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Henry Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, told a hearing on Toyota that highway safety regulators do not have the expertise to properly evaluate sophisticated engineering systems in today’s vehicles.

“Ultimately, I believe addressing this problem will require legislation,” Waxman said. “Carmakers have entered the electronics era but the (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) seems stuck in a mechanical mind-set.”

Automakers are watching the Toyota developments very closely to see if the saga prompts new congressional or regulatory action.

Waxman’s committee on Monday sharply criticized NHTSA’s handling of consumer complaints about unintended acceleration in Toyota and Lexus models, particularly persistent reports over the years alleging problems with software-driven electronic throttles.

Toyota says its throttles are sound and no NHTSA review has found any problems with them. Jim Lentz, the company’s U.S. sales chief, said at the hearing that Toyota is in the midst of an outside review of those systems.

But Waxman said regulators have lacked the necessary resources to “critically assess Toyota’s insistence that its vehicles could not fail.”

The panel’s investigation found that NHTSA’s staff does not include electrical or software engineers, Waxman said in a letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

“We need to make sure the federal safety agency has the tools and resources it needs to ensure the safety of the electronic controls and onboard computers that run today’s automobiles,” Waxman told witnesses at the hearing.

LaHood said NHTSA is adding staff and disputed the committee’s finding that the agency did not have electrical engineering expertise. However, he told Waxman that the Transportation Department may be “asking for some legislative remedies.”

He was not specific but did say it would help NHTSA if automakers were required to report to U.S. regulators their safety problems in other countries.

LaHood also said the government should consider a potential industry mandate for systems that would allow brakes to override the throttle in cases of runaway acceleration.

NHTSA is reviewing electronics in Toyota vehicles as well as those made by other manufacturers. It is consulting outside experts and Toyota.

“We’re going to do a complete review of electronics,” LaHood told lawmakers at the hearing. “We’re going to get into the weeds on the electronics. We feel an obligation to do that.”

NHTSA is a relatively small agency that oversees auto safety and fuel efficiency standards.

It opens about 100 safety investigations annually and has broad powers that critics say are not always used fully. NHTSA receives about 30,000 complaints a year.

The agency relies on nudging industry into “voluntary” recalls rather than forcing action. It’s tougher stance with Toyota in 2009 and this year prompted big recalls for unintended acceleration related to floor mats that can be trapped by the accelerator and gas pedals that do not spring back as designed.

LaHood said he did not believe NHTSA needed expanded authority from Congress to force recalls.

The last major auto safety legislation authorized by Congress toughened industry defect reporting requirements following the 2001 Firestone tire debacle associated with deadly rollovers of Ford Motor Co SUVs.

Over the past three years, NHTSA’s defect and compliance investigations have led to 524 recalls involving 23.5 million vehicles, transportation officials said.

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NAGOYA, JAPAN — The president of Toyota apologized at a hastily arranged news conference Friday night for the quality problems that led to the recall of more than nine million cars worldwide.

He also pledged that the Japanese automaker would soon announce steps to address brake problems on the 2010 Prius.

Akio Toyoda, grandson of Toyota’s founder, spoke in his first formal remarks since the uproar enveloping his company, the world’s largest automaker, and took personal responsibility for the problems.

“I deeply regret that I caused concern among so many people,” Mr. Toyoda said. “We will do our utmost to regain the trust of our customers.”

Asked whether Toyota had underestimated the situation, Mr. Toyoda said, “I believe what is happening now is a very big problem. We are in a crisis.”

Mr. Toyoda also apologized to shareholders for the fall in the company’s share price. The company’s stock has dropped about 20 percent in the last two weeks.

Mr. Toyoda said a committee would be set up to look at quality issues. With his comments, he became the second successive Toyota president to apologize for defects on the company’s cars — and the second to assemble a committee to address them.

In 2006, his predecessor, Katsuaki Watanabe, shocked onlookers by bowing low at a news conference and vowing Toyota would improve its quality. But many cars involved in the two recent recalls, one for sticking accelerator pedals, the other for floor mats that could become entangled in the pedals, went on sale after that effort.

One car now in question is the 2010 Prius, the newest version of Toyota’s most important car. The automaker said it was working on a solution to fix issues with the car’s anti-lock brakes, which were redesigned for the 2010 model. Toyota has sold just over 300,000 of the new Priuses in Japan, the United States and Europe since it was introduced.

Company executives also are looking at two other hybrids with the same brake system, the Lexus HS250h and the Sai, a small hybrid sold only in Japan.

Mr. Toyoda is among the industry’s best-known executives, but he has been conspicuously absent in recent weeks, even as his company struggled on three continents to contain the fallout of problems that have shaken its long-held reputation for quality.

Until Friday, Mr. Toyoda’s only public comments came in a brief interview with a Japanese broadcaster on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Toyota’s slowness in addressing its problems has been criticized by regulators in the United States and Japan. Earlier this week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood spoke with Mr. Toyoda, after sending officials from Washington to Japan in December.

“Users are noticing defects and there have been accidents,” Japan’s transport minister, Seiji Maehara, said Friday ahead of Mr. Toyoda’s briefing. “This leads me to believe Toyota has not put consumers first.”

Mr. Toyoda, who spoke in Japanese and English during the news conference, said that was not the case. “I came out here today because I would not want our customers to spend the weekend wondering whether their cars are safe,” he said.

He would not answer a question about whether the company has ever withheld information related to safety concerns. “Toyota is committed to safety,” he said.

He added in broken English: “The people who drive Toyota, who cares about Toyota, I’m a little bit worried while they are driving, they feel little bit cautious. But believe me, Toyota’s car is safety but we will try to increase our product better.”

The Japanese government has ordered the company to investigate the brakes on the Prius, as has the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Safety regulators in Washington said Thursday that they would open an investigation into the car’s brakes. Toyota said it would “fully cooperate” with the investigation.

Under ordinary circumstances, the Prius braking problem would probably not be serious enough to prompt a recall, said David Champion, director of automotive testing for Consumer Reports magazine.

But given the amount of negative attention surrounding Toyota, and with two committees of the House of Representatives scheduling hearings this month, the carmaker needs to show that it is doing everything it can to ease fears about its vehicles, Mr. Champion said.

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1950s: The idea of a supersonic passenger plane gains momentum after legendary U.S. aviator Chuck Yeager’s 1947 blast through the sound barrier.

1962: Manufacturers in France and Britain agree to cooperate, along with engine builders from both countries.

1969: The plane lifts off from Toulouse, France for its first test flight.

1976: The Concorde begins commercial service at Air France and British Airways. It is hailed as a technological marvel, but its economics are shaky and it never makes back the billions of tax dollars invested in it. Protests emerge about its noise and lack of fuel economy during an oil crisis.

1984: Britain and France stop underwriting the Concorde’s costs, and the two airlines take responsibility.

2000: An Air France Concorde crashes after takeoff from Paris on July 25, 2000, killing 113 people and forcing both airlines to ground their supersonic jets for over a year.

2001: Overhauled Concordes return to service two months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, in the middle of one of aviation’s worst slumps.

2003: Air France and British Airways both retire their Concordes. One Air France Concorde goes on show at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

2010: A trial opened in Pontoise, north of Paris, to determine who was responsible for the 2001 crash. The proceedings are expected to last four months.

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Tony Blair told the inquiry he believed Saddam Hussein was a “monster” before 9/11 but accepted that he would have to make the best of the situation.

At his first meeting with George Bush, in February 2001, Blair discussed Iraq. But it was in the context of trying to get a better sanctions regime. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, this view changed dramatically.

“I would fairly describe our policy up to September 11 as doing our best … but with a different calculus of risk assessment … The crucial thing after September 11 was that the calculus of risk changed.”

• He said “nothing was decided” when he had a one-to-one dinner with Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. It it is important for leaders to establish a “close and strong relationship”, he said.

“As I recall that discussion it was less to do with specifics … the principle part of my conversation was really to try and say in the end we have got to deal with the various different dimensions of this whole issue.”

• He said he was quite open about his determination to deal with Saddam and had made this point publicly in the press conference he held with Bush. “What I was saying – I was not saying this privately, incidentally; I was saying it in public – was: ‘We are going to be with you in confronting and dealing with this threat’ … The position was not a covert position; it was an open position. We would be with them in dealing with this threat and how we did that was an open question, and even at that stage I was raising the issue of going to the UN.”

• He said that telling Bush that he would support him in his drive to deal with Iraq did not set conditions because the US-UK relationship was “an alliance, not a contract”.

• Blair said that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, he firmly believed that he could not run the risk that Saddam would reconstitute his banned weapons programmes. “The decision I took – and frankly would take again – was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction [WMD] we should stop him. That was my view then and that is my view now.”

• He suggested that there was no real difference between wanting regime change and wanting Iraq to disarm: regime change was US policy because Iraq was in breach of its UN obligations. “It’s more a different way of expressing the same proposition.”

• On the “beyond doubt” line written he wrote in the foreword of the September 2002 dossier to describe the strength of evidence of weapons of mass destruction, he said: “What I actually said in the foreword was that I believed it beyond doubt … and I did believe it.”

He said if anyone read the summary of the document produced by the joint intelligence committee as a result of the evidence presented to them at the time, he could not see how they could produce a different interpretation.

“All the intelligence we received was to the same effect. There were people perfectly justifiably and sensibly also saying that you cannot sit around and wait … you have got to take action clearly and definitively.”

• On the claim Saddam could use weapons in 45 minutes, he said he mentioned it in a statement on 24 September 2002 but “without great emphasis”. He said he has said on my occasions it would have been better to correct the impression given by claim (that it referred to WMD). But he pointed out there was not one mention of the “45-minutes” claim within the 40,000 parliamentary written questions tabled about Iraq between 2002-03. Only two of the 5,000 oral questions on Iraq during this period mentioned the allegation.

• He said that Bush’s view was that a second UN resolution was not necessary, but that he was prepared to work for one. Blair had drafted a resolution with Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector. He rejected suggestions that his attempt to get a second resolution was to try to curtail the inspections process because of the needs of the military planning.

• Blair said he thought he could have got the nine votes necessary for a security council vote in favour of a second resolution if it had not been for the French and the Russians making it clear that they were vehemently opposed.

• On his recent interview with Fern Britton, he admitted he made a mistake when he said that he would have wanted to get rid of Saddam even if he had known Iraq had no WMD.

“I did not use the word ‘regime change’ in that interview and I did not mean to change the basis for the justification for war,” he said. It was in no sense a change in the position, which was the breach of UN resolutions on WMD, he went on. “That was the cause. It was so and it remains.”

• He told the panel that if the military at any point said that not being allowed to start ordering equipment would inhibit their ability to be ready for war, he would have accepted that. This follows claims by Geoff Hoon, the former defence secretary, that Blair had stopped him and Michael Boyce, the then chief of the defence staff, making logistics plans in the autumn of 2002 because the public would have realised the government was planning for war. Boyce said this caused a problem.
 
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A crowd of Haitian looters called for help from U.S. soldiers on Tuesday after finding a man buried in the rubble of a building that had been repeatedly scavenged since the devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince two weeks ago.

A witness told Reuters the man, covered in dust and wearing only underwear, was rescued by soldiers from the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division at a ruined building on Rue de Miracle in downtown Port-au-Prince.

The Americans treated Rico Dibrivell, 35, for a broken leg and severe dehydration. Dibrivell said he had been trapped under the building since the Jan. 12 quake.

The military provided no details about how he managed to survive, saying only in a statement late Tuesday that Dibrivell’s family said he had been missing for two weeks.

“He got sent to the hospital. He’s going to make it,” Specialist Andrew Pourak, one of the rescuers, said.

More than 100 people have been unearthed by rescue teams since the quake, and many more by their neighbors, but most of those were in the immediate aftermath and authorities say it is unlikely for anyone to survive more than 72 hours without water. On Saturday, an international team of rescuers unearthed a shop clerk who they believed had been buried since the earthquake.

Hundreds of thousands of other hungry and thirsty children are scattered among Port-au-Prince’s squatter camps of survivors, without protection against disease or child predators — often with nobody to care for them.

“There’s an estimated 1 million unaccompanied or orphaned children or children who lost one parent,” said Kate Conradt, a spokeswoman for the aid group Save the Children. “They are extremely vulnerable.”

The U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, has established a special tent camp for girls and boys separated from their parents in the Jan. 12 quake, and who are in danger of falling prey to child traffickers and other abusers. The Connecticut-based Save the Children has set up “Child Spaces” in 13 makeshift settlements. The Red Cross and other groups are working to reunite families and get children into orphanages.

The post-quake needs of Haiti’s children have outrun available help. Some youngsters have been released from hospitals with no one to care for them — there just aren’t enough beds.

“Health workers are being advised to monitor and send separated/unaccompanied children to child-friendly spaces,” the U.N. humanitarian office said in its latest situation report.

The plight of the young is poignant even in a country where the U.N. estimates a third of the 9 million population needs international assistance in the quake’s aftermath. “We still have a huge distance to go,” said John Holmes, the U.N. relief coordinator.

That was evident in Port-au-Prince’s streets, alleys and crumbled doorways, where handwritten messages begged for help. In the Juvenat neighborhood, a group of 50 families hung a white sheet from a doorway, with this plea scrawled in green: “We need food assistance, water and medicine.”

It was evident, too, among the thousands pressing against Haitian police at a food-distribution site in the Cite Soleil slum. They swung sticks to beat back the crowd.

Brazilian troops in armored personnel carriers controlled a tightly packed line of earthquake survivors waiting for food in the broiling sun by firing pepper spray and training their guns on the jostling, rowdy crowd. The line stretched between the partially collapsed National Palace and entirely destroyed Supreme Court.

One soldier loaded a shotgun and returned their taunts by shouting back insults in Creole. Some were offended, others amused at hearing a Brazilian trooper insulting them in their own language.

“They treat us like animals, they beat us but we are hungry people,” said Muller Bellegarde, 30.

Several left without getting food, fearful of the pepper spray, the soldiers, and thugs who were grabbing food from receivers.

Many said they appreciate the international response and under no circumstances want the Haitian government to handle aid deliveries, but suggested Haitian churches could provide more orderly and respectful venues for distributions, with Haitian communities organizing security.

“The help is good but the way they’re doing it is bad. This is anarchy,” Thomas Louis, 40, trying to get rice and oil for his two babies, aged 2 and six months. “This is not aid. This is a way to put people down.”

The monumental scale of the Haiti disaster — perhaps 200,000 dead, a capital city on its knees — has severely strained the world’s ability to get relief supplies through Port-au-Prince’s overloaded airport and crippled seaport.

Some 800 to 1,000 aid flights were still awaiting permission to land, a seven-day backlog, U.N. and European officials reported Tuesday. On top of that, “trucks are needed,” U.N. spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva — especially small trucks because “the streets are extremely congested.”

The U.N.’s Holmes estimated that 2 million people need food, but only 500,000 have received some so far.

The medical picture has improved, but remains critical. World Health Organization spokesman Paul Garwood said more medical staff is needed, especially rehabilitation specialists, to help with postoperative recovery of 200,000 people who have had amputations or other surgery.

Haitians and volunteers from dozens of countries, working around the clock, were still performing up to 100 amputations a day in some hospitals.

At the General Hospital, Price strode from tent to tent checking on the 81 children under his care. Staff interrupted the tall, balding pediatrician with a string of questions: “Do you know about this baby?” “Where’s the medication?” “Where will we sleep tonight?”

Of the nameless, speechless trio, he was treating young Joe for an infection oozing from both eyes. The 7-pound (3-kilogram) Baby Sebastian, in a white diaper decorated with sheep, had diarrhea. The unnamed girl, about 10, lay listlessly and stared upward. She had an eye infection, but would soon be picked up by an orphanage, Price said.

With no clues to their past, Price could only wonder.

“Maybe some of these parents are not even looking because their house was destroyed and they might think the kid was inside,” he said. “But maybe the kid was pulled out, so they are missing each other.”

Children left alone are everywhere. At one of the 13 Save the Children sites, about 25 children have no adult relatives taking care of them, Conradt said. She said the group has helped some 6,000 children since the quake.

The aid group’s “Child Spaces” are cordoned-off areas where children can play under supervision,” run around being children, giving them a chance to return to normalcy as much as they can.”

Such areas also protect children against the potential for abduction by child traffickers, a chronic problem in pre-quake Haiti, where thousands were handed over to other families into lives of domestic servitude, said Deb Barry, an emergency protection adviser with Save the Children.

She said her organization was working to track down every rumor it hears about threats to stranded children, “but we haven’t been able to verify those thus far.”

In Geneva, a UNICEF spokeswoman, Veronique Taveau, said the organization had been told of children disappearing from hospitals. “It’s difficult to establish the reality,” she said, but added that UNICEF has strengthened security at hospitals and orphanages.

Save the Children, the Red Cross and other organizations, meanwhile, are trying to establish a joint database of information to try to reunite separated families.

Government spokeswoman Marie Laurence Jocelyn-Lassegue, the communications minister, said Tuesday that Haitian officials have temporarily halted new adoptions because of concerns about corruption and carelessness in the system.

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