DAILY NEWS
Break point for nurses ● Banning Eyman ● Boeing’s fix may have failed
Thursday, April 4, 2019
THIS WASHINGTON
ALSO at The Stand — Hospital caregivers’ unions: SHB 1155 is urgently needed — Please visit BreaksAreALifesaver.org to send your state senator a message to vote YES on this important patient-safety legislation. SHB 1155 will help ensure our nurses and caregivers are well-rested and alert, and help reduce medical errors and ensure quality care for Washingtonians.
LOCAL
► In the Seattle Times — Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan signs deal with city unions to counteract Supreme Court’s fees ruling — Durkan signed an agreement with a coalition of city unions Tuesday meant to counteract the Janus decision. Calling the case part of a “continued assault” on worker rights and organized labor, the mayor at a City Hall news conference said Seattle’s new agreement will “make sure workers are protected.”
► In today’s Seattle Times — Seattle Times to sell Bothell printing plant to help fund news operations — The Seattle Times plans to sell its printing-press property in Bothell to fund news operations, and will shift to printing the paper at its Rotary Offset Press in Kent next year. There will be job losses at the facility, which typically employs about 150 people, but it’s too soon to know how many, a spokesman said.
BOEING
► In today’s Seattle Times — Preliminary crash report confirms Ethiopian 737 MAX pilots lost control despite following Boeing’s instructions — It confirms also that the pilots lost control even though they followed the procedure Boeing laid out after the Lion Air crash as a way to recover from such a system failure. This finding casts serious doubt on the adequacy of the emergency procedures Boeing and the FAA directed pilots to follow after the first crash.
► In today’s Seattle Times — Why Boeing’s emergency directions may have failed to save 737 MAX — Boeing has publicly contended for five months that this simple procedure was all that was needed to save the airplane if MCAS was inadvertently activated…. A local expert, former Boeing flight-control engineer Peter Lemme, recently explained how the emergency procedure could fail disastrously. His scenario is backed up by extracts from a 1982 Boeing 737-200 Pilot Training Manual posted to an online pilot forum a month ago by an Australian pilot.
THAT WASHINGTON
seek demand 6 years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns — The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee asked the IRS on Wednesday for six years of Trump’s personal and business tax returns, a request with which the president immediately said he was not inclined to comply. Privately, Trump has told White House advisers that he does not plan to hand over his tax returns to Congress — and that he would fight the issue to the Supreme Court, hoping to stall it until after the 2020 election.
► In today’s Washington Post — Limited information Barr has shared about Russia investigation frustrated some on Mueller’s team — Members of Mueller’s team have complained to close associates that the evidence they gathered on obstruction was alarming and significant. Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could made public, one official said… “Why did Barr feel the need to release his own summary?” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “Why didn’t he release a summary produced by Bob Mueller itself instead of trying to shape it through his own words?”
► In today’s Washington Post — One group that wouldn’t be surprised if Barr undersold Mueller’s findings: Most Americans — Polls show that most Americans believe Trump wasn’t exonerated of the specific allegation that his campaign had colluded with Russia but that, instead, possible coordination couldn’t be proved.
► From HuffPost — ICE arrests hundreds in largest workplace raid in over a decade — ICE agents went into the offices of CVE Technology Group, a telecommunications equipment repair business in Allen, Texas, and arrested more than 280 employees for “administrative immigration violations,” which generally are arrests for being unauthorized, not for committing any other offense.