Business briefs: Takata air bag linked to seventh fatality
NEW YORK – U.S. regulators have confirmed that an air bag made by Takata Corp. was involved in the April death of a woman in Louisiana, connecting the defective air bags to a seventh fatality.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it examined the car Kylan Langlinais drove, read police and medical reports, and other evidence. Takata said it had no comment. Honda, the maker of the car, confirmed that the air bag inflator ruptured during the crash.
Takata, the NHTSA and automakers are still trying to determine why the inflators explode, but it’s known that a chemical that inflates the air bags can expand with too much force, blowing apart a metal inflator and sending shrapnel into the passenger compartment.
A 2005 Honda Accord driven by Langlinais crashed into a utility pole in Lafayette, Louisiana on the morning of April 5.
Honda confirmed Friday that it sent a recall notice for the car three days before the crash. According to a lawsuit filed by Langlinais’ family this week, that notice arrived two days after the crash. Langlinais died two days later.
Food, gas hikes lead wholesale prices jump
WASHINGTON – Prices at the wholesale level rose at the fastest pace in nearly 3 years in May, pushed higher by a sharp jump in the cost of gasoline and a record increase in the price of eggs related to an outbreak of avian influenza. But outside of increases in volatile food and energy costs, core inflation remained moderate.
The producer price index, which measures inflation pressures before they reach consumers, spiked 0.5 percent in May, the Labor Department reported Friday. It was the biggest one-month increase since September 2012. The increase followed a 0.4 percent drop in wholesale prices in April. The May increase reflected a 17 percent rise in gasoline prices, the biggest hike since August 2009, and a record 56.4 percent surge in egg prices.
Core prices, which exclude energy and food, rose just 0.1 percent in May.
France orders Google to expand URL removals
PARIS – France’s data privacy agency ordered Google to remove search results worldwide upon request, giving the company two weeks to apply the “right to be forgotten” globally.
The order Friday from CNIL comes more than a year after Europe’s highest court ruled that people have the right to control what appears when their name is searched online.
So far, Google says it has received more than 268,000 requests to remove URLs after the May 2014 decision. French citizens lead the European Union in requests, with more than 55,000.
But switching to a non-European Google domain can still pull up the deleted links in a matter of clicks.