Federal authorities are investigating if General Motors failed to
disclose in its bankruptcy filing the defects that led to the recent
recall of 1.6 million cars.
品質眾生相 (243):Justice Department announces $1.2 billion settlement with Toyota
FoxNews.com
Toyota has reached a $1.2 billion settlement with the U.S.
government that ends a four-year criminal investigation into the
automaker’s response to safety issues, Attorney General Eric Holder
announced Wednesday.
Under the agreement, the company will admit that it misled U.S.
consumers by making deceptive statements about two safety issues
affecting its vehicles. As a result, Toyota will pay a $1.2 billion
financial penalty under a "deferred prosecution agreement."
Holder called Toyota's conduct in the matter "shameful," and said
that the automaker showed "a blatant disregard for systems and laws
designed to look after the safety of consumers. By the company's own
admission, it protected its brand ahead of its own customers. This
constitutes a clear and reprehensible abuse of the public trust."
The settlement represents the largest penalty of its kind imposed on an automotive company by the U.S.
Holder added that “other car makers should not make Toyota’s
mistake,” while U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York
Preet Bharara underlined this point, saying that Toyota’s public
admissions should be a warning to other automakers.
In a statement early Wednesday, Toyota said it has "cooperated with
the U.S. Attorney's office in this matter for more than four years" and
had "made fundamental changes to become a more responsive and
customer-focused organization, and we are committed to continued
improvements."
The criminal investigation focused on whether Toyota was forthright
in reporting problems related to unintended acceleration troubles.
Starting in 2009, Toyota issued massive recalls, mostly in the U.S.,
totaling more than 10 million vehicles for various problems including
faulty brakes, gas pedals and floor mats. From 2010 through 2012, Toyota
Motor Corp. paid fines totaling more than $66 million for delays in
reporting unintended acceleration problems.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration never found
defects in electronics or software in Toyota cars, which had been
targeted as a possible cause.
The settlement continues a string of bad publicity for Toyota, which
before the unintended acceleration cases had a bulletproof image of
reliability. Since the cases surfaced, the company's brand image has
been damaged and it has lost U.S. market share as competition has
intensified.
Last year, Toyota agreed to pay more than $1 billion to resolve
hundreds of lawsuits claiming that owners of its cars suffered economic
losses because of the recalls. But that settlement did not include
wrongful death and injury lawsuits that have been consolidated in
California state and federal courts.
In December, Toyota filed court papers after a four-year legal battle
saying that it's in settlement talks on nearly 400 U.S. lawsuits, but
other cases aren't included in the talks.
The negotiations come less than two months after an Oklahoma jury
awarded $3 million in damages to the injured driver of a 2005 Camry and
to the family of a passenger who was killed.
The ruling was significant because Toyota had won all previous
unintended acceleration cases that went to trial. It was also the first
case where attorneys for plaintiffs argued that the car's electronics —
in this case the software connected to a midsize Camry's electronic
throttle-control system — were the cause of the unintended acceleration.
At the time, legal experts said the Oklahoma verdict might cause
Toyota to consider a broad settlement of the remaining cases. Until
then, Toyota had been riding momentum from several trials where juries
found it was not liable.
Toyota has blamed drivers, stuck accelerators or floor mats that
trapped the gas pedal for the acceleration claims that led to the big
recalls of Camrys and other vehicles. The company has repeatedly denied
its vehicles are flawed.
No recalls have been issued related to problems with onboard
electronics. In the Oklahoma case, Toyota attorneys theorized that the
driver mistakenly pumped the gas pedal instead of the brake when her
Camry ran through an intersection and slammed into an embankment.
But after the verdict, jurors told AP they believed the testimony of an expert who said he found flaws in the car's electronics.
Toyota also had to pay millions for recalls, as well as a series of
fines totaling $68 million to the NHTSA, the U.S. government's road
safety watchdog, for being slow to report acceleration problems.
Still, the payments won't hurt Toyota's finances very much. In its
last fiscal quarter alone, Toyota posted a $5.2 billion profit,
crediting a weak yen and strong global sales. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Series of Errors by Malaysia Mounts, Complicating the Task of Finding Flight 370
ByKEITH BRADSHER and MICHAEL FORSYTHEMarch 16, 2014
马来政府的系列错误使寻找航班任务愈加复杂
KEITH BRADSHER, MICHAEL FORSYTHE2014年03月16日
SEPANG, Malaysia
— The radar blip that was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 did a wide U-turn
over the Gulf of Thailand and then began moving inexorably past at
least three military radar arrays as it traversed northern Malaysia,
even flying high over one of the country’s biggest cities before heading
out over the Strait of Malacca.
Yet inside a
Malaysian Air Force control room on the country’s west coast, where
American-made F-18s and F-5 fighters stood at a high level of readiness
for emergencies exactly like the one unfolding in the early morning of
March 8, a four-person air defense radar crew did nothing about the
unauthorized flight. “The watch team never noticed the blip,” said a
person with detailed knowledge of the investigation into Flight 370. “It
was as though the airspace was his.”
然而，在马来西亚西海岸，一间马来西亚空
军(Malaysian Air
Force)的控制室内，一个四人组成的空防雷达工作组面对这次未经授权的飞行任务却无动于衷。在这里，美国制造的F-18和F-5战机处于高度警戒状
态，随时准备应对3月8日早上发生的这类紧急情况。“监控人员从没注意到这个雷达光点”，一个了解370航班调查工作详细进展的人说。“就好像这片领空是
属于他的。”
It was not the
first and certainly not the last in a long series of errors by the
Malaysian government that has made the geographically vast and
technologically complex task of finding the $50 million Malaysia
Airlines jet far more difficult.
A week after the
plane disappeared, the trail is even colder as the search now sprawls
from the snowy peaks of the Himalayas to the empty expanses of the
southern Indian Ocean. Nobody knows yet whether the delays cost the
lives of any of the 239 people who boarded the flight to Beijing at
Kuala Lumpur’s ultramodern airport here. But the mistakes have
accumulated at a remarkable pace.
“The fact that it
flew straight over Malaysia, without the Malaysian military identifying
it, is just plain weird — not just weird, but also very damning and
tragic,” said David Learmount, the operations and safety editor for Flightglobal, a news and data service for the aviation sector.
Senior Malaysian
military officers became aware within hours of the radar data once word
spread that a civilian airliner had vanished. The Malaysian government
nonetheless organized and oversaw an expensive and complex international
search effort in the Gulf of Thailand that lasted for a full week. Only
on Saturday morning did Prime Minister Najib Razak finally shut it down
after admitting what had already been widely reported in the news
media: Satellite data showed that the engines on the missing plane had
continued to run for nearly six more hours after it left Malaysian
airspace.
Finding the plane
and figuring out what happened to it is now a far more daunting task
than if the plane had been intercepted. If the aircraft ended up in the
southern Indian Ocean, as some aviation experts now suggest, then
floating debris could have subsequently drifted hundreds of miles,
making it extremely hard to figure out where the cockpit voice and data
recorders sank.
And because the
recorders keep only the last two hours of cockpit conversation, even the
aircraft’s recorders may hold few secrets.
并且由于记录器只能保留驾驶舱内最后两小时的对话，即使找到可能还是会有一些谜团无法解开 。
With so much
uncertainty about the flight, it is not yet possible to know whether any
actions by the Malaysian government or military could have altered its
fate. Responding to a storm of criticism, particularly from China, whose
citizens made up two-thirds of the passengers, Mr. Najib took pains in a
statement early Saturday afternoon to say that Malaysia had not
concealed information, including military data.
“We have shared
information in real time with authorities who have the necessary
experience to interpret the data,” he said, reading aloud a statement in
English at a news conference. “We have been working nonstop to assist
the investigation, and we have put our national security second to the
search for the missing plane.”
Malaysia Airlines
issued a similarly defensive statement late Saturday afternoon. “Given
the nature of the situation and its extreme sensitivity, it was critical
that the raw satellite signals were verified and analyzed by the
relevant authorities so that their significance could be properly
understood,” the airline said. “This naturally took some time, during
which we were unable to publicly confirm their existence.”
Aviation experts
said that a trained pilot would be the most obvious person to have
carried out a complicated scheme involving the plane. Yet for a week
after the plane’s disappearance, Malaysian law enforcement authorities
said that their investigation did not include searching the home of the
pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah.
航空专家说，最有可能利用这架飞机实施某种复杂阴谋的人，应该是一名训练有素的飞行员。然而在飞机消失后的一周，马来西亚执法机构仍然表示，他们的调查并没有包括对飞行员扎哈里·艾哈迈德·沙阿(Zaharie Ahmad Shah)住所的搜查。
On Saturday
afternoon, the police were seen entering the gated community where Mr.
Zaharie was said to have lived, and Malaysian news media reported that
they had searched his home. The police declined to comment, and it is
not known whether the authorities made any effort to secure Mr.
Zaharie’s home and prevent any destruction of evidence over the past
week.
Mr. Najib said on
Saturday that “the Malaysian authorities have refocused their
investigation into the crew and passengers on board,” but Mr. Zaharie
has not been accused of any wrongdoing. No information has been released
yet on whether the homes of the co-pilot or flight attendants might be
searched.
Even before the
plane took off, Malaysian immigration officials had already allowed onto
the plane at least two people using passports that had been logged into
a global database as stolen, although there is no evidence that either
person carrying a stolen passport was involved in diverting the plane.
A British Royal Air
Force base in the colonial era, the Malaysian air force base at
Butterworth sits on the mainland across from the island of Penang at the
northern reaches of the Strait of Malacca. There, in the early morning
hours of March 8, the four-person crew watching for intrusions into the
country’s airspace either did not notice or failed to report a blip on
their defensive radar and air traffic radar that was moving steadily
across the country from east to west, heading right toward them, said
the person with knowledge of the matter.
Neither that team
nor the crews at two other radar installations at Kota Bharu, closer to
where the airliner last had contact with the ground, designated the blip
as an unknown intruder warranting attention, the person said. The
aircraft proceeded to fly across the country and out to sea without
anyone on watch telling a superior and alerting the national defense
command near Kuala Lumpur, even though the radar contact’s flight path
did not correspond to any filed flight plan.
As a result, combat
aircraft never scrambled to investigate. The plane, identified at the
time by Mr. Najib as Flight 370, passed directly over Penang, a largely
urban state with more than 1.6 million people, then turned and headed
out over the Strait of Malacca.
The existence of
the radar contact was discovered only when military officials began
reviewing tapes later in the morning on March 8, after the passenger jet
failed to arrive in Beijing. It was already becoming clear that
morning, only hours after the unauthorized flyover, that something had
gone very wrong. Tapes from both the Butterworth and Kota Bharu bases
showed the radar contact arriving from the area of the last known
position of Flight 370, the person familiar with the investigation said.
Gen. Rodzali Daud,
the commander of Malaysia’s Air Force, publicly acknowledged the
existence of the radar signals for the first time on Wednesday, well
into the fifth day after the plane’s disappearance. He emphasized that
further analysis was necessary because the radar plots of the aircraft’s
location were stripped of the identifying information given by the
plane’s onboard transponders, which someone aboard the aircraft appeared
to have turned off.
The failure to
identify Flight 370’s errant course meant that a chance to send military
aircraft to identify and redirect the jet, a Boeing 777, was lost. And
for five days the crews on an armada of search vessels, including two
American warships, focused the bulk of their attention in the waters off
Malaysia’s east coast, far from the plane’s actual path.
General Rodzali
went to the Butterworth air force base the day that the plane
disappeared and was told of the radar blips, the person familiar with
the investigation said. The Malaysian government nonetheless assigned
most of its search and rescue resources, as well as ships and aircraft
offered by other nations, to a search of the Gulf of Thailand where the
aircraft’s satellite transponder was turned off, while allocating
minimal attention to the Strait of Malacca on the other, western side of
Peninsular Malaysia.
社長豐田章男表示，此事是促成豐田致力改革的轉捩點。歐新社
豐田針對暴衝瑕疵原因說謊，重創商譽。法新社
社長豐田章男表示，此事是促成豐田致力改革的轉捩點。歐新社
豐田針對暴衝瑕疵原因說謊，重創商譽。法新社
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