Accidents/Man-made Disasters

One of Boeing Co. BA -1.73% ’s biggest engineering challenges has morphed into a political problem—and the company is running out of time to get help from the current Congress. The plane maker’s executives and lobbyists are racing to persuade federal lawmakers to lift a Dec. 27 deadline set by Congress two years ago as part of a law aimed at making future airplanes safer. The law, enacted in the wake of two deadly crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX, requires new aircraft to…

The Biden administration made a significant shift in its Venezuela policy when it allowed Chevron Corp. CVX -0.29% to pump oil in the South American country again, but the decision will yield little increase to the world’s oil production in the short-term.The U.S. company will have to contend with myriad technical issues at Venezuela’s aging oil fields and a complicated network of remaining U.S. sanctions that must be altered to ensure more of the country’s oil reaches…

A Canadian-American consortium swept into Puerto Rico last year with promises to transform the island’s antiquated power grid. Many residents welcomed the change, tired of subpar service from a state-run utility that left them in darkness for months after a strong hurricane five years ago. But since the private company, Luma Energy LLC, took charge of the grid in June 2021, power outages on the island have lengthened. Hurricane Fiona, a less-than-ferocious category-1 storm in September, caused an island-wide…

BRISBANE, Australia—Every week, workers at one of Australia’s major airports spend hours searching the tarmac and terminals for a security threat that could bring down an airplane. The inspectors at Brisbane Airport, in Australia’s third-biggest city, are hunting for the keyhole wasp, an introduced species that builds nests in Pitot tubes—a crucial instrument on the fuselage that tells pilots how fast they are flying. The wasps, which build nests out of mud, can block a tube in as little as 20 minutes. They are smaller…

When Andy Warhol’s colossal view of a car accident first came at auction in 1987, the silk-screen sold for $660,000. On Wednesday, bidders got another chance at it—and the work resold at Sotheby’s for $85.4 million. Looming 12 feet over audiences like an oversize reel of film reel stuck on pause, Warhol’s “White Disaster (White Car Crash 19 Times)” is the largest single-panel version of the artist’s car crashes to have ever come to auction. Both its seller and winning telephone bidder remain anonymous. It is…

The electricity industry is increasingly turning to a tool of last resort when power demand threatens to outstrip supply: asking users to turn off the lights.To get through temperature extremes and tight electricity supplies, grid operators are relying more on conservation pleas to everyone from homeowners to manufacturers and some of the biggest users, bitcoin miners. Such requests aren’t new, but they are becoming more urgent as weather patterns become more extreme and construction of new infrastructure for…

LONDON–Qatar Airways Ltd. has accused Airbus EADSY 0.48% SE of being too close to its safety regulator in a multibillion-dollar legal dispute over paint chipping on the body and wings of one of its flagship aircraft.The airline made the accusation Friday in a statement to a London court as part of a case in which it claims that surface-paint issues on its fleet of A350s present a safety risk. Qatar Airways has grounded 29 aircraft over the issue, reducing its capacity as…

PARIS— EDF SA EDF -0.08% warned of lower power generation this year across its nuclear reactors in France, dealing a setback to the country’s efforts to ride out Europe’s energy crisis amid a spell of unseasonably warm weather. EDF, the world’s largest owner of nuclear plants, said its French fleet of reactors are expected to produce between 275 and 285 terawatt-hours of energy in 2022, compared with a previous estimate of between 280…

Boeing Co. BA 5.55% executives on Wednesday said they planned to restore the plane maker’s financial strength over the next three years, after a string of losses in the wake of two 737 MAX crashes and other problems. Boeing Chief Financial Officer Brian West said the company expects to generate about $100 billion in annual sales by 2025 or the next year, a level it hasn’t reported since 2018. The first of…

Families of people who died in two Boeing 737 MAX crashes have rights as crime victims under federal law and may continue to challenge last year’s settlement that spared the company from prosecution, a federal judge in Texas found. Ruling in a challenge brought by the families, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, said they have standing to question the January 2021 agreement with the Justice Department because…