TOKYO — Subaru, already smarting from a vehicle inspection scandal at home, said it was now investigating whether mileage readings may have also been falsified during final checks, driving its shares down as much as 8 percent.
Mileage readings, an indicator of fuel efficiency, do not fall under safety requirements. However, any proof of what would be a second instance of misconduct in as many months would taint the image of not only Subaru but also Japan’s manufacturing industry, which has been rocked by a slew of scandals recently.
Just last year, Mitsubishi Motors saw around 40 percent of its market value, or $3.2 billion, wiped out in three days after it admitted it had overstated the fuel economy of its minivehicles.
Subaru on Wednesday said it was checking to see if any possible fabrication could have impacted its official mileage readings and if any exported models may have been affected.
“At the moment we are trying to confirm whether data was indeed fabricated, and if so, how this happened and which models are affected,” Subaru spokeswoman Miyuki Yasuda said.
She added that any evidence of falsified mileage figures was unlikely to result in a recall as it would not constitute a violation of safety requirements.
The mileage probe follows Subaru’s revelation in October that uncertified staff had been for decades carrying out final checks that the Japanese government requires on new cars sold in the Japanese domestic market. The company this week vowed to improve oversight, but it did not mention any probe into mileage readings at the time.
Subaru said reports of falsified mileage readings emerged as external investigators looked into the inspection scandal.
Some inspectors told investigators that mileage data had been altered on some sample vehicle models tested during final checks. Subaru said it had not confirmed that any such fabrications had taken place.
“Coming on the heels of the certified inspection issue, this could be a sign of a bigger problem of how Subaru manages its manufacturing operations,” said Janet Lewis, head of Asia transportation research at Macquarie Securities.
Subaru shares fell as much as 8.5 percent to their lowest since July 2016, before ending down 7 percent. The stock has given up almost 10 percent over the past two months amid the inspection scandal.
A series of compliance failings by Japanese companies have surfaced in recent months, hitting the country’s reputation for quality control and prompting calls for better governance.
Nissan has admitted to incorrect final inspection procedures. In just the latter half of the year, Kobe Steel, Mitsubishi Materials and Torbay Industries — all key suppliers of products to global manufacturers — have admitted to product data fabrication.
Fretting about the impact of the string of scandals, nearly half of Japanese firms have either taken steps to strengthen internal controls or are planning to do so, a Reuters poll showed earlier this month.
Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu Ran Kim and Ayai Tomisawa
When I visited Jason McHenry’s farm in South Dakota, the young farmer, dressed in worn jeans and sunglasses, led me up a slippery steel ladder on the side of a grain bin. We tumbled through the manhole into a shifting mountain of soybeans. You could sift them through your fingers and taste their sweet, cloudy flavor.
The U.S. soybean crop is four billion bushels a year, about 240 billion pounds. It generates the most cash receipts for American farms after cattle and corn. Of those beans, more than 90 percent are genetically modified organisms, or GMOs—that is, they’ve been genetically enhanced, most often through the addition of a gene from a soil bacterium that renders them immune to the weed killer glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup.Â
The 4,000 bushels McHenry and I were sitting in, however, represent a new type of plant that’s been modified using gene editing. A startup had employed the technology to introduce changes in two genes involved in fatty-acid synthesis, so that oil pressed from the beans is more like olive oil than typical soy oil.
McHenry first heard the pitch for the beans last December, at a hotel near the cooperative of South Dakota soybean processors. “We have something new and exciting,†a salesman told the farmers. “You’ve heard about the ban on trans fats?†Soybean oil has been losing market share since the U.S. government banned unhealthy fats created when soy oil is partially hydrogenated and turns to a solid (think Crisco). Those fats have been killing people. They’re bad food.
Jason McHenry on the South Dakota land where he grows soybeans created with gene editing.
Oil from the gene-edited beans could solve that problem, because it doesn’t need to be processed in the same way. Any farmer who agreed to plant the beans, McHenry heard, would be part of the wave of innovation filling store shelves with Greek yogurts, green packaging, and healthy ingredients. What’s more, it would mean a few quarters more per bushel. “You make a little more money, you have a great experience, and you are part of a revolution,†said the pitchman, Thomas Stoddard, a lanky biologist turned seed seller who visited McHenry’s farm with me.
To McHenry, a farmer just starting out with his own acres, his own debts, and his own decisions, the pitch made sense. The Roundup-resisting beans his father still plants are expensive. What’s more, the tumbleweeds have evolved to survive spraying and grow as high as your waist. “Looking at the market as a whole, Europe and China are questioning GMOs,†McHenry says. “You have to keep your finger on what the consumer wants, and as a farmer, you have to differentiate yourself. If you are looking at a market that could be gone, you have to think about alternatives.â€
University of Minnesota geneticist Dan Voytas develops new plants using genetic engineering. “The genie is out of the bottle,†he says.
The new beans are the creation of a startup called Calyxt, located 300 miles away, near Minneapolis, where Stoddard works, and nearly a straight shot east on Highway 90 from McHenry’s farm. At the company’s greenhouses, thousands of plants are being altered with gene editing every week. The virtue of the technology is that it lets scientists create designer plants that don’t have foreign DNA in them. The technique, which adds or deletes snippets of genetic information, is similar to what could be achieved through conventional breeding, only much faster. In essence, if there’s some quality about a soybean that you like, and if you know the genetic instructions responsible, gene editing can move them to another bean in a single molecular step.
To many scientists, the potential of gene editing seems nearly limitless, offering a new way to rapidly create plants that are drought-resistant, immune to disease, or improved in flavor. A supermarket tomato that tastes good? That could happen if scientists restore the flavor-making genes that make heirloom varieties delicious. What about a corn plant with twice as many kernels? If nature allows it, scientists believe, gene editing could let them build it.
There is another reason gene editing is causing excitement in industry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has concluded that the new plants are not “regulated articles.†The reason is a legal loophole: its regulations apply only to GMOs constructed using plant pathogens like bacteria, or their DNA. That means Calyxt can commercialize its beans without going through the process of permits, inspections, and safety tests required for other genetically modified crops. It’s counting on that to cut at least half the 13 years and $130 million that companies have, on average, invested in order to create a new GMO and get it into farmers’ hands.
To GMO opponents, the new, unregulated plants are a source of alarm. For years, they have argued that GMOs should be opposed because they might be unsafe. What if they cause allergies or poison butterflies? Now the battle lines are shifting because companies like Calyxt can create plants without DNA from a different species in them. They can argue that gene editing is merely “accelerated breeding technology.â€Â
To the critics, any attempt to reclassify engineered plants as natural is a dangerous fiction. “If they don’t have to go through the regulatory requirements, then it is game on again for genetic modification in agriculture,†says Jim Thomas, head of a nonprofit called the ETC Group that lobbies on environmental issues. “That is the prize. They are constructing a definition of a GMO so that gene editing falls outside it.â€
Designer plants grow under artificial light at the greenhouse of Calyxt, a gene-editing startup in Minneapolis.
Already, the effort to persuade governments and food groups is reaching a planetary scale. New Zealand decided that the new plants are GMOs after all, and so did the USDA’s own organic council. The Netherlands and Sweden don’t think they are. China hasn’t said. The European Union still has to make up its mind. Billions in global grain exports could ultimately hang in the balance.
Opponents say they’re ready to fight for rules, regulations, and labels. “Our position has never changed. This is just a form of genetic engineering, so the same things should happen—there should be required safety assessments,†says Michael Hansen, a staff scientist at the Consumers Union, a lobby group attached to Consumer Reports magazine. “I can’t see this being resolved anytime soon.â€
But McHenry has already accepted the argument. Pointing to his rows of grain bins, he ticked off whether the beans inside were GMOs or not. The one full of Calyxt beans he called “non-GMO.†“To me a GMO is [adding] an outside organism into a plant. The way I understand it there’s no foreign DNA put into the seed,†said McHenry. “It’s like we found a switch to make people’s lives easier. If it’s that easy, it makes sense to me.â€
Drug companies see gene-editing technology as a versatile molecular scissors that could offer a radical new means to cure genetic diseases such as muscular dystrophy (see “Can CRISPR Save Ben Dupree?â€). What’s not so widely appreciated is how close the technology is to large-scale implementation in agriculture and in our food. By the end of 2018, Calyxt says, it will be crushing beans and selling oil, potentially becoming the first company to enter the market with a gene-edited crop. At least one other crop is nearing commercialization from DuPont, which used gene editing to create a starchier corn plant.
To be sure, neither product is expected to take over farmland the way herbicide-resisting GMOs did. Instead, these initial examples are niche products with prosaic objectives. DuPont’s “waxy†corn is going to end up in glue sticks and as an emulsifier in salad dressing. Calyxt’s oil will fry doughnuts and chips. Even so, the mountain of beans at McHenry’s farm shows how quickly these crops could arrive. McHenry, making some fast calculations, estimated that we were sitting on 600 million of them. By then Stoddard, the salesman, had climbed into the story-tall grain bin too. “Gene editing is the future, and the first place it’s growing at scale is here in South Dakota,†he said reverently, letting beans drift through his hands.
Flipping a switch
The beans at McHenry’s farm are all descendants of a single soybean cell modified in 2012 by Dan Voytas, the cofounder of Calyxt and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota. Voytas told me he inherited a scientific interest in plants from his father, a government forest manager. “It was ‘Okay, son, what tree is that? Latin name, please,†he recalls.
I met Voytas at the startup’s greenhouse outside of Minneapolis, where he showed me fluid-mixing robots and a tall gene gun that fires the DNA into a plant cell. Green blobs growing on clear jelly in petri dishes were canola plants “regenerating†from a single cell after receiving new genetic instructions. The company has a staff of 35, two-thirds of whom are scientists. “We have a long list of ideas,†says Voytas. “But you can get a great oil and a sick plant. A lot of it is experimental.â€
Grain bins in Clark, South Dakota.
The startup uses a gene-editing technology called TALEN that Voytas helped develop—and patented. By the late 1990s, he had been part of a small group of biologists trying to move past the first round of GM plants not by adding entire genes, but instead by using cutting enzymes, called nucleases, to precisely sever the DNA chain—the life instructions found inside every living cell. To make Calyxt’s beans, Voytas used his technology to disable two genes.
Today, a different gene-editing technology, CRISPR, dominates the headlines, because it is easy to employ and inexpensive. However, because TALEN was developed two years earlier than CRISPR, the technique has advanced further toward commercial crops. Moreover, other plant biotech companies have been slowed by an ongoing patent fight over CRISPR, which left it unclear which of them would be able to use that technique.
In the meantime, Calyxt says, it has already used TALEN to design 19 plants and is banking on gene editing to make it one of the first small companies to introduce a successful genetically engineered crop. It says the USDA has already confirmed that six of its plants won’t be regulated, including, in September, an alfalfa plant modified to have less lignin, making it easier for cows and horses to digest. The company, which went public in July, has spent only $47 million so far.
Until now, every successful GMO on the market has had as its objective increasing the yield from each acre of farmland. Marketing “healthier†food made from GMOs has been a taller order. But if gene-edited plants can avoid the stigma of GMOs, that could change. In Calyxt’s view, that would open up valuable new uses of genetic engineering. In addition to its soybean oil, Calyxt claims it has changed wheat plants so they can be ground into white flour with three times as much fiber as usual. A bread company might even be able to claim that hamburger rolls help prevent cancer.
Some of the more radical changes gene editing may bring were apparent the day I visited Voytas at his university laboratory. He was meeting with his students, who diagrammed their plans on a whiteboard. (By now, all the students are using CRISPR.) A woman from Ethiopia wanted to change a local grain plant, teff, so that it stands up straight instead of drooping and losing seeds. Another student was investigating how to inject DNA into the stem cells found in the roots and shoots of growing plants. “We’re almost getting to the point where if you ask ‘What’s the best oil crop?’ we could create the genome to make that plant,†Voytas says.
Some significant obstacles remain. Drug companies working on gene therapy have learned it is easier to design and make DNA strands than to get them inside a person’s cells. That is also true of many plants, where delivery of the gene-editing ingredients is still difficult. Understanding which genes should be edited is yet another roadblock. Scientists know a lot about how oils are synthesized and why fruit turns brown. But the list of valuable plant traits whose genetic causes are both well understood and easy to alter drops off quickly after that. “Right now it’s a grab bag of traits,†says Rebecca Bart, a plant scientist at the Danforth Center, in St. Louis. “We still need to have pretty significant investment in discovery before you can manipulate them with gene editing. It has to go in that order.â€
What’s more, for traits that are well understood, gene editing isn’t the only way to create such plants—just the newest. For instance, Calyxt’s soybeans will face competition from beans with similar oil content that are already on the market, including one, called Vistive Gold and sold by Monsanto, that was created via old-fashioned GMO technology. Voytas acknowledges that his beans aren’t entirely novel but says they will be a useful test of Calyxt’s fast-to-market business model and a way to prove to investors that the company can make money. “Calyxt is the first plant gene-editing company out there and needs to show it can commercialize products,†he says. “The advantage is getting to revenue in the short term.â€
Some entrepreneurs think gene editing will have a big impact only when it can change the amount of food an acre can produce. “In real estate, the saying is ‘Location, location, location.’ Well, in agriculture, it’s ‘Yield, yield, yield,’†says Oliver Peoples, CEO of Yield10, a plant-engineering company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Canola plants “regenerate†from individual cells following a round of gene editing.
So Calyxt is also working on plants that could increase the amount of food farmers can reap, like a wheat plant resistant to powdery mildew. To date, no GMO wheat has ever been commercialized, partly because, as happens with many plants, wheat’s genome accumulates extra DNA like a closet that never gets cleared out. In fact, wheat is hexaploid—its cells harbor six mostly identical copies of every chromosome. That has made it massively complicated to genetically engineer, but Voytas says that with gene editing it is fairly easy. In a single reaction, the TALEN tools can search out and cut all six copies of any wheat gene they want to remove.
GMO or not?
Outside of Penn Station, in Manhattan, a 10-story-tall advertisement for Ketel One, a brand of vodka, declares that it is “made with 100% NON GMO grain.†At any supermarket, it is easy to find a profusion of similar claims, even for products like salt, which don’t contain plant material. About 40 percent of U.S. adults think foods made from GMOs are less healthy to eat.
Such beliefs are the result of warring messages from scientists, agriculture lobbies, and nonprofits like Greenpeace that stir doubts about the safety of GM organisms. The result for the first generation of GMOs has been a global split decision. While GMOs cover millions of acres of cropland in the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, and India, governments have banned the cultivation of such plants through much of the rest of the world, including France, Germany, China, and Russia.
Now the question is whether gene-edited crops can dodge the GMO label. Broadly speaking, companies argue that these plants should be unregulated because they could have been created by conventional breeding. The proof? In many cases, there would be no way to tell a gene-edited plant from a natural one.
Editing one gene makes wheat resist mildew.
GMO critics now fear a tidal wave of “frankenfood†if such plants slip through regulations, something that is already occurring in the U.S. The reason gene-edited plants can be exempt from USDA rules is that the agency employs an outdated 30-year-old definition of a GMO that is triggered only if a plant was modified using plant bacteria, as early products were. The agency, in January 2017, acknowledged that plants with even profound genetic alterations “may entirely escape regulation†depending on how they are made. Since then, four more gene-edited plants have been waved forward, including a salt- and drought-tolerant soybean developed by the USDA itself, Calyxt’s alfalfa plant, a type of camelina grass created by Yield10, and a species of millet with a delayed flowering time. “They’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole of old laws not meant to address these new technologies,†says Gregory Jaffe, who follows biotechnology at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, in Washington, D.C.
What’s missing, then, is enough scrutiny of whether the plants could harm insects, spread their genetic enhancements to wild cousins, or create superweeds like the ones resistant to Roundup. Companies do typically consult with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to confirm that their plants are safe to eat. But that process is voluntary. Jaydee Hanson, senior policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, which promotes organic farming, thinks companies have been astute in starting with simple, even obscure, products. “The public has not had a chance to say ‘Wait a second,’†he says. “As we move into more complicated gene editing, there are going to be more questions. And we could see the same kind of kickback we saw before.â€
The “GMO or not†question is going to be a global one. Food regulators will have to decide if store packaging needs to disclose the presence of gene-edited plants. Some organic associations have already said such plants cannot carry that label, reasoning that they really are GMOs. The European Court of Justice, meanwhile, is set to weigh in on the issue in Europe, where scientists have argued that gene editing is simply an advanced form of breeding. Opponents are counting on Europe to classify the plants as GMOs, a decision that would frustrate the technology’s spread.
“It would be sad if opponents won,†Voytas told me. We were in his office and students were passing outside his window, waiting to for a chance to review their gene-editing plans with him. Even undergraduates, he noted, are now able to edit plants. “In some sense,†he said, “I think the genie is out of the bottle.â€
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Originally, one of bitcoin’s big selling points was that payments would be fast, convenient, and cheap. “The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions,” wrote bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto in the white paper announcing the technology.
“With bitcoins, transfers can take place across continents and timezones with no problems, no timelags, and only minuscule transaction fees,” wrote economics reporter Felix Salmon in 2013.
Until the beginning of this year, bitcoin fees tended to be well below $1, and often less than $0.10. Bitcoin supporters liked to point out that fees on the bitcoin network were often a lot less than the fees merchants paid to accept credit card payments. But in recent months, bitcoin’s popularity has outstripped the network’s ability to cope with growing demand.
As a result, the bitcoin network today is a radically different animal. Fees are high—the average transaction yesterday cost around $28. And that is having huge implications for the ways bitcoin is being used and the kinds of businesses being built on top of it. Indeed, companies that are trying to realize Nakamoto’s vision of bitcoin as a platform for “small casual transactions” are starting to shift to alternative networks, because it’s impossible to support small transactions when each transaction costs $20 in fees.
Rising transaction fees have been a huge headache for Bitpay
Consider Bitpay, one of the first successful bitcoin startups. Bitpay makes it easy for ordinary businesses to accept bitcoin payments. Bitpay accepts payments on merchants’ behalf and offers the option to immediately convert the payments to dollars or other conventional currencies, insulating merchants from bitcoin’s volatility. In the early years, Bitpay could accept payments that were just a few pennies.
But over the last year, the bitcoin network itself has seen fees go higher and higher. And Bitpay has been forced to raise transaction fees in response.
“Now that fees are reaching an average of $1 per transaction across the bitcoin network, it’s becoming uneconomical for users to make micropayments under $1,” Bitpay wrote in a March blog post. Bitpay also announced that it would start charging customers for the transaction fees Bitpay itself faced when it received a bitcoin payment.
Bitpay also started getting complaints about slower payment times thanks to the increasingly congested network. The way the bitcoin network deals with congestion is essentially by auctioning off scarce capacity to the highest bidder. Customers have the option to pay a higher fee in exchange for immediate delivery or to pay a lower fee and wait until congestion declines enough to make room for lower-fee transactions. As fees rise, this becomes a more and more dicey proposition.
“With the rising cost of bitcoin miner fees, refunds are also often costly to send,” Bitpay wrote last month. “Customers with mistaken payments only receive partial refunds of the BTC they sent because of miner fee costs. One customer of a Bitpay merchant recently spent 0.003853 BTC on a payment which was mistakenly underpaid by a small amount. They were only able to receive a refund of 0.002247 BTC.”
High fees are pushing companies away from bitcoin
Bitpay hasn’t stopped processing bitcoin payments, but it recently announced it would begin accepting payments with a rival version of bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash. Fees on the Bitcoin Cash network have averaged around 25¢ in recent days, compared to more than $20 on the mainstream bitcoin network. Merchants will be able to decide whether to accept payments with bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or both.
Video game giant Steam announced earlier this month that it would stop accepting bitcoin payments, citing skyrocketing transaction fees. “At this point, it has become untenable to support bitcoin as a payment option,” the company wrote.
A gift card merchant called BitCart switched from bitcoin to a rival called Dash back in June. “Bitcoin as a method of payment on BitCart is simply not sustainable and it’s a nightmare from a merchant point of view.”
Another frequently mentioned application for bitcoin is for remittances. A number of companies are working to build international money transfer services based on bitcoin that compete with conventional payment networks like Western Union and Moneygram.
But in October, one of those services, Bitspark, announced it was giving up on bitcoin because of the network’s high, unpredictable fees. Bitspark is shifting support to a lesser-known cryptocurrency called Bitshares.
Notice that many of the developments I’ve noted so far happened before the really big run-up of fees over the last few weeks. Prior to November, average daily bitcoin fees were rarely above $5. In the last week, by contrast, daily average bitcoin fees have consistently been above $20.
This is an existential crisis for any business built around facilitating small—or even medium-sized bitcoin transactions. If $5 transaction fees were enough to sour a few businesses away from using the platform, we can expect $20 fees to chase away a lot more. And if bitcoin’s speculative mania continues, the fees could easily go even higher.
Bitcoin has a lot riding on the Lightning network
Bitcoin insiders are not unaware of this problem. But their solution, called Lightning, is still months away, and it may or may not be enough to solve the problem.
The bitcoin network is built on the blockchain, a shared global ledger that is organized into data structures called blocks. A new block is created every 10 minutes, and each block can be up to 1 megabyte in size, leaving room for around 2,000 transactions per block. A recent upgrade called segregated witness might double this limit in the coming months.
Some people in the bitcoin community want to simply raise that 1 megabyte block limit to a higher number, leaving room for more transactions. But the developers who control the standard bitcoin software have resisted doing that, arguing that it’s important to ensure that ordinary bitcoin users can fully participate in bitcoin’s peer-to-peer networks. Frustrated big-block advocates seceded from the mainstream bitcoin community in August, creating a rival called Bitcoin Cash that uses essentially the same code but allows blocks up to 8 megabytes.
This has left the small-block faction firmly in control of the mainstream bitcoin network. And they’ve outlined a different vision for bitcoin’s future—one that’s built on a new payment layer called Lightning. Lightning uses a technique called payment channels to make bitcoin payments that don’t need to be written individually to the blockchain. Instead, payment channels allow people to essentially send each other cryptographically enforceable IOUs. Many of these IOUs can be bundled together and submitted as a batch to the blockchain, spreading the cost of a single on-chain transaction across many off-chain payments.
In theory, this will allow people to make many off-chain payments for every on-chain payment, relieving bitcoin’s congestion problems. The basic technology seems sound. Three teams working on independent Lightning implementations announced a 1.0 specification earlier this month and hope to unveil production-quality software implementing that specification in the coming months. But of course, the devil is in the details, and those details haven’t yet been fully worked out.
And even if the network works magnificently in the long run, it’s not going to arrive quickly enough for avoid fee-driven turmoil in the coming months. Businesses built on the premise that bitcoin transactions will be fast and cheap will have to find some way to cope with transactions that are slow and expensive.
That might mean switching to a rival like Bitcoin Cash or Dash. It might mean dropping cryptocurrency support all together until things stabilize. Or it might mean simply passing steadily rising costs on to customers.
The fatal derailment of an Amtrak train south of Seattle on Monday is likely to intensify scrutiny of the national passenger railroad company’s safety record, which was already under the microscope following a series of fatal incidents.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said late on Monday that a data recorder retrieved from the rear locomotive showed the train was traveling at 80 miles per hour in a 30 mph zone when it jumped the tracks.
The NTSB said it was too soon to say if that contributed to the crash, which killed at least three people, and it could take months for the board’s investigators to reach a conclusion.
Amtrak’s co-chief executive, Richard Anderson, told reporters earlier on Monday he would not speculate on the cause of the crash, and that safety was the firm’s top priority.
But he acknowledged that positive train control (PTC), a system that automatically slows trains if they are going too fast, had not been installed on that stretch of track.
Just last month, the NTSB chairman issued a scathing critique of Amtrak’s culture, saying a future breakdown was likely, and the board made nine safety recommendations.
“Amtrak’s safety culture is failing and is primed to fail again, until and unless Amtrak changes the way it practices safety management,” Robert Sumwalt said on Nov. 14.
Sumwalt’s statement was made in conjunction with the NTSB’s findings into a fatal Amtrak accident in April 2016 in Pennsylvania, which it said was caused by “deficient safety management across many levels of Amtrak and the resultant lack of a clear, consistent and accepted vision for safety.”
In that crash an Amtrak train struck a backhoe tractor on railroad tracks in Chester, Pennsylvania, killing two maintenance workers and injuring 41. It occurred a few miles south of the site of a May 2015 derailment in which eight people were killed and more than 200 injured.
Sumwalt told a hearing the board’s investigation “revealed more than two dozen unsafe conditions and not all of these were rule-breaking by frontline employees.”
Amtrak named former Delta Air Lines Chief Executive Officer Anderson as co-CEO last summer.
Anderson also told reporters on Monday that Amtrak took NTSB recommendations from investigations “very seriously” and was continuing to make investments that the board recommended.
Amtrak said in a memo to employees in November seen by Reuters that it had been “transforming our safety culture” since the Pennsylvania incident and had made numerous reforms, including to communication, training, safety efforts and creating a team that conducts safety audits. It also expanded drug and alcohol testing.
Slow rollout of PTC safety system
On Monday, a U.S. congressman from Washington state called attention to the slow rollout of PTC.
“We don’t know that it could have saved lives … but it is a disappointment to me that we’re not further along in the implementation of installing PTC,” Representative Denny Heck, a Democrat, told CNN.
Congress had mandated the implementation of PTC nationwide by the end of 2015, then extended that deadline until the end of 2018 when its installation became more complex than anticipated.
“There is a money issue because while Congress mandated the implementation of PTC on the railroads they didn’t give any money for it, so it is self-funded,” said Allan Zarembski, director of the Railroad Engineering and Safety Program at the University of Delaware.
Zarembski cautioned against assigning blame for Monday’s accident, noting that Amtrak does not own the track where the accident occurred.
It is owned by the Seattle-area Sound Transit agency.
“The railways generally are very safe,” he said. “I’m very reluctant to point the finger and say the railroads are a major problem here.”
A spokesman for Sound Transit, Geoff Patrick, said the track had recently been upgraded to handle passenger trains from its prior use for slow-moving freight trains.
He said Sound Transit was part of the incident response and was working with the NTSB in its investigation.
In its third phase of testing, the test pod achieved a top speed of 240 miles per hour at the company’s DevLoop test track. Previously, we had seen a Hyperloop One pod
test track. This latest test employed a new airlock, which helped the tube transition to internal pressures as low as one would experience at 200,000 feet above sea level, Virgin Hyperloop One said.
The $50 million investment comes from Caspian Venture Capital and DP World. So far, Virgin Hyperloop One has raised a total of $295 million since 2014. This latest investment arrives ahead of a Series C round of funding, so we can expect that total to rise again soon. In addition to raising money and continuing tests, Virgin Hyperloop One’s CEO Rob Lloyd said, “Our focus in 2018 will be on accelerating commercial agreements for both passenger and cargo projects.”
You won’t feel as proud of yourself for being able to shuffle a split deck at poker night after you watch the card manipulating skills of Huron Low, Kevin Ho, and Daren Yeow. The trio, also known as Virtuoso, can make a deck of cards leap through the air as if the effects of gravity aren’t actually felt during a performance.
Referring to these talented manipulators as card jugglers almost feels like it’s insulting the skills they’ve spent years perfecting. They prefer the term “cardisty†which feels a little pretentious, but watching them move cards around in mid-air like they wield the Force makes you realize they’ve probably earned the right to call their craft whatever they want.
On December 18, 1987, developer Square released its first Final Fantasy title to the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicon console. While Hironobu Sakaguchi thought it would be his last video game, the title was a financial success, leading to a continuous stream of sequels released on every gaming platform since then, including a surprising recent foray onto iOS with Final Fantasy XV Pocket. The first Final Fantasy was included on the recent NES Classic, too, if you were lucky enough to grab one before Nintendo discontinued making them.
Now the publisher is known as Square Enix, and has since released 14 other main Final Fantasy games, with a host of spin-off games and crossover titles, as well. Games in the series tend to have deep (if confusing) plot lines, turn-based RPG mechanics and small groups of heroes bent on battling great evil while they learn more about each other as people in the process.
The publisher is celebrating the title’s 30th anniversary with a ton of commemorative items that it’s been selling all year, including T-shirts, discounted Final Fantasy titles, plush dolls and, yes, even themed ballpoint pens. Whether you’re a long-time fan or just learning about the long-running, ironically-named series, you might enjoy browsing the memorabilia and remembering the first time you played a Final Fantasytitle (mine was Final Fantasy Adventure on the Game Boy).
