Boeing said Wednesday that it will provide an “initial investment” of $100 million over several years to help families and communities affected by two crashes of its 737 Max plane that killed 346 people.
The airline manufacturer said some of the money will go toward living expenses and to cover hardship suffered by the families of passengers killed in the crashes.
Boeing faces dozens of lawsuits over the accidents. Relatives of passengers on a Lion Air Max that crashed off the coast of Indonesia agreed to try to settle through mediation, but families of passengers killed in an Ethiopian Airlines crash are waiting until more is known about the accidents.
Preliminary investigations point to the role played by new software that pushed the planes’ noses down. Boeing is updating the software to make it easier for pilots to control, but the company doesn’t expect to submit its work for final regulatory approval until September.
Lawyers who are suing Boeing on behalf of passengers’ families said the new $100 million promise won’t stop them from demanding that Boeing provide details about how the plane and the new flight-control software were developed.
“For the totality of these losses, that is a very small number,” said Robert Clifford, who represents relatives of those killed in the March crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Max. “I wouldn’t even say it’s a good start.”
Trade gap rises to 5-month high
The U.S. trade deficit rose to a five-month high in May as the politically sensitive imbalances with China and Mexico widened.
The Commerce Department said Wednesday that the gap between the goods and services the U.S. sells and what it buys from foreign countries rose 8.4% to $55.5 billion in May, the highest since December. Exports increased 2% to $210.6 billion on rising shipments of soybeans, aircraft and cars. But imports climbed more – 3.3% to $266.2 billion – on an increase in crude oil and cellphones.
The deficit in the trade of goods with Mexico rose 18.1% to a record $9.6 billion. The goods gap with China widened 12.2% to $30.2 billion.
President Donald Trump has sought to reduce America’s persistent trade deficit, which he sees as a sign of economic weakness and the result of bad trade agreements crafted by naive U.S. negotiators.
So far this year, the goods-and-services deficit is $261.4 billion, up 6.4% from January-May 2018.
Judge to reassess Monsanto awards
A federal judge says he will reconsider a jury’s $80 million damage award to a cancer victim who used Monsanto’s Roundup weed-killer.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said at a hearing Tuesday that he will reduce but not entirely eliminate punitive damages for what he called the company’s “reprehensible” conduct. He said the evidence at the trial showed “Monsanto not really caring whether its products cause cancer.”
In March, a jury found that glyphosate, an active ingredient in Roundup, was a likely cause of 70-year-old Edwin Hardeman’s diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Hardeman was diagnosed in 2015 after spraying the product on his California property for more than 26 years. Monsanto is appealing the verdict.
Thousands of similar lawsuits against Monsanto are pending.
Governor sued in Puerto Rico
A federal control board overseeing Puerto Rico’s finances sued the U.S. territory’s governor Wednesday, saying he refuses to submit required documents and has approved tens of millions of dollars in unbudgeted spending amid a 13-year recession.
The board also accused Gov. Ricardo Rosselló of signing nearly two dozen joint resolutions to appropriate funds for expenditures not approved by board-certified budgets.
“Puerto Rico cannot fall back into an era of uncontrolled spending,” board chairman Richard Carrión said. “This led us into bankruptcy and resulted in pain and suffering on our island.”
The suit says this “is not the first instance of the governor misinterpreting the scope of his authority” after Congress created the board. Rosselló has long maintained that the board’s powers do not supersede his.