Current Events

GM has now recalled nearly 7 million vehicles worldwide this year as it seeks to more aggressively respond to safety issues. GM’s recall related to the ignition-switch defects now totals 2.59 million cars.

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WASHINGTON — Congressional investigators began poring over boxes of internal General Motors documents on Tuesday, seeking to understand the decade-long failure by regulators and the company to act on reports of a defect in Chevrolet Cobalts and other cars. Also, two senators introduced legislation on Tuesday intended to help identify problems earlier.

Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, both Democrats, introduced a Senate bill that would make the auto companies give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration copies of insurance claims made against them and lawsuits about fatal crashes in which they were defendants. They would also have to provide copies of internal safety studies related to the car model involved. Mr. Markey, when he was a congressman, wrote similar legislation in 2010, which passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, but was not enacted.

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Efforts to conceal the extent of dangerous car defects at Toyota Motor Corp. were so pervasive, prosecutors say, that an exasperated employee at one point warned that “someone will go to jail if lies are repeatedly told.”

Yet no one has gone to jail, nor is likely to.

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Cadillac is recalling approximately 63,900 XTS sedans over an issue with the brake booster pump. The company believes that the brake booster pump can create positive pressure inside the wiring harness attached to the pump relay, and this pressure can dislodge a cavity plug in the relay and allow corrosive elements to enter the connector, creating a resistive short. Cadillac believes that this could lead to overheating and melting of plastic components, and may cause a fire in the engine compartment.

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Just the Facts:

• General Motors is recalling 355 vehicles, including the 2014 Buick Regal and Chevrolet Impala because a transmission shift cable adjuster problem could lead to a rollaway risk.
• Also included in the recall are the 2014 Buick LaCrosse, Verano and Enclave, 2014 Chevrolet Malibu, Cruze and Traverse and 2014 GMC Acadia.
• The recall is expected to begin in late March.

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Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general, talked in impassioned tones on Wednesday about Toyota’s behavior in hiding safety defects from the public, calling it “shameful” and a “blatant disregard” for the law. A $1.2 billion criminal penalty, the largest ever for a carmaker in the United States, was imposed.

Mr. Holder said the department’s four-year investigation of Toyota found that the company concealed information about defects from consumers and government officials, putting lives at risk because of faulty parts that caused sudden, unintended acceleration in several of its models.

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Some widely used over-the-counter cold and flu medicines may be exposing patients to unexpectedly high amounts of one ingredient, revealing a lapse in regulations and perhaps raising safety concerns, a company that develops such drugs reported on Wednesday.

The company, AFT Pharmaceuticals of New Zealand, said that when the nasal decongestant phenylephrine, or PE, was combined with the pain reliever acetaminophen, levels of PE in the blood were two to four times as high as when the same dose of PE was taken alone.

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Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY) and Sanofi were accused in a lawsuit by Hawaii of failing to disclose that the blood-thinning drug Plavix has little effect on 30 percent of the population and puts patients at risk for gastrointestinal bleeding.

From 38 percent to 79 percent of Pacific-Islanders and 40 percent to 50 percent of East Asians may respond poorly to Plavix because of a genetic predisposition to inadequately metabolize the drug, Hawaii Attorney General David Louie said in an e-mailed statement. The companies failed to disclose the information to protect their profit from Plavix prescriptions, he said in a complaint today in state court in Honolulu.

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It was a moment unlike any other at General Motors: the top executive stepping — personally and publicly — into the middle of one of the gravest safety problems in the company’s history.

But there was Mary T. Barra on Tuesday, barely two months into her job as chief executive, pledging to fix faulty ignition switches linked to 12 deaths and to explain why the automaker failed for 10 years to correct a problem it knew existed.

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Investigators Tuesday said they discovered a crack in the gas main outside the two buildings destroyed by last week's deadly explosion in East Harlem, an indication that a failure in the main caused the catastrophe.

In a carefully worded statement, the National Transportation Safety Board said the 8-inch cast iron and plastic main under the street "failed the pressure test," which showed that the low-pressure pipe had a leak "adjacent to" 1646 Park Ave., one of the destroyed buildings.

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A raft of lawsuits by more than 75 Apollo area residents claiming they contracted cancer from a neighboring nuclear fuel factory's plumes of radioactive uranium dust continues to move toward jury trials, with a new deadline in the case this week.

On Wednesday, the alleged victims' lawyers will continue fighting to have jurors -- if and when the individual cases reach trial -- to hear the expert testimony of Steve Wing. Mr. Wing, a radiation safety officer with a doctorate in physics and radiological sciences, has previously told the courts that both the Apollo uranium-processing facility and its fellow Parks plutonium factory founded by Nuclear Materials and Equipment Co., and later owned by Babcock & Wilcox Power Generation Group and Atlantic Richfield Co., "regularly emitted large amounts of radioactive material into the environment through airborne stack emissions, unfiltered stack emissions, ventilation problems" and other handling mistakes and that "these releases regularly and consistently exceeded federal regulatory limits," according to court documents.

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