#CrimeAndPunishment

Google. While breaking privacy laws seems to be their global sport of choice, they sure do stick to the letter of the law when their autonomous cars are perusing American roads.

Oddly, that’s a problem according to the New York Times, because the rest of us operate our automobiles in a legal gray area, bending the rules to our benefit when we know we won’t get caught.

Update 2: Connecticut police have sent over a statement.

Update: We’ve received a reply from Lime Rock Park’s Press, PR & Editorial Director, Rick Roso, detailing what happened last night. It is included below.

Police say several teens broke into Lime Rock Park on Wednesday night and crashed go-karts, injuring two teenagers. According to police, a 15-year-old girl was transported to a Hartford children’s hospital via helicopter and a 15-year-old boy was transported to a local hospital, both with non-life threatening injuries. Both teens are in stable condition.

In the area, multiple local news sources are reporting the crash.

Police were called out to the track around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Police in North Carolina are looking for Ronnie Pollard, who appeared in the Discovery Channel’s series “Street Outlaws,” in connection with an engine theft, WGHP is reporting.

According to investigators, Pollard may have been involved with a June robbery in King, North Carolina where thieves made off with nearly $450,000 in engines and caused $14,000 in damage to Buck Racing Engine’s shop.

“The Discovery Channel should have done a little better job checking people out,” shop owner Charlie Buck told the news station. “It’s just hard to believe that somebody like that’s been on TV, and then they break in and steal stuff from you.”

According to the shop, donations for reward money have flooded the shop, and investigators and the shop are offering more than $22,000 for information about the missing engines.

The court case against former FCA Australia executive Clyde Campbell is turning into a veritable who’s-who of decision makers at the company, reports The Age.

Campbell, who is charged with misappropriation of $30 million AUD of company funds, claims he had verbal permission from recently departed FCA executive John Kett, current company hotshot Mike Manley, and head of FCA Sergio Marchionne.

A U.S. Senate committee has shot down a number of auto safety measures including one that would hold executives criminally accountable for not disclosing known automotive defects, reports the New York Times.

“Hiding these deadly defects with near impunity is what the industry has succeeded in doing,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., according to the story. He introduced many of the failed provisions.

Another proposal that would have made it illegal for used-car dealers to sell vehicles with outstanding recalls was rejected by the committee.

When Maggie Dajani realized that the tire-pressure warning light was on in the van she’d rented to take six teenagers and their parents to a One Direction concert in El Paso, she took the van back to the rental company. A representative of the company, Star Limo, told her not to worry. She then continued to the concert. Shortly afterwards, the van blew two tires and rolled over. Several motorists helped drag the ten passengers out of the van, which was filling with smoke. The children went to the hospital with various injuries, and one of them reportedly received one hundred and fifty stitches as a result.

Now, the New Mexico Public Regulatory Commission has delivered a very, ahem, business-friendly verdict on the whole ordeal. Turns out that Star Limo is the beneficiary of a unique combination of regulatory conditions.

Aftermath of Carrollton, KY bus crash May 14, 1988.

No one is in favor of drunk driving. Don’t do it. Now that I’ve completed the ritualistic incantation prior to writing a piece about drunk driving, let’s hit the jump and discuss the latest proposal from the NTSB.

As the nation’s peacekeepers are learning to live without the venerable Ford Crown Victoria it is also a time to reflect on what police cars were like in the time before the Panther platform debuted in 1978 for the 1979 model year. In 1972, the cruiser of choice for the City of Lexington was the Ford Galaxie 500.

Author’s note- In order to protect the privacy of the victims, some names and details have been omitted or changed.

Part One of this story can be found here.

Author’s note: In order to protect the identity of the victims in this case, some names and details have been omitted or changed.

There are a million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.

Remember the great “Road Rage” epidemic of the late- nineties? Before the media and various bureaucratic institutions jumped on “distracted driving” as the automotive menace du jour that’s going to turn our highways and byways red with blood, there was a brief period of intense focus on road rage. All of the major news shows, like Dateline and 20/20, had pieces about traffic disputes escalating from displays of a middle finger into multiple homicide by Weedeater or whatever other gardening tool fell quickly to hand.

Certainly such incidents can and do happen, although we don’t seem to hear about them as much as we did a few short years ago. However, the other side of the road rage coin can be just as dangerous. I’m talking about violations of the rules of the road in the misguided attempt to be “nice” to your fellow motorists.

For years it had been a mystery how the Texas House of Representatives, 83 percent of whose members voted to ban photo enforcement, could nonetheless endorse the use of red light cameras. An ethical storm that broke around state Representative Linda Harper-Brown (R-Irving) last month provides the answer. Harper-Brown, a Transportation Committee member, accepted unreported gratuities from a traffic camera firm in return for playing the decisive role in establishing the automated ticketing industry in the Lone Star State.

US District Court Judge James B. Zagel on Wednesday unsealed documents filed in the case against former Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich (D). The 91-page document lays out in greater detail the evidence in the prosecution’s corruption case against a man charged with using his office to line his own pockets. One of the central money-making schemes alleged is a multi-billion deal to install High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes inside an existing toll road. Blagojevich announced the program in 2008.

Although independent studies have shown a link between the use of photo enforcement equipment and a statistically significant increase in the number of collisions, opponents of photo radar have produced few concrete examples of these incidents. In Arizona, the group CameraFraud.com has begun using freedom of information laws to get its hands on examples of accidents that would not have happened but for the presence of a speed camera van ( view studies).

Thus far, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s war on distracted driving has been largely a rhetorical hobbyhorse, giving the good Secretary a crowd-pleasing speech topic no matter where he finds himself. After calling the situation “an epidemic,” LaHood held a summit at which it was agreed that distracted driving is bad, especially when it causes deaths. Federal employees were subsequently barred from texting while driving government-owned vehicles during work hours. And that was just about it. Apparently chastened by his big build-up and lack of pay-off on this issue, LaHood has kept himself busy with the Toyota debacle of late, leaving distracted driving largely alone since last summer’s summit. Until he remembered that there was one crucial tool in his bureaucratic bag of tricks that he hadn’t yet used: the photo op.