RIM Pays Nokia $65M to Settle Patent Dispute

RIM has paid Nokia $65 million to settle what may be the saddest slap-fight of a patent war in recent memory by forking over an amount that would just cover Google’s annual budget for employee sleeping pods, yoga classes and on-campus massages.

The Financial Times reported the specifics of the recent agreement, which appeared in documents RIM filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The $65 million settlement puts to rest the ongoing dispute over RIM’s use of Wi-Fi in its mobile devices. Nokia had filed suit against RIM in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, trying to have the BlackBerry maker adhere to the ruling of a Swedish arbitration ruling.

The two companies reached an agreement in December, but the terms were not disclosed. According to analysts contacted by the Financial Times, RIM could also be on the hook to pay Nokia an additional $2 to $5 per handset sold — a potentially larger hit to RIM’s bottom line.

Nokia has aggressively defended its patent portfolio while its handset business has fallen on tough times. The former king of cellphones has hitched its smartphone wagon to Microsoft’s less-than-stellar-selling Windows Phone platform in a bid to recapture some of market lost to Apple and Google’s mobile offerings.

Like Nokia, RIM has been losing market share since the introduction of the iPhone and Android devices. The company is betting on the BlackBerry 10 operation system and its devices to reverse the current trend. BlackBerry 10 will launch at the end of January.

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

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Depardieu, in tax fight, gets Russian citizenship

MOSCOW (AP) — The Kremlin has cast Gerard Depardieu in one of the most surprising roles of his life — as a new Russian citizen.

The announcement Thursday that President Vladimir Putin has approved Depardieu‘s application for citizenship is almost a real-life analogue to the French actor’s 1990 comedy “Green Card,” in which his character enters into a sham marriage in order to work in the United States.

But in this version, taxes appear to be at the heart of the matter. Depardieu has waged a battle against a proposed super tax on millionaires in his native country.

French President Francois Hollande plans to raise the tax on earned income above €1 million ($ 1.3 million) to 75 percent from the current 41 percent, while Russia has a flat 13-percent tax rate.

A representative for the former Oscar nominee declined to say whether he had accepted the Russian offer.

Thursday was a holiday in Russia and officials from the Federal Tax Service and Federal Migration Service could not be reached for comment on whether the decision would require Depardieu to have a residence in Russia.

But it’s clearly an image buffer for Russia, calling attention to the country’s attractive tax regime and boosting Putin’s efforts to show that the economic chaos of the early post-Soviet period has passed.

“The distinctiveness of our tax system is poorly known about in the West. When they know about it, we can expect a massive migration of rich Europeans to Russia,” Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin bragged on Twitter.

Others aren’t so sure.

Political analyst Pavel Svyatenkov told the state news agency RIA Novosti that the move was “very good, very high-quality PR for Russia” but he was didn’t think it would ignite a flood of new residents.

“I don’t expect a massive movement of rich people to here, for the reason that Russia remains a pretty poor country by Western measurements and here there are bigger problems with crime and corruption,” he said.

As Depardieu’s criticism of the proposed tax roiled his country, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called him “pathetic.”

Depardieu responded angrily in an open letter.

“I have never killed anyone, I don’t think I’ve been unworthy, I’ve paid €145 million ($ 190 million) in taxes over 45 years,” the 64-year-old actor wrote. “I will neither complain nor brag, but I refuse to be called ‘pathetic’.”

Depardieu said in the letter that he would surrender his passport and French social security card. In October, the mayor of a small Belgian border town announced that Depardieu had bought a house and set up legal residence there, a move that was slammed by Hollande’s newly-elected Socialist government.

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the French government spokeswoman, didn’t comment directly on Depardieu’s tax fight. But she drew a clear distinction between people who have personal or professional reasons to live abroad and “French citizens who proclaim loudly and clearly that they they’re exiling themselves for fiscal reasons.”

She said Putin’s offer “is an exclusive prerogative of the Russian chief of state.”

Depardieu has had increasingly high-profile ties with Russia.

Last October he visited Grozny, the capital of the Russian province of Chechnya, to celebrate the birthday of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. And in 2011, he was in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region to play the lead role in the film “Rasputin.”

He is well known in the country, where he appears in an ad for Sovietsky Bank’s credit card and is prominently featured on the bank’s home page.

“You have to understand that Depardieu is a star in Russia,” Vladimir Fedorovski, a Russian writer living in France, told the Europe 1 network on Thursday. “There are crowds around Depardieu. He’s a symbol of France. He’s a huge ambassador of French culture.”

Depardieu has made more than 150 films and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Cyrano de Bergerac in the 1990 film of the same name.

The Kremlin statement gave no information on why Putin made the citizenship grant, but the Russian president had expressed sympathy with the actor in December, days after Depardieu reportedly said he was considering Russian citizenship.

“As we say, artists are easily offended and therefore I understand the feelings of Mr. Depardieu,” Putin said.

Although France’s highest court struck down the new tax on Dec. 29, the government has promised to resubmit the law in a slightly different form. On Wednesday, the French government estimated the court decision to overturn the tax would cost the country €210 million ($ 275 million) in 2013.

In an interview, Depardieu told the Sunday Parisien the court decision made no difference.

France’s debt burden is around 90 percent of national income — not far off levels that have caused problems elsewhere in the 17-country eurozone.

Depardieu is not the only high-profile Frenchman to object to the super tax. Bernard Arnault — chief of the luxury goods and fashion giant LVMH and worth an estimated $ 41 billion — has said he would leave for Belgium.

____

Hinnant contributed from Paris. Silvie Corbet also contributed from Paris.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Question Mark: Why Am I Getting Shorter With Age?

Sal DiMarco Jr. for The New York Times

The upward trajectory of youth starts falling for most people after 40. In a file photo, a Macungie, Pa., middle school nurse, Linda Duffy, measures a student.

Relax. You’ve been through this before.

Back when you were a baby baby boomer, your doctor probably laid you down every few months and measured your height.

Then came the big day: you toddled into the doctor’s office on your own two feet and instead of lying down to be measured, you stood up. And the odds are that when the doctor jotted down your height, it seemed to suggest that you had shrunk since the last visit.

The truth, of course, was that you weren’t really shrinking. When you were measured standing up, gravity compressed your spine. In follow-up visits, you quickly made up for lost ground, your height milestones rising on the doctor’s chart much as they may have in pencil markings on a kitchen wall.

Decades later, pretty much the same thing is probably happening to you right now, with two minor differences: you actually are shrinking. And you are not likely to get that height back.

Starting at about age 40, people tend to lose about four-tenths of an inch of height every decade, said Dr. David B. Reuben, chief of geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at U.C.L.A. Some of the height loss occurs as part of the normal aging process, and some because of disease. Our old friend gravity, bane of the first vertical height measurement, also plays a role. “It’s a Newton thing,” said Dr. Reuben, a past president of the American Geriatrics Society.

As we age, the disks between the vertebrae of the spine, sometimes described as gel-like cushions, dry out and become thinner, with the result that the spine becomes compressed. The bone loss known as osteoporosis can also contribute. People who have the condition may sustain small compression fractures in the spine, often without their knowledge. “The best way to think about those is if you step on a soda can and the soda can just kind of crumples,” Dr. Reuben said.

The fractures can lead to excessive curving of the spine, which can be seen in many people as they age. When it is very pronounced, it is considered hyperkyphosis, sometimes known as dowager’s hump. Hyperkyphosis, however, can occur even in the absence of fractures, often as a result of a loss of muscle tone, especially in core muscles like the abdominals. Even the flattening of the arches of the feet that comes with time can contribute to a loss of height.

There is not much to be done about many of these changes, but people who exercise, strengthening their core, may retain or gain height through better posture. And some research, while not definitive, has offered promising evidence that yoga may even help reverse the curving of the spine. If the yoga is begun at an earlier age, it may be possible to prevent the condition altogether, though more research would need to be done to establish this.

Making sure to get enough calcium and vitamin D can help, Dr. Reuben said, and there are medications used to prevent the fractures caused by osteoporosis.

Of course, if sit-ups or downward dogs are not your style, there are two simple tricks to being taller. Check your height in the morning, when it is at its maximum. Or ask your doctor to measure you lying down.

Questions about aging? E-mail boomerwhy@nytimes.com

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DealBook: Hormel to Buy Skippy Peanut Butter

3:12 p.m. | Updated

The Hormel Foods Corporation, the producer of canned and cured meats and Spam, said on Thursday that it had agreed to buy the Skippy peanut butter business from Unilever for $700 million in cash.

The acquisition adds to the company’s growing stable of foods that do not contain any meats, which include Wholly Guacamole and a wide variety of Mexican foods and several of its Country Crock side dishes.

“We’re still very enthusiast about our meat portofolio, but we have been making a very deliberate effort to become a bigger player in general packaged foods,” Jeffrey M. Ettinger, chief executive of Hormel, said in a brief telephone interview.

Many of the company’s acquisitions reflect an effort to appeal to the growing ethnic diversity of American consumers, as well as their increasing awareness of the role that food plays in health. Mr. Ettinger noted, for instance, peanut butter’s high protein content as one attraction in the acquisition.

Unilever, the British-Dutch food and consumer products giant, announced in October that it was considering selling Skippy, the No. 2 peanut butter brand in the United States, behind J.M. Smucker’s Jif. Skippy has annual sales of roughly $370 million, with $100 million of that coming from outside the United States.

One attraction for Hormel is that Skippy is the leading brand in China, where peanut butter is in a relatively small number of households, but is growing rapidly. Skippy sales in China account for between $30 million to $40 million of the $100 million in international sales.

“Outside the U.S., peanut butter is a growth story,” Mr. Ettinger said. “Skippy has a good franchise in Canada, it’s growing in Mexico, and we really see opportunity in Asia.”

Skippy is the biggest acquisition by Hormel, known primarily for its meats business. Nonfrozen grocery products account for 14 percent of its annual revenue, according to Thomson Reuters data. Its brands include Chi-Chi’s, Dinty Moore, El Torito and perhaps its best known, Spam.

The last big purchase by Hormel, based in Austin, Minn., was its $334 million acquisition of the Turkey Store Company in 2001, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ data. The company said it expected that the Skippy acquisition would add 13 to 17 cents to earnings per share in its 2014 fiscal year.

In August 2011, MegaMex Foods LLC, a joint venture between Hormel and Herdez Del Fuerte, acquired Fresherized Foods, the maker of Wholly Guacamole and Wholly Salsa products. The company did not disclose the amount spent on this acquisition.

Monday’s acquisition includes Unilever’s Skippy production plants in Little Rock, Ark., and in Weifang, China. “It will be our third facility in China producing on a daily basis,” Mr. Ettinger said.

He said he had been hearing all morning about different combinations of peanut butter, ranging from peanut butter and pickles to peanut butter and bananas and peanut butter and bacon, a favorite of a former Hormel chief executive.

“I’m kind of a traditionalist, I guess, because I like to have peanut butter – and it’s Skippy, actually – several mornings a week on a toasted English muffin,” Mr. Ettinger said.

Shares of Hormel were up more than 3 percent in late afternoon trading, at $33.10.

Skippy was first sold by the Rosefield Packing Company of Alameda, Calif., in 1933, according to a corporate Web site. Chunky peanut butter was introduced the same year. (One fun fact: It takes 772 peanuts to make a single 16.3-ounce jar of Skippy.)

Unilever has a huge portfolio of food and household goods brands, including Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Dove soap and Lipton and PG Tips teas. It has shed brands in North America and Europe to focus on faster-growing emerging markets, which now account for more than half the conglomerate’s sales.

Barclays is advising Hormel Foods. Lazard and the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore advised Unilever.

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White House eases path to residency for some illegal immigrants

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration eased the way Wednesday for illegal immigrants who are immediate relatives of American citizens to apply for permanent residency, a change that could affect as many as 1 million of the estimated 11 million immigrants unlawfully in the U.S.

A new rule issued by the Department of Homeland Security aims to reduce the time illegal immigrants are separated from their American families while seeking legal status, immigration officials said.

Beginning March 4, when the changes go into effect, illegal immigrants who can demonstrate that time apart from an American spouse, child or parent would create “extreme hardship,” can start the application process for a legal visa without leaving the U.S. 

Once approved, applicants would be required to leave the U.S. briefly in order to return to their native country and pick up their visa.

PHOTOS: Notable moments of the 2012 presidential election

The change is the latest move by the administration to use its executive powers to revise immigration procedures without Congress passing a law. In August, the Obama administration launched a program to halt the deportation of young people brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children.

The new procedures could reduce a family's time apart to one week in some cases, officials said. In recent years a few relatives of U.S. citizens have been killed in foreign countries while waiting for their applications to be resolved.

“The law is designed to avoid extreme hardship to U.S. citizens, which is precisely what this rule achieves,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in a statement. “The change will have a significant impact on American families by greatly reducing the time family members are separated from those they rely upon,” he said.

Until now, many immigrants who might seek legal status do not pursue it out of fear they will not receive a "hardship waiver" of strict U.S. immigration laws: An illegal immigrant who has overstayed a visa for more than six months is barred from reentering the U.S. for three years; those who overstay more than a year are barred for 10 years.

The new rule allows those relatives to apply for the waiver without first leaving the U.S.

PHOTOS: Scenes from the 'fiscal cliff'

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6 States Bar Employers From Demanding Facebook Passwords

California and Illinois on Tuesday joined four others in becoming the union’s only states barring employers from demanding that employees fork over their social-media passwords.

Congress unsurprisingly couldn’t muster the wherewithal to approve the Password Protection Act of 2012, so a handful of states have taken it upon themselves.

The new laws come amid reports nationwide that employers were demanding access to their employees’ or potential employees’ personal, non-public data on Facebook, Twitter and other social-media accounts.

Facebook, too, said in March that it noticed an increase in complaints about employers demanding “inappropriate access” to Facebook accounts.

California’s and Illinois’ laws took force Tuesday, the first day of the year. Michigan’s and New Jersey’s became active last month and Maryland’s, in October. Delaware’s measure became law in July.

California Assemblywoman Nora Campos, a Democrat from San Jose, said when the Golden State’s measure unanimously passed the California Assembly in May, that AB 1844 would protect Californians from snooping employers.

“Our social-media accounts offer views into our personal lives and expose information that would be inappropriate to discuss during a job interview due to the inherent risk of creating biases in the minds of employers,” Campos said. “In order to continue to minimize the threat of bias and discrimination in the workplace and the hiring process, California must continue to evolve its privacy protections to keep pace with advancing technology.”

None of the measures prohibit employers from reviewing what their employees or potential hires publicly post to social-media accounts.

Homepage Photo: SimonQ / Flickr

David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.

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A Minute With: Singer Trey Songz on new movie “Texas Chainsaw 3D”

LOS ANGELES, January2 (Reuters) – R&B and hip-hop artists have appeared in horror films before, but 28-year old singer Trey Songz tackles a brand new incarnation of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise with “Texas Chainsaw 3D.”

The film, which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, follows a young woman who inherits a lavish, isolated mansion. When she visits it for the first time with her three friends, one of whom is played by Songz, they realize there is horror awaiting them in the basement.

Songz, a Grammy-nominated artist with hits like “Say Aah,” “Can’t Be Friends” and “Bottoms Up,” took a break from his world tour to talk to Reuters about his first movie role as a lead actor.

Q: Is acting something you’ve had your eye on?

A: “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but music comes first. I wanted to make sure when I did choose a role, I had time to really get in to it. (Director) John (Luessenhop) came to the studio to meet me for the first time and I told him to give me 24 hours to figure it out. I had just come off tour, I was recording an album and the four weeks I was set to have for vacation would be the four weeks I’d be shooting the film.”

Q: What did you think about during that 24-hour period?

A: “Making sure I wouldn’t be carrying the weight of the film. My name means so much in the music world that I was worried I’d have to carry the film, but I think the franchise carries the weight of the film. Luckily, (my character) Ryan is a likeable guy. There wasn’t too much stress on me mentally and it didn’t take too much away from me as a person in order to be him … I couldn’t ask for a better stepping-stone as a first-time actor.”

Q: You’ve stated that you are the first black actor in the “Texas Chainsaw” franchise. What does that mean to you?

A: “I think it means something not only to me, but to the franchise. Ryan was originally envisioned as a white male. The fact that the studio, the producers and the director went out on a limb and put a black man in such a strong part in a classic movie first made in the 70s, when things were so different, speaks volumes too.”

Q: Your single “Heart Attack,” off your fifth and current album “Chapter V,” was nominated for a best R&B song Grammy, making it your third nomination. What would a win mean?

A: “Right now I feel like I’m in the Grammy club, but not in the V.I.P. I’m just looking at the V.I.P. going, ‘I got to drink. I want a bottle, just let me in the V.I.P. please!’ But all jokes aside, the Grammy is the most elite award you can win as a musician so it would mean so much.”

Q: You moved around a lot as child, partly because you had a stepfather who worked in the military and partly because of your mother’s work opportunities. What was that like?

A: “When you’re a young, single mother, you’re dependent on welfare. Your mother is struggling and we would move around a lot – Virginia, Florida, Kansas, New Jersey, Baltimore … I went to eight different schools before ninth grade.”

Q: How does that impact you today?

A: “I’ve never really been settled. I don’t think I’ve ever known what it was like to be a person that was used to sitting still. I think it’s given me the ability to detach from any situation. It’s so easy to remove myself from the closest of situations just because I’ve had to do it my whole life.”

Q: Do you ever want to know what it feels like to be settled?

A: “I do. I don’t know when it will happen. I don’t even know how to. When I sit still for a couple of days, I get fidgety. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Q: I suppose acting is another way to keep yourself from sitting still. Will there be more acting in store for you?

A: “I’ve set a goal for myself to land a couple of films a year. Recently, I shot a movie starring Paula Patton entitled ‘Baggage Claim.” It’s an urban film where I get to be comedic as well as sexy.”

Q: Comedic and sexy – it’s great that you see yourself that way. What confidence!

A: Some things just are what they are!

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Jackie Frank)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Employers Must Offer Family Health Care, Affordable or Not, Administration Says

WASHINGTON — In a long-awaited interpretation of the new health care law, the Obama administration said Monday that employers must offer health insurance to employees and their children, but will not be subject to any penalties if family coverage is unaffordable to workers.

The requirement for employers to provide health benefits to employees is a cornerstone of the new law, but the new rules proposed by the Internal Revenue Service said that employers’ obligation was to provide affordable insurance to cover their full-time employees. The rules offer no guarantee of affordable insurance for a worker’s children or spouse. To avoid a possible tax penalty, the government said, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer affordable coverage to those employees. But, it said, the meaning of “affordable” depends entirely on the cost of individual coverage for the employee, what the worker would pay for “self-only coverage.”

The new rules, to be published in the Federal Register, create a strong incentive for employers to put money into insurance for their employees rather than dependents. It is unclear whether the spouse and children of an employee will be able to obtain federal subsidies to help them buy coverage — separate from the employee — through insurance exchanges being established in every state. The administration explicitly reserved judgment on that question, which could affect millions of people in families with low and moderate incomes.

Many employers provide family coverage to full-time employees, but many do not. Family coverage is much more expensive, and the employee’s share of the premium is typically much larger.

In 2012, according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance averaged $5,615 a year for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage. The employee’s share of the premium averaged $951 for individual coverage and more than four times as much, $4,316, for family coverage.

Starting in 2014, most Americans will be required to have health insurance. Low- and middle-income people can get tax credits to help pay their premiums, unless they have access to affordable coverage from an employer.

In its proposal, the Internal Revenue Service said, “Coverage for an employee under an employer-sponsored plan is affordable if the employee’s required contribution for self-only coverage does not exceed 9.5 percent of the employee’s household income.”

The rules, though labeled a proposal, are more significant than most proposed regulations. The Internal Revenue Service said employers could rely on them in making plans for 2014.

In writing the law, members of Congress often conjured up a picture of employees working year-round at full-time jobs. But in drafting the rules, the I.R.S. wrestled with the complex reality of part-time, seasonal and temporary workers.

In addition, the administration expressed concern that some employers might try to evade the new requirements by firing and rehiring employees, manipulating their work hours or using temporary staffing agencies. The rules include several provisions to prevent such abuse.

The law says an employer with 50 or more full-time employees may be subject to a tax penalty if it fails to offer coverage to “its full-time employees (and their dependents).”

Employers asked for guidance, and the Obama administration provided it, saying that a dependent is an employee’s child under the age of 26.

“Dependent does not include the spouse of an employee,” the proposed rules say.

Thus, employers must offer coverage to children of an employee, but do not have to make it affordable. And they do not have to offer coverage at all to the spouse of an employee.

The administration said that the rules — which apply to private businesses, nonprofit organizations and state and local government agencies — would require changes at many work sites.

“A number of employers currently offer coverage only to their employees, and not to dependents,” the I.R.S. said. “For these employers, expanding their health plans to add dependent coverage will require substantial revisions to their plans.”

In view of this challenge, the agency said it would grant a one-time reprieve to employers who fail to offer coverage to dependents of full-time employees, provided they take steps in 2014 to come into compliance. Under the rules, employers must offer coverage to employees in 2014 and must offer coverage to dependents as well, starting in 2015.

The new rules apply to employers that have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees. A full-time employee is a person employed on average at least 30 hours a week. And 100 half-time employees are considered equivalent to 50 full-time employees.

Thus, the government said, an employer will be subject to the new requirement if it has 40 full-time employees working 30 hours a week and 20 half-time employees working 15 hours a week.

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Markets Jump on Fiscal Deal

Global stocks kicked off the 2013 trading year with a strong start Wednesday, as investors welcomed a deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans that ended, at least temporarily, an impasse over fiscal policy that had threatened chaos in the new year.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times

People watch traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. Global stocks kicked off the year with a strong start.

The broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index leapt 2.1 percent in late trading. The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 2 percent, or about 260 points, and the Nasdaq composite index climbed 2.7 percent.

The deadline drama over the fiscal impasse ended when a sufficient number of Republicans in the House of Representatives joined Democrats to back a deal the Senate had reached earlier. The deal modestly raises income taxes on the highest-earning Americans, ends payroll tax cuts and creates permanent tax cuts for others.

“There’s clearly a big relief rally,” said Christian Schulz, an economist in London with Berenberg Bank.

The Euro Stoxx 50 index of euro zone blue chips ended 2.4 percent higher, while the FTSE 100 index in London gained 2.1 percent. The euro gained 0.6 percent to $1.3270, and yields fell on Spanish and Italian government bonds.

Asian indexes also gained, with the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong rising 2.9 percent. But markets in Japan and mainland China were closed for holidays.

Still, analysts warned that the gains might not last, as the last-minute deal had only bought time.

The deal “is likely to prove only a temporary fix to address fiscal uncertainty in the U.S.,” Lee Hardman, an analyst at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in London, wrote in a research note, pointing out that “the planned sequester government spending cuts merely delayed for two months.”

Investors, he added, probably will begin to focus on “whether U.S. politicians will be able to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months to avert a technical default, and whether the delayed sequester spending cuts will now come into force on March 1.”

Mr. Schultz noted that the United States hit the debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion, or 104 percent of 2012 gross domestic product, on Dec. 31, and could it exceed it as soon as February without Congressional action.

There are also questions about how America’s new commitment to cutting the deficit will affect the economy and its credit ratings.

“The austerity they’ve imposed is very modest,” Mr. Schultz said, “perhaps 1 percent of G.D.P. So maybe the most interesting thing will be to see how the ratings agencies react.”

Analysts at DBS in Singapore wrote in a research note: “Call it breathing room, call it kicking the can down the road, call it whatever you like — come mid-February, when the decision on the legal U.S. debt limit will be needed, the fight starts afresh.”

They added, “Two more months of shenanigans and waffling/seasick markets? It certainly looks that way.”

In economic reports, the Institute for Supply Management said manufacturing in the United States expanded slightly in December. Its manufacturing activity index rose to 50.7 points in December, up from 49.5 in November.

In Europe, manufacturing activity remained in the doldrums. Surveys of purchasing managers by Markit Economics showed euro zone factories ended 2012 in poor shape, with both production and new orders declining in December. German factories posted declines in both output and new orders, according to the Markit data, while the Spanish manufacturing shrank a 20th consecutive month, with both the decline and the pace of job cuts accelerating.

David Jolly reported from Paris. Bettina Wassener reported from Hong Kong.

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Ruling over bumper-car injury supports amusement park

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court, protecting providers of risky recreational activities from lawsuits, decided Monday that bumper car riders may not sue amusement parks over injuries stemming from the inherent nature of the attraction.

The 6-1 decision may be cited to curb liability for a wide variety of activities — such as jet skiing, ice skating and even participating in a fitness class, lawyers in the case said.

"This is a victory for anyone who likes fun and risk activities," said Jeffrey M. Lenkov, an attorney for Great America, which won the case.

But Mark D. Rosenberg, who represented a woman injured in a bumper car at the Bay Area amusement park, said the decision was bad for consumers.

"Patrons are less safe today than they were yesterday," Rosenberg said.

The ruling came in a lawsuit by Smriti Nalwa, who fractured her wrist in 2005 while riding in a bumper car with her 9-year-old son and being involved in a head-on collision. Rosenberg said Great America had told ride operators not to allow head-on collisions, but failed to ask patrons to avoid them.

The court said Nalwa's injury was caused by a collision with another bumper car, a normal part of the ride. To reduce all risk of injury, the ride would have to be scrapped or completely reconfigured, the court said.

"A small degree of risk inevitably accompanies the thrill of speeding through curves and loops, defying gravity or, in bumper cars, engaging in the mock violence of low-speed collisions," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote for the majority. "Those who voluntarily join in these activities also voluntarily take on their minor inherent risks."

Monday's decision extended a legal doctrine that has limited liability for risky sports, such as football, to now include recreational activities.

"Where the doctrine applies to a recreational activity," Werdegar wrote, "operators, instructors and participants …owe other participants only the duty not to act so as to increase the risk of injury over that inherent in the activity."

Amusement parks will continue to be required to use the utmost care on thrill rides such as roller coasters, where riders surrender control to the operator. But on attractions where riders have some control, the parks can be held liable only if their conduct unreasonably raised the dangers.

"Low-speed collisions between the padded, independently operated cars are inherent in — are the whole point of — a bumper car ride," Werdegar wrote.

Parks that fail to provide routine safety measures such as seat belts, adequate bumpers and speed controls might be held liable for an injury, but operators should not be expected to restrict where a bumper car is bumped, the court said.

The justices noted that the state inspected the Great America rides annually, and the maintenance and safety staff checked on the bumper cars the day Nalwa broke her wrist. The ride was functioning normally.

Reports showed that bumper car riders at the park suffered 55 injuries — including bruises, cuts, scrapes and strains — in 2004 and 2005, but Nalwa's injury was the only fracture. Nalwa said her wrist snapped when she tried to brace herself by putting her hand on the dashboard.

Rosenberg said the injury stemmed from the head-on collision. He said the company had configured bumper rides in other parks to avoid such collisions and made the Santa Clara ride uni-directional after the lawsuit was filed.

Justice Joyce L. Kennard dissented, complaining that the decision would saddle trial judges "with the unenviable task of determining the risks of harm that are inherent in a particular recreational activity."

"Whether the plaintiff knowingly assumed the risk of injury no longer matters," Kennard said.

maura.dolan@latimes.com

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