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)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Think Like a Doctor: The Man Who Wobbled

The Challenge: Can you solve the medical mystery of a man who suddenly becomes too dizzy to walk?

Every month, the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to try their hand at solving a medical mystery. Below you will find the story of a 56-year-old factory worker with dizziness and panic attacks. I have provided records from his two hospital visits that will give you all the information available to the doctor who finally made the diagnosis.

The first reader to offer the correct diagnosis gets a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” and the satisfaction of solving a case that stumped a roomful of specialists.

The Patient’s Story:

The middle-aged man clicked his way through the multiple reruns of late-late-night television. He should have been in bed hours ago, but lately he hadn’t been able to get to sleep. Suddenly his legs took on a life of their own. Stretched out halfway to the center of the room, they began to shake and twitch and jump around. The man watched helplessly as his legs disobeyed his mental orders to stop moving. He had no control over them. He felt nauseous, sweaty and out of breath, as if he had been running some kind of race. He called out to his wife. She hurried out of bed, took one look at him and called 911.

The Patient’s History:

By the time the man arrived at Huntsville Hospital, in Alabama, the twitching in his legs had subsided and his breathing had returned to normal. Still, he had been discharged from that same hospital for similar symptoms just two weeks earlier. They hadn’t figured out what was going on then, so they weren’t going to send him home now.

The patient considered himself pretty healthy, but the past year or so had been tough. In 2011, at the age of 54, he had had a mild stroke. He had no medical problems that put him at risk for stroke — no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, no diabetes. A work-up at that time showed that he had a hole in his heart that allowed a tiny clot from somewhere in his body to travel to the brain and cause the stroke. He was discharged on a couple of blood thinners to keep his blood from making more clots. He hadn’t really felt completely well, though, ever since. His balance seemed a little off, and he was subject to these weird panic attacks, in which his heart would pound and he would feel short of breath whenever he got too stressed. Mostly he could manage them by just walking away and focusing on his breathing. Still, he never felt as if he was the kind of guy to panic.

And he had always been quick on his feet. The first half of his career he had been in the steel business — building huge metal trusses and supports. He and his team put together 60-plus tons of steel structures every day. For the past decade he had been machining car parts. After his stroke, work seemed to get a lot harder.

The Dizziness:

A few weeks ago, he stood up and wham — suddenly the whole world went off-kilter. He felt as if he was constantly about to fall over in a world that no longer lay down flat. His first thought was that he was having another stroke. He went straight to his doctor’s office. The doctor wasn’t sure what was going on and sent him to that same emergency room at Huntsville Hospital. After three days of testing and being evaluated by lots of specialists, his doctors still were not sure what was going on. He hadn’t had a heart attack; he hadn’t had a stroke. There was no sign of infection. All the tests they could think of were normal.

The only abnormal finding was that when he stood up, his blood pressure dropped. Why this happened wasn’t clear, but the doctors in the hospital gave him compression stockings and a pill — both could help keep his blood pressure in the normal range. Then they sent him home. He was also started on an antidepressant to help with the panic attacks he continued to have from time to time.

You can read the report from that hospital admission below.

You can also read the consultation and discharge notes from that hospital visit here.

He had been home for nearly two weeks and still he felt no better. He tried to go back to work after a week or so at home, but after driving for less than five miles, he felt he had to turn around. He wasn’t sure what was wrong; he just knew he didn’t feel right. Then his legs started jumping around, and he ended up back in the hospital.

The Doctor’s Exam:

It was nearly dawn by the time Dr. Jeremy Thompson, the first-year resident on duty that night, saw the patient. Awake but tired, the patient told his story one more time. He had been at home, watching TV, when his legs started jumping on their own and he started feeling short of breath. His wife sat at the bedside. She looked just as worried and exhausted as he did. She told the resident that when he spoke that night at home, his speech was slurred. And when the ambulance came, he could barely walk. He has never missed this much work, she told the young doctor. It’s not like him. Can’t you figure out what’s wrong?

The resident had already reviewed the records from the patient’s previous hospital admissions. He asked a few more questions: the patient had never smoked and rarely drank; his father died at age 80; his mother was still alive and well. The patient exam was normal, as were the studies done in the E.R.

The first E.R. doctor thought that his symptoms were a result of anxiety, culminating in a full-blown panic attack. The resident thought that was probably right. In any case he would discuss the case with the attending in a couple of hours during rounds on the new patients. Till then, he told the worried couple, they should just try to get a little sleep.

An Important Clue:

Dr. Robert Centor was definitely a morning person. His cheerful enthusiasm about teaching and taking care of patients made him a favorite among residents. At 7:30 that morning, he stood outside the patient’s door as Dr. Thompson relayed the somewhat frustrating case of the middle-aged man with worsening dizziness and panic attacks. Then they went into the room to meet the patient. He was a big guy, tall and muscular with the first signs of middle-aged thickening around his middle. His complexion had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Dr. Centor introduced himself and pulled up a chair as the rest of the team watched. He asked the patient what brought him to the hospital.

“Every time I get up, I get dizzy,” the man replied. Sure, he had had some balance problems ever since his stroke, he explained, but this felt different – somehow worse. He could hardly walk, he told the doctor. He just felt too unstable.

“Can you get up and show us how you walk?” Dr. Centor asked.

“Don’t let me fall,” the patient responded. He carefully swung his legs over the side of the bed. The resident and intern stood on either side as he slowly rose. He stood with his feet far apart. When asked to close his eyes as he stood there, he wobbled and nearly fell over. When he took a few steps, his heel and toes hit the ground at the same time, making a strange slapping sound.

Seeing that, Dr. Centor knew where the problem lay and ordered a few tests to confirm his diagnosis.

You can see the review report and notes for the patient’s second hospital visit below.

Solving the Mystery:

What tests did Dr. Centor order? Do you know what is making this middle-aged man wobble? Enter your guesses below. I’ll post the answer tomorrow.

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Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the Comments section below. The correct answer will appear tomorrow on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

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European Union Moves Toward Bonus Cap for Bankers

BRUSSELS — The European Union moved a step closer early on Thursday to imposing strict curbs on bonus pay for bankers, which has been blamed by many politicians for inciting the risk-taking behavior that triggered the recent financial crisis.

A provisional agreement struck between the European Parliament, the European Commission and national representatives could mean that the coveted bonuses many bankers receive are capped at the level of their annual salaries starting next year.

The agreement, as it stands, was seen as some as a blow to Britain, which partly relies on generous remuneration packages to ensure that the City of London remains the biggest financial center in Europe and the overseas headquarters of banks from around the globe.

’We need to make sure that regulation put in place in Brussels is flexible enough to allow those banks to continue competing and succeeding while being located in the U.K.,” David Cameron, the British prime minister, said on a visit to Riga, the capital of Latvia. A majority of E.U. states still must give their final approval for the legislation to go into force and there are expected to be more discussions on the rules at the European Parliament and among governments.

The goal of the bonus cap proposal is to balance many different interests, including “the desire to limit bankers pay while maintaining a competitive European banking sector,” Michael Noonan, the finance minister of Ireland, which holds the rotating E.U. presidency, said in a statement after the talked ended.

Under the proposal, the bonus rules would also apply to bankers employed by E.U. banks but working outside the bloc, for example in New York. E.U. authorities are drafting separate rules that could restrict remuneration at private equity firms and hedge funds.

Mr. Noonan said he would present the plan at a meeting of finance ministers next week.

Alex Beidas, a lawyer with Linklaters, a global legal and consulting firm based in London, warned that the legislation represented “a major disadvantage in the global market” for banks and said there was “a real danger that this will result in bankers moving to the U.S. and Asia.” 

The rules were “also likely to lead to an increase in salaries which is undesirable as banks are trying to minimize their fixed costs,” she said.

Amid concerns that capping bonuses could mean bankers begin to migrate to banks in more economically dynamic locations, lawmakers emphasized that the proposal would include provisions for monitoring such side effects and, if necessary, allow leeway for remedies.  

“If the bonus cap is shown to cause bankers to begin relocating outside the E.U., then we will have the ability to swiftly look again at the provisions in place through an early review,” said Vicky Ford, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists group from Britain.

Political leaders who hailed the preliminary deal included Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament and a German member of the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

"The cap on bonuses is a groundbreaking measure that in my view will make the economic system fairer and safer," Mr. Schulz said in a statement. "Exuberant bonuses often provided a wrong incentive for financial markets, encouraging risky behavior and short-term, purely speculative investment," he said.

An E.U. diplomat stressed that a significant amount of technical work still needed to be done before the rules were finalized by governments.

The diplomat, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity, said the rules would contain a review clause requiring authorities to assess whether the rules were having damaging effects on the banking sector. The envoy said no date was fixed for the review but that could be finalized during discussions over coming weeks.

The proposal would also allow higher bonuses if a sufficient number of shareholders agreed.

It is part of a set of laws requiring higher capital requirements for banks, called the Basel III rules, which the E.U. officials also approved early Thursday.

Mr. Noonan said the Basel III package would “make sure that banks in the future have enough capital, both in terms of quality and quantity, to withstand shocks” and that “will ensure that taxpayers across Europe are protected into the future.”

David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris.

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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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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)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: What Housework Has to Do With Waistlines

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

One reason so many American women are overweight may be that we are vacuuming and doing laundry less often, according to a new study that, while scrupulously even-handed, is likely to stir controversy and emotions.

The study, published this month in PLoS One, is a follow-up to an influential 2011 report which used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine that, during the past 50 years, most American workers began sitting down on the job. Physical activity at work, such as walking or lifting, almost vanished, according to the data, with workers now spending most of their time seated before a computer or talking on the phone. Consequently, the authors found, the average American worker was burning almost 150 fewer calories daily at work than his or her employed parents had, a change that had materially contributed to the rise in obesity during the same time frame, especially among men, the authors concluded.

But that study, while fascinating, was narrow, focusing only on people with formal jobs. It overlooked a large segment of the population, namely a lot of women.

“Fifty years ago, a majority of women did not work outside of the home,” said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and lead author of the new study.

So, in collaboration with many of the authors of the earlier study of occupational physical activity, Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.

He found the information he needed in the American Heritage Time Use Study, a remarkable archive of “time-use diaries” provided by thousands of women beginning in 1965. Because Dr. Archer wished to examine how women in a variety of circumstances spent their time around the house, he gathered diaries from both working and non-employed women, starting with those in 1965 and extending through 2010.

He and his colleagues then pulled data from the diaries about how many hours the women were spending in various activities, how many calories they likely were expending in each of those tasks, and how the activities and associated energy expenditures changed over the years.

As it turned out, their findings broadly echoed those of the occupational time-use study. Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy. (The authors did not include child care time in their calculations, since the women’s diary entries related to child care were inconsistent and often overlapped those of other activities.) In general at that time, working women devoted somewhat fewer hours to housework, while those not employed outside the home spent more.

Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.

More striking, the diary entries showed, women at home were now spending far more hours sitting in front of a screen. In 1965, women typically had spent about eight hours a week sitting and watching television. (Home computers weren’t invented yet.)

By 2010, those hours had more than doubled, to 16.5 hours per week. In essence, women had exchanged time spent in active pursuits, like vacuuming, for time spent being sedentary.

In the process, they had also greatly reduced the number of calories that they typically expended during their hours at home. According to the authors’ calculations, American women not employed outside the home were burning about 360 fewer calories every day in 2010 than they had in 1965, with working women burning about 132 fewer calories at home each day in 2010 than in 1965.

“Those are large reductions in energy expenditure,” Dr. Archer said, and would result, over the years, in significant weight gain without reductions in caloric intake.

What his study suggests, Dr. Archer continued, is that “we need to start finding ways to incorporate movement back into” the hours spent at home.

This does not mean, he said, that women — or men — should be doing more housework. For one thing, the effort involved is such activities today is less than it once was. Using modern, gliding vacuum cleaners is less taxing than struggling with the clunky, heavy machines once available, and thank goodness for that.

Nor is more time spent helping around the house a guarantee of more activity, over all. A telling 2012 study of television viewing habits found that when men increased the number of hours they spent on housework, they also greatly increased the hours they spent sitting in front of the TV, presumably because it was there and beckoning.

Instead, Dr. Archer said, we should start consciously tracking what we do when we are at home and try to reduce the amount of time spent sitting. “Walk to the mailbox,” he said. Chop vegetables in the kitchen. Play ball with your, or a neighbor’s, dog. Chivvy your spouse into helping you fold sheets. “The data clearly shows,” Dr. Archer said, that even at home, we need to be in motion.

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Media Decoder Blog: SFX Entertainment Buys Electronic Dance Music Site

SFX Entertainment, the company led by the media executive Robert F. X. Sillerman, has agreed to buy the music download site Beatport, part of the company’s plan to build a $1 billion empire centered on the electronic dance music craze.

Mr. Sillerman declined on Tuesday to reveal the price. But two people with direct knowledge of the transaction, who were not authorized to speak about it, said it was for a little more than $50 million.

Beatport, founded in Denver in 2004, has become the pre-eminent download store for electronic dance music, or E.D.M., with a catalog of more than one million tracks, many of them exclusive to the service. It says it has nearly 40 million users, and while the company does not disclose sales numbers, it is said to be profitable.

The site has also become an all-purpose online destination for dance music, with features like a news feed, remix contests and D.J. profiles. Those features, and its reach, could help in Mr. Sillerman’s plan to unite the disparate dance audience through media.

“Beatport gives us direct contact with the D.J.’s and lets us see what’s popular and what’s not,” Mr. Sillerman said in an interview. “Most important, it gives us a massive platform for everything related to E.D.M.”

Since the company was revived last year, SFX has focused mostly on live events, with the promoters Disco Donnie Presents and Life in Color; recently it also invested in a string of nightclubs in Miami and formed a joint venture with ID&T, the European company behind festivals like Sensation, to put on its events in North America.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sillerman spent $1.2 billion creating a nationwide network of concert promoters under the name SFX, which he sold to Clear Channel Entertainment in 2000 for $4.4 billion; those promoters are now the basis of Live Nation’s concert division.

Matthew Adell, Beatport’s chief executive, said that being part of SFX could help the company extend its business into live events, and also into countries where the dance genre is exploding, like India and Brazil.

“We already are by far the largest online destination of qualified fans and talent in the market,” Mr. Adell said, “and we can continue to grow that.”

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Mike Piazza softens stance on Dodgers' Vin Scully

PHOENIX—

— Calling Vin Scully "a class act" and saying he had "the utmost respect" for him, Mike Piazza on Monday defended what he wrote in his recently released autobiography about the Hall of Fame broadcaster.

In his book, "Long Shot," Piazza described Scully as instrumental in turning the fans of Los Angeles against him during the contract stalemate that led to his trade to the Florida Marlins in 1998. Piazza wrote that Scully "was crushing me" on the air, a charge Scully vehemently denied.

"I can't say that I have regrets," Piazza said. "I was just trying to explain the situation."

The former All-Star catcher was at the Dodgers' spring-training facility with Italy's World Baseball Classic team, for which he is a coach. Scully was also at the complex, to call the Dodgers' 7-6 victory over the Chicago Cubs.

"I'd love to see him," Piazza said.

The two didn't meet.

"I always liked him," Scully said. "I admired him. I think either he made a mistake or got some bad advice. I still think of him as a great player and I hope he gets into the Hall of Fame. I really do. Whatever disappointment I feel, I'll put aside."

Scully declined to comment further on Piazza or his book.

Piazza complimented Scully as he tried to defend what he wrote.

"Vin is a class act; he's an icon," Piazza said. "To this day, I have the utmost respect for him. But the problem is, you have to go back in time and understand that at that point in time in my career with the Dodgers was a very tumultuous time. I was more or less telling my version of the story, at least what I was experiencing. And I said at the end of the book, it's not coming from a place of malice or anger. I think anybody who remembers that time knows it was a very tumultuous time."

Piazza said his intent wasn't to blame Scully.

"I don't think anybody who read the passage from start to finish felt that way," Piazza said. "Anybody who reads it knows it wasn't me blaming. That was definitely not the only factor. There were other factors. The team made the mistake, I made the mistake, of speaking publicly."

Piazza acknowledged that he never heard Scully's broadcasts and that his impressions of them were based on what he heard from others.

"My perception was that he was given the Dodgers' versions of the negotiations, which, I feel, wasn't 100% accurate," Piazza said.

In his book, Piazza also took issue with how Scully asked him about his contract demands during a spring-training interview. Piazza said Monday that he was "taken aback" by the line of questioning because he previously hadn't talked publicly about the negotiations.

To reach the practice fields at Camelback Ranch on Monday, Piazza had to pass through a gantlet of Dodgers fans. Piazza said he wasn't nervous.

"I did a book signing a couple of weeks ago in Pasadena and the fans were really nice," he said.

Piazza denied that he hadn't returned to Dodger Stadium in recent years out of fear of being booed, as Tom Lasorda told The Times last month.

Piazza said he always associated the Dodgers with the O'Malley family, which sold the team to News Corp. in 1998.

"Since then, obviously, they've taken on a different identity," Piazza said.

Piazza was noncommittal about visiting the ballpark in the future. "We'll see," he said. "I'll never say never."

Wouldn't it be harder to return now that his portrayal of Scully has upset fans?

"I don't know," he said. "I can't answer that."

Piazza also spoke about falling short of being elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

"I definitely couldn't lie and say I wasn't a little disappointed," he said.

He is hopeful he will one day be inducted. "I trust the process," he said.

Piazza wouldn't say whether he thought Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. Both players, who have been linked to performance-enhancing drugs, also were denied election.

Piazza has denied using performance-enhancing drugs and has never faced detailed allegations that he did. Asked if he was upset that the indiscretions of others might have altered others' perceptions of him, he replied, "Unfortunately, that's the way life is sometimes. I can't control and worry about what people think."

dylan.hernandez@latimes.com

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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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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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