Toyota to pay big to settle suits

Toyota Motor Corp., moving to put years of legal problems behind it, has agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle dozens of lawsuits relating to sudden acceleration.

The proposed deal, filed Wednesday in federal court, would be among the largest ever paid out by an automaker. It applies to numerous suits claiming economic damages caused by safety defects in the automaker's vehicles, but does not cover dozens of personal injury and wrongful-death suits that are still pending around the nation.

The suits were filed over the last three years by Toyota and Lexus owners who claimed that the value of their vehicles had been hurt by the potential for defects, including floor mats that could cause the vehicles to surge out of control.

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In addition, Toyota said it is close to settling suits filed by the Orange County district attorney and a coalition of state attorneys general who had accused the automaker of deceptive business practices. The costs of those agreements would be included in a $1.1-billion charge the Japanese automaker said it will take against earnings to cover the actions.

"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," Christopher Reynolds, Toyota's chief counsel in the U.S., said in a statement.

Toyota's lengthy history of sudden acceleration was the subject of a series of Los Angeles Times articles in 2009, after a horrific crash outside San Diego that took the life of an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer and his family.

Under terms of the agreement, which has not yet been approved in court, Toyota would install brake override systems in numerous models and provide cash payments from a $250-million fund to owners whose vehicles cannot be modified to incorporate that safety measure.

In addition, the automaker plans to offer extended repair coverage on throttle systems in 16 million vehicles and offer cash payments from a separate $250-million fund to Toyota and Lexus owners who sold their vehicles or turned them in at the end of a lease in 2009 or 2010. The total value of the settlement could reach $1.4 billion, according to Steve Berman, the lead plaintiff attorney in the case.

The lawsuits, filed over the last several years, had been seeking class certification.

News of the agreement comes scarcely a week after Toyota agreed to pay a record $17.35-million fine to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for failing to report a potential floor mat defect in a Lexus SUV. Those come on top of almost $50 million in fines paid by Toyota for other violations related to sudden acceleration since 2010.

The massive settlement does not, however, put Toyota's legal woes to rest. The automaker still faces numerous injury and wrongful death claims around the country, including a group of cases that have been consolidated in federal court in Santa Ana, and other cases awaiting trial in Los Angeles County.

The first of the federal cases, involving a Utah man who was killed in a Camry that slammed into a wall in 2010, is slated for trial in mid-February.

The California cases are set to begin in April, among them a suit involving a 66-year-old Upland woman who was killed after her vehicle allegedly reached 100 miles per hour and slammed into a tree.

Edgar Heiskell III, a West Virginia attorney who has a dozen pending suits against Toyota, said he is preparing to go to trial this summer in a case that involved a Flint, Mich., woman who was killed when her 2005 Camry suddenly accelerated near her home.

"We are proceeding with absolute confidence that we can get our cases heard on the merits and that we expect to prove defects in Toyota's electronic control system," he said.

Toyota spokesman Mike Michels said the settlement would have no bearing on the personal injury cases.

"All carmakers face these kinds of suits," he said. "We'll defend those as we normally would."

The giant automaker's sudden acceleration problems first gained widespread attention after the August 2009 crash of a Lexus ES outside San Diego.

That accident set off a string of recalls, an unprecedented decision to temporarily stop sales of all Toyota vehicles and a string of investigations, including a highly unusual apology by Toyota President Akio Toyoda before a congressional committee. Eventually Toyota recalled more than 10 million vehicles worldwide and has since spent huge sums — estimated at more than $2 billion, not including Wednesday's proposed settlement — to repair both its automobiles and public image.

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Police find New York gunman's threatening note but no motive

The New York felon who set a Christmas Eve trap for firefighters left a note saying he wanted to burn down the neighborhood and "do what I do best: killing people," police said Tuesday.

Investigators found human remains in the burned-out home of ex-con William Spengler, 62, a day after his rampage in Webster, a Rochester suburb. Officials said the remains probably were those of Spengler's missing sister, Cheryl, 67.

Spengler apparently set the blaze in or near his home and lay in wait, killing two firefighters and seriously wounding two more before taking his own life, officials said.

In his note, Spengler wrote, "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," police said at a Christmas Day news conference.

Officers characterized the note as "rambling" and said it did not include 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," Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering said.

Spengler appeared to have led an uneventful life for the last 14 years, but had a violent history: In 1980, he beat his grandmother to death with a hammer. He spent 18 years in prison and was released in 1998.

Monday's blaze — which officials think may have started as a vehicle fire — consumed seven homes and damaged two more in Webster, a sleepy community on the shores of Lake Ontario and Irondequoit Bay.

Police think Spengler used a military-style Bushmaster .223 rifle with a flash suppressor. They recovered the weapon along with a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver and a Mossberg pump-action 12-gauge shotgun.

As a felon, Spengler was barred from owning guns. Officials were unsure how he had obtained them, but said he was armed to the teeth.

"He was equipped to go to war and kill innocent people," Pickering said.

Spengler's attack would mark the third time in two weeks that a gunman had attempted a mass killing with an assault rifle. On Dec. 14, Adam Lanza 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. 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.

The discovery that Spengler had a Bushmaster is likely to intensify the outcry for tighter gun controls that followed the Newtown massacre. The gun, which looks like a military assault rifle, also was used in the 2002 sniper attacks that left 10 dead and three wounded in the Washington, D.C., area.

President Obama is expected to begin pushing for specific gun control measures, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, after he receives recommendations from Vice President Joe Biden in January. The National Rifle Assn., the nation's most powerful gun lobby, has vowed to fight any attempts to curtail gun ownership.

In Webster, during the first of two news conferences on Christmas Day, officials described Monday's chaotic "combat situation." Firefighters were targeted before getting out of their trucks, police said, and a Webster police officer used his duty rifle to trade fire with Spengler.

Rounds shattered the windshield of the firetruck that two of the firefighters were in; the wounded driver crashed 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 the officer, who has not been identified.

Another police officer from nearby Greece, N.Y., 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," Pickering said.

The two wounded firefighters remained in intensive care 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. The outpouring "has been incredible."

matt.pearce@latimes.com

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

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Jessica Simpson's Christmas gift: She's pregnant

NEW YORK (AP) — Jessica Simpson's daughter has the news all spelled out: "Big Sis."

Simpson on Tuesday tweeted a photo of her baby daughter Maxwell playing in the sand, the words "Big Sis" spelled out.

The 32-year-old old singer and personality has been rumored to be expecting again. The tweet appears to confirm the rumors.

"Merry Christmas from my family to yours" is the picture's caption. Simpson used a tweet on Halloween in 2011 to announce she was pregnant with Maxwell. She is engaged to Eric Johnson and gave birth to Maxwell in May.

One possible complication regarding her pregnancy: She is a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Our Failed Approach to Schizophrenia

TOO many pendulums have swung in the wrong directions in the United States. I am not referring only to the bizarre all-or-nothing rhetoric around gun control, but to the swing in mental health care over the past 50 years: too little institutionalizing of teenagers and young adults (particularly men, generally more prone to violence) who have had a recent onset of schizophrenia; too little education about the public health impact of untreated mental illness; too few psychiatrists to talk about and treat severe mental disorders — even though the medications available in the past 15 to 20 years can be remarkably effective.

Instead we have too much concern about privacy, labeling and stereotyping, about the civil liberties of people who have horrifically distorted thinking. In our concern for the rights of people with mental illness, we have come to neglect the rights of ordinary Americans to be safe from the fear of being shot — at home and at schools, in movie theaters, houses of worship and shopping malls.

“Psychosis” — a loss of touch with reality — is an umbrella term, not unlike “fever.” As with fevers, there are many causes, from drugs and alcohol to head injuries and dementias. The most common source of severe psychosis in young adults is schizophrenia, a badly named disorder that, in the original Greek, means “split mind.” In fact, schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personality, a disorder that is usually caused by major repeated traumas in childhood. Schizophrenia is a physiological disorder caused by changes in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is essential for language, abstract thinking and appropriate social behavior. This highly evolved brain area is weakened by stress, as often occurs in adolescence.

Psychiatrists and neurobiologists have observed biochemical changes and alterations in brain connections in patients with schizophrenia. For example, miscommunications between the prefrontal cortex and the language area in the temporal cortex may result in auditory hallucinations, as well as disorganized thoughts. When the voices become commands, all bets are off. The commands might insist, for example, that a person jump out of a window, even if he has no intention of dying, or grab a set of guns and kill people, without any sense that he is wreaking havoc. Additional symptoms include other distorted thinking, like the notion that something — even a spaceship, or a comic book character — is controlling one’s thoughts and actions.

Schizophrenia generally rears its head between the ages of 15 and 24, with a slightly later age for females. Early signs may include being a quirky loner — often mistaken for Asperger’s syndrome — but acute signs and symptoms do not appear until adolescence or young adulthood.

People with schizophrenia are unaware of how strange their thinking is and do not seek out treatment. At Virginia Tech, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well. The parents and community-college classmates of Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and shot and injured 13 others (including a member of Congress) in 2011, did not know where to turn. We may never know with certainty what demons tormented Adam Lanza, who slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, though his acts strongly suggest undiagnosed schizophrenia.

I write this despite the so-called Goldwater Rule, an ethical standard the American Psychiatric Association adopted in the 1970s that directs psychiatrists not to comment on someone’s mental state if they have not examined him and gotten permission to discuss his case. It has had a chilling effect. After mass murders, our airwaves are filled with unfounded speculations about video games, our culture of hedonism and our loss of religious faith, while psychiatrists, the ones who know the most about severe mental illness, are largely marginalized.

Severely ill people like Mr. Lanza fall through the cracks, in part because school counselors are more familiar with anxiety and depression than with psychosis. Hospitalizations for acute onset of schizophrenia have been shortened to the point of absurdity. Insurance companies and families try to get patients out of hospitals as quickly as possible because of the prohibitively high cost of care.

As documented by writers like the law professor Elyn R. Saks, author of the memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness,” medication and treatment work. The vast majority of people with schizophrenia, treated or untreated, are not violent, though they are more likely than others to commit violent crimes. When treated with medication after a rampage, many perpetrators who have shown signs of schizophrenia — including John Lennon’s killer and Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin — have recognized the heinousness of their actions and expressed deep remorse.

It takes a village to stop a rampage. We need reasonable controls on semiautomatic weapons; criminal penalties for those who sell weapons to people with clear signs of psychosis; greater insurance coverage and capacity at private and public hospitals for lengthier care for patients with schizophrenia; intense public education about how to deal with schizophrenia; greater willingness to seek involuntary commitment of those who pose a threat to themselves or others; and greater incentives for psychiatrists (and other mental health professionals) to treat the disorder, rather than less dangerous conditions.

Too many people with acute schizophrenia have gone untreated. There have been too many Glocks, too many kids and adults cut down in their prime. Enough already.

Paul Steinberg is a psychiatrist in private practice.

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Barry-Wehmiller has a funny way of valuing its employees

You'd be hard pressed to find a company that talks more about its "people-centric" management culture than Barry-Wehmiller, a privately owned manufacturer of industrial equipment.

Barry-Wehmiller, which has $1.5 billion in annual sales, says it's all about fostering "personal growth" among its 7,000 employees, whom it calls "team members." Its "Guiding Principles of Leadership" include the imperative to "treat people superbly and compensate them fairly." (Italics are theirs.)

The chief yogi of this philosophy is Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Chapman, who gives talks about the "crisis of leadership" in corporate America, lamenting that "over 130 million people in our workforce go home every day feeling they work for a company that doesn't care about them." With a catch in his throat and possibly a tear in his eye, he told one audience in May about the "awesome responsibility" he shoulders for "the lives that are influenced by my leadership."

Hey, Bob? Tell it to the 111 steelworkers you're laying off in Southern California so you can transfer their jobs to a lower-paid workforce in Ohio (with the help of a "job creating" tax break from the latter state).

These workers — excuse me, "team members" — are employed by Barry-Wehmiller's Pneumatic Scale Angelus plant in Vernon. When they reported to work Nov. 2, they were handed a five-paragraph statement advising them that the company had decided to shut the plant by Jan. 1. Only a few weeks earlier, the company had staged a ceremony at the plant in recognition of its record sales.

The notice said the workers would be paid through the end of the year, but to avoid "personal injury to you or harm to equipment or products ... because of this distraction," they should go home and stay home. In the meantime, the company would negotiate the "tentative closing decision" with their representatives from the United Steel Workers union. USW officials have told me it's clear that the decision is anything but tentative.

The 60-day notice, which is required by state law whenever a big layoff is in the offing, was signed by the company's director of "people and culture development." "That notice was the first anyone heard of their plans," says Douglas Marshall, 71, who retired last year after 23 years as a machinist at Angelus.

You may never have heard of Angelus, so here's some background on what used to be one of California's most community-oriented businesses.

Founded by Henry L. Guenther in 1910 as the Angelus Sanitary Can Machine Co., the firm produced "can seamers." These machines fuse the lids of metal cans to their bodies. Angelus' models, which were the gold standard in the packaging industry, can be found in bottling plants all over the world. Hoist a can of Coke or a cold beer, and the chances are roughly 4 in 5 that it was produced on an Angelus machine.

"They were the Rolls-Royce of machines," says Gil Salazar, who spent 43 years in the industry — the last five as a field representative for Angelus — before retiring this month. "The Angelus people were craftsmen, which is something the United States doesn't have anymore."

After Guenther and his wife, Pearl, died in the 1950s, control of Angelus passed to a nonprofit foundation she had established. Its profits every year went into the Henry L. Guenther Foundation's coffers and out to dozens of worthy Los Angeles charities, chiefly health and medical institutions.

In 2007, pressured by the IRS to comply with rules forbidding ownership of a profit-making company by a nonprofit, the foundation sold Angelus to Barry-Wehmiller for $84 million, according to a foundation tax filing. Since then, the foundation has had no involvement with Angelus. But it has continued to make millions of dollars in donations every year: The Salk Institute, St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, Mercy Hospital in San Diego and the Braille Institute in Los Angeles all ranked among its top beneficiaries in 2011.

Barry-Wehmiller, for its part, promptly applied its "people-centric" policies at Angelus, former employees told me. Non-union managers got their holidays pared back, their pensions frozen and their healthcare premiums jacked up.

"They let us know that was what they were looking to do with the union workers too," recalls Chuck Johnson, a USW shop steward at the plant for more than 20 years. A layoff hit 33 members of the Angelus local last year. Chapman made occasional appearances at the plant but never spoke with the unionized employees, Johnson says.

I called Chapman at Barry-Wehmiller's headquarters in suburban St. Louis so he could help me reconcile his words and his actions. But neither he nor anyone else from the firm called me back, apparently content to let his logorrhea do the talking.

And talk he does. His appearance in May at an Illinois event affiliated with the TED organization seemed to be typical. (TED is a lecture series allowing self-styled visionaries and CEO types to put their personal awesomeness on display, but the results can be hit-or-miss.) Chapman's TED talk was vaguely spiritual, filled with the buzz of sincerity and the buzzwords of self-actualization — "We've been paying people for their hands for years, and they would have given us their heads and their hearts for free if we had just known how to ask them and say, 'Thank you for sharing.'" Etc., etc.

There do seem to be Barry-Wehmiller locations where its Guiding Principals of Leadership hold sway. A USW analysis called the firm "paternalistic" and acknowledged it treats employees with "a lot of respect and kindness." A United Auto Workers representative in Green Bay, Wis., told me the 330 UAW workers at the firm's large printing-equipment plant there enjoy excellent relations with management, not least because in taking over the plant, Barry-Wehmiller kept it from folding.

"As a workplace, we should be envied," UAW local President Pat Vesser said.

That hasn't been the experience at Angelus. When the foundation sold the factory it had a healthy order backlog and plenty of overtime. But soon after the 2007 takeover, the employees in Los Angeles, where the average hourly wage was about $25, saw that their work was being shifted to a non-union plant in Ohio, where the wage was $16 to $18, according to the USW.

The company even cadged a five-year, $760,000 tax credit from a state development fund in Ohio for promising to add 75 jobs there — a hint of how a smart company may be playing the job-creation game for profit while actually cutting employment.

The average age of the Angelus workforce is 54, and the average worker has been there for decades. But there's no sign that any economic development agencies in California, Los Angeles County or Vernon stepped up to try to save the more than 100 jobs at stake. Could they have helped? Who knows. The Angelus workers say Vernon owns the lease on the factory, but there doesn't seem to have been an effort by the city to cut the rent.

Barry-Wehmiller has firmly turned away USW proposals to keep the Vernon plant running, says Steve Bjornbak, 56, a 38-year veteran of Angelus and the USW local's president. He suspects the company plans to revive limited operations with lower-wage employees in California later, "after they've dissolved the union." There will be talks after the first of the year over severance, healthcare and retirement benefits for the laid-off workforce.

No one disputes that Barry-Wehmiller is perfectly within its rights to find the cheapest way to manufacture whatever it wishes, wherever it wishes. But its actions at Angelus don't exactly measure up to Bob Chapman's saccharine prattle about running one of those organizations that "truly care about the impact they make on the lives of the people that join them."

"This is all about people's lives," Chapman told his TED audience. Right you are, Bob.

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

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Jack Klugman dies at 90; star of TV's 'The Odd Couple,' 'Quincy'

Jack Klugman, the three-time Emmy Award-winning actor best known for his portrayals of slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison on TV's “The Odd Couple” and the title role of the murder-solving medical examiner on “Quincy, M.E.,” died Monday at his home in Woodland Hills. He was 90.

Klugman had been in declining health for the last year, his son Adam said.

He had withdrawn from a production of “Twelve Angry Men” at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J., in Marchfor undisclosed health reasons. He had undergone successful surgery for cancer of the larynx in 1989.

PHOTOS: 2012 notable deaths

Klugman was the last surviving member of the cast that played the jury in “12 Angry Men,” the classic 1957 movie drama about deliberations in a first-degree murder trial. He was also a veteran of live TV dramatic anthology series in the 1950s and appeared in several episodes of “Twilight Zone.”

On Broadway, Klugman played Ethel Merman's boyfriend, Herbie, in the hit musical “Gypsy,” which earned him a 1960 Tony Award nomination. He won his first Emmy in 1964 for a guest appearance on “The Defenders.”

In 1965, he was back on Broadway, replacing Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison in the original production of “The Odd Couple,” Neil Simon's classic comedy about two friends with polar-opposite personalities who become roommates — one is divorced and the other just broke up with his wife.

PHOTOS: Jack Klugman -- 1922 - 2012

But that's not why Klugman landed the role of the casually sloppy Oscar Madison in the TV version of “The Odd Couple” opposite Tony Randall's fussy neat-freak Felix Unger.

Randall, who had appeared in a production of “The Odd Couple” with Mickey Rooney, had wanted Rooney to play Oscar in the TV series. But executive producer Garry Marshall fought for Klugman.

In his 2005 book “Tony and Me: A Story of Friendship,” Klugman wrote that during the first rehearsals for the TV series, Marshall told him he'd never seen him play Oscar on Broadway.

“What!” said Klugman. “Then why did you fight for me?”

“I saw you in ‘Gypsy,’ “ said Marshall. “You did a scene with Ethel Merman and I was impressed because as she was singing to you, she was spitting a lot and it was getting on your clothes and your face and in your eyes. You never even flinched. I said to myself, ‘Now that's a good actor.’ “

Although “The Odd Couple” was not a hit when it aired on ABC from 1970 to 1975, it has had a long life in syndication and forever cemented the reputation of its two stars as one of TV's great comedy teams.

In TV Guide's 1999 listing of “TV's Fifty Greatest Characters Ever,” Felix and Oscar ranked No. 12.

“Many acting tandems have played Neil Simon's testosterone-and-teacup duo over the years on stage and screen,” the magazine observed. “But Tony Randall and Jack Klugman are the Felix and Oscar we love most. For five unflaggingly creative seasons, they were the most evenly matched ‘Odd Couple' imaginable.”

Although Randall claimed he was “very little like” Felix, Klugman said in a 1996 interview with The Times, that he was “pretty close” to Oscar.

In fact, when members of the wardrobe department initially sought to outfit the unkempt Oscar, they looked no further than Klugman himself.

“They paid me $360 for everything in my closet, and I still made a profit on the deal,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2005.

As Oscar, Klugman won Emmys in 1971 and 1973 for outstanding continued performance by an actor in a leading role in a comedy series.

After “The Odd Couple” ended its run in 1975, Klugman said the last thing on his mind was doing another TV series.

Having “spent five years in the best situation comedy ever devised” and having worked with Randall, “the nicest guy in this business,” Klugman said, he turned down one pilot series script after another, particularly those for sitcoms.

But when he received the script for “Quincy, M.E.,” he said, he saw “potential in it — the gimmick of a doctor who solves crime for the police by medical and scientific deduction. It was not just another cop show.”

And with “Quincy, M.E.” which ran on NBC from 1976 to 1983 and earned Klugman four Emmy nominations, he saw a way to raise issues such as incest, child abuse, drunk driving and elderly abuse.

“I'm a muckraker,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. “I saw the possibilities in ‘Quincy': We could entertain with what was essentially a good murder mystery but also do important shows on important subjects. This was why I got into the business.”

One of six children, Klugman was born in Philadelphia on April 27, 1922. His father, a financially struggling house painter, died when Klugman was 12. A year later, after a stint selling newspapers, Klugman began taking horse bets to earn extra money.

“The dealer said, ‘These guys will give you slips of paper. Just put them in the tin,'“ he recalled in a 1971 interview with The Times. “Then I was taking bets on the phone.”

A lifelong track aficionado, Klugman later owned a horse farm in Temecula, and his racehorse, Jaklin Klugman, finished third in the 1980 Kentucky Derby.

Back home in 1945 after serving in the Army during World War II, Klugman lost the $3,000 he had saved in U.S. savings bonds by betting on baseball games. Worse, he owed $500 to a loan shark and faced serious bodily injury unless he made a payment within three days.

Unable to come up with the cash, Klugman skipped town and moved to Pittsburgh, where he was accepted into the drama department of what is now Carnegie Mellon University. A few years later he moved to New York, where he landed parts in off-Broadway and summer stock.

He appeared in films such as “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” and also starred in two short-lived situation comedies: “Harris Against the World” and “You Again?”

In 1989, Klugman, a heavy smoker, underwent surgery for cancer of the larynx in which the center of his right vocal cord was removed. Afterward, the actor famous for his raspy growl initially was unable to speak above a whisper.

After going public with his story a year-and-a-half later, he worked with voice specialist Gary Catona who put Klugman on a regimen of daily vocal exercises to strengthen his left vocal cord so that it could stretch to touch what was left of his right vocal cord and produce a sound.

His old friend Randall also played a key role in his return to acting in 1991.

After beginning his vocal exercises, Randall called Klugman to suggest that they do a one-night benefit performance of “The Odd Couple” on Broadway for Randall's new National Actors Theatre.

“I said to Tony, ‘I can't even talk. I don't know how I can do it,' “ Klugman recalled in a 1993 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

But, as he wrote in his memoir, after six months of working on his voice “like Rocky worked on his body,” the whisper “became a sound, and in time, the sound became a little voice. But was it enough to perform on Broadway?”

Nervous about facing an audience and hating the way he sounded, Klugman, who wore a small microphone on stage, was encouraged after getting his first laugh.

At the end of the performance, he took his bow to a standing ovation.

“After that, I knew I was back,” he said.

Klugman married actress and comedienne Brett Somers in 1953. They had been separated for many years when she died in 2007.

In addition to son Adam, he is survived by his wife, Peggy; son David; and two grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

McClellan is a former staff writer.

news.obits@latimes.com

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El MIDI, la tecnología que le abrió la puerta a la música digital, cumple 30 años

Un pequeño teclado y un ordenador portátil: hasta que apareció la tecnología MIDI, hace 30 años, nadie imaginaba que sólo con ese equipo se podría dar un concierto. Dicen los entendidos que para apreciar realmente el tema Shine on you crazy diamond , de Pink Floyd, es mejor escucharlo en vinilo.

Las emisiones de los sintetizadores estallan a través del crepitar de la púa sobre el disco, mientras la guitarra y la batería marcan un ritmo ondulante. Es un sonido enorme que define toda una época, y uno puede sumergirse por completo en el espíritu de esos años con esa versión en vinilo.

Pero más allá de la impresionante creatividad de la música, el sonido evidencia una importante limitación en la forma en la que los instrumentos musicales electrónicos se controlaban en aquel momento.

“Una banda como Kraftwerk, por ejemplo, utilizaba 200 teclados analógicos distintos”, explica el músico argentino Cineplexx.

Pero la tecnología de la Interfaz Digital de Instrumentos Musicales (MIDI, según sus siglas en inglés) permitió conectar los instrumentos a una computadora y entre sí, lo que supuso un cambio enorme.

“Yo cuando doy un concierto utilizo un teclado con 20 teclas y un ordenador portátil”, cuenta Cineplexx .

Con estos elementos es posible componer, secuenciar, programar, modificar y reproducir el sonido de cualquier instrumento, como “un vibráfono o un sintetizador”.

Un lenguaje común

El protocolo MIDI nació en California, de la mano de Dave Smith, un fabricante de sintetizadores, que convenció a sus competidores para que adoptaran un formato en común que permitiera controlar de forma externa a los sintetizadores, con otro teclado o incluso a través de una computadora.

MIDI pronto se convertiría en el estándar industrial para conectar diferentes instrumentos electrónicos, cajas de ritmo, samplers y ordenadores. Esta tecnología abrió una “nueva era de procesamiento musical”.

“Lo que hizo MIDI es permitir el nacimiento de los primeros estudios de grabación caseros”, cuenta Smith en conversación con Tom Bateman, de BBC Radio 4.

El Prophet-600 de Sequential Circuits en acción

“Las computadoras eran lo suficientemente rápidas como para secuenciar notas y controlar el número de teclados y cajas de ritmos al mismo tiempo, y eso abrió paso a una industria nueva”.

Fue un avance que tendría el mismo impacto en la música popular que la electrificación de guitarras, desarrollada décadas antes.

El nacimiento de la música dance

Alex Paterson , fundador de la banda de ambient dance llamada The Orb, tiene un estudio de grabación en su casa de Buckinghamshire, Reino Unido.

“Que Dios bendiga a MIDI”, exclama al ser consultado.

“Fue como entrar en un sueño”, cuenta, refiriéndose al sistema utilizado en 1990 para grabar el tema emblemático de la banda, Little Fluffy Clouds.

“Estaba todo allí guardado, listo para que tú lo lances, fue realmente increíble”, recuerda.

Este control orquestado y secuenciado de los sonidos de sintetizadores, cajas de ritmo y samplers dio lugar a nuevas formas de producción: así nació la música dance.

Lo que hizo MIDI fue “separar la tecla del sonido”, dice Cineplexx. Ahora se pueden crear órdenes digitales y asignarle a cada tecla los sonidos que se quieran.

El músico argentino ofrece una comparación interesante con las cámaras digitales y analógicas en el mundo de la fotografía.

“Hay quienes cuestionan la calidad”, dice, pero destaca que en la práctica el MIDI proporcionó la posibilidad de escribir partituras digitales interpretarlas como se quiera con un pequeño teclado.

Libre acceso

El primer instrumento con capacidad MIDI fue un sintetizador llamado Prophet-600 – diseñado por Dave Smith – que comenzó a producirse en 1982.

Las computadoras Atari y Commodore 64, muy populares entre los aficionados a los videojuegos en aquella época, también podían utilizarse para controlar instrumentos MIDI a través de un cable con conectores DIN (de cinco puntas) en cada extremo.

La amplia disponibilidad del formato y la facilidad de su uso permitieron redefinir la música pop de los 80, le aportaron un fuerte sonido electrónico y engendraron muchos de los géneros musicales contemporáneos.

Dom Beken, coproductor de Alex Paterson, recuerda cómo la tecnología MIDI permitió que cualquiera pudiera crear “masivos paisajes sonoros”. “Pioneros de la electrónica y antiguos punks ahora podían hacer cosas que enloquecían al público en las pistas de baile”, dice.

Para Dave Smith, MIDI sólo podía triunfar si todos los fabricantes la adoptaban. “Tuvimos que regalarla”, dice. La universalidad del formato fue quizás un ejemplo precursor de lo que ahora se denomina tecnología de código abierto (open source), para que cualquiera tuviera acceso.

“Por supuesto que hubiera sido divertido ganar dinero con ella”, dice su creador californiano.

“Pero ese no era el plan”.

Treinta años después, la tecnología MIDI se mantiene como uno de los componentes centrales de la grabación y producción profesional de música.

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: El MIDI, la tecnología que le abrió la puerta a la música digital, cumple 30 años
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Reaction to the death of actor Jack Klugman

Celebrities on Monday reacted to the death of "Odd Couple" star Jack Klugman, who died Monday at age 90. Here are samples of sentiments expressed on Twitter:

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"R.I.P. Jack Klugman, Oscar, Quincy a man whose career spanned almost 50 years. I first saw him on the Twilight Zone. Cool guy wonderful actor." — Whoopi Goldberg.

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"You made my whole family laugh together." — Actor Jon Favreau, of "Swingers," ''Iron Man" and other films.

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"I worked with Jack Klugman several years ago. He was a wonderful man and supremely talented actor. He will be missed" — Actor Max Greenfield, of the "New Girl" on Fox.

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"So sorry to hear that Jack Klugman passed away. I learned a lot, watching him on television" — Dan Schneider, creator of Nickelodeon TV shows "iCarly," ''Drake and Josh" ''Good Burger," ''Drake & Josh."

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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?

Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.

Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.

That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.

Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.

In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.

In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.

Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.

But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.

The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.

The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.

Other rumors also spring from real events.

In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.

Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.

So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.

Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.

In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.

The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”

The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.

The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.

The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.

The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.

The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.

In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.

In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.

Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.

But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

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BitTorrent co-founder now working with Hollywood

A Silicon Valley executive whose previous venture was synonymous with Internet piracy has found a way to play nice with Hollywood.

BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Ashwin Navin is working with television networks and consumer electronics companies on a new technology called Samba that aims to deliver enhanced viewing on Internet-connected "smart TVs."

Navin said his experiences with BitTorrent and the backlash engendered by the file-sharing pioneer spurred his decision to work in collaboration with the entertainment industry — instead of pursing a path of business disruption.

"You can get a lot of great press, you can get all the bloggers and social media folks really excited with statements like, 'I'm here to kill cable,'" said Navin, 35. "But that doesn't actually work. It's not productive,

because cable and subscription television is subsidizing and paying for the programming we love."

Navin's San Francisco company, Flingo, draws from the same body of academic research for Samba that underlies the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's face recognition technology to teach smart TVs to "see" the images flickering on the screen.

Like an infant opening her eyes for the first time, the software is trained to recognize actors' faces and objects on the screen. It uses these visual cues to identify a show in real time by comparing it with a database of hundreds of channels of content.

Once Samba determines what a viewer is watching, it delivers contextually relevant content, such as casting information or social media conversations, directly to the TV — as well as to other screens in the room. The software synchronizes the devices automatically, via the Internet, so the consumer doesn't need to download a special application. The supplemental material is available through a Web browser running on a tablet, smartphone or the TV itself.

"From a consumer point of view, [Flingo's] doing a nice job of stitching these things together based around a TV-centric experience," said Paul Gray, television research director for NPD DisplaySearch. "And not trying to be a PC in your living room — which is the big danger."

Flingo is one of several companies seeking to serve as the technological glue that connects the living room TV with the smartphones, tablets or laptop computers that millions of consumers have in their hands, along with their TV remote controls. One Nielsen study found that 86% of tablet owners and 84% of smartphone users said they check these screens while they watch TV. Television networks have been grappling with the intrusion of these small screens, which compete with the TV for viewers' attention.

"If we can find ways to connect those screens, we can deepen the engagement with the show, we can remind people that they are watching TV," said Hardie Tankersley, Fox's vice president of platforms and innovation. "Being able to match the ads that you're seeing on your laptop with the ads that are running on TV — that has tremendous potential for brands, who advertise both on TV and the Web. To be able to synchronize up is really powerful."

Companies such as Zeebox, Yahoo Inc.'s IntoNow and Shazam Entertainment Ltd. offer smartphone and tablet applications that identify TV shows and deliver supplementary content to this second, smaller screen — including cast lists, a plot synopsis and interactive features such as polling.

Flingo's Navin is placing his bet on a different screen: the TV. Announcements of partnerships with device makers are expected next month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Smart TVs are moving from a novelty to the mainstream, with shipments expected to grow 15% worldwide this year, according to NPD DisplaySearch. Some 43 million of these devices — TVs that connect to the Internet and provide access to services such as YouTube, Netflix or Hulu — are expected to ship globally this year. That number is projected to reach 95 million by 2016.

This momentum is less obvious in North America, where Internet-connected TVs have been slower to catch on than other parts of the world, Gray said. That's because purchases are linked to media consumption habits. In China, for example, consumers watch free Internet content — and favor TVs with built-in browsers, which make it easier to watch streaming video. Similarly, in Western Europe, where half the households receive TV programming via over-the-air signals, broadcasters provide past episodes free online for consumers to do catch-up viewing. That's helped spur demand for Internet-connected TVs, Gray said.

Navin launched Flingo in 2008, creating smart TV applications for networks including A&E, Fox, History Channel, Lifetime, Showtime and TMZ, as well as websites such as Revision3, Funny or Die and College Humor. As a result of this development work, the company has built relationships with more than a dozen major consumer electronics manufacturers, among them LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Corp. and Vizio Inc. It claims to have published more smart TV apps than any other company in the world — available on more than 15 million devices in 118 countries.

That may position it to take serious advantage of smart TV growth in the U.S.

"The smart TV is the last great unmined consumer platform," said billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who saw a demonstration of Flingo at the CES trade show last year and is an investor in the company.

dawn.chmielewski@latimes.com

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