Monday, March 10th, 2025

(Photo Courtesy of the Allegheny County Police)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Pittsburgh, PA) According to Allegheny County Police, a man from Fayette County was charged for possessing a gun at Pittsburgh International Airport’s main security checkpoint on Thursday. A felony charge was given to forty-five-year-old James McDonald of Point Marion after he possessed a firearm in his suitcase and did not have a license. Allegheny County Police have confirmed that a valid concealed carry permit is needed to possess a firearm and McDonald did not have one. Allegheny County Police were given an alert by TSA officers when the incident occurred. A notification about the incident was also given to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

(Photo Courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Pittsburgh, PA) A man from Morgantown, West Virginia got arrested on Wednesday for bringing a gun through one of Pittsburgh International Airport’s security checkpoints. The weapon was a handgun and it was found in a carry-on after being intercepted by TSA. According to TSA, these incidents are happening so frequently which could make them set a record that they do not want. That record is for the most intercepted guns in a year at the Pittsburgh International Airport.

(Photo Courtesy of the Beaver Borough)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Beaver Borough, PA) The Beaver Borough announced some of their spring events. Their annual town yard sale occurs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, May 3rd. You do not need a permit for this event. The Beaver Borough’s Spring clean-up days to get rid of household items are on Saturday, May 10th for the South side of town and on Saturday, May 17th for the North side of town. They do not accept “garbage,” items with freon, building materials, lawn waste, electronics, mattresses or propane tanks. You can also call 724-773-6700 for more information.

(File Photo of Aliquippa Fire Department Truck)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Aliquippa, PA) An investigation continues to identify the cause of a kitchen fire that occurred in a house in Aliquippa on Friday morning. The fire got reported on the 1600 block of Davidson Street just after 1 a.m. The fire chief confirmed nobody was cooking during the fire and that everyone in the house escaped safely. There is no identifiable cause for this fire at this time.

(File Photo: Source for Photo: President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

DETROIT (AP) — President Donald Trump’s short reprieve for U.S. automakers from stiff tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada isn’t likely to allow enough time for those companies to make the changes necessary to minimize the damage from Trump’s intensifying trade war.

Trump granted a one-month exemption to 25% tariffs on vehicles and auto parts traded through the North American trade agreement USMCA after speaking with leaders of automakers Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the White House said Wednesday. Trump then broadened the exemption beyond autos for Mexico and some imports from Canada on Thursday.

In response to concerns about the short timeline for auto companies, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt noted that Trump told the companies to “start investing, start moving, shift production here.”

It’s just not that simple.

Automakers “will be hit differently based on exactly where their supply chain is,” said John Paul MacDuffie, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania. In particular, “GM and Ford have shrunk back from a formerly much more global footprint, but they still are global companies.

“Of course, if the goal is to move a lot of production to the U.S.,” he added, “I guess you could. But I don’t see those changes happening quickly.”

Automakers responded to Wednesday’s news graciously. Ford said in a company statement: “We will continue to have a healthy and candid dialogue with the Administration to help achieve a bright future for our industry and U.S. manufacturing.” Both GM and Stellantis thanked Trump for the exemption in statements.

Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents the three automakers, said he applauds the president “for recognizing that vehicles and parts that meet the high U.S. and regional USMCA content requirements should be exempt from these tariffs.”

But with only a monthlong grace period, automakers know challenges lie ahead.

Why is this so hard for auto companies?

To be sure, as automakers spent decades expanding around the world, they frequently battled supply-related woes and policy changes that hindered production — and their bottom lines.

A disaster halfway across the globe impacting one tiny component, with no easy or obvious supply alternative, can take down a vehicle’s production for weeks.

Contentious labor negotiations and work stoppages have put significant pauses on automaking for the domestic car companies.

The COVID-19 pandemic also interrupted global supply chains and sent new and used vehicle inventory to disastrous lows on dealer lots, causing prices to skyrocket.

“At least automakers have seen some version of this uncertainty,” said Hovig Tchalian, assistant professor at the University of Southern California. “I think this uncertainty is actually higher. But they’ve had some practice doing it.”

Working in the favor of automakers are normalized and in some cases high levels of inventory at dealerships; a healthy number of cars yet to be sold provides a buffer to any slowdown in production.

But for years automakers and suppliers have kept a strategic amount of parts on hand — enough to account for disruptions but not so much that excess capital is tied up in components just sitting in warehouses.

“What the 30 days will allow them to do is to analyze what kind of work in progress they’ve got, what kind of parts stock that they’ve got,” Martin French, partner at consultancy Berylls by AlixPartners, said of automakers and their supply companies.

Generally there has been a lot of progress in U.S. manufacturing, he said, “But the reality is that just does not happen in the space of a couple of weeks.”

Compounding impact

Those disruptions and others throughout the business’s history have made it clear that automakers can only respond so quickly.

The tariff exemption is no exception, given the ever-increasing complexity of assembly lines and manufacturing. Plants can’t be moved, factories can’t be built and product lines can’t be changed overnight.

And even with this pause, steel and aluminum tariffs are still expected to go into effect on March 12. Then, on April 2, Trump is expected to set broad “reciprocal” tariffs to match the taxes and subsidies charged by other countries on imports.

Those would disrupt the automotive industry quickly and dramatically, said Sam Fiorani, an analyst at AutoForecast Solutions.

“A substantial change in automotive free trade will hurt stock prices of all automakers because their profits will take a hit and consumers will face higher prices on vehicles, further diluting sales going forward,” he said.

Not only do companies have to decide whether immediate changes in production are realistic, but if they’re unable to do that meaningfully, they might produce or sell fewer vehicles — sending new car buyers to other brands or the used market — and, ultimately, make less money.

“The uncertainty that’s being created for the auto industry is going to inhibit investment as firms try to assess what the future looks like,” said Brett House, a professor at Columbia University’s business school, “and they have very little clarity on it.”

(File Photo: Source for Photo: FILE – Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and other officials view the aftermath of a fatal small plane crashed in Philadelphia, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The cockpit voice recorder was not working on a medical transport plane that killed seven people when it plummeted into a Philadelphia neighborhood in January and likely had not been functioning for several years, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report Thursday. The NTSB also confirmed the crew made no distress calls to air traffic control. A ground warning system that may contain flight data memory is still being evaluated by the manufacturer, the agency said.

The plane plummeted into a residential and commercial area within a minute of taking off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport and erupted into a fireball on Jan. 31. Officials said the crash killed all six people aboard the Learjet 55 and a seventh person who was in a vehicle on the ground. At least two dozen others were injured, including a 10-year-old boy in a vehicle who was hit by debris while trying to protect his sister.

Former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall called the finding about the cockpit recording “disturbing” because “that and the whole flight data recorder are important to find out what went wrong.”

“It’s a significant loss of important information that should have been there,” Hall said.

He noted that the lack of any distress call shows the emergency occurred too quickly for the crew to communicate with the tower.

Those on the plane included an 11-year-old girl who had received medical treatment at Shriners Children’s Philadelphia hospital. Jet Rescue Air Ambulance said the plane was taking Valentina Guzmán Murillo and her 31-year-old mother, Lizeth Murillo Osuna, home to Mexico.

Messages seeking comment were left Thursday with Jet Rescue. The company previously identified its team aboard as Dr. Raul Meza Arredondo, 41; the captain, Alan Montoya Perales, 46; copilot Josue de Jesus Juarez Juarez, 43; and paramedic Rodrigo Lopez Padilla, 41. All four were from Mexico.

According to the report, the recorder was recovered 8 feet (2.4 meters) underground after the crash and had significant damage, including exposure to liquids. After extensive cleaning and repairs, the agency discovered the 30-minute tape didn’t have audio of the flight.

The high-impact crash destroyed or badly damaged more than a dozen homes and business, leaving debris from the plane scattered across a wide area nearly 500 yards (457 meters) long and 300 yards (274 meters) wide.

Former NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti said the loss of any cockpit recordings makes the agency’s work more difficult, but not impossible. He hoped the ground warning system can provide some data, and wondered why the voice recorder hadn’t been inspected regularly.

“I really think that puts a black mark on this Mexican operator, for not ensuring that their cockpit voice recorder was operating,” Guzzetti said. “The NTSB, I think, will still be able to come to a probable cause, just because they’re really good at extracting circumstantial evidence.”

Under Mexican regulations, owners are supposed to include the voice and flight data recorders in the maintenance plans for aircraft, and the government authority where aircraft are registered is responsible for supervising those plans and checking aircraft to make sure that what’s in the documents is true at least once a year, said Rogelio Rodríguez Garduño, a professor of aviation law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Civil aviation authorities in Mexico have not responded to an Associated Press request for documents about Jet Rescue’s maintenance.

Guzzetti, a lead NTSB investigator on John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal crash near Martha’s Vineyard, believes the Philadelphia crash has some of the same hallmarks of a pilot suffering from “spatial disorientation” in dark or cloudy skies.

That occurs, he said, when pilots lose their bearings, don’t trust their instruments and turn, sometimes repeatedly, in a misguided attempt to correct course. The Learjet in Philadelphia, he noted, “came screaming out of the sky — and it did some turns too — and again you see those same types of turns in the JFK Jr. accident.”

“The human body can play tricks on you, and that’s why you have to be incredibly vigilant as a pilot and trust your instruments,” he said. “But, you know, it’s not to say that there couldn’t have been some sort of distraction in the cockpit too that occurred during that time.”

Several victims on the ground retained law firms to represent them in potential lawsuits, including a man badly burned after his SUV became engulfed in jet fuel.

The crash was among recent aviation disasters and close calls that left some people worried about the safety of flying. It happened two days after an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter collided in midair in Washington, D.C. — the deadliest U.S. air disaster in a generation.

(File Photo of the American Red Cross logo)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Pittsburgh, PA) The American Red Cross is reminding people to not only turn their clocks ahead one hour on Sunday, but also to give their smoke alarms a test. According to a release from the American Red Cross, Greater Pennsylvania Region, over the past year, local Red Cross volunteers responded to help more than 6,100 people across Pennsylvania affected by more than 1,500 home fires, which account for most of the about 65,000 disasters that the Red Cross responds to annually across the country. The American Red Cross recommends to put smoke alarms in each level of your house and to find a replacement to smoke alarms that are ten years old or more. In case of a fire, the company also encourages people to have a meeting spot away from home and to both have and execute a fire escape plan to escape your home in two minutes or less.  

(File Photo of Senator Elder Vogel, Jr.)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Harrisburg, PA) According to a release from Senator Elder Vogel, Jr’s office, Vogel said that the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture has issued new recommendations for poultry producers. Cases of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza are planning to be reduced if these recommendations are followed. These producers want both to keep poultry inside and avoid their contact with dairy cattle and wild birds. According to the Centers for Disease Control, this form of influenza has had seventy human cases confirmed and most of those cases are related to dairy cattle and poultry that are infected. In Pennsylvania, there are currently no reported human cases or cases in dairies.