Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

The Rick Steves guide to life

The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

Is Southwest about to end its free-for-all seating?

Carolyn Hax: Is checking his phone the best way to prove he isn’t lying anymore?

Ask Amy: Boyfriend’s CPA dad did my taxes wrong for years

Miss Manners: I think kindergarten graduations are ‘ridiculous’

Meta’s oversight body prepares to lay off workers

An AI blood test purports to diagnose postpartum depression

A TikTok ban could also end short-form video as we’ve come to know it

Where seas are rising at alarming speed 

The new face of flooding

In photos: Tornadoes wreak havoc in Oklahoma, Nebraska and Iowa

Soldiers reunite with their pets from overseas: ‘It meant everything to me’

Chiropractor works on giraffe, is nuzzled: ‘Giraffes are just giant dogs?’

An SUV was in flames on the highway. Strangers saved the driver.  

Middle East conflict live updates: Blinken calls proposed Israeli cease-fire deal ‘extraordinarily generous’

The Rangers swept the Capitals, and it’s time for the new core to take charge

Jayden Daniels is latest in Washington’s checkered history of first-round QBs

An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India

Spanish leader Sánchez to stay in power after resignation drama

Scotland leader Humza Yousaf resigns in latest setback for independence 

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

The Fed’s fight against inflation needs to lose the dot plot

Hunter Biden attorney threatens litigation against Fox News

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Harsh deportation tools are just fine with many Americans

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Facts in the Trump courtroom v. ‘facts’ in the court of public opinion

 Donald Trump Speaks During A Campaign Rally In Green Bay Wisconsin

Elaine Thompson

The Justice Department violated the rights of passengers killed on Boeing 737 Max planes when the federal government reached a deferred prosecution deal with the company in 2021, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, rejecting arguments by the Justice Department and Boeing, found that the 346 people killed in crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019 are crime victims under federal law. O’Connor hasn’t ruled on what the government must do to remedy its violation of their rights.

The ruling marks a broad repudiation of the approach taken by Justice Department officials in the case.

Family members and lawyers of some of those killed have called on the judge to throw out the Justice Department’s deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing. As part of that agreement, Boeing admitted to conspiring to defraud federal regulators, but the company would be immunized from being prosecuted for that conspiracy if it meets the terms of the deal, which was signed <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/january-6-capitol-riot/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Jan. 6</a>, 2021.

Those killed in 737 Max crashes aren’t ‘crime victims,’ Justice says

In a <a href="https://docs-cdn-prod.news-engineering.aws.wapo.pub/publish_document/c5b3a8a4-db15-4a7e-84c8-03bae6cca2dd/published/c5b3a8a4-db15-4a7e-84c8-03bae6cca2dd.pdf" target=_blank>sharply worded opinion</a>, O’Connor said the evidence was clear that Boeing’s admitted conspiracy led to the deaths of hundreds of people.

“The Court finds that the tragic loss of life that resulted from the two airplane crashes was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of Boeing’s conspiracy to defraud the United States,” O’Connor wrote.

Long before the Max disasters, Boeing had a history of failing to fix safety problems

Paul Cassell, a University of Utah law professor and former federal judge who is representing the victims’ families, said the Justice Department had engaged in a “major, deliberate and orchestrated violation of a law that requires that crime victims be involved in crafting these kinds of arrangements.” He added: “The government and Boeing both had multiple lawyers working on this secret deal, and now the judge has made clear that secrecy was a gross violation of federal law.”

The Justice Department and Boeing officials declined to comment.

Some family members said late Friday that they are seeking prosecution for Boeing and its executives.

“Families like mine are the true victims of Boeing’s criminal misconduct, and our views should have been considered before the government gave them a sweetheart deal,” Naoise Connolly Ryan, whose husband, Mick, was killed in the Ethiopia crash, said in a statement.

Boeing 737 Max crashes were ‘horrific culmination’ of errors, investigators say

Michael Stumo, whose daughter Samya was killed in the crash outside Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, said in a statement that “Boeing captured the FAA to get the deadly MAX 8 certified. They captured the Department of Justice under Trump and Biden to deny crash families’ rights to participate in the criminal investigation and prosecution. They thought they could capture a federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas.”

Stumo said Attorney General Merrick Garland “should order a new investigative team to re-do the entire criminal inquiry against Boeing.”

The question before O’Connor was whether those killed in the Boeing jets were “directly and proximately harmed as a result of the commission of a federal offense,” which is the definition of a victim under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

The Justice Department argued in court filings that it could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Boeing’s fraud conspiracy resulted in “the crashes of two flights in foreign countries, run by foreign airlines, overseen by foreign regulators, and flown by foreign pilots.” O’Connor disagreed.

He wrote that Boeing’s lies to a group within the Federal Aviation Administration about when an automated flight control system would activate resulted in lower pilot training standards on the new planes. Because of Boeing’s conspiracy to defraud, O’Connor said, U.S. regulators didn’t require simulator training and other warnings to pilots that the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) could activate at low speeds.

The judge cited the global effects of decisions made by American aviation regulators, noting Boeing’s comment that “FAA is pretty powerful and most countries defer to what the FAA does.”

“Had Boeing’s employees not concealed their knowledge about MCAS, the [FAA’s Aircraft Evaluation Group] would have certified a more rigorous level of training, pilots around the world would have been adequately prepared for MCAS activation, and neither crash would have occurred,” O’Connor wrote. He added that “an adequately trained pilot could have quickly averted the crises” using other tools in the cockpit to override the errant system and save the nosediving planes.

Under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, victims — or, in this case, their survivors — must be provided a “reasonable right to confer with the attorney for the government in the case.” They also have the right to be informed “in a timely manner” of a deferred prosecution agreement or plea bargain.

O’Connor gave both sides until Oct. 28 to indicate whether they will submit additional information on how they believe he should remedy the violation of the law.

Cassell said the standard remedy is to invalidate at least part of the agreement.

“This is a big deal for the crime victims’ rights movement in America,” Cassell said. “That will be a signal that crime victims can no longer be ignored in this process, and will have a voice, loud and clear, when these kinds of agreements are negotiated.”

Stanford University, BA in political science

Michael Laris writes about the transformation of the U.S. transportation system. He has covered government accountability and was a reporter in Beijing.

Michael Laris

washpost

DOJ violated rights of Boeing Max victims in prosecution deal, judge rules

the-washington-post

Boeing China

name

iptc-media/crime_law_and_justice/judiciary/court/judge

iptc-media/disaster_accident_and_emergency_incident/accident_and_emergency_incident/transport_accident_and_incident

iptc-media/crime_law_and_justice/judiciary/court/trial_(court)/litigation

iptc-media/crime_law_and_justice/judiciary/prosecution

iptc-media/disaster_accident_and_emergency_incident

iptc-media/crime_law_and_justice

iptc-media/crime_law_and_justice/justice_and_rights

Judge rules DOJ violated rights of Boeing Max victims in prosecution deal

The deferred agreement marks a broad repudiation of the approach taken by Justice Department officials in the case