Takata pleads guilty in air bag scandal, agrees to pay $1B
Takata pleads guilty in air bag scandal, agrees to pay $1B
DETROIT (AP) — Japanese auto parts maker Takata Corp. pleaded guilty to fraud Monday and agreed to pay $1 billion in penalties for concealing an air bag defect blamed for at least 16 deaths, most of them in the U.S.
The scandal, meanwhile, seemed to grow wider when plaintiffs’ attorneys charged that five major automakers knew the devices were dangerous but continued to use them for years to save money.
In pleading guilty, Takata admitted hiding evidence that millions of its air bag inflators can explode with too much force, hurling lethal shrapnel into drivers and passengers.
The inflators are blamed for 11 deaths in the U.S. alone and more than 180 injuries worldwide. The problem touched off the biggest recall in U.S. automotive history, involving 42 million vehicles and up to 69 million inflators.
The company’s chief financial officer, Yoichiro Nomura, entered the guilty plea on Takata’s behalf in federal court in Detroit. He also agreed that Takata will be sold or merge with another company.
Neighbors riled as insular Hasidic village seeks to expand
KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y. (AP) — A quickly crowding Hasidic Jewish village that is working to expand its boundaries faces opposition from neighbors who fear more urban-style development by the insular community could overrun their slice of suburbia.
“It’s going to become like New York City, like the Bronx or Brooklyn,” said Michael Queenan, mayor of the neighboring village of Woodbury, about 50 miles north of New York City. “People moved up here because they wanted a different kind of lifestyle, they wanted a little elbow room.”
Kiryas Joel is a 1.1-square-mile village of nearly 22,000 markedly different from the surrounding suburban sprawl. Sidewalks are crowded with bearded men in heavy wool coats and brimmed hats. Women in long skirts push baby carriages into bustling stores where Yiddish is spoken. Schools teem with children. And streets are lined with one tightly packed apartment after another.
Followers of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum began coming here from Brooklyn in the 1970s, hoping to create the sort of cohesive community some recalled from Europe, with large families a big part of it. Under tradition, Kiryas Joel girls marry young and start having children immediately, fueling long-term population growth. While the average Kiryas Joel family has six people, it’s not uncommon to see couples with as many as 10 children. An average of three babies are born in the village each day.
“For us, family is part of faith. It’s not something we choose,” said Malka Silberstein, a principal of a girls’ school who settled here with her family 35 years ago.
Pressure on GOP to revamp health law grows, along with rifts
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump declared Monday that “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” Yet the opposite has long been painfully obvious for top congressional Republicans, who face mounting pressure to scrap the law even as problems grow longer and knottier.
With the GOP-controlled Congress starting its third month of work on one of its marquee priorities, unresolved difficulties include how their substitute would handle Medicaid, whether millions of voters might lose coverage, if their proposed tax credits would be adequate and how to pay for the costly exercise.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office made their job even dicier recently, giving House Republicans an informal analysis that their emerging plan would be more expensive than they hoped and cover fewer people than former President Barack Obama’s statute. The analysis was described by lobbyists speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with congressional aides.
For many in the party, those problems, while major, are outweighed by pledges they’ve made for years to repeal Obama’s 2010 law and substitute a GOP alternative. Conservatives favoring full repeal are pitted against more cautious moderates and governors looking to curb Medicaid’s costs also worry about constituents losing coverage. But Republicans see inaction as the worst alternative and leaders may plunge ahead as soon as next week with initial House committee votes on legislation.
“I believe they have left themselves no choice. Politically they must do something,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and health analyst, said Monday.
AP-NORC Poll: US teens disillusioned, divided by politics
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — In the days after President Donald Trump’s election, thousands of teenagers across the nation walked out of class in protest. Others rallied to his defense.
It was an unusual show of political engagement from future voters who may alter America’s political landscape in 2020 — or even in next year’s midterm elections.
Now, a new survey of children ages 13 to 17 conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research with the permission of their parents finds that America’s teens are almost as politically disillusioned and pessimistic about the nation’s divisions as their parents. The difference? They aren’t quite as quick to write off the future.
Eight in 10 feel that Americans are divided when it comes to the nation’s most important values and 6 in 10 say the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Nyles Adams, a 14-year-old from New York City, was in kindergarten when Barack Obama was sworn in as the nation’s first black president. Adams, the grandson of Trinidadian immigrants, remembers watching the inauguration on TV and talking with his mother about the particular significance of Obama’s election for his black, immigrant family.