Bulletin Business Briefing

Published 7:07 pm Wednesday, November 8, 2023

General Motors’ Cruise autonomous vehicle unit is recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street in early October.

The company said in documents posted by U.S. safety regulators on Wednesday that, with the updated software, Cruise vehicles will remain stationary should a similar incident occur in the future.

The Oct. 2 crash prompted Cruise to suspend driverless operations nationwide after California regulators found that its cars posed a danger to public safety. The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles revoked the license for Cruise, which was transporting passengers without human drivers throughout San Francisco.

In the crash, another vehicle with a person behind the wheel struck a pedestrian, sending the person into the path of a Cruise autonomous vehicle.

Air travel is getting worse, judging from the number of consumer complaints.

Consumer complaints about airlines nearly doubled in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year and kept soaring in April and May, the U.S. Transportation Department said Wednesday.

Those are the latest figures from the government.

The Transportation Department said information about complaints has been delayed because there are so many of them to process.

The department said it received 24,965 complaints about airline service in the first three months of the year, up 88% from the first quarter of 2022.

Consumers filed another 6,712 complaints in April, up 32% from a year earlier, and 6,465 in May, an increase of 49%.

Citigroup intentionally discriminated against Armenian Americans when they applied for credit cards, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Wednesday.

The bureau said some bank employees argued internally that Armenian Americans were more likely to commit fraud and referred to applicants as “bad guys” or as affiliated with organized crime.

The CFPB found that Citi employees were trained to avoid approving applications with last names ending in “yan” or “ian” — the most common suffix to Armenian last names — as well applications that originated in Glendale, California, where a significant portion of the country’s Armenian-American population lives.

As part of the order, Citi will pay $24.5 million in fines as well as $1.4 million in remedies to impacted customers.

The origins of the case come as a result of some organized crime syndicates operating in Southern California that involve Armenian Americans.

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