Current Events

Volkswagen is on the verge of pleading guilty to criminal charges and paying $4.3 billion in fines, in a deal that would resolve a federal criminal investigation into its cheating on vehicle emissions tests, the automaker said on Tuesday.

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Drivers like Norma Caplan of Boynton Beach are growing impatient that dealers say they still do not have enough replacement parts to fix recalled Takata airbags as 2017 gets underway.

“Get it done,” Caplan urged Monday. “To be injured or killed by flying metal pieces is terrible. They’re supposed to protect you.”

Abbott Laboratories (ABT.N) moved to protect patients with its St. Jude heart implants against possible cyber attacks, releasing a software patch on Monday that the firm said will reduce the "extremely low" chance of them being hacked.

The F.B.I. has arrested a Volkswagen executive in Florida, accusing him of playing a central role in a broad conspiracy to keep United States regulators from discovering that diesel vehicles made by the company were programmed to cheat on emissions tests.

By David Shepardson and Joel Schectman | WASHINGTON

Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) and the U.S. Justice Department are nearing an agreement to resolve the government's civil and criminal investigations that would require the German automaker to pay a penalty of more than $3 billion, sources briefed on the talks said on Friday.

The agreement is not final and could top $4 billion or fall apart but a deal could be announced as early as next week, said the sources on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential.
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By ADAM GOLDMAN and HIROKO TABUCHI

JANUARY 9, 2017

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a Volkswagen executive who faces charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, two people with knowledge of the arrest said on Sunday, marking an escalation of the criminal investigation into the automaker’s diesel emissions cheating scandal.

Oliver Schmidt, who led Volkswagen’s regulatory compliance office in the United States from 2014 to March 2015, was arrested on Saturday by investigators in Florida and is expected to be arraigned on Monday in Detroit, said the two people, a law enforcement official and someone familiar with the case.

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By Dena Aubin

Insurance giant American International Group has been hit with a racketeering lawsuit accusing it of unlawfully charging successful personal injury and workers' compensation claimants thousands of dollars in undisclosed brokers' commissions.

By Dena Aubin

Insurance giant American International Group has been hit with a racketeering lawsuit accusing it of unlawfully charging successful personal injury and workers' compensation claimants thousands of dollars in undisclosed brokers' commissions.

Filed on Tuesday in Boston federal court, the proposed class action said AIG has reaped millions of dollars of improper profits through an alleged scheme involving so-called structured settlement annuities.

To read the full story on Westlaw Practitioner Insights, Read more . . .

A Long Island Rail Road train that crashed in Brooklyn on Wednesday was going more than twice the speed limit when it slammed into a train station, injuring more than 100 people, federal investigators said on Thursday.

The train was traveling at more than 10 miles per hour when it hit the end of the tracks at Atlantic Terminal, where the speed limit is 5 m.p.h., said Ted Turpin, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.
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Mercedes-Benz is recalling nearly 48,000 GLE models from 2016 and 2017 to address a software flaw that could prevent the crossover's airbags from working as intended. The problem is rooted in the GLE's occupant classification system (OCS), which determines whether or not an adult is seated in the front passenger's seat and turns the associated airbags on or off, accordingly.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that the OCS software on some GLE models may not have been properly calibrated, and as a result, it may mistakenly identify an adult passenger as a child, disabling the front passenger airbags. Should that happen, the airbags wouldn't deploy during a collision, increasing the risk of injury to anyone riding in the front passenger's seat.

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Federal investigators are trying to determine why a rush-hour Long Island Rail Road train crashed through a barrier at the end of the tracks at the Brooklyn terminal Wednesday, injuring more than 100 people.

At a news briefing at Atlantic Terminal on Wednesday night, lead investigator Jim Southworth said National Transportation Safety Board officials planned to interview the train’s three-member crew, including the engineer, who was treated for minor injuries.

NTSB investigators also on Wednesday retrieved the train’s event recorder, which should provide data on the train’s performance, including its speed and whether brakes were applied. The information could then be compared with video of the train pulling into the station.

“I take that data and we look at it very closely and make determinations about its accuracy,” Southworth said.
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New Technology to Reduce Many Types of Crashes

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed new safety regulations that got very little coverage; perhaps because the proposed rule came out on December 13th just before the yearend holidays. These regulations would use a new technology – vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) radio communications – that would allow vehicles to automatically send vehicle sensor data – the vehicle’s speed, heading, brake status and other information – to other vehicles to alert drivers to potential crash situations.

This is interesting technology that could impact the speed with which autonomous vehicles become viable. That is because the chief impediment to the viability of autonomous vehicles are fears that they are not safe enough.

There are already advanced crash avoidance technologies available that employ on-board sensor technologies - such as vehicle camera systems, RADAR, and LIDAR - to monitor a vehicles’ surroundings.