Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/175505197?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
No cellphones, no texting by drivers, US urges (AP)
WASHINGTON ? Texting, emailing or chatting on a cellphone while driving is simply too dangerous to be allowed, federal safety investigators declared Tuesday, urging all states to impose total bans except for emergencies.
Inspired by recent deadly crashes ? including one in which a teenager sent or received 11 text messages in 11 minutes before an accident ? the recommendation would apply even to hands-free devices, a much stricter rule than any current state law.
The unanimous recommendation by the five-member National Transportation Safety Board would make an exception for devices deemed to aid driver safety such as GPS navigation systems.
A group representing state highway safety offices called the recommendation "a game-changer."
"States aren't ready to support a total ban yet, but this may start the discussion," Jonathan Adkins, a spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, said.
NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman acknowledged the recommendation would be unpopular with many people and that complying would involve changing what has become ingrained behavior for many Americans.
While the NTSB doesn't have the power to impose restrictions, its recommendations carry significant weight with federal regulators and congressional and state lawmakers. Another recommendation issued Tuesday urges states to aggressively enforce current bans on text messaging and the use of cellphones and other portable electronic devices while driving.
"We're not here to win a popularity contest," she said. "No email, no text, no update, no call is worth a human life."
Currently, 35 states and the District of Columbia ban texting while driving, while nine states and D.C. bar hand-held cellphone use. Thirty states ban all cellphone use for beginning drivers. But enforcement is generally not a high priority, and no states ban the use of hands-free devices for all drivers.
A total cellphone ban would be the hardest to accept for many people.
Leila Noelliste, 26, a Chicago blogger and business owner, said being able to talk on the cellphone "when I'm running around town" is important to self-employed people like herself.
"I don't think they should ban cellphones because I don't think you're really distracted when you're talking, it's when you're texting," she said. When you're driving and talking, "your eyes are still on the road."
The immediate impetus for the recommendation of state bans was a deadly highway pileup near Gray Summit, Mo., last year in which a 19-year-old pickup driver sent and received 11 texts in 11 minutes just before the accident.
NTSB investigators said they are seeing increasing texting, cellphone calls and other distracting behavior by drivers in accidents involving all kinds of transportation. It has become routine to immediately request the preservation of cellphone and texting records when an investigation is begun.
In the past few years the board has investigated a train collision in which the engineer was texting that killed 25 people in Chatsworth, Calif.; a fatal accident on the Delaware River near Philadelphia in which a tugboat pilot was talking on his cellphone and using a laptop computer, and a Northwest Airlines flight that sped more than 100 miles past its destination because both pilots were working on their laptops.
Last year, a driver was dialing his cellphone when his truck crossed a highway median near Munfordville, Ky., and collided with a 15-passenger van. Eleven people were killed.
The board said the initial collision in the Missouri accident was caused by the inattention of the pickup driver who was texting a friend about events of the previous night. The pickup, traveling at 55 mph, hit the back of a tractor truck that had slowed for highway construction. The pickup was rear-ended by a school bus that overrode the smaller vehicle. A second school bus rammed into the back of the first bus.
The pickup driver and a 15-year-old student on one of the buses were killed. Thirty-eight other people were injured. About 50 students, mostly members of a high school band from St. James, Mo., were on the buses heading to the Six Flags St. Louis amusement park.
Missouri had a law banning drivers under 21 years old from texting while driving at the time of the crash, but wasn't aggressively enforcing the ban, board member Robert Sumwalt said.
"Without the enforcement, the laws don't mean a whole lot," he said.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported earlier this year that pilot projects in Syracuse, N.Y., and Hartford, Conn., produced significant reductions in distracted driving by combining stepped-up ticketing with high-profile public education campaigns.
Before and after each enforcement wave, NHTSA researchers observed cellphone use by drivers and conducted surveys at drivers' license offices in the two cities. They found that in Syracuse, hand-held cellphone use and texting declined by a third. In Hartford, there was a 57 percent drop in hand-held phone use, and texting behind the wheel dropped by nearly three-quarters.
However, that was with blanket enforcement by police.
The board's decision to include hands-free cellphone use in its recommendation is likely to prove especially controversial. No states currently ban hand-free use although many studies show that it is often as unsafe as hand-held phone use because drivers' minds are on their conversations rather than what's happening on the road.
Hersman pointed to an Alexandria, Va., accident the board investigated in which a bus driver talking on a hands-free phone ran into a bridge despite his being familiar with the route and the presence of warning signs that the arch was too low for his bus to clear. The roof of the bus was sheared off.
The board has previously recommended bans on texting and cellphone use by commercial truck and bus drivers and beginning drivers, but it had stopped short of calling for a ban on the use of the devices by adults behind the wheel of passenger cars.
The problem of texting while driving is getting worse despite a rush by states to ban the practice, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said last week. In November, Pennsylvania became the 35th state to forbid texting while driving.
About two out of 10 American drivers overall ? and half of drivers between 21 and 24 ? say they've thumbed messages or emailed from the driver's seat, according to a survey of more than 6,000 drivers by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
However, the survey found that many drivers don't think it's dangerous when they do it ? only when others do.
At any given moment last year on America's streets and highways, nearly one in every 100 car drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the Web or otherwise using a hand-held electronic device, the safety administration said. Those activities were up 50 percent over the previous year.
Driver distraction wasn't the only significant safety problem uncovered by NTSB's investigation of the Missouri accident. Investigators said they believe the pickup driver was suffering from fatigue that may have eroded his judgment. He had an average of about five-and-a-half hours of sleep a night in the days leading up to the accident and had had fewer than five hours of sleep the night before the accident, they said.
The pickup driver had no history of accidents or traffic violations, investigators said.
Investigators also found significant problems with the brakes of both school buses involved in the accident. A third school bus sent to a hospital after the accident to pick up students crashed in the hospital parking lot when that bus' brakes failed.
However, the brake problems didn't cause or contribute to the severity of the accident, investigators said.
Another issue involved the difficulty passengers had getting out of the first school bus after the accident. Its doors were unusable and passengers had to exit through an emergency window. The raised latch on the window kept catching on clothing as students tried to escape, investigators said. Escape was further slowed because the window design required one person to hold the window up in order for a second person to crawl through, they said.
It was critical for passengers to leave as quickly as possible because a large amount of fuel underneath the bus was a serious fire hazard, investigators said.
"It could have been a much worse situation if there was a fire," Donald Karol, the NTSB's highway safety director, said.
___
Associated Press writer Karen Hawkins in Chicago contributed to this report.
___
Follow Joan Lowy at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Joan_Lowy
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Holiday sales up, but returns may set a record
NEW YORK?? Ah, the warm feelings of the holidays: Comfort and joy. Good cheer.
And buyer's remorse.
People who rushed to snag discounts on TVs, toys and other gifts are quickly returning them for much-needed cash. The shopping season started out strong for stores, but it looks like the spending binge has given way to a holiday hangover.
Return rates spiked when the Great Recession struck and have stayed high. For every dollar stores take in this holiday season, they'll have to give back 9.9 cents in returns, up from 9.8 last year, according to the National Retail Federation's survey of 110 retailers. In better economic times, it's about 7 cents.
This time of year, fractions of a penny add up. Stores are expected to ring up $453 billion during the holiday season. Merchants make up to 40 percent of their annual sales in the last two months of the year.
Returns are typically more associated with January than December. After all, that hot pink sweater with yellow stars on the sleeves may not be exactly what your sister had in mind. But these days, more is going back before it ever gets to Santa's sack.
Story: Online holiday sales rise 15 percent to $24.6B"When the bills come in and the money isn't there, you have to return," says Jennifer Kersten, 33, of Miami. She spent $300 the day after Thanksgiving on books, movies and clothes for her nephews. Last week she returned half of it.
Some reasons for the many unhappy returns:
- Shoppers are binging on big discounts. Stores are desperate to get people in the door. But the same shoppers who find a "60 percent off" tag too good to resist may realize at home that they busted the budget.
- Stores have made it easier to take things back. Nordstrom is letting online shoppers return items at no extra charge this year. It used to charge $6. Other stores are offering more time to return or rolling out "no questions asked" policies ? no tag or receipt required. But that can backfire. "Spurring more returns wasn't part of the plan," says Al Sambar, a retail strategist for consulting firm Kurt Salmon.
- Stores are undercutting each other in a tough economy. Wanda Vazquez spent $39.99 at a New York Target on iPad speakers for her 12-year-old daughter, then returned them when she found something similar for $16.99 at Marshalls.
Consumer electronics in particular are being returned at a rapid clip. Stores and manufacturers are expected to spend $17 billion reboxing, repairing, restocking and reselling electronics this year, up 21 percent from four years ago.
Story: A five-step plan for minimizing your mall timeAbout half of the 100 electronics manufacturers and stores surveyed by Accenture, a consulting firm, return rates have increased over the past three to five years. Most of the items are returned without flaws.
In an industry where profit margins are thin and competition is brutal, those return rates are unsustainable, says Mitch Cline, managing director of Accenture's electronics and high-tech group.
Several retailers declined to talk about returns. But if they need any evidence of growing remorse among their shoppers, all they have to do is look at the overstuffed aisles of liquidator warehouses.
Story: Rich, poor gap will show up under the treeLiquidation.com, which buys returned merchandise from big stores like Wal-Mart and auctions it to small businesses and dollar stores, says return rates are 12 to 15 percent, up two percentage points from last year and double the rate in better times.
Its four warehouses across the country are packed with thousands more smartphones, TVs other holiday castaways than a year ago, says Bill Angrick, CEO of the site's parent company, Liquidity Services.
To get rid of all that extra stuff, the company says it is holding 20 percent more online auctions than it did last year. The company declined to say how many it was holding.
"This is going to be a record year for returns," Angrick says. "People are still reluctant to spend."
Dave Vehec, senior vice president of GENCO ATC, a liquidator that sells returned merchandise from six of the nation's top 10 retailers, also says stores are reporting a spike in returns this year.
Americans spent $52.4 billion over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, the highest total for that period, according to the NRF. But business has fallen. Sales last week were down 1.9 percent from a year ago, according to research firm ShopperTrak.
Stores are already being squeezed by rising costs for materials and labor. Returns make it worse. When you return a sweater, a paid worker has to restock it. Return a computer after just turning it on, and the hard drive has to be scrubbed.
It adds up to lost dollars for stores, which have to eat as much as 12 percent of the cost for returned clothes and 50 percent for returned electronics.
Shoppers, of course, are more concerned with their own bottom line.
That's why Lisa Dublin, a New York mother of three, last weekend returned half of the $200 she spent at Banana Republic. The clothes were going to be gifts for her 15-year-old son.
Dublin, 33, also returned a pair of knee high-boots that she bought as a gift for herself at Charlotte Russe, a women's store. She got them for $25, marked down from $40. It was a good deal, she says, but it wasn't good enough.
"I have been buying a bunch of stuff at a time," Dublin says. "Then, when I get home I analyze and figure out what I really need."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45673527/ns/business-holiday_retail/
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Thursday, December 15, 2011
Iran says Obama should apologize for downed drone (Reuters)
TEHRAN (Reuters) ? President Barack Obama should apologize for sending an unmanned spy plane into Iranian territory rather than asking for it back after it was seized, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.
Iran announced on December 4 it had downed the spy plane in the eastern part of the country, near Afghanistan. It has since shown the plane on television and said it is close to cracking its technological secrets.
On Monday, Obama told a news conference: "We have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond." Iranian officials had already said they would not return the drone.
"It seems that (Obama) has forgotten that our air space was violated, a spying operation conducted and international law trampled," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told a news conference.
"Instead of an official apology for the offence they have committed, he is raising such a demand. America must know that the violation of Iran's air space can endanger world peace and security."
Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi told the official IRNA news agency: "The U.S. spy drone is the property of Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran will decide what it wants to do in this regard."
AGGRESSOR AMERICA
Parliament issued a resolution calling the drone incursion "evidence of international terrorism and a blatant violation of international law by the aggressor America," and said Iran might seek reparations from Washington.
Iran has already complained to the U.N. Security Council about the incursion, calling for action to "put an end to these dangerous and unlawful acts.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan initially said the plane may have been an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance drone that went missing during a mission over western Afghanistan.
But a person familiar with the situation has since told Reuters in Washington that the drone was on a surveillance mission over Iran.
The drone affair is just the latest incident adding to tensions between Iran and the West which accuses the Islamic Republic of trying to develop nuclear weapons, a charge it denies.
Iran's judiciary announced on Tuesday it had issued indictments against 15 unidentified people held on suspicion of spying for the United States and Israel, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Iran said in May it had arrested 30 people it said were spying for the United States. Spying in Iran can be punishable by death.
In response to tightened economic sanctions against Iran, radical youths stormed the British embassy in Tehran on November 29, causing London to recall all its staff and close its mission.
Republican presidential candidates in the United States have upped rhetoric on a possible military strike against Iran, something Israel says it may carry out as a last resort to stop the Islamic Republic getting the bomb.
"It's better that they don't use phrases like 'all options are on the table'," Mehmanparast said, referring to the stock phrase used by Israeli and U.S. leaders about the military option.
"The phrase has been used so often it has become tiresome," he added.
(Additional reporting by Hossein Jaseb; Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Matthew Jones)
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