Toyota to pay at least $1.2 billion to settle sudden-acceleration lawsuit

Toyota Motor Co. has announced an agreement worth more than $1 billion to settle a lawsuit involving unintended acceleration in some of its vehicles.

Under terms of the settlement, filed Wednesday in federal court in Santa Ana, Toyota will install a brake-override system in an estimated 3.25 million vehicles and compensate car owners for the alleged reduced value of the vehicles, among other terms.

According to attorneys for the plaintiffs, the estimated value of the settlement makes it the largest of its kind, although there have been larger non-auto industry class settlements in recent years. They said the settlement provides that 16 million current Toyota owners will be eligible for a customer care plan that provide a warranty for certain parts alleged to be tied to unintended acceleration claims.

After a fiery crash of a Lexus, Toyota's luxury brand, took four lives near San Diego in August 2009, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that floor mats could entrap pedals in Toyota vehicles, leading the Japanese automaker to issue its largest recall ever. That, in turn, led to a series of subsequent investigations and recalls stretching over several years.

Toyota has maintained that its vehicles were free from electronic flaws that caused sudden acceleration. The NHTSA and NASA investigated, but was unable to trace the defect.

ROAD TO RECALL: Read The Times' award winning coverage

“This was a difficult decision -- especially since reliable scientific evidence and multiple independent evaluations have confirmed the safety of Toyota’s electronic throttle control systems,” Christopher P. Reynolds, Toyota Motor North America’s chief legal officer, said in a statement. “However, we concluded that turning the page on this legacy legal issue through the positive steps we are taking is in the best interests of the company, our employees, our dealers and, most of all, our customers.”

The total value of the settlement is estimated to be between $1.2 and $1.4 billion, according to Steve Berman, the lawyer in charge of directing the class litigation and leading settlement discussions.

“After two years of intense work, including deposing hundreds of engineers, poring over thousands of documents and examining millions of lines of software code, we are pleased that Toyota has agreed to a settlement that was both extraordinarily hard-fought and is exceptionally far-reaching,” Berman said in a statement.

Details of the settlement, along with a copy of the settlement proposal, are available online or by calling (877) 283-0507. More information will be available once the court gives preliminary approval to the settlement.

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Google Music Self-Censoring Naughty Lyrics for Some Users

Cee-Lo’s F*#$ You has a great beat and all, but it’s not the type of thing you want queuing up with grandma in the room. No worries. Google’s got you covered. Some Google Music users complain the service is randomly replacing expletive-intensive songs with the duller, cleaner versions.

The Google Music Scan and Match feature has run afoul of some users by replacing explicit versions of songs with the kid-friendly clean versions. Even less fun, Droid Life reports that some people are seeing clean versions of songs replaced with explicit versions. That’s bad news when you expect to hear the sanitized version of Radiohead’s Creep while hanging out with your kids. Now you have to spend the rest of winter vacation explaining to them why they can’t sing how so f’ing special they are on the playground.

Google Music isn’t the first service to experience trouble determining which version of a song is being matched. Apple’s iTunes Match experienced the same issue when it launched. The problem stems from a few issues. First, the metadata for a particular song might not be correct, or it might be missing vital information. Like which version of the album the song was ripped or purchased from.

Also, it’s tougher for Google Music and other song-matching services to determine if a song is clean or explicit if a curse word only appears once or twice during the song. Cee-Lo’s F*#$ You is easier to rate because the change takes place throughout the entire song.

If you find that your favorite 2 Live Crew songs are completely unlistenable, Google told Wired that listeners could change the version of the song from within the Google Music player. In the Google Music Player, right-click the track with the incorrect version. Select “Fix incorrect match” from the contextual menu. The actual song file will be uploaded to the service instead of using Google’s matching system.

Not exactly user friendly, but better than listening to beeps over your favorite swear words. Everyone knows all the best music is full of swear words.

Roberto is a Wired Staff Writer for Gadget Lab covering augmented reality, home technology, and all the gadgets that fit in your backpack. Got a tip? Send him an email at: roberto_baldwin [at] wired.com.

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Q & A: Should Older Adults Be Vaccinated Against Chickenpox?

Q. Should a 65-year-old who has never had chickenpox be vaccinated against it?

A. In someone who has never had chickenpox, the vaccine would protect against a disease that is far more serious in adults than it is in children, said Dr. Mark S. Lachs, director of geriatrics for the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System and professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College.

After childhood chickenpox, the varicella virus is never eliminated from the body but lies dormant in nerve roots. Decades later, it may reactivate along the nerve pathway and cause the very painful rash called shingles, and later, in many cases, a persistent pain called postherpetic neuralgia, or PHN.

Therefore, for most people over 60, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the shingles vaccine. It safely reduces (but does not eliminate) the risk of both shingles and PHN in those who have had chickenpox, Dr. Lachs said.

In someone who never had chickenpox, he said, the concern is not shingles but adult chickenpox, which has “fatality rates 25 times higher than in children.”

Such a person should instead be vaccinated against a primary infection with the varicella virus, Dr. Lachs said. The vaccine differs in strength from the one for shingles and is given in two injections, a month apart.

C. CLAIBORNE RAY

Readers may submit questions by mail to Question, Science Times, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, or by e-mail to question@nytimes.com.

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Toyota Settles Lawsuit Over Accelerator Recalls’ Impact

DETROIT — Toyota Motor said on Wednesday that it would spend $1.1 billion to settle a sweeping class-action lawsuit by owners of millions of vehicles that were recalled for problems with unintended acceleration.

The agreement, filed in federal court in California, was called one of the largest product-liability settlements in history.

If the agreement is approved by the court, Toyota would compensate current and former owners for loss of value on vehicles recalled because of faulty floor mats and other conditions that could cause sudden acceleration.

Toyota has also agreed to install special safety systems on 3.2 million vehicles that were recalled for floor-mat problems.

The class-action suit was filed in 2010 after widespread complaints were made to federal safety regulators about Toyota models that accelerated unexpectedly.

Toyota has since recalled about eight million vehicles in the United States for problems relating to floor mats and sticky accelerator pedals.

After a long investigation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said there was no evidence that electronic systems contributed to unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles.

The law firm representing Toyota owners in the class-action suit said the overall settlement was estimated at $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion.

“We are extraordinarily proud of how we were able to represent the interests of Toyota owners, and believe this settlement is both comprehensive in its scope and fair in compensation,” said Steve Berman, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs.

Toyota said in a statement that it would compensate customers for loss of value of their vehicles, as well as retrofit additional cars with a free safety system that prevents unintended acceleration.

The company said it will take a one-time, $1.1-billion charge against earnings to cover the costs of the settlement and possible resolution of other pending litigation.

“This agreement marks a significant step forward for out company,” said Christopher Reynolds, Toyota’s chief United States legal officer. “In keeping with out core principles, we have structured this agreement in ways that work to put our customers first.”

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N.Y. gunman wrote that 'killing people' was what he did best

This time, there was a note.

Before ex-con William Spengler, 62, opened fire on firefighters who had responded to a blaze at his home in Webster, N.Y., on Christmas Eve, killing two and seriously wounding two others, he'd typed a couple pages announcing his plans, police said.

"I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down and do what I do best: killing people," Spengler wrote, police said Tuesday.

The previous morning, Spengler shattered the holiday calm with a shocking assault that officials found uncharacteristic of the 14 years he'd spent out of prison since killing his grandmother with a hammer in 1980.

Monday's blaze -- which officials think may have started as a vehicle fire -- consumed seven homes and damaged two more in the sleepy lakeside community, a suburb of Rochester. Officials also said they'd found human remains at Spengler's house that they suspect were his sister, Cheryl, 67.

Police think Spengler used a Bushmaster .223 rifle with a flash suppressor in his rampage. They recovered the weapon along with a Smith and Wesson .38-caliber revolver and a Mossberg pump-action 12-gauge shotgun. Officials weren't sure how Spengler -- a felon who was not allowed to own guns -- had obtained his weapons, but said he was armed to the teeth.

"He was equipped to go to war and kill innocent people,” Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering said at a televised news conference on Christmas Day. One of the men killed a day earlier was Mike Chiapperini, 43, a Webster  police lieutenant as well as a volunteer firefighter.

In a time of contentious debate over whether assault weapons should be banned or tightly controlled in the United States, Spengler's attack would mark the third time in two weeks that a shooter has attempted a mass killing with an assault rifle.

On Dec. 14, Adam Lanza, 20, killed 20 grade-school students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., using a military-style Bushmaster .223 rifle. Lanza also killed his mother and himself. And on Dec. 11, Jacob Tyler Roberts  opened fire in a Clackamas, Ore., mall with an AR-15-style rifle, killing two and wounding one before taking his own life.

Spengler, who also shot himself,  is the only one of the three known to have left a note. Police characterized it as "rambling" and said he did not express a motive. They declined to release more excerpts Tuesday. 

“Motive is always the burning question, and I’m not sure we’ll ever really know what was going through his mind," Pickering said.

A friend of the gunman told the Los Angeles Times that Spengler hated his sister and loved his mother, who had lived with the pair until she died Oct. 7. The fire began next door to the home where Spengler had killed his  92-year-old grandmother,  for which he served 18 years in prison; he was released in 1998.

Officials Tuesday described a chaotic "combat situation." A Webster police officer used his duty rifle to trade fire with Spengler on Monday in morning darkness after the firefighters had been fired upon before getting out of their trucks, police said.

Rounds shattered the windshield of the firetruck that two of the firefighters were in; the wounded driver crashed it into a bank trying to get away.

"Had that police officer not been there, more people would have been killed, because he immediately engaged the shooter," Pickering said of his officer.

Greece, N.Y., police officer Jon Ritter was driving behind the firetruck when he also came under fire. He was wounded by shrapnel from the bullets that struck his windshield and engine block, police said.

Ritter "tried to shelter some of the fallen firemen with his car when the other firefighters -- that we later extracted from the location with the armored personnel carrier -- had taken cover under the firetruck to try to escape further harm from the ongoing gunfire," Pickering said.

The two wounded firefighters, Joseph Hofstetter and Theodore Scardino, remained in the intensive care unit and were described as stable.

Officials said that 33 neighborhood residents had been displaced by the blaze and the investigation and that hotels had offered them places to stay.

“We all have been inundated from citizens, police agencies across the nation and really across the world, wanting to provide donations," Pickering said, getting emotional.

"On a personal note, and speaking for my law enforcement associates and all my fire associates and all my EMS associates, I want to thank the community for tremendous outpouring. It has been incredible."

matt.pearce@latimes.com

John Hoeffel in Naples, N.Y., contributed to this report.

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A Look Inside Tarantino's <em>Django Unchained</em> Comic Book

Django Unchained opens in theaters today, but the big screen isn’t the only way to see the newest work by Quentin Tarantino. The issue of the Django Unchained comic book mini-series from DC/Vertigo Comics is available now in comic book stores (and online), and in advance of tomorrow’s film debut, Wired has a look at the Tarantino’s introduction to the comic, along with the original character sketches by artist R.M. Guéra and a six-page preview of the first issue.

The comic is an incredibly faithful adaptation of Tarantino’s movie script – the first issue is the first few scenes of the film, almost line for line. Drawing on the director’s story, the book’s interior art comes from Guéra, who made characters that hew closely to their actor counterparts but are their own characters entirely. The artist’s Django, the slave that becomes a bounty hunter, has a more steely cowboy vibe than smooth, cool Jamie Foxx; ruthless plantation owner Calvin Candie looks even more maniacal than Leonardo DiCaprio; and Candie’s house slave Stephen looks far more jowly and grizzled on the page than Samuel L. Jackson does on screen.

“Growing up I read the adventures of Kid Colt Outlaw, TOMAHAWK, The Rawhide Kid, BAT LASH, and especially, Yang (which was basically the Kung Fu TV show done as a comic), and Gunhawks featuring Reno Jones (a Jim Brown stand-in) and Kid Cassidy (a David Cassidy stand-in), which for my money was the greatest Blaxploitation Western ever made,” Tarantino says in the first issue’s intro. “And it’s in that spirit of cinematic comics literature that I present to you Django Unchained.”

Tarantino’s version of the story hits theaters Dec. 25.

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Queen delivers 1st Christmas message in 3D

LONDON (AP) — Queen Elizabeth II has hailed the holidays in a new dimension, delivering her Christmas message for the first time in 3D.

In the annual, prerecorded broadcast, the monarch paid tribute to the armed forces, “whose sense of duty takes them away from family and friends” over the holidays, and expressed gratitude for the outpouring of enthusiasm for her Diamond Jubilee celebrations.

The queen said she was struck by the “strength of fellowship and friendship” shown by well-wishers to mark her 60 years on the throne.

“It was humbling that so many chose to mark the anniversary of a duty which passed to me 60 years ago,” she said as footage showed crowds lining the Thames River in the rain earlier this year for a boat pageant. “People of all ages took the trouble to take part in various ways and in many nations.”

The queen also reflected on Britain’s hosting of the Olympic games in 2012, praising the “skill, dedication, training and teamwork of our athletes” and singling out the volunteers who devoted themselves “to keeping others safe, supported and comforted.”

Elizabeth’s message aired shortly after she attended a traditional church service at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, the monarch rode to church in a Bentley, accompanied by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie. Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other members of the royal family.

Three familiar faces were missing from the family outing. Prince William is spending the holiday with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury. Prince Harry is serving with British troops in Afghanistan.

After the church service, the royals usually gather to watch the queen’s prerecorded television broadcast, a tradition that began with a radio address by King George V in 1932.

The queen has made a prerecorded Christmas broadcast on radio since 1952 and on television since 1957. She writes the speeches herself and the broadcasts mark the rare occasion on which the queen voices her own opinion without government consultation.

Her switch to 3D was not the only technological leap for prominent British figures this Christmas.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York chose to tweet their sermons for the first time, in order to bring Christmas to a new digital audience.

In his speech, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he has been inspired by meeting victims of suffering over the past decade while leading the world’s 80 million-strong Anglican Communion.

Delivering his final Christmas Day sermon from Canterbury Cathedral, Williams also acknowledged how a vote against allowing women to become bishops has damaged the credibility of the church.

Still, he said, it was “startling” to see after the vote how many people “turned out to have a sort of investment in the church, a desire to see the church looking credible and a real sense of loss when — as they saw it — the church failed to sort its business out.”

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Netflix Points to Amazon to Explain Christmas Eve Outage

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An outage at one of Amazon's web service centers hit users of Netflix Inc.'s streaming video service on Christmas Eve and was not fully resolved until Christmas day, a spokesman for the movie rental company said on Tuesday.

The outage impacted Netflix subscribers across Canada, Latin America and the United States, and affected various devices that enable users to stream movies and television shows from home, Netflix spokesman Joris Evers said. Such devices range from gaming consoles such as Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3 to Blu-ray players.

Evers said that the issue was the result of an outage at an Amazon Web Services' cloud computing center in Virginia, and started at about 12:30 p.m. PST (2030 GMT) on Monday and was fully restored Tuesday morning, although streaming was available for most users late on Monday.

"We are investigating exactly what happened and how it could have been prevented," Evers said.

"We are happy that people opening gifts of Netflix or Netflix capable devices can watch TV shows and movies and apologize for any inconvenience caused last night," he added.

An outage at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, knocked out such sites as Reddit and Foursquare in April of last year.

Amazon Web Services was not immediately available for comment. Evers, the Netflix spokesman, declined to comment on the company's contracts with Amazon.

(Reporting by Sam Forgione; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

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Dueling Santa trackers are off and running

A screen grab from Google's Santa Tracker. (Google / December 24, 2012)

By Deborah Netburn

December 24, 2012, 1:11 p.m.

All year long Santa keeps an eye on you. Now it's time to turn the tables.

One day a year, you are invited to keep an eye on Santa as he whips around the world in his sleigh, delivering a dizzying number of presents to children all over the world.

If you'd like to see where Santa is at the moment, you've got choices. Google and NORAD, which used to team up for your Santa tracking pleasure, have gone their separate ways this year and created two distinct tracking options.

Google's Santa Tracker is the slicker of the two. It takes you to Santa's Dashboard, where you can see Santa's current location, his next location, the number of miles traveled, and the number of presents delivered. Santa is also adding Twitter like status updates. The most recent one as of this writing: "Rudolph's nose just turned red." 

PHOTOS: Google Doodles of 2012

You can also click on the map and see where Santa has been, as noted by little present icons on the map. Click on the icon and you'll see how many presents Santa has delivered in each city. When Santa is on the move, you'll see him flying on the map in a sleigh. When he's stopped to deliver presents, you'll see him shoving presents down a chimney.

Over at the official NORAD Tracks Santa website you'll also find a running tally of how many presents Santa has delivered as well as what city he just left and what city he's currently headed toward. NORAD also offers Santa Cams that show animations of Santa flying around the world. 

Both Santa tracking services offer loads of extras. If you visit Santa's Village on Google's tracker you can send a message from  Santa to a friend or family member. And NORAD has more than 1,200 volunteers staffing a Santa hotline to answer all your Santa questions.  (877-HI-NORAD).

In the spirit of the season you might try them both out, but hurry up. The trackers shut down a few hours before Christmas morning. 

Happy tracking!

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deborah.netburn@latimes.com

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Army Goes Goth With 'Super-Black' Materials

Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.

In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn’t really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an “antireflective coating or surface treatment process for metals” to absorb stray light “in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared regions.” This, the Army hopes, will boost the quality of high-resolution cameras, while also cooling down sensitive electronics. Or to put it another way: The Army needs the color black to reflect its icy-cold heart.

Another curious thing is that the program is being run out of the Army’s Program Executive Office Ammunition at the Picatinny Arsenal, a main center for the Pentagon’s experiments in all sorts of weapons: from rifles and tank cannons to directed-energy weapons. But the purpose of the solicitation isn’t much more specific than described. “Simply put, it’s too early yet to speculate on where the technology(s) will go,” Frank Misurelli, an Army spokesman at Picatinny said in a statement provided to Danger Room. ”Possibly in a few months, after an contract has been awarded, more information may become available.”

But for whatever the Army wants to fade to black, it seems that regular black isn’t good enough. This is because most black paint will absorb only around 90-95 percent of light, with the other 5-10 percent reflected back outwards. For a high-resolution camera, that stray light can bounce back into the lens and interfere with the quality of an image. It’s even a problem for NASA’s ultra-deep-space sensors. In the extreme coldness of space, black paint turns a silver-y color, which increases heat and can interfere with infrared-detecting instruments.

But wait, doesn’t black get really hot when hit with light, like wearing black clothes during the summer? The answer is: sorta. Black is really good at absorbing heat, but is also really good at radiating heat away. This is why cooling fins, radiators and engines for cars and trucks are often painted black. In 2011, NASA developed a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbed between 98-99.5 percent of light, depending on the wavelength. Nor do the coating’s thin layers of nanotubes change color in extreme cold. They absorb more light, and help radiate heat away from instruments, keeping them cold.

The Army could go another route. A second option uncovered by Britain’s National Physical Laboratory involves immersing an object in a solution of nickel and sodium for several hours, which blackens the color, and then taking it out and dunking it in nitric acid for a few seconds. According to New Scientist, this creates an alloy pock-marked with tiny microscopic craters that prevent light from bouncing away.

Finally, the Army also hopes to expand the materials to “optical glass surfaces” — camera lenses, in other words — while testing to see whether “it will be able to survive in a military environment.” The material should also come in “multiple surface colors” and be able to “selectively exhibit earth color instead of broadband absorption.” And another hope is to use the materials to absorb water to cool down equipment. See, it’s tough out there being goth, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it in comfort.

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