TechStop

NEW YORK – Toyota Motor Corp. plans Monday to try to weaken suggestions that its electronics systems caused the sudden speeding up problems that led to the recall of more than 8 million vehicles.

The automaker plans an event in which it will seek to expose a reviewer who claims faulty gas pedals did not cause the sudden acceleration.

Toyota will make plan to duplicate the scenario created by David W. Gilbert, a professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Gilbert told Congress on Feb. 23 that he was able to recreate sudden acceleration in a Toyota vehicle by manipulating its electronics.

The company is calling in the director of Stanford University’s Center for Automotive Research to try to refute the claims. Toyota said Stanford professor Chris Gerdes will show that the malfunctions Gilbert produced “are completely unrealistic under real-world conditions and can easily be reproduced on a wide range of vehicles made by other manufacturers.”


Stanford’s Center for Automotive Research is funded by a group of auto companies, counting Toyota.

Toyota also has hired a consulting firm to study whether electronic problems could cause unintended acceleration. The firm, Exponent Inc., released an temporary report that has found no link between the two.

The event designed Monday is part of a broad campaign by the world’s biggest automaker to discredit critics, repair its damaged reputation and begin restoring trust in its vehicles.

On Friday, a congressional committee questioned Toyota’s efforts to find the causes of the problems. It also questioned whether the company had sufficiently investigated the issue of electronic defects.

Toyota executives will also address recall issues at its annual suppliers meeting in Kentucky on Tuesday.

NEW YORK – Millions of cable subscribers faced the view of Oscar night without the Academy Awards broadcast Sunday after ABC’s parent company switched off its signal to Cablevision customers and the two companies blasted each other for failing to reach a deal in a dispute over fees.

In duel statements dispatched early Sunday, the two companies traded fault for the stalemate in front of one of the most-watched nights of television.

“Cablevision has once again betrayed its subscribers,” said Charissa Gilmore, a spokeswoman for the Walt Disney Co. and ABC Television Group, in a statement. “Cablevision pocketed almost $8 billion last year, and now customers aren’t getting what they pay for … again.”

Cablevision Systems Corp. said the stall in conference should be answerable on Disney CEO Bob Iger. “It is now with difficulty clear to millions of New York area households that Disney CEO Bob Iger will hold his own ABC viewers prisoner in order to extract $40 million in new fees from Cablevision,” said Charles Schueler, a Cablevision executive vice president, in a statement.

The signal can still be pulled from the air for free with an receiver and a new TV or digital converter box.

Cablevision has argued that Disney is seeking an additional $40 million a year in new fees, even though the company pays more than $200 million a year to Disney.

Disney counters by arguing that Cablevision charges customers $18 per month for basic broadcast signals but does not pass on any payment for ABC to Disney.


The quarrel is similar to a standoff at the end of last year between News Corp. and Time Warner Cable over how much Fox television station signals were worth. That fight, which exposed the college football bowl season and new episodes of “The Simpsons,” was resolved without a signal interruption.

Cablevision also feuded with Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. in a January dispute that for the short term forced the Food Network and HGTV off the service. Neither side provided terms of an agreement that restored the channels after three weeks.

Disney and Cablevision have been discussion dueling advertisements about the ongoing dispute for the past week. Also, lawmakers in Washington have chimed in, suggesting the Federal Communications Commission step in.

The company’s previous contract with Cablevision expired more than two years ago, but it was extended month by month as talks continued.

Under previous planning, Disney was paid for cable channels such as ESPN and Disney Channel, but gave its ABC broadcast signal away for free, a situation that most broadcasters are now trying to change.

“We can no longer sit back and allow Cablevision to use our shows for free while they continue to charge their customers for them,” WABC-TV president and general manager Rebecca Campbell said in a statement.

Schuler recommended that disgruntled viewers should blame Disney’s top executive if the station goes dark.

“There is one man who is going to decide whether New York gets to see the Oscars, and that’s Disney President and CEO Bob Iger,” he said in a statement late Friday. “We call on Bob Iger to stop holding his own viewers hostage, end his threats to pull the plug on ABC at midnight and instead work with us to reach a fair agreement.”

WABC-TV is the most-watched TV station in the country, said Disney, which is based in Burbank, Calif.

DICHATO, Chile – Chile’s president says it will take three years to rebuild the region wracked by an earthquake and tsunami, something all too clear to the people cleaning up this splintered tourist town.

Dichato is nestled between pine-forested hills and a lovely sheltered bay where colorful fishing boats served coastal communities and export companies. Its population of 4,000 triples each January and February with tourists — many were in town when disaster struck — and residents count on that brief summer vacation for much of their income.

The quake and tsunami killed at least 19 people in Dichato and smashed neat wooden houses and small hotels into huge splinter piles. The surge ruined most other buildings in town, which stank Thursday with decomposing fish. One fishing boat marooned far inland was full of rotting octopus.

President Michelle Bachelet said Thursday that she is confident “Chile will rise” from the devastation — but not as fast as some might want.

She said it could take at least three years to bring the region back.

“It’s going to be — it’s going to be very hard moving ahead,” she told ADN radio.

Powerful aftershocks continued to rock the area. A magnitude-6.0 aftershock shook the quake-hit city of Concepcion early Friday morning, sending rattled residents running out of buildings in their underwear. Several hours later, a magnitude-6.6 shake — the strongest since Sunday — sent people fleeing into the streets yet again.

A resident of San Pedro, across the river from Concepcion, called into Radio Bio-Bio to report that a quake-damaged building had collapsed in the aftershock. Officials had not confirmed the report.

In Dichato, Bachelet’s government had made a difference before the quake, building 130 neat mustard-yellow duplexes in a public housing project that just opened in September and providing 60 million pesos — $120,000 — to restore the facades of businesses along main street, said Mabel Gomez, president of the local chamber of commerce.

But as they rooted through the remains Thursday, Dichato’s residents said they are pinning their hopes for renewal on the new president, conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera, who takes office next week.

“I think he has the ability to do it,” said Luis Omar Cid Jara, 66, whose bakery and roast chicken shop on Dichato’s main street were destroyed.

Pinera, who takes office March 11, named new governors for the six hardest-hit regions and told them to get to work even before his inauguration. His immediate priorities: Find the missing; ensure law and order; restore utilities; and tend to the injured.

Pinera also stepped up his criticism of Bachelet on Thursday as he called for a sweeping modernization of Chile’s disaster system to eliminate what he called “the lack of coordination and the weaknesses that this tragedy has uncovered with brutal eloquence.”

The president-elect said his administration will work more closely with the military on disasters than Bachelet has done, and he pledged to rebuild “with the most modern and efficient standards.”

Critics said Bachelet initially was reluctant to summon the military to stop looting and deliver aid, given the armed forces’ brutal repression of the Chilean left in the past, especially during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Top military officers had complained they couldn’t deploy troops to quash looting or deliver aid until Bachelet finally declared a state of emergency more than 24 hours after the temblor.

Touring an aid distribution center in the heavily damaged city of Concepcion, Bachelet denied any delays or indecision in the hours following Saturday’s pre-dawn quake.

The magnitude-8.8 quake — one of the strongest on record — and the tsunami that followed ravaged a 700-kilometer (435-mile) stretch of Chile’s Pacific coast.

The government said Thursday it had identified 279 of the dead, dropping the confirmed official death toll from 802. Officials said the earlier figure includes people listed as missing.

Authorities say 2 million people were affected in some way. They declared a three-day official mourning period starting Sunday.

The army was flying in 320 tons of aid, and the navy was shipping 270 more tons to coastal towns cut off from the rest of Chile.

In the coastal town of Constitucion, firefighters were looking for bodies of people swept away by the tsunami as they camped on Isla Orrego, an island in the mouth of the Maure River that flows through the city. Constitucion suffered perhaps the greatest loss of life in the disaster, in part because many people had come for carnival celebrations and were caught in huge waves that reached the central plaza.

“There were about 200 people in tents who disappeared” on Isla Orrego, Fire Chief Miguel Reyes told The Associated Press.

An Associated Press Television News crew witnessed several bodies being recovered, including that of a baby girl washed up on the beach.

Rescue and recovery were in full swing in Dichato, where firefighters used long poles to probe for bodies in huge piles of muddy sand and beach wreckage. The navy ferried troops ashore to help unload 86 tons of food.

Volunteers canvassed camps up in the hills created by people who abandoned their ruined property in town, fearing another tsunami because of frequent aftershocks. They handed out carloads of clothing and food.


Chile has asked other countries and the United Nations for help. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon planned to meet both Bachelet and Pinera on Friday and tour Concepcion.

Another earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.3 struck late Thursday near Calama, 780 miles (1,260 kilometers) north of Santiago and roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) north of the epicenter of Saturday’s quake. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

Both quakes occurred along the same tectonic boundary where the Nazca Plate, moving eastward, is forcing its way under the continental plate of South America, said Susan Potter, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.