New York
Two drivers of Mercedes AMG cars file class action lawsuit over alleged burn hazard in its logo
NEW YORK (AP) — Two drivers of Mercedes AMG cars have filed a class action lawsuit against the luxury car company, claiming that the AMG logo on their driver’s seat gets so hot that it literally brands them and causes burns.
Gabriel Lahijani and Karendeep “Karina” Bath allege the front seats of certain Mercedes AMG vehicles have a design defect where the raised metallic AMG logo is “reasonably expected to contact an occupant’s upper back, neck, or shoulder,” according to the court document filed earlier this week in the U.S. District Court of California’s Western division.
The plaintiffs want Mercedes to compensate them for any medical expenses, as well as any pain, suffering and emotional distress they can prove at trial. They also want Mercedes to pay for other owners to have the logo removed from their cars.
Mercedes-Benz couldn’t be reached immediately for comment.
Lahigani, a Los Angeles resident, had leased a new 2026 Mercedes-AMG E-Class vehicle from an authorized Mercedes-Benz dealership in Los Angeles, according to the suit. He reported receiving second-degree burns on his back on May 31, after entering his vehicle wearing a tank top. A board-certified dermatologist subsequently documented first- and second-degree burns, describing the injury as “AMG inscribed.”
Roughly six weeks later, Bath, a Chatsworth, California resident, received similar burns allegedly from the logo design while wearing a sleeveless top. After parking her Mercedes-AMG vehicle in Los Angeles, Bath returned to the vehicle and entered the driver’s seat, the suit said. Her shoulder immediately touched the logo, causing a burning sensation. In the following days, a mark in the shape of the AMG logo “darkened and became visible on her skin, consistent with a thermal contact burn,” the lawsuit said.
In December, Mercedes-Benz USA and parent company Daimer AG agreed to pay $149.6 million to settle allegations that the automaker secretly installed devices in hundreds of thousands of vehicles to pass emission tests, according to an announcement by a coalition of attorneys general.
According to the coalition, between 2008 and 2016 the German automaker equipped more than 211,000 diesel passenger cars and vans with software devices that optimized emission controls during tests but reduced the controls during normal operations.
New York
Feds charge speedboat operator after mother and infant are killed in New York Harbor capsizing
NEW YORK (AP) — The operator of a speedboat that capsized in New York Harbor over the weekend, killing a 27-year-old woman and her infant daughter, is due to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Monday.
Authorities did not immediately reveal the federal charge or charges brought against Manuel Hernandez, a 46-year-old New York man already facing state charges of reckless endangerment in the deaths of Sara Sanchez and her 5-month-old daughter, Antonella Garcia.
It was also unclear who will represent Hernandez in federal court.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for Manhattan federal prosecutors, said Hernandez was in federal custody and that further information would be provided.
The mother and daughter died after a 22-foot Bayliner speedboat overturned late Saturday near the Statue of Liberty.
Police divers found them and they were pronounced dead at a hospital. Twelve other people were rescued before police arrived. The U.S. Coast Guard said they were in stable condition.
Capt. Doreen McCarthy, the Coast Guard Sector New York commander, credited the rescue of survivors to “heroic, swift actions” by those who responded from various agencies, along with a good Samaritan vessel.
Washington
Todd Blanche is sworn in as attorney general after bruising confirmation fight
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, was sworn in Monday as attorney general after a bruising confirmation fight that exposed bipartisan concerns about the Justice Department’s direction under the Republican president.
Another former Trump attorney — Emil Bove, now a federal appeals court judge — administered the oath of office to Blanche at the White House following early Saturday’s Senate confirmation vote by the narrowest of margins.
Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in New York, is officially taking command of a Justice Department he has been leading in an acting capacity since Pam Bondi’s firing in April.
With the confirmation battle behind him, Blanche now faces the challenge of having to navigate the demands of a president who has made no secret his desire to use the law enforcement agency to target his political foes. Blanche will do so with an agency that has been hollowed out by resignations, firings and voluntary departures while also confronting mounting pushback from the courts.
Blanche was confirmed in a 50-49 vote, opposed by two Republicans who cited concerns about what they described as increased politicization of the department under Trump.
Under deputy attorney general and later as acting attorney general, Blanche has overseen the investigations of numerous Trump foes, including former FBI Director James Comey, whom the Justice Department indicted in April for a second time since Trump returned to the White House last year.
Blanche has strongly defended the Trump administration against accusations that it has weaponized the Justice Department. Blanche has said he feels no pressure to placate Trump and insists he sees no problem with the president’s interest in Justice Department matters, calling it the president’s “right” and “his duty.”
Blanche entered the president’s orbit when he left his law firm in 2023 to represent Trump against multiple criminal cases, including two brought by the Justice Department under Democratic President Joe Biden. Blanche has said that experience afforded him a firsthand look at what he contends was the weaponization of the criminal justice system against Trump.
Blanche’s defenders say the close relationship he developed with Trump as his defense lawyer can make him more successful than Bondi was at pushing back on the president’s demands.
Blanche’s nomination was almost scuttled over bipartisan concerns about Trump’s controversial settlement of his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. His nomination only moved forward after he confirmed in writing, under pressure from Republicans, that the administration was rescinding plans to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they were wronged by the department.
Massachusetts
Defense lawyer takes aim at psychiatrist’s care before woman killed her 3 kids
Lindsay Clancy ‘s lawyer probed her psychiatrist’s expertise, prescribing decisions and overall treatment as the defense sought Monday to suggest that the mental healthcare system overlooked and even accelerated the Massachusetts mother’s decline in the months before she killed her three young children.
In questioning Dr. Jennifer Tufts, defense lawyer Kevin Reddington spotlighted her use of 25-minute video appointments with limited time for talk therapy, the computerized forms that documented her observations, and the series of pharmaceuticals she recommended as Clancy reported various side effects, symptoms and concerns about taking medications.
Reddington portrayed Clancy’s care not as common practice in U.S. mental healthcare, but rather as inadequate and indifferent treatment, at one point implying that the doctor was a box-checking “robot.”
“What did you do? You had a woman who was telling you she felt hopeless,” he asked as they discussed an appointment about two months before the killings.
“I told her that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs,” Tufts said, “so she knew that she still had options and a reason to hope.”
“Did you ever suggest to her that ‘maybe you should come in and see me, rather than on the computer?’” Reddington asked.
“Talking to her over the video didn’t seem like an issue. It didn’t seem like there was something I was missing,” Tufts replied.
Clancy, 35, has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from 8 months to 5 years old. They were found in the basement of the family’s home in coastal Duxbury, Massachusetts, and their mother was found lying in the yard. She had jumped out a second-story window and remains paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors argue that the former labor and delivery nurse was an intentional killer who connived to get her husband out of the house by sending him out on errands, then strangled the children with exercise bands on Jan. 24, 2023. In an opening statement last month, prosecutor Shannan Buckingham urged jurors not to view the trial as “a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women.”
Clancy’s attorneys don’t dispute that she killed the children. But they that say she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she was mentally ill, believing that she heard voices ordering her to take the children’s lives and her own.
The defense contends that she was in the grip of bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, a rare postpregnancy condition that can alter women’s sense of reality. A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed her with those conditions after the killings.
Her attorneys say Clancy did everything she could to seek help: She turned to multiple outpatient providers, tried various drugs they prescribed, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, and approached but wasn’t accepted into a hospital-based, full-day treatment program for women with postpregnancy mental health problems. Clancy then even checked herself into a psychiatric hospital for several days.
Rather than improving, her condition worsened on the ever-remixed cocktail of psychiatric medications, some of them problematic for bipolar patients, her attorneys and family say.
Tufts saw Clancy, via video, from September 2022 until the day before the killings. Her diagnosis: generalized anxiety disorder and an adjustment disorder with depressed mood.
The psychiatrist testified that Clancy never told her about manic episodes, a criterion for a bipolar diagnoses, nor about hearing voices or having other signs of psychosis.
Clancy at times said she was “close” to feeling suicidal, hopeless or like she was going to die, Tufts recalled. But she said Clancy denied having a plan to take her own life or harm anyone else and never revealed — as the defense says she did to her husband — that she had thoughts about harming the children.
“I would have be very concerned if I had heard that,” Tufts said.
Clancy is suing Tufts and other practitioners in civil court.
“I do not believe that I’ve been negligent,” Tufts testified in the criminal trial Monday as Reddington questioned how much experience she had treating postpregnancy conditions before Clancy came to her. Tufts had finished her psychiatric residency training in July 2022 and joined a private practice the month before Clancy’s first appointment.
If convicted of murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
Two drivers of Mercedes AMG cars file class action lawsuit over alleged burn hazard in its logo
NEW YORK (AP) — Two drivers of Mercedes AMG cars have filed a class action lawsuit against the luxury car company, claiming that the AMG logo on their driver’s seat gets so hot that it literally brands them and causes burns.
Gabriel Lahijani and Karendeep “Karina” Bath allege the front seats of certain Mercedes AMG vehicles have a design defect where the raised metallic AMG logo is “reasonably expected to contact an occupant’s upper back, neck, or shoulder,” according to the court document filed earlier this week in the U.S. District Court of California’s Western division.
The plaintiffs want Mercedes to compensate them for any medical expenses, as well as any pain, suffering and emotional distress they can prove at trial. They also want Mercedes to pay for other owners to have the logo removed from their cars.
Mercedes-Benz couldn’t be reached immediately for comment.
Lahigani, a Los Angeles resident, had leased a new 2026 Mercedes-AMG E-Class vehicle from an authorized Mercedes-Benz dealership in Los Angeles, according to the suit. He reported receiving second-degree burns on his back on May 31, after entering his vehicle wearing a tank top. A board-certified dermatologist subsequently documented first- and second-degree burns, describing the injury as “AMG inscribed.”
Roughly six weeks later, Bath, a Chatsworth, California resident, received similar burns allegedly from the logo design while wearing a sleeveless top. After parking her Mercedes-AMG vehicle in Los Angeles, Bath returned to the vehicle and entered the driver’s seat, the suit said. Her shoulder immediately touched the logo, causing a burning sensation. In the following days, a mark in the shape of the AMG logo “darkened and became visible on her skin, consistent with a thermal contact burn,” the lawsuit said.
In December, Mercedes-Benz USA and parent company Daimer AG agreed to pay $149.6 million to settle allegations that the automaker secretly installed devices in hundreds of thousands of vehicles to pass emission tests, according to an announcement by a coalition of attorneys general.
According to the coalition, between 2008 and 2016 the German automaker equipped more than 211,000 diesel passenger cars and vans with software devices that optimized emission controls during tests but reduced the controls during normal operations.
New York
Feds charge speedboat operator after mother and infant are killed in New York Harbor capsizing
NEW YORK (AP) — The operator of a speedboat that capsized in New York Harbor over the weekend, killing a 27-year-old woman and her infant daughter, is due to appear in federal court in Manhattan on Monday.
Authorities did not immediately reveal the federal charge or charges brought against Manuel Hernandez, a 46-year-old New York man already facing state charges of reckless endangerment in the deaths of Sara Sanchez and her 5-month-old daughter, Antonella Garcia.
It was also unclear who will represent Hernandez in federal court.
Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for Manhattan federal prosecutors, said Hernandez was in federal custody and that further information would be provided.
The mother and daughter died after a 22-foot Bayliner speedboat overturned late Saturday near the Statue of Liberty.
Police divers found them and they were pronounced dead at a hospital. Twelve other people were rescued before police arrived. The U.S. Coast Guard said they were in stable condition.
Capt. Doreen McCarthy, the Coast Guard Sector New York commander, credited the rescue of survivors to “heroic, swift actions” by those who responded from various agencies, along with a good Samaritan vessel.
Washington
Todd Blanche is sworn in as attorney general after bruising confirmation fight
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, was sworn in Monday as attorney general after a bruising confirmation fight that exposed bipartisan concerns about the Justice Department’s direction under the Republican president.
Another former Trump attorney — Emil Bove, now a federal appeals court judge — administered the oath of office to Blanche at the White House following early Saturday’s Senate confirmation vote by the narrowest of margins.
Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in New York, is officially taking command of a Justice Department he has been leading in an acting capacity since Pam Bondi’s firing in April.
With the confirmation battle behind him, Blanche now faces the challenge of having to navigate the demands of a president who has made no secret his desire to use the law enforcement agency to target his political foes. Blanche will do so with an agency that has been hollowed out by resignations, firings and voluntary departures while also confronting mounting pushback from the courts.
Blanche was confirmed in a 50-49 vote, opposed by two Republicans who cited concerns about what they described as increased politicization of the department under Trump.
Under deputy attorney general and later as acting attorney general, Blanche has overseen the investigations of numerous Trump foes, including former FBI Director James Comey, whom the Justice Department indicted in April for a second time since Trump returned to the White House last year.
Blanche has strongly defended the Trump administration against accusations that it has weaponized the Justice Department. Blanche has said he feels no pressure to placate Trump and insists he sees no problem with the president’s interest in Justice Department matters, calling it the president’s “right” and “his duty.”
Blanche entered the president’s orbit when he left his law firm in 2023 to represent Trump against multiple criminal cases, including two brought by the Justice Department under Democratic President Joe Biden. Blanche has said that experience afforded him a firsthand look at what he contends was the weaponization of the criminal justice system against Trump.
Blanche’s defenders say the close relationship he developed with Trump as his defense lawyer can make him more successful than Bondi was at pushing back on the president’s demands.
Blanche’s nomination was almost scuttled over bipartisan concerns about Trump’s controversial settlement of his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. His nomination only moved forward after he confirmed in writing, under pressure from Republicans, that the administration was rescinding plans to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they were wronged by the department.
Massachusetts
Defense lawyer takes aim at psychiatrist’s care before woman killed her 3 kids
Lindsay Clancy ‘s lawyer probed her psychiatrist’s expertise, prescribing decisions and overall treatment as the defense sought Monday to suggest that the mental healthcare system overlooked and even accelerated the Massachusetts mother’s decline in the months before she killed her three young children.
In questioning Dr. Jennifer Tufts, defense lawyer Kevin Reddington spotlighted her use of 25-minute video appointments with limited time for talk therapy, the computerized forms that documented her observations, and the series of pharmaceuticals she recommended as Clancy reported various side effects, symptoms and concerns about taking medications.
Reddington portrayed Clancy’s care not as common practice in U.S. mental healthcare, but rather as inadequate and indifferent treatment, at one point implying that the doctor was a box-checking “robot.”
“What did you do? You had a woman who was telling you she felt hopeless,” he asked as they discussed an appointment about two months before the killings.
“I told her that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs,” Tufts said, “so she knew that she still had options and a reason to hope.”
“Did you ever suggest to her that ‘maybe you should come in and see me, rather than on the computer?’” Reddington asked.
“Talking to her over the video didn’t seem like an issue. It didn’t seem like there was something I was missing,” Tufts replied.
Clancy, 35, has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from 8 months to 5 years old. They were found in the basement of the family’s home in coastal Duxbury, Massachusetts, and their mother was found lying in the yard. She had jumped out a second-story window and remains paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors argue that the former labor and delivery nurse was an intentional killer who connived to get her husband out of the house by sending him out on errands, then strangled the children with exercise bands on Jan. 24, 2023. In an opening statement last month, prosecutor Shannan Buckingham urged jurors not to view the trial as “a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women.”
Clancy’s attorneys don’t dispute that she killed the children. But they that say she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she was mentally ill, believing that she heard voices ordering her to take the children’s lives and her own.
The defense contends that she was in the grip of bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, a rare postpregnancy condition that can alter women’s sense of reality. A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed her with those conditions after the killings.
Her attorneys say Clancy did everything she could to seek help: She turned to multiple outpatient providers, tried various drugs they prescribed, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, and approached but wasn’t accepted into a hospital-based, full-day treatment program for women with postpregnancy mental health problems. Clancy then even checked herself into a psychiatric hospital for several days.
Rather than improving, her condition worsened on the ever-remixed cocktail of psychiatric medications, some of them problematic for bipolar patients, her attorneys and family say.
Tufts saw Clancy, via video, from September 2022 until the day before the killings. Her diagnosis: generalized anxiety disorder and an adjustment disorder with depressed mood.
The psychiatrist testified that Clancy never told her about manic episodes, a criterion for a bipolar diagnoses, nor about hearing voices or having other signs of psychosis.
Clancy at times said she was “close” to feeling suicidal, hopeless or like she was going to die, Tufts recalled. But she said Clancy denied having a plan to take her own life or harm anyone else and never revealed — as the defense says she did to her husband — that she had thoughts about harming the children.
“I would have be very concerned if I had heard that,” Tufts said.
Clancy is suing Tufts and other practitioners in civil court.
“I do not believe that I’ve been negligent,” Tufts testified in the criminal trial Monday as Reddington questioned how much experience she had treating postpregnancy conditions before Clancy came to her. Tufts had finished her psychiatric residency training in July 2022 and joined a private practice the month before Clancy’s first appointment.
If convicted of murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.
