It involves devising a method to pressure Argentina to pay up on the disputed bonds. And that has left the investors who hold a majority of Argentina’s foreign debt vulnerable, as well as the banks that process the payments to those investors.

While the hedge funds have grabbed the headlines — winning a temporary court order to seize an Argentine naval ship docked in Ghana, for example — most of the other holders of Argentina’s nearly $100 billion in defaulted debt agreed over the last decade to accept new bonds, taking big losses in the process. The country has since faithfully paid on the exchange bonds.

At the same time, Argentina has vehemently repeated that it will not pay the hedge funds and other holders of its old debt and has passed laws forbidding the government from paying anything to the bondholders who didn’t participate in the exchanges.

But last year, Judge Thomas P. Griesa of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled that if Argentina wanted to pay the holders of the restructured debt, it would have to pay the hedge funds and other holders of the defaulted debt, too. The judge included third-party banks in his injunction, and prohibited them from processing payments to holders of the exchange bonds unless all debt holders were paid.

Large banks, investors and the United States Treasury Department have objected to the judge’s order. In short, they say, using the sanction could cause financial losses for innocent bystanders and lead to unnecessary disruption in the bond markets.

“They are trying to block the payments system,” said Vladimir Werning, executive director for Latin American research at JPMorgan Chase. “This is unprecedented in the New York jurisdiction.”

In an e-mail, Kevin Heine, a spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which handles bond payments, said the ruling, “will create unrest in the credit markets and result in cascades of litigation, which is precisely the opposite effect that an injunction should have.”

A ruling in favor of the hedge funds would also have ripple effects throughout the debt markets.

“Any time you have something that can change of balance of power, it can matter beyond Argentina,” said Robert Kahn, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite the legal worries, investors have so far been keen to hold higher-yielding emerging markets debt, given that interest rates are so low. Apart from Argentine bonds, debt issued by developing countries has performed strongly.

Unlike Argentina, some countries have held their noses and cut deals with holdouts in the past to get on with important economic overhauls, most recently Greece on certain smaller foreign-law bonds.

And in the years since Argentina’s default, most sovereign bonds have special clauses in them that make it much harder for holdouts to succeed. These are called collective action clauses, which state that if a certain majority of bondholders agree to take losses in a bond restructuring, those losses would be forced on all bondholders, even would-be holdouts who don’t agree.

But large amounts of bonds, those issued more than 10 years ago, do not have collective action clauses. And those that do have the clauses may not act as intended if the holdouts win their Argentina case, said Mr. Werning of JPMorgan.

Right now, a bond with a collective action clause might get restructured if 75 percent of the holders agree to it. If Judge Griesa’s ruling is upheld, more bondholders might be reluctant to enter a restructuring and the required majority might not be achieved. Bondholders might not enter the restructuring because they fear holdout litigation depriving them of payments later on.

“This could adversely affect the level of participation in a swap,” Mr. Werning said.

Still, others contend that the market for sovereign debt may be improved if the judge’s ruling is upheld, with the sanction on payments banks mostly intact. Countries like Argentina, they say, have taken advantage of the fact that there is no bankruptcy regime in the sovereign debt market to allow creditors to recoup money in a default. Indeed, Judge Griesa has said the Argentina case is partly about creating safeguards for creditors in the absence of bankruptcy regime.

But Anna Gelpern, a professor at the Washington College of Law at the American University, said that if the federal court’s rulings are upheld, it might just end up underscoring the limitations of the American courts’ power.

“What if Argentina still doesn’t settle? How does the court look then?” she said. “It can only isolate Argentina and Argentina seems content to be isolated.”

While there is a chance that the appellate court’s decision could be appealed to the United States Supreme Court, it is more likely that its ruling will be the final word on the lower court order.

According to that order, if a bank chose to channel payments from Argentina to the owners of the restructured debt, the bank would not be in compliance with his order. A payments bank, Bank of New York Mellon in the case of Argentine exchange bonds, would then decline to process the exchange bond payments, and the bonds could fall into default, inflicting big losses on their holders.

Some market specialists have raised the prospect that Argentina could keep paying the exchange bondholders by avoiding payments banks that operate in the United States. It could, for instance, swap the exchange bonds for new instruments registered under Argentine law that make payments through an Argentine entity.

But the court may decide that, in such a situation, the exchange bondholders themselves would be breaking its injunction. One of the things the appeals court is looking into is how to determine which third parties should sit outside the reach of the district court’s ruling.

It is not just hedge funds who are hoping to gain from an affirmation of the lower court ruling. This group also includes many individual investors, who are now feeling more optimistic about getting their money back as the case comes before the appeals court.

“We are hopeful the ruling will stay as issued,” said Horacio Vázquez, who helps lead a group in Buenos Aires that represents bondholders.

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DealBook: Barnes & Noble Founder Leonard Riggio to Bid for Bookstore's Retail Business

The founder of Barnes & Noble plans to bid for the retail business of the bookstore chain he started 40 years ago, as the company struggles to deal with the changing competitive landscape.

On Monday, Leonard Riggio told the company’s board that he will make an offer for Barnes & Noble Booksellers, barnesandnoble.com and other retail assets. The proposal would not include the e-book division, Nook Media.

Like many retailers, Barnes & Nobles is dealing with waning profit in its core business, as online players and other competitors gain marketshare. The company recently warned that earnings in the latest quarter would be weak, with losses rising in its Nook Media division.

Conceived as a serious competitor to Amazon.com’s Kindle, the Nook has instead become an also-ran in the race for digital book supremacy. The Kindle remains the top-selling dedicated e-reader, while the iPad consistently leads the competition among tablets.

Amazon’s Kindle app has also maintained a huge lead in popularity, limiting Barnes & Noble’s reach across the broader digital book-selling landscape.

Mr. Riggio, who owns nearly 30 percent of Barnes & Noble, plans to negotiate the price with the board, according to a regulatory filing. The proposal is expected to be mainly in cash.

It is the boldest move yet by Mr. Riggio to try and save the company he built into the nation’s biggest brick-and-mortar bookseller. He has fended off challenges from the likes of the billionaire Ronald Burkle, arguing in large part that the company was well-positioned in the future by betting on the Nook and digital books.

Others believed in the promise of the e-reader as well. Last April, Microsoft paid $300 million for a 17.6 percent stake in the Nook business, valuing it then at $1.7 billion. The technology titan also secured Barnes & Noble’s commitment to produce an e-reader app for its Windows 8 operating system.

And in December, the British publisher Pearson agreed to buy a 5 percent stake for $89.5 million.

Barnes & Noble said in a statement that it has formed a special board committee comprised of three directors — David G. Golden, David A. Wilson and Patricia L. Higgins — to consider Mr. Riggio’s proposal. The trio will be advised by Evercore Partners and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

The retailer’s board had already been weighing whether to spin off its Nook unit.

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'Argo' wins best picture on scattered Oscar night

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Just as Oscar host Seth MacFarlane set his sights on a variety of targets with a mixture of hits and misses, the motion picture academy spread the gold around to a varied slate of films. "Argo" won best picture as expected, along with two other prizes. But "Life of Pi" won the most awards with four, including a surprise win for director Ang Lee.

"Les Miserables" also won three Academy Awards, while "Django Unchained" and "Skyfall" each took two.

Among the winners were the front-runners throughout this lengthy awards season: best actor Daniel Day-Lewis for his deeply immersed portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's epic "Lincoln," best actress Jennifer Lawrence as a troubled young widow in "Silver Linings Playbook" and supporting actress Anne Hathaway as the doomed prostitute Fantine in the musical "Les Miserables." Christoph Waltz was a bit of a surprise for supporting actor as a charismatic bounty hunter in Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained," an award he'd won just three years ago for Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds."

The 22-year-old Lawrence, who got to show her lighter side in the oddball romance "Silver Linings Playbook" following serious roles in "Winter's Bone" and "The Hunger Games," gamely laughed at herself as she tripped on the stairs en route to the stage in her poufy, pale pink Dior Haute Couture gown. Backstage in the press room, when a reporter asked what she was thinking, she responded: "A bad word that I can't say that starts with 'F.'" Keeping journalists in hysterics, she explained, "I'm sorry. I did a shot before I ... sorry."

That's the kind of raunchiness MacFarlane himself seemed to be aiming for as host while also balancing the more traditional demands of the job. There was a ton of singing and dancing during the three-and-half-hour broadcast — no surprise from the musically minded creator of the animated series "Family Guy" — including a poignant performance from Barbra Streisand of "The Way We Were," written by the late Marvin Hamlisch, during the memorial montage. But MacFarlane also tried to keep the humor edgy with shots at Mel Gibson, George Clooney, Chris Brown and Rihanna.

An extended bit in which William Shatner came back from the future as his "Star Trek" character, Capt. James T. Kirk, had its moments while a joke about the drama "Flight" being restaged entirely with sock puppets was a scream. A John Wilkes Booth gag in reference to "Lincoln" was a bit of a groaner, perhaps intentionally, while MacFarlane relied on his alter ego, the cuddly teddy bear from his directorial debut "Ted," to make a crack about a post-Oscar orgy at Jack Nicholson's house. (MacFarlane already has indicated he's one-and-done with Academy Awards hosting.)

But it was Day-Lewis who came up with the kind of pop-culture riffing that's MacFarlane's specialty. In accepting his record third best-actor award from presenter Meryl Streep, he deadpanned that before they'd swapped roles, he originally was set to play Margaret Thatcher "and Meryl was Steven's first choice for 'Lincoln,' and I'd like to see that version."

Besides best picture, "Argo" won for Chris Terrio's adapted screenplay and for William Goldenberg's film editing. Affleck famously (and strangely) wasn't included in the best-director category for his thrilling and surprisingly funny depiction of a daring rescue during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. But as a producer on the film alongside George Clooney and Grant Heslov, he got to take home the top prize of the night.

"I never thought I'd be back here, and I am because of so many of you in this academy," said Affleck, who shared a screenplay Oscar with pal Matt Damon 15 years earlier for their breakout film "Good Will Hunting."

Among the wisdom he's acquired since then: "You can't hold grudges — it's hard but you can't hold grudges."

Lee, who previously won best director in 2006 for "Brokeback Mountain" (which also didn't win best picture), was typically low-key and self-deprecating in victory. His "Life of Pi" is a fable set in glorious 3-D, but Spielberg looked like the favorite for "Lincoln." The film also won for its cinematography, original score and visual effects.

"Thank you, movie god," the Taiwanese director said on stage. Later, he thanked his agents and said: "I have to do that," with a little shrug and a smile.

"Les Miserables" also won for sound mixing and makeup and hairstyling. The other Oscar for "Django Unchained" came for Tarantino's original screenplay. Asked about his international appeal backstage, Tarantino was enthusiastic as usual in saying: "I'm an American, and a filmmaker, but I make movies for the planet Earth."

Speaking of global hits, the James Bond action thriller "Skyfall" won for its original song by the unstoppable Adele (with Paul Epworth). It also tied for sound editing with "Zero Dark Thirty," the only win of the night for Kathryn Bigelow's detailed saga about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Among the other winners, "Searching for Sugar Man," about a forgotten musician's rediscovery, took the prize for best documentary feature. Pixar's fairy tale "Brave" won best animated feature.

One of the biggest moments of the night came at the end, as First Lady Michelle Obama announced the winner of the best picture prize. Backstage, Affleck described how surreal it was when he heard her say the word: "Argo."

"I was sort of hallucinating when that was happening," he explained. "In the course of a hallucination it doesn't seem that odd: 'Oh look, a purple elephant. Oh look, Michelle Obama.'"

___

Contact AP Movie Critic Christy Lemire through Twitter: http://twitter.com/christylemire

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Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds

About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study found.

The findings, published on the New England Journal of Medicine’s Web site on Monday, were based on the first major clinical trial to measure the diet’s effect on heart risks. The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.

The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight and most of them were already taking statins, or blood pressure or diabetes drugs to lower their heart disease risk.

“Really impressive,” said Rachel Johnson, a professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. “And the really important thing — the coolest thing — is that they used very meaningful end points. They did not look at risk factors like cholesterol of hypertension or weight. They looked at heart attacks and strokes and death. At the end of the day, that is what really matters.”

Until now, evidence that the Mediterranean diet reduced the risk of heart disease was weak, based mostly on studies showing that people from Mediterranean countries seemed to have lower rates of heart disease — a pattern that could have been attributed to factors other than diet.

And some experts had been skeptical that the effect of diet could be detected, if it existed at all, because so many people are already taking powerful drugs to reduce heart disease risk, while other experts hesitated to recommend the diet to people who already had weight problems, since oils and nuts have a lot of calories.

Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet is powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.

Low-fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain — a reality born out in the new study, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

“Now along comes this group and does a gigantic study in Spain that says you can eat a nicely balanced diet with fruits and vegetables and olive oil and lower heart disease by 30 percent,” he said. “And you can actually enjoy life.”

The study, by Dr. Ramon Estruch, a professor of medicine at the University of Barcelona, and his colleagues, was long in the planning. The investigators traveled the world, seeking advice on how best to answer the question of whether a diet alone could make a big difference in heart disease risk. They visited the Harvard School of Public Health several times to consult Dr. Frank M. Sacks, a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention there.

In the end, they decided to randomly assign subjects at high risk of heart disease to three groups. One would be given a low-fat diet and counseled on how to follow it. The other two groups would be counseled to follow a Mediterranean diet. At first the Mediterranean dieters got more intense support. They met regularly with dietitians while the low-fat group just got an initial visit to train them in how to adhere to the diet followed by a leaflet each year on the diet. Then the researchers decided to add more intensive counseling for them, too, but they still had difficulty staying with the diet.

One group assigned to a Mediterranean diet was given extra virgin olive oil each week and was instructed to use at least 4 tablespoons a day. The other group got a combination of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts and was instructed to eat about an ounce of them each day. An ounce of walnuts, for example, is about a quarter cup — a generous handful. The mainstays of the diet consisted of at least 3 servings a day of fruits and at least two servings of vegetables. Participants were to eat fish at least three times a week and legumes, which include beans, peas and lentils, at least three times a week. They were to eat white meat instead of red, and, for those accustomed to drinking, to have at least 7 glasses of wine a week with meals.

They were encouraged to avoid commercially made cookies, cakes and pastries and to limit their consumption of dairy products and processed meats.

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