Most Recent Posts

A month after a man armed with a knife leapt the White House fence and got deep into the first floor of the building, another man made a run across the North Lawn Wednesday night.

His unannounced visit ended much sooner. NPR's Tamara Keith reports via Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan that security dogs — which weren't deployed Sept. 19 when Omar Gonzalez trespassed — brought him down while he was still on the lawn. The apprehended man is being transported to a hospital for evaluation, Donovan said in a release.

U.S.

How Can The Secret Service Recover Its Reputation?

The earlier intrusion resulted in the Oct. 1 resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson, who herself had only been on the job since 2013, when she replaced the retiring director following a scandal involving agents and prostitutes in Colombia.

Update at 10:10 p.m. ET: In an updated release, Donovan identified the arrested man as Dominic Adesanya, a 23-year-old from Bel Air, Md., northeast of Baltimore. The Secret Service spokesman also said two of the agency's dogs were taken to a veterinarian "for injuries sustained during the incident."

Omar Gonzalez

Secret Service

White House

Once again the U.S. Supreme Court is correcting its own record, but Wednesday marks the first time that the court has called attention to its own mistake with a public announcement. And it was the erring justice herself, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who asked the court's public information office to announce the error.

Last Friday Ginsburg pulled an all-nighter to write a dissent from the court's decision to allow the Texas voter ID law to go into effect while the case is on appeal. The dissent, released Saturday at 5 a.m. and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, listed a variety of photo ID forms not accepted for purposes of voting under the Texas law. Among those listed in the Ginsburg dissent as unacceptable was a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs photo ID.

Three days after the opinion was released, professor Richard Hasen of the University of California, Irvine said on his election law blog that the state does in fact accept the Veterans Affairs IDs. Upon confirmation of that fact by the Texas secretary of state's office, Ginsburg amended her opinion.

Not surprising. What was surprising is that, according to Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg, Justice Ginsburg instructed the press office to announce that the opinion had "contained an error" and that it was being corrected.

On Wednesday, the court announced the mistake and the correction.

Texas Can Enforce Voter ID Law For November Election Oct. 18, 2014

The Two-Way

Supreme Court Lets Texas Enforce Voter ID Law For Nov. Election

Errors of this sort are not exactly rare. In this case, it appears that Ginsburg may have gotten the Wisconsin and Texas voter ID provisions, both before the court, mixed up.

Until the era of the blogosphere, however, this sort of mistake was the stuff of academic gossip. Now it is the stuff of academic blogs, which sometimes get picked up in the popular press. A more embarrassing mistake by Justice Antonin Scalia was caught by Harvard Law professor Richard Lazarus last spring; the error was quickly fixed, but it was not announced. Nor was another error made and corrected by Justice Kagan.

Ginsburg is the first justice to call the public's attention to her own mistake.

Web Resources

Revised Dissent

Most auto recalls usually involve one carmaker at a time, but a massive recall this week affects not just one, but 10, ranging from BMWs to Toyotas.

At the center of it is Takata, a little-known, but extremely important, auto parts maker. The company makes more than one-third of the air bags in all cars.

Nearly 8 million vehicles have been recalled to have defective air bags fixed, and Congress is now opening an investigation into the problems.

Another big issue that sets this recall apart, says Karl Brauer, an analyst with Kelley Blue Book, "is that there's essentially nothing you can do to kind of mitigate the potential damage or danger from these air bags if they fail" — there's no big habit you can change or quick fix you can make.

The other thing that makes this different, Brauer says, is the basic fact of what happens when the air bags fail. They're supposed to cushion you during an accident, but instead the defective ones send metal shrapnel flying.

"So if you're in an unavoidable or an unpredictable accident, in the blink of an eye an air bag fires, and in that firing, it throws shrapnel at you at a high rate of speed, there's really nothing you can do about it," he says.

The Two-Way

NHTSA Adds More Than 3 Million Vehicles To Air Bag Recall

"One minute you're driving, the next minute, there's an accident — 'Bang, boom! — An air bag pops and there's shrapnel thrown."

Takata, a Japanese auto supplier that serves the global auto industry, is responsible for more than 30 percent of car air bags. It's one of only three big air bag suppliers.

"If one of those three suddenly needs to recall and replace a whole bunch — like, tens of millions of air bags that they've already produced — plus keep up with ongoing new vehicle air bags that they're already kind of at capacity producing, there ... isn't a solution," Brauer says. "There's no pressure relief valve that they can turn to easily to make the old air bag replacements, while continuing to make the new air bags for new cars."

Four deaths have been linked to the defect. The problem seems to be triggered by humid conditions. The Department of Transportation has taken the unusual step of urging owners of millions of vehicles who live in areas with high humidity — such as Florida, other Gulf states and Hawaii — to act immediately.

The warning cautions drivers not to use their vehicles until they are serviced by a dealer.

Ellen Bloom, senior director of federal policy with Consumers Union, says she's worried that drivers have grown too apathetic about recalls.

For instance, in the big General Motors recall that affects tens of millions of cars, only about half have been brought in to be fixed.

"The idea that air bag can explode and send pieces of metal into your flesh is troubling to say the least," Bloom says. "Again, while no one should panic, we think it's a serious safety issue and that people should address it."

Bloom says the government and carmakers need to do a much better job of informing the public about and resolving recall issues — and urges consumers to check on recalls at safercar.gov.

David Whiston, an equity analyst with Morningstar, says car companies' stock prices or sales are unlikely to be affected, as most of the vehicles covered under the recall are older models.

The background to this recall, Whiston says, is a movement to standardize parts across the globe. That's helpful for carmakers, "but, when something goes wrong, it will now go wrong across a much wider number of vehicles than people are used to hearing about in the news for a recall," he says.

The main pressure in today's auto industry is to realize economies of scale, he says.

"It's a viciously competitive industry; there really aren't a lot of weak players anymore. So, because of that, I think ... it's worth the automakers taking the risk of having more recall volume in exchange for getting more economies of scale," he says.

Whiston expects high-volume car recalls to continue — but you really need to pay attention to this one.

Takata

air bags

air bags

crash safety

auto accidents

recalls

auto industry

Off to the side of the wickedly funny Swedish black comedy Force Majeure lurks a minor but significant figure with a sour, slightly saturnine face. The man is a cleaner in a fancy French Alps ski hotel and he hardly says a word. But his wordless hovering inspires dread, nervous laughter or both. Which pretty much sums up Force Majeure's adroit shifts of tone, and quite possibly its director's take on the ways of the hip urban bourgeoisie.

Cleaners dig for dirt, and this expressionless snooper keeps popping up to intrude on the unraveling of a seemingly perfect couple. They're so wrapped up in their bickering efforts to restore equilibrium, they fail to notice that they've locked their two young children in a room with a creepy stranger who could pass for an ax murderer.

A successful businessman who seems equally pleased with his good looks and his cell phone, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) has come to this pricy resort to relax with his trophy wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kingsli), and their two children. They make a sleek, perfect domestic unit in a perfect, smooth-running hotel, all clean lines and blond wood.

Well, forget that: Force Majeure is framed around the fast-moving degradation of the couple's week-long vacation, which heads south after a supposedly controlled explosion backfires, setting off an avalanche that bears down on the family's patio lunch. Instead of protecting his family, Tomas snatches up his phone and takes off. So much for alpha males, and it's not over yet.

Physically, everyone's fine, but a shocked Ebba can't stop repeating the story of her husband's escape to anyone who will listen, as well as some who'd rather not. The couple's unease quickly infects the friends who join them: a red-headed, hyper-masculine Viking type (Kristofer Hivju) who looks a bit like an escapee from the set of Brave, and his pert, much younger girlfriend (Fanni Metelius). Here, writer-director Ruben Ostlund pauses to poke more fun at patriarchy, but no one in this increasingly unpleasant, hapless crew gets off unscathed.

Ostlund is a gifted creator of malignant ambience, which he masterfully uses to keep his audience wound tight and unsure whether the payoff in catastrophe will be physical, emotional or both. He bathes us in pervasive unease (electric toothbrushes play a recurring role) rendered all the more sinister by a snowy backdrop of breathtaking blues and grays.

Of course, nature is no more authentic than anything else in this fiendishly contrived movie, in which natural beauty is CG-enhanced to the point of hysteria: The heavy silence is disturbed only by the soft swish of skis on pristine snow or the brittle chatter of ski-suited hotel guests seeking hookups. Those man-made explosions elicit jumps, but in no way prepare you for the feral misbehavior that disrupts this borderline fascistic milieu, only to disappear into white fog — then reappear for encores.

In one of the film most entertaining moments, an unhinged Tomas sinks to the floor and launches into a confession like a fearful 8-year-old. Yet Ostlund isn't just getting under the skin of a smug bourgeois marriage. Force Majeure is about the paper-thin fragility of civilization itself.

That's not a terribly original insight, but it's cunningly driven home by a crucial turn of the screw when a crowd of homeward-bound vacationers walks down a mountain in a kind of ecstatic silence, aware of precisely how much human frailty they share in common. Metaphorically speaking, one in particular has just been dragged from a very high horse. Let's just say that that person's consort is quite pleased.