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SUSONO, Japan (AP) -- Toyota is developing a safety technology that takes control of the steering so the vehicle can veer away when it isn't able to stop before impact. Toyota Motor Corp. showed some of its up and coming safety innovations in a demonstration to reporters Thursday at its facility in this town, west of Tokyo, near Mount Fuji. All the world's automakers are working on special safety technology in an effort to woo customers, as competition intensifies among manufacturers already neck-and-neck in delivering the regular features for their products. Cars that stop or slow down automatically before an...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Buffeted by high taxes, strict regulations and uncertain state budgets, a growing number of California companies are seeking friendlier business environments outside of the Golden State. And governors around the country, smelling blood in the water, have stepped up their courtship of California companies. Officials in states like Florida, Texas, Arizona and Utah are telling California firms how business-friendly they are in comparison. Companies are "disinvesting" in California at a rate five times greater than just two years ago, said Joseph Vranich, a business relocation expert based in Irvine. This includes leaving altogether, establishing divisions elsewhere...

Is President Obama proving his political genius by floating a plan for a $4 trillion deficit cut deal to lift the debt ceiling, offering entitlement cuts that will enrage parts of his base knowing he'll never face their wrath, because far-right Republicans will never take the deal? It could be. House Speaker John Boehner rejected Obama's "grand bargain" Sunday and Monday, because his members won't consider anything to raise revenue, not even closing loopholes for corporate private jets or a tax giveaway for hedge fund managers. Insiders say this lets Obama look like "the only grownup," the man who was...

PEORIA, Ill. (AP) -- Caterpillar Inc. avoided paying more than $2 billion in federal income taxes from 2000 to 2009 by accounting fraudulently for billions in dollars of profits, according to a lawsuit filed by a manager of the heavy equipment maker. Daniel Schlicksup, who was a global tax strategy manager for the company from 2005 to 2008, alleges that the company wrongly attributed at least $5.6 billion in profits from sales through an Illinois-based warehouse to its unit in Switzerland in order to lessen its tax burden and increase earnings. A spokesman for Caterpillar, which reported $2.7 billion in...

Conservation group analyzes legislators' votes Arizona state lawmakers have their worst scores on record when it comes to supporting legislation having to do with conservation and the environment. The Arizona League of Conservation Voters released its annual environmental scorecard, showing the voting records of legislators on 21 bills covering topics such as water and land conservation, state parks preservation, species protection, and air quality. The group says the results indicate the Arizona legislature "had the worst performance of the millenium on conservation issues and probably the worst ever," according to a news release. Steve Arnquist, executive director of the non-partisan...

WASHINGTON -- An attack on the right to vote is under way across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we'd condemn it as election-rigging. But it's happening here, so there's barely a whimper. The laws are being passed in the name of preventing "voter fraud." But study after study has shown that fraud by voters is not a major problem -- and is less of a problem than how hard many states make it for people to vote in the first place. Some of...

Bob Schieffer: You know, Republican say over and over the way to create jobs is by cutting taxes, bringing the deficit down. But do you believe that there's anything else that the government can do to get people back to work? Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): It's obvious that the stimulus, borrowing all that money and spending it basically on government employees, didn't do any good. If you talk to business people, and Bill Daley, the president's chief of staff, did recently, you find out their biggest complaint is over-regulation. The federal government with that stimulus money hired a quarter of...

Continuing a campaign initiated by Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) addressed the Telematics Detroit 2011 conference with harsh words on the growing trend to integrate infotainment technology into cars. David Strickland told those assembled, “I’m just putting everyone on notice. A car is not a mobile device. I’m not in the business of helping people tweet better. I’m not in the business of helping people post on Facebook better.” That’s not to say that the NHTSA and DOT are opposed to all telematics applications. In fact, the agencies support systems...

I once worked for an editor who banned the word "oxymoron." I don't know why. It's a good word, meaning a contradiction in terms. The dictionary offers some examples: "wise fool" and "legal murder." I would like to cite another: Barack Obama. He sends contradictory messages.This aspect of Obama's is beginning to play a crucial role in his management of the economy. The fact remains, no matter what Obama says -- and almost no matter what he does -- the business community deeply feels that he is unsympathetic to them and their goals. They say all they want to do...

BEIJING (AP) -- China's supreme court has ordered judges across the country to issue harsher sentences, including the death penalty, to people convicted of food safety violations as the government struggles to clean up the nation's food supply after repeated scandals.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Falungong members are suing Cisco Systems for custom-building "Golden Shield" Internet technology used by China to track down devotees of the spiritual movement. Cisco dismissed the case Monday as being without basis and vowed to "vigorously defend" itself. Cisco "designed, supplied and helped maintain a censorship and surveillance network known as Golden Shield" used by Chinese officials to identify Falungong practitioners who were detained, tortured and sometimes killed, a lawyer for the group said in court documents filed last week. Cisco established a China Network Technology Corp. subsidiary in Beijing in 1998 that went to work...

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), in his speech last night in New York, insisted that he’s desperate to lower the deficit. But his desperation has limits. “We should be talking about cuts of trillions, not just billions. They should be actual cuts and program reforms, not broad deficit or debt targets that punt the tough questions to the future. “And with the exception of tax hikes — which will destroy jobs — everything is on the table.” Dave Weigel noted, “At some point, eventually, people are going to notice that if one thing is off the table, ‘everything’ is not...

If you're an organisation that is making public an internal document, you best make sure that you have deleted or blacked out any personal, confidential or actionable information. The act of obscuring the sensitive information is known as "redaction", and - for obvious reasons - needs to be done properly if you care about privacy and avoiding a potentially damaging data leak. In the old days - before PDFs and Word documents - you might have redacted a document with a thick black marker pen, ensuring that anyone who made a photocopy of the document wouldn't be able to see...

The Republican Party is the “party of science deniers,” a top House Democrat said Monday. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), an ardent proponent of climate-change legislation, criticized Republicans for their attempts to block the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions during a speech at the Center for American Progress Monday. “I’ve never been in a Congress where there was such an overwhelming disconnect between science and policy,” Waxman, the former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said. “Republicans in Congress have become the party of science deniers, and that is profoundly dangerous,” he said. Waxman lamented...

As Republicans seek to repeal health care reform, they have assaulted "Obamacare" as a job-killing, freedom-crushing behemoth that's pushed the country onto the path to socialism. In order to defend their landmark legislative achievement, Democrats, meanwhile, have tried to highlight the bill's most popular provisions, ones that have already gone into effect. "We can either talk about abstraction, or we can talk about real people," said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), at a hearing on Tuesday, where Democrats invited ordinary citizens to testify about how health reform has helped them personally. "None of us did a good enough job" explaining the...

The media establishment that hyped this Democratic president but refused to be humbled with him. Pundits' premises so fundamentally disproved. The conservative collapse that was not. The so-told emerging liberal era that was not. The Democratic leaders who bought the hype, acting on the masochistic premise that if big liberal things were done, the American mind's apprehension to big liberal things could be undone. The Republican generals saved by conservative foot soldiers. A liberal opposition that, all over again, undid itself in Pyrrhic victory. It was a year of conventional irony. But there was a particular irony to the chasm...

We keep hearing about it—the “all-digital future”: easier, more convenient, no need to drive to the store. Download all the content you want instantly. Thus, iTunes, OnLive, Steam, and various other services were born. But this convenience bears a steep price. In our rush to embrace the all-digital future, we’ve sacrificed fundamental property rights. Time and again, record labels, software developers, and movie studios have expressed their displeasure with physical media. The overhead is too steep. There’s too much piracy. The second-hand market is immoral and equivalent to piracy. Technophiles love to debate the merits of streaming media, but it’s...

I did a search at Google today for “cars” and was shocked. Rather than list links allowing me to search for “cars” on Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver and Yandex, Google instead favored its own search results. I’m glad the EU will be investigating whether this favoritism violates anti-trust laws. Consider the evidence. Here’s a search on Google for cars:As you can clearly see, none of the competing search engines I’ve named are listed in the top results. Rather than show them, Google instead shows pages about cars that it has collected across the web using its own technology.Google’s behavior...

Microsoft's annual meeting of shareholders in Bellevue this morning was pretty much the standard routine -- except for one question toward the end. The company's nine-member board was reappointed and a lone shareholder proposal, to establish a board environmental committee, was rejected. CEO Steve Ballmer touted the company's revenue and earnings growth. Shareholders complained about the stagnant share price and pressed for a higher dividend. Ballmer talked about Microsoft's product pipeline and finance chief Peter Klein noted that the company has returned more than $170 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks over the past decade....

"Why don't they fight back?" That's the question I've been hearing from the Democratic Party's stunned and dispirited base. For the past month, I've been on a book tour that has taken me to Asheville, N.C., Terre Haute, Ind., Austin and elsewhere. Everywhere I go, supporters of President Obama and his agenda ask me why so many Democrats in Washington don't stand up for what they say they believe. I confess that I don't have a good answer. What I can say with confidence, however, is that the White House and Democrats in Congress ignore these grumblings at their peril....