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Boeing CEO to face congressional grilling as new whistleblower claims emerge

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Boeing CEO David Calhoun is slated to face a Congressional grilling on Tuesday in his first appearance before lawmakers since a panel blew out of a 737 Max during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. Calhoun will tell the Senate investigations subcommittee that the culture is “far from perfect” — just as two new whistleblowers have emerged. 

According to prepared remarks shared by Boeing ahead of the 2 p.m. Eastern hearing, Calhoun said the company is “committed to making sure every employee feels empowered to speak up if there is a problem,” and stressed that Boeing is working on improving “transparency and accountability, while elevating employee engagement.”

On Tuesday, the Senate subcommittee released information on two whistleblowers who have recently emerged. One, current Boeing employee Sam Mohawk, alleges that “Boeing is improperly documenting, tracking and storing parts that are damaged or otherwise out of specification, and that those parts are likely being installed on airplanes,” according to the statement.

He also claims that his supervisors told him to conceal evidence from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to the Senate subcommittee. 

The second whistleblower, who is anonymous, alleged to the subcommittee that Boeing has made efforts to get rid of quality inspections, instead tapping workers to inspect their own work and that of their co-workers. 

“This is a culture that continues to prioritize profits, push limits and disregard its workers,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and a Boeing critic who is also the chair of the subcommittee, in a Tuesday statement. “A culture where those who speak up are silenced and sidelined while blame is pushed down to the factory floor.”

In a statement to CBS News, Boeing said it received information about the new whistleblowers on Monday evening and is reviewing their claims. “We continuously encourage employees to report all concerns as our priority is to ensure the safety of our airplanes and the flying public,” the company said.

Boeing earlier this year denied claims it had reduced the number of safety inspectors.

“In January 2019, a senior Boeing quality executive told The Seattle Times that the company planned to reduce inspector roles in its Quality organization by 900 people and reform how it conducts quality checks as it integrated technology and monitoring into the secondary inspection process. However, Boeing did not reduce these inspector roles, has grown our Quality team and has increased the number of inspections per airplane significantly since 2019,” the company said in a statement at the time.

Whistleblower claims

In a Senate report about the whistleblower claims, Mohawk alleges that when Boeing restarted production of the 737 Max after two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019 there was “a 300% increase” in reports about parts that did not meet manufacturer standards.

While hundreds of nonconforming parts were supposed to be removed from production and closely tracked, “Mohawk feared that nonconforming parts were being installed on the 737s and that could lead to a catastrophic event,” the report states.

The document says that Mohawk also claims when Boeing learned of a pending FAA inspection last June, many parts were moved to another location to “intentionally hide improperly stored parts from the FAA.”

In April, Boeing whistleblowers, including Sam Salehpour, a quality engineer at the company, testified to lawmakers.

“Despite what Boeing officials state publicly, there is no safety culture at Boeing, and employees like me who speak up about defects with its production activities and lack of quality control are ignored, marginalized, threatened, sidelined and worse,” he told members of an investigative panel of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Boeing has denied Salehpour’s allegations and defended the safety of its planes, including the Dreamliner.

Boeing’s deadly Max crashes

No one was seriously injured in Alaska Airlines incident, but the incident raised fresh concerns about the company’s best-selling commercial aircraft. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are conducting separate investigations.

“From the beginning, we took responsibility and cooperated transparently with the NTSB and the FAA,” Calhoun said in remarks prepared for the hearing. He defended the company’s safety culture. “We are taking comprehensive action today to strengthen safety and quality.”

Blumenthal has heard that before, when Boeing was reeling from deadly Max crashes in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in Ethiopia.

“Five years ago, Boeing made a promise to overhaul its safety practices and culture. That promise proved empty, and the American people deserve an explanation,” Blumenthal said when he announced the hearing. He called Calhoun’s testimony a necessary step for Boeing to regain public trust.

Calhoun’s appearance also was scheduled to take place as the Justice Department considers whether to prosecute Boeing for violating terms of a settlement following the fatal crashes.

Calhoun will leave his position by the end of this year when a new CEO is named.

—With reporting by Kris Van Cleave and the Associated Press.



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Robert Towne, legendary Hollywood screenwriter of “Chinatown,” dies at 89

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Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay writer of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and other acclaimed films whose work on “Chinatown” became a model of the art form and helped define the jaded allure of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.

Towne “passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family” Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his publicist Carri McClure, told CBS News in a statement. She did not provide a cause of death.

In an industry which gave birth to rueful jokes about the writer’s status, Towne for a time held prestige comparable to the actors and directors he worked with. Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the signature films of an era when artists held an unusual level of creative control. The rare “auteur” among screen writers, Towne managed to bring a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles onto the screen.

Writer Robert Towne
Writer Robert Towne in audience during the 36th AFI Life Achievement Award tribute to Warren Beatty held at the Kodak Theatre on June 12, 2008 in Hollywood, California. 

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for AFI


“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a sort of place of last resort. It’s a place where, in a word, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re forever disappointed.”

Recognizable around Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three other times, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.

“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” said “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on X.

Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s business, a dress shop, closed down because of the Great Depression. His father changed the family name to Towne.

Towne’s success came after a long stretch of working in television, including “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and on low-budget movies for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owed his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. As Beatty worked on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set while the movie was filmed in Texas.

Towne’s contributions were uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark crime film released in 1967, and for years he was a favorite ghost writer. He helped out on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait” among others and referred to himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game.” But Towne was credited by name for Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.

“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a private detective asked to follow the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).

Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne resurrected the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but cast Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey across a grander and more insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate into a timeless detective tale, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the most repeated lines in movie history, words of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

The back story of “Chinatown” has itself become a kind of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of 1960s-1970s Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” dedicated entirely to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” published in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost writer — former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to “The Big Goodbye,” for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor did not ask for credit on the film because his “friendship with Robert” mattered more.

The studios assumed more power after the mid-1970s and Towne’s standing declined. His own efforts at directing, including “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had mixed results. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a commercial and critical disappointment when released in 1990 and led to a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.

Around the same time, he agreed to work on a movie far removed from the art-house aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a race car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 movie was famously over budget and mostly panned, although its admirers include Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans. And Towne’s script popularized an expression used by Duvall after Cruise complains another car slammed him: “He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t nudge you. He rubbed you.

“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.'”

Towne later worked with Cruise on “The Firm” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” movies. His most recent film was “Ask the Dust,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that came out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also wrote screenplays, his credits include “The Natural.”



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Analyzing impact of Supreme Court’s Trump immunity decision

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It’s been a day since the Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump has immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken in office but that he is not protected from prosecution for unofficial acts. CBS News legal analyst Jessica Levinson joins to unpack the decision.

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