Category: US

Tribar Manufacturing, the Wixom automotive supplier responsible for a release of potentially cancer-causing hexavalent chromium into the Huron River late last month, apparently overrode alarms 460 times on July 29, as a large tank containing the chemical was drained into the city of Wixom’s wastewater treatment system, state regulators allege in violation notices issued to the company.

The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy on Tuesday issued a “Second Violation Notice — Egregious” to Tribar Manufacturing, claiming company personnel:

• Improperly released pollutants into the publicly owned Wixom wastewater treatment facility.
• Failed to report the hexavalent chromium release in a timely fashion to the Wixom wastewater treatment plant.
• Failed to have an up-to-date, certified pollution incident prevention plan.

“Because of the gravity of the violations, WRD (EGLE’s Water Resources Division) moved directly into second notification and escalated enforcement, normally a three-step process,” EGLE spokeswoman Jill Greenberg said.

‘Please explain’ how alarms were overridden

EGLE’s violation notice states that according to a required release incident report Tribar officials provided to the agency and the city of Wixom on Aug. 5, the contents had been held in “Tank A,” a 14,923-gallon rinse waste holding tank that contained approximately 10,000 gallons of material containing approximately 5% hexavalent chromium. The tank was emptied on July 29 and entered the sanitary sewer.

A Southern California dermatologist accused of poisoning her husband allegedly spiked his hot lemonade multiple times with liquid Drano, police said.

The woman, a physician in Mission Viejo, was arrested on Aug. 4, after her husband contacted police saying he believed his wife was poisoning him and provided detectives with “video evidence supporting his suspicion,” police said in a Tuesday statement.

She was booked at the Orange County Jail, and posted a $30,000 bond on Aug. 5, but charges had not been filed as of Wednesday, according to police and an attorney in the case.

According to the statement, the husband told police he suspected he was being poisoned by his wife after becoming ill over the course of a month.

Her husband sustained “significant internal injuries,” but was expected to recover, police said.

Three people were killed when a house exploded in Evansville, Indiana, on Wednesday in a blast that damaged 39 other homes, officials said.

One person was also taken to a hospital after the explosion just before 1 pm, Evansville Fire Chief Mike Connelly said.

Some of the homes were damaged so severely that they were not safe to enter, and a search for more victims had not yet been finished by Wednesday evening, he said.

The cause of the explosion, which erupted on North Weinbach Avenue, was under investigation, officials said.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was also completing a blast analysis, Connelly said.

The identities of the dead and other details were not being released until next of kin are notified, the Vanderburgh County Coroner’s Office said.

Utility company CenterPoint Energy arrived and made the area of ​​the blast safe, and Connelly said that its equipment did not detect any natural gas but that the cause of the explosion was still being determined.

CenterPoint said in a statement that its crews responded to the explosion and that the company is working closely with the fire department, the state fire marshal and other agencies.

And even as Americans face pressure from elevated grocery bills and rising rents, consumer spending is slowing but still strong — fueling hopes that inflation might ease without leading to a full-blown recession.

“We are turning the corner on inflation,” Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi said in an interview before the data release.

The new report is a welcome development for a White House that has been celebrating recent legislative victories — including a law aimed at boosting domestic semiconductor manufacturing and the Senate’s passage of a deficit-reducing package with funding for climate and health initiatives — that Democrats say will fight inflation. It could also blunt Republican attacks that the administration — and the Fed — vastly miscalculated the rise in the cost of living.

New survey data published by the New York Fed on Monday found that consumers are softening expectations that runaway prices will continue to eviscerate their paychecks over the next three years. Those expectations play a key role in the central bank’s decisions on how much to raise rates. Americans now expect gas prices to rise 1.5 percent — compared to 5.7 percent just a month ago, and 6.7 percent for food, a decline of 2.5 percentage points.

While those figures represent clear improvements, it will take a lot more for President Joe Biden and the Democrats to turn around the narrative that spiking prices have overshadowed most of the economy’s gains as it emerges from the pandemic.

“Even if it comes down a little bit, it’s still going to be bad,” Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who is heading the effort to flip the Senate to Republican control, said in an interview ahead of the release. He called for reductions in government spending, arguing that the Senate-passed package won’t cut it.

“When they raise taxes, they never get the tax revenue than they anticipate and they always spend more than they anticipate,” he said.

For now, Americans haven’t curtailed spending, even as prices continue to climb. While consumer confidence metrics are fading, MasterCard reported that year-over-year spending swelled by more than 11 percent last month — a trend the credit card company claimed was driven as much by demand as swelling prices.

Amazon likely had a hand as well.

In reports released this week, both BofA Institute and Adobe pointed to Prime Day — the e-commerce giant’s massive company-wide sale — as a contributing factor to July spending. The discounts offered on Amazon during the sale can “really influence where we understand the consumer to be; in a very sort of price-sensitive state,” said Adobe Digital Insights Lead Analyst Vivek Pandya.

Lower online prices, however, provide a respite for consumers hammered by soaring costs.

To be certain, economists in the past have been premature in declaring that inflation has “peaked,” and several other indicators, including an explosive jobs market, rising labor costs and spiking household rents suggest upward pressure on prices could last for some time. That means that even if the Fed avoids causing a deep recession, it may still have to keep rates high for longer than many investors expect.

“We have a lot more heavy lifting in front of us, despite the likely peak in inflation,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for RSM US. “We’re not in a multi-month process. We’re in a multi-year process.”

Meanwhile, several data points offer a muddled picture, at best, of where the economy is headed. The Consumer Price Index’s “headline number” includes food and energy — commodities with prices that are much more volatile driven by trading on exchanges, rather than by businesses. But the Fed also looks at measures excluding those prices to better gauge what it calls core inflation.

Any measure of price arises points to high inflation, so Fed Chair Jerome Powell says that distinction is less important for the moment. In July, core inflation rose 0.3 percent — still notable but below what economists had expected.

Still, Powell has said the central bank is looking for multiple reports showing inflation clearly cooling before it begins to ease off its interest rate hikes.

One of the most troublesome inflation drivers has been rent, which rose by 0.6 percent in July alone. Many expect housing costs to continue climbing sharply even as higher mortgage rates slow the ascent of home prices.

Andrew Patterson, senior international economist at Vanguard, said he expects inflation to persist above 3 percent through the end of 2023 because of housing costs — well above the Fed’s 2 percent target.

“If you get into the second half of next year and rents are persistently high? That’s going to be a point of concern for them,” he said.

Zandi, whose work has frequently been cited by the White House, said he expects rental prices to keep the Fed from hitting its target before 2024.

Strong labor markets will also play a role. The unemployment rate is at 3.5 percent, and while job openings have ticked down, they were still higher last month than at any point in the decade prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Labor Department data. And pay raises have continued to accelerate, which could increase costs for employers even as worker income fails to keep pace with overall price increases.

Bank of America Institute economist Anna Zhou said the strong labor market has helped prop up bank balances across all income levels, which allows households to offset some of the pressure of rising prices — particularly when it comes to rent.

“Around 34 percent of US households are renters,” Zhou said. “Surging rent prices definitely are squeezing their wallets.”

That squeeze will feel even tighter if gas prices start to climb again and food inflation persists.

Administration officials are quick to cite any data point that reinforces their case that lowering inflation has been Biden’s “number one priority,” as one White House official said Tuesday. Lower gas prices, the Inflation Reduction Act — which isn’t likely to have any immediate impact on prices — and the new CHIPS and Sciences law are part of those messaging efforts.

None of that will be enough to assume inflation hawks, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who have warned that the Fed’s slow footing on inflation prior to the recent rate hikes has left the economy ill-suited to prepare for a soft landing.

“There will be disinflation coming from gasoline and other commodity prices,” Summers tweeted late Monday night. “It does not mean inflation is coming under control.”

Former President Donald Trump said he refused to answer questions from investigators with the New York Attorney General’s office on Wednesday, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination related to the years-long civil fraud probe into his businesses.

Trump appeared for a deposition in New York on Wednesday morning. In a statement posted to his social network after he arrived for questioning, Trump called New York Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation “a vindictive and self-serving fishing expedition” that he claims is politically motivated.

“Accordingly, under the advice of my counsel and for all of the above reasons, I declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution,” he said.

Trump’s lawyers have long hinted that he might invoke the Fifth Amendment and decline to answer questions. In arguing to quash the subpoena that led to Trump’s deposition, they said that the attorney general could give the deposition to other law enforcement agencies. They said Trump would have to choose between answering questions that could be used in parallel criminal investigations and taking the Fifth, a move that could lead prosecutors or grand jurors to “draw an adverse inference.”

Trump attorney Ron Fischetti claimed in a January interview with CBS News that James’ office “wants him to testify under oath, without immunity. So she can turn his testimony over to the district attorney and say, ‘Here, we have it. You can use it and you don’t have to give him immunity,'” alluding to the New York practice of giving immunity to those who testify before grand juries.

Judges in three separate New York courts have sided with the James and ruled she is free to do with the deposition what she wants, including turning it over to other law enforcement agencies.

James has sought the deposition for more than half a year as Trump and two of his children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, fought subpoenas through a trio of New York courts. They were eventually ordered to sit for depositionsand earlier this month Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump were questioned.

The subpoenas sought “testimony and documents in connection with an investigation into the valuation of properties owned or controlled by Donald J. Trump or the Trump Organization, or any matter which the Attorney General deems pertinent.”

Attorneys for James’ office have said in court that their investigation has collected evidence that Trump and his company have used “fraudulent and misleading financial statements,” inflating the valuations of assets while seeking loans and insurance coverage and deflating their value to reduce tax liability.

Trump and his company have repeatedly denied all allegations of wrongdoing.

Attorneys for James’ office have indicated during multiple court hearings this spring and summer that the investigation is nearing its conclusion.

The former president’s deposition Wednesday comes amid a time of heightened legal peril. The FBI on Monday entered his home in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, taking away boxes of documents as part of an investigation into Trump’s handling of classified material. A federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot is looking into communications between some of Trump’s closest allies of him, and a judge in Georgia on Tuesday ordered Trump’s former personal attorney, Rudy Giulianito appear before a special grand jury there.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in each of those matters.