Toyota Prius recall: Automaker will fix nearly 700,000 hybrids

Toyota Motor Corp. announced two safety recalls for its flagship Prius hybrid.

The automaker said the steering intermediate extension shafts in 670,000 Prius cars sold in the U.S. need to be inspected and in some cases replaced. And 350,000 of those hybrids also will have to have their electric water pumps replaced.

Toyota will recall another 2 million vehicles worldwide, including the Prius and the Corolla, to fix the same problems.  

The gas-sipping Prius has become an important vehicle for Toyota, giving the company a reputation for producing fuel-efficient, green vehicles and quietly becoming one of the best sellers in the automaker’s lineup.

Toyota is on track to sell more than 250,000 Prius hatchbacks and station wagons this year, which will make it one of the best selling passenger cars in the U.S.  So far this year, the Prius has been the best selling car in California. Toyota sells more hybrids in the U.S. than all other automakers combined.

In the U.S., the recall includes 2004 through 2009 model year Prius hybrids.

The steering shaft problem results from a manufacturing error in which certain parts in the system did not have the required hardness and can deform.

Toyota said that in some of the cars, the electric motor that drives the water pump that circulates coolant through the hybrid components can shut off. In some cases this can cause the hybrid system to stop while the vehicle is being driven.
 
There have been no crashes or injuries reported for these two conditions.

Owners of vehicles covered by these safety recalls will receive an owner notification letter via first-class mail starting in December.  Any authorized Toyota dealer will perform these recalls at no charge.

This is the second large recall by Toyota in barely a month.  

In October, the Japanese automaker recalled 2.5 million vehicles nationally to fix a faulty power window switch that has been linked to at least nine injuries and several hundred reports of smoke and fire. In one instance reported to federal regulators, a passenger in a Camry was burned while trying to use a loose article of clothing to extinguish a fire caused by the switch.

The big recalls come as Toyota's vehicle sales in the U.S. have been surging after being derailed last year. Sales were hurt by manufacturing disruptions and inventory shortages caused by the Japanese earthquake. Massive recalls in 2010 for sudden-acceleration problems and other safety defects also added to Toyota's sales woes.

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Follow me on Twitter (@LATimesJerry), Facebook and Google+.

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Mike D'Antoni plans to coach Lakers on Sunday

Mike D'Antoni won NBA coach of the year in his first full season as head coach of the Phoenix Suns. (Jeff Gross / Getty Images)

By T.J. Simers

November 13, 2012, 8:36 a.m.

Just finished interviewing new Lakers Coach Mike D’Antoni by telephone, and how’s that for a fine start in town — he's talking to Page 2.

It’s going to take a little while to transcribe tape and write a column, but here’s how we began Tuesday morning.

"Got bad news for you, Mike. You’re losing 73% to 11% to Phil Jackson in a poll of who people would like to see coaching the Lakers."

D’Antoni laughs. "I’ve got some really close friends who are Laker fans and they were disappointed I got the job."

Reminded that the fans in Staples Center have been chanting, "We want Phil," D’Antoni says, "They can’t chant, 'We want Mike,' because they got him."

D’Antoni is still recovering from reconstructive surgery on his right knee. He’s getting around now with one crutch or a cane.

He will fly to Los Angeles on Wednesday, meet his team Thursday and says he’s probably aiming to make his Lakers coaching debut Sunday.

"When I feel better I’ll start coaching, and I think miraculously I’ll start feeling better when Steve [Nash] is feeling better," he says. "I’ve already tried coaching without him and that didn’t work out too well, so I’m thinking I’ll be smart this time."

If the tape recorder batteries hold up, more to come soon.

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Phil Jackson gets call from Lakers and it's not what he expected

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At Mao-style conclave, China embraces Twitter age

BEIJING (AP) — During China’s last party congress, the cadres in charge of the world’s most populous nation didn’t know a hashtag from a hyperlink. But five years on, there’s a new message from Beijing: The political transition will be microblogged.

Party officials have this fall embraced social media with unprecedented enthusiasm, hoping it can help guide public opinion and stir up excitement about the staid and scripted party meeting taking place this week in Beijing that kicks off a transition to a new, younger set of top leaders.

Dozens of the more than 2,000 party delegates, among them Chairman Mao‘s grandson, are using social media to wax rhapsodic about China’s rise and Party General Secretary Hu Jintao’s live 90-minute reading of highlights from this year’s party work report. Typical posts include pictures of grinning delegates on Tiananmen Square and mobile snapshots of poinsettia arrangements and chandeliers from inside the Great Hall of the People, where the congress is meeting.

Guo Mingyi, a miner from the frigid northeast who was making his debut as a party delegate, tweeted: “On this land with great affections, how can I not sing, how can I not tear up, I love this piece of land, the people and the great Chinese Communist Party!”

State media also are posting microblog interviews with officials and shooting out updates about the congress schedule via Twitter-like accounts.

But apart from being a tool to deliver Beijing’s approved policy messages to the mobile phones of ordinary Chinese, the Internet is a two-way street that’s also being used by the public to poke fun at and critique the propaganda. Online commentators have compared the gushy crying and clapping of some delegates over Hu’s speech to North Korean style mass hysteria.

Responding to state media report about how a female delegate, Li Jian, cried five times at Hu’s work report, a Sina microblog user writing under the name ‘Buying Soysauce’ wrote: “I sobbed uncontrollably too, at the thought that these people were my compatriots.”

Wang Keqin, the assistant to the editor in chief of Beijing’s Economic Observer magazine, wrote about the tears of another delegate, He Guiqin: “It’s back to North Korea overnight!”

Other critics have dredged up old headlines from 1987 about the scourge of bribe-seeking and posted them online to highlight how little party rhetoric, and party problems, have changed despite major social change over the last three decades.

The clash of ideas underscores just how important the Internet has become in China’s campaign to guide public opinion — a major shift from just a few years ago.

At the last party conclave in October 2007, Twitter was a little over a year old and hashtags had only just been introduced. China’s leading homegrown Twitter-like microblog service, Sina Weibo, was still two years from launch.

But as elsewhere, China’s Internet population has exploded over the last five years, jumping from 170 million to more than 500 million today. Social media has boomed with it and now plays a huge part in everyday Chinese life, particularly for urban residents who use it to find restaurants, jobs and mates.

Beijing’s initial reaction to social media was to block and censor, to limit conversations by banning access to Twitter and Facebook and to limit mention of anything considered sensitive or destabilizing with keyword filters. Though authorities still use those tactics, the government is increasingly proactive and working to wrest control of the online conversation by flooding the zone with its own content.

David Bandurski, a researcher with the China Media Project at Hong Kong University, says Chinese officials have learned that simply banning or blocking reports is no longer effective in the porous Internet sphere and that stifling information can backfire by fanning more interest in scandals and crises and sparking online rumors.

“You can’t just stuff the genie back into the bottle,” said Bandurski. “You have also to channel public opinion … officially, they are seeing social media as the best way to send out their authoritative information and kind of drive the agenda.”

But the government remains yoked to its party-ese, which can seem hopelessly out of date in the Twitter age.

A dispatch on the trend by the official Xinhua News Agency gives a hint to the flavor of Beijing’s rhetoric.

“The Internet has been unprecedentedly embedded into the ongoing National Congress of the Communist Party of China,” the news agency trumpeted over the weekend. “Not only can contents on the Internet be found in the congress report, but online media practitioners are attending the congress in person.”

On Saturday, Chairman Mao’s grandson Mao Xinyu tweeted this to his 105,943 followers on Renmin Weibo, the microblog of the official party paper, the People’s Daily: “Mao Zedong thought will always be the guiding ideology of the party.”

It got 155 retweets, a mediocre showing in China‘s lively web sphere.

___

Follow Alexa Olesen on Twitter: http://twitter.com/alobeijing

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Day-Lewis heeded inner ear to find Lincoln's voice

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A towering figure such as Abraham Lincoln, who stood 6 feet 4 and was one of history's master orators, must have had a booming voice to match, right? Not in Daniel Day-Lewis' interpretation.

Day-Lewis, who plays the 16th president in Steven Spielberg's epic film biography "Lincoln," which goes into wide release this weekend, settled on a higher, softer voice, saying it's more true to descriptions of how the man actually spoke.

"There are numerous accounts, contemporary accounts, of his speaking voice. They tend to imply that it was fairly high, in a high register, which I believe allowed him to reach greater numbers of people when he was speaking publicly," Day-Lewis said in an interview. "Because the higher registers tend to reach farther than the lower tones, so that would have been useful to him."

"Lincoln" is just the fifth film in the last 15 years for Day-Lewis, a two-time Academy Award winner for best actor ("My Left Foot" and "There Will Be Blood"). Much of his pickiness stems from a need to understand characters intimately enough to feel that he's actually living out their experiences.

The soft, reedy voice of his Lincoln grew out of that preparation.

"I don't separate vocal work, and I don't dismember a character into its component parts and then kind of bolt it all together, and off you go," Day-Lewis said. "I tend to try and allow things to happen slowly, over a long period of time. As I feel I'm growing into a sense of that life, if I'm lucky, I begin to hear a voice.

"And I don't mean in a supernatural sense. I begin to hear the sound of a voice, and if I like the sound of that, I live with that for a while in my mind's ear, whatever one might call it, my inner ear, and then I set about trying to reproduce that."

Lincoln himself likely learned to use his voice to his advantage depending on the situation, Day-Lewis said.

"He was a supreme politician. I've no doubt in my mind that when you think of all the influences in his life, from his childhood in Kentucky and Indiana and a good part of his younger life in southern Illinois, that the sounds of all those regions would have come together in him somehow.

"And I feel that he probably learned how to play with his voice in public and use it in certain ways in certain places and in certain other ways in other places. Especially in the manner in which he expressed himself. I think, I've no doubt that he was conscious enough of his image."

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Q & A: Weighing the Evidence

Q. My husband weighs twice as much as I do, yet we take the same dose of over-the-counter medications, as recommended on the packaging. Shouldn’t weight be a factor?

A. There is little information about using weight as a factor in adjusting doses of either prescription or over-the-counter medications, said Dr. Steven A. Kaplan, director of the Iris Cantor Men’s Health Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital.

“We are beginning to study different responses by weight,” he said, but he and other researchers have reached no conclusions on recommendations for therapy.

“In my own field, urology,” he added, “my opinion is that it is more likely for the recommended dose to be ineffective in a larger person rather than to be toxic in a thinner adult.”

Some prescription drugs, like chemotherapy agents, already have their dosages adjusted for weight because of their highly toxic nature. As for over-the-counter drugs, recommended doses generally tend to be weighted in favor of safety rather than efficacy, Dr. Kaplan said.

He and other doctors emphasized the importance of following package directions. For example, acetaminophen (like Tylenol) can present a life-threatening risk if the liver cannot process a high dose. If you find that the recommended dose does not work for you, Dr. Kaplan said, speak to your doctor.

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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US stocks rise; Home Depot boosts Dow average

Stocks are rising in midday trading on Wall Street, shaking off a sluggish start. A surge in Home Depot's stock is sending the Dow Jones industrial average higher.

The market opened lower Tuesday after European leaders postponed the latest aid package for Greece. The Dow turned positive in the first hour of trading and continued to rise through the morning.

The Dow was up 50 points at 12,865 at noon Eastern. About a third of the gain was attributable to Home Depot, which soared 4 percent after the company delivered a strong earnings report.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose six points to 1,386. The Nasdaq composite index was flat at 2,904.

Microsoft fell 3 percent following the sudden departure of the head of its Windows division.

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Why Lakers' hiring of Mike D'Antoni is bad, in 7 seconds or less

The new Lakers coach famously wants his players to shoot in seven seconds or less. I’m not going to require that long to list the reasons that hiring Mike D'Antoni was yet another Buss blunder.

He's never taken a team to an NBA Finals. He has a losing record in the playoffs. He doesn't coach defense. His sprinting offense will be tested on a team led by aging guys who no longer sprint.

And, oh yeah, he's not Phil Jackson.

I'll repeat what I wrote on Friday, only now with a greater and sadder emphasis: The only way the panicky firing of Mike Brown makes even an ounce of sense is if he was immediately replaced by Jackson.

Turns out, not only did Jim Buss not have a deal in place with Jackson when he fired Brown -- an inconceivable truth -- but he also wasn't prepared to make a deal. Buss apparently walked away from Jackson partially because the coach asked for an ownership piece of the team. Magic Johnson wins five championship rings and gets a piece of the Lakers, but Jackson's five championship rings gets him the door? This couldn’t be because Jim Buss never really liked Jackson, could it?

If you insist on applauding the Buss family for great ownership in moving so fast on firing Brown, then you must rip them for not having his logical replacement already in place, and you must be sickened that they didn’t realize the only man for that job, at this time, at any cost, was Jackson.

Mike D'Antoni is a great guy and a charismatic presence. If they add some younger and quicker pieces, the Lakers could eventually be wildly fun. But he has even less credibility with players than Mike Brown. He is exactly as one-dimensonal as Mike Brown. And his postseason basketball success makes Mike Brown look like, well, Jackson.

If you want to hire D'Antoni, you give Brown more than five games to get this roster figured out, because the transition time for D'Antoni is going to be long and the rewards are going to be questionable. If you want to hire D'Antoni, you make darn sure this season is trashed first, because there are no guarantees that his system can get any team past the second round.

Once it became obvious that Buss wouldn't give in to Jackson's incredible demands -- do you really blame Jackson for his asking price? -- then they should have just handed the team to Bernie Bickerstaff and taken their time in a national search. Instead, they settled on a guy who is recovering from knee-replacement surgery and can't even join the team immediately, they settled on him in about two days, and they relied on his best reference being a point guard with a fractured leg.

What about interviewing Brian Shaw? How about Nate McMillan? If Jackson is not an option, don't you at least look at Jerry Sloan?

D'Antoni coached in New York, so he can handle the heat here. The problem is, he went 121-167 there and could not even weasel a winning record out of a roster that, at one point, included Carmelo Anthony, Amare Stoudemire and Jeremy Lin.

D'Antoni coached basketball's most exciting team in Phoenix, so he knows entertainment. The problem: Those Phoenix teams had flexible fliers like Leandro Barbosa, Shawn Marion, a younger Steve Nash and a healthier Stoudemire. All that, and they still lost in the Western Conference finals in consecutive seasons.

His teams famously don't guard anybody. His offense is famously based on youth and quickness. His is a game of glitter but, so far, no NBA gold. How long is Dwight Howard sticking around if he doesn't think this guy can make the Lakers a winner?

On Friday night, in the wake of the Brown firing, everyone from the fans to Kobe Bryant were begging for Phil Jackson. Come this morning, they should be begging for an explanation.

One could list the reasons that the Mike Brown fire/Mike D'Antoni hire is just the latest in a series of moves that, despite their glittering roster, illustrate a huge vacancy in the Lakers' top-level leadership. But it's going to take a lot more than seven seconds.

Bill.plaschke@latimes.com

Twitter.com/billplaschke

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Elmo puppeteer accused of underage relationship

NEW YORK (AP) — The puppeteer who performs as Elmo on "Sesame Street" is taking a leave of absence from the popular kids' show in the wake of allegations that he had a relationship with a 16-year-old boy.

Sesame Workshop said puppeteer Kevin Clash denies the charges, which were first made in June by the alleged partner, who by then was 23.

"We took the allegation very seriously and took immediate action," Sesame Workshop said in a statement issued Monday. "We met with the accuser twice and had repeated communications with him. We met with Kevin, who denied the accusation."

The organization described the relationship as personal and "unrelated to the workplace." Its investigation found the allegation of underage conduct to be unsubstantiated. But it said Clash exercised "poor judgment" and was disciplined for violating company policy regarding Internet usage. It offered no details.

"I had a relationship with (the accuser)," Clash told TMZ. "It was between two consenting adults and I am deeply saddened that he is trying to make it into something it was not."

At his request, Clash has been granted a leave of absence in order to "protect his reputation," Sesame Workshop said.

No further explanation was provided, nor was the duration of his leave specified.

"Elmo is bigger than any one person and will continue to be an integral part of 'Sesame Street' to engage, educate and inspire children around the world, as it has for 40 years," Sesame Workshop said in its statement.

"Sesame Street" is currently in production, but other puppeteers are prepared to fill in for Clash during his absence, according to a person close to the show who spoke on condition of anonymity because that person was not authorized to publicly discuss details about the show's production.

"Elmo will still be a part of the shows being produced," that person said.

The 52-year-old Clash, the divorced father of a grown daughter, has been a puppeteer for "Sesame Street" since 1984. It was then that he was handed the fuzzy red puppet named Elmo and asked to come up with a voice for him. Clash transformed the character, which had been a marginal member of the Muppets troupe for a number of years, into a major star rivaling Big Bird as the face of "Sesame Street."

In 2006, Clash published an autobiography, "My Life as a Furry Red Monster," and was the subject of the 2011 documentary "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey."

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The New Old Age Blog: What Chemo Can't Do

Let’s start with a simple medical fact: Chemotherapy doesn’t cure people who have very advanced Stage 4 lung or colon cancer.

Chemo can be quite effective at earlier stages. Even in late-stage disease, it may relieve symptoms for a while; it might help someone with tumors in his lungs breathe more easily, for example. Chemo can extend life for weeks or months.

It can also make the recipient feel nauseated, wiped out and generally lousy, and require him to spend more time in clinics and hospitals than a dying person might choose to. But it can’t banish cancer. Many aspects of medical prognosis and treatment are uncertain. Not this one.

Such patients’ doctors have almost certainly told them their cancer is incurable. Those who opted for chemotherapy anyway had to sign consent forms spelling out the potential side effects. Yet Dr. Jane Weeks, a research oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, knew from previous studies that cancer patients can develop unrealistic ideas about their odds of survival.

So as she and her co-authors began analyzing results from the first representative national study of patients with advanced cancer, all undergoing chemotherapy, to see what they thought about its effects, Dr. Weeks expected many — perhaps a third of them — to get it wrong.

She was staggered to see how mistaken she was.

Nearly 1,200 patients or their surrogates were interviewed within months of a diagnosis of Stage 4 colon or lung cancer. They answered a number of questions during these telephone interviews, but the key one was: “After talking with your doctors, how likely did you think it was that chemotherapy would cure your cancer?” The only correct answer: “Not at all likely.”

But a great majority chose one of the other responses indicating some likelihood of cure or else said they didn’t know. The study, just published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that 69 percent of lung cancer patients and 81 percent of those with colon cancer misunderstood the purpose of the very treatment they’d been undergoing.

The misperception was significantly higher among African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics than among whites — but not because of education levels, the usual variable in studies of health knowledge. “It suggests that this reflects cultural differences,” Dr. Weeks said.

Strangely, the patients who responded inaccurately also were more likely to highly rate their communications with doctors. Those who grasped that chemo wasn’t curative were, in effect, penalizing the doctors who helped them reach that understanding.

In a way, Dr. Weeks said, this makes sense. It reflects what researchers call optimism bias — or what Dr. Douglas White, a University of Pittsburgh bioethicist, has called “the powerful desire not to be dead.”

These were not very elderly people.  The bulk were ages 55 to 69. Only about a quarter of colon cancer patients and about a third of those with lung cancer were over age 70.

“It’s completely understandable that patients want to believe the chemo will cure them,” Dr. Weeks said. “And it’s understandable that physicians hesitate to take away that false hope.”

But this confusion can have unhappy consequences. For patients to make truly informed decisions, “they need to understand the outcomes,” Dr. Weeks said. “If they’re missing this critical fact, that can’t happen.”

People often hit rough times during weeks of chemotherapy. Common side effects include nausea and vomiting, diarrhea and fatigue; there are many trips to hospitals for IV drugs, X-rays and blood tests. “They’ll soldier on if they think it will cure them,” Dr. Weeks said. “Any of us would.”

But if these patients might respond differently if they understand that chemo is meant to make them feel better but may have the opposite effect, or that it may buy them another 10 to 12 weeks (a reasonable average for lung cancer) or maybe a year (for colon cancer) but won’t prevent their deaths.

Moreover, “if patients think chemo has a chance of curing them, they’ll be less likely to have end-of-life discussions early on,” Dr. Weeks said. “And they pay a price for that later” — if they enter hospice care much too late or die in hospitals instead of at home, as many prefer.

Possibly, at the time of the initial discussions, these patients recognized that chemo didn’t equal cure, she hypothesized. Then, they and their doctors began to focus on doing something, and they stopped seeing their cancer as incurable.

But realism — as palliative care doctors know — doesn’t have to mean despair. “A really good physician can communicate effectively and still maintain patient trust and confidence,” Dr. Weeks said.

“We have the tools to help patients make these difficult decisions,” two Johns Hopkins physicians, Dr. Thomas J. Smith and Dr. Dan Longo, wrote in an editorial published with the study. “We just need the gumption and incentives to use them.”

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

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U.S. to become world's largest oil producer before 2020, IEA says

The U.S. will become the world’s top producer of oil within five years, a net exporter of the fuel around 2030 and nearly self-sufficient in energy by 2035, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.

It’s a bold set of predictions for a nation that currently imports some 20% of its energy needs.

Recently, however, an “energy renaissance” in the U.S. has caused a boost in oil, shale gas and bio-energy production due to new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fuel efficiency has improved in the transportation sector. The clean energy industry has seen an influx of solar and wind efforts.

Quiz: Why are California gas prices so high? 

By 2015, U.S. oil production is expected to rise to 10 million barrels per day before increasing to 11.1 million bpd by 2020, overtaking second-place Russia and front-runner Saudi Arabia. The U.S. will export more oil than it brings into the country in 2030.

Around the same time, however, Saudi Arabia will be producing some 11.4 million bpd of oil, outpacing the 10.2 million from the U.S. In 2035, U.S. production will slip to 9.2 million bpd, far behind the Middle Eastern nation’s 12.3 million bpd. Iraq will exceed Russia to become the world’s second largest oil exporter.

At that point, real oil prices will reach $125 a barrel. By then, however, the U.S. won’t be relying much on foreign energy, according to the IEA’s World Energy Outlook.

Globally, the energy economy will undergo a “sea change,” according to the report, with nearly 90% of Middle Eastern oil exports redirecting toward Asia.

“No country is an energy ‘island,’ and the interactions between different fuels, markets and prices are intensifying,” according to the report.

And what of energy efficiency efforts?

Fossil fuels, which enjoyed a 30% jump in subsidies last year to $523 billion worldwide, will still surpass renewable energy sources, according to IEA. But so-called green power will become the world’s second-largest form of generation within three years and will threaten coal’s supremacy by 2035.

That progression, however, “hinges critically on continued subsidies” for wind, solar and bio-fuel technologies, which last year amounted to some $88 billion and needs to reach $4.8 trillion through 2035, according to IEA.

Even then, however, “the world is still failing to put the global energy system onto a more sustainable path,” according to the report.

Quiz: Test your knowledge of business news

Global energy demand will boom by more than a third by 2035, rising to 99.7 million barrels a day from 87.4 million last year. China’s demand will rise 60% over the period; India’s will more than double. Demand in developed countries will increase just 3%, with the desire for oil and coal losing share in the overall energy mix.

Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will creep up, causing a long-term average temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Celsius, or 38.48 degrees Fahrenheit. Energy production will continue to suck at the world’s water resources – it already accounts for 15% of total water use.

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IMF warns of 'alarmingly high' risk of deep global slowdown

Like Feinstein, Boxer urges federal inqury into high gas prices

Iraq oil output will nearly triple by 2035, says 'landmark study'

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