The president of the United Autoworkers Union, Gary Jones, abruptly resigned Wednesday just as union leaders announced they would expel him and another top UAW official in an unfolding corruption scandal.

In a related development, General Motors (GM) filed suit against rival Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) alleging that the company bribed UAW officials in order to get favorable labor contracts and disadvantage GM.

Michigan Radio’s Sarah Cwiek reported that the UAW’s International Executive Board unanimously voted to expel Jones.

“That kickstarted the process to remove Gary Jones and another UAW official, Director Vance Pearson.

“Both men have been implicated in a corruption scheme that involved misusing union funds for personal expenses, then covering it up.

“Both Jones and Pearson had already taken leaves of absence. Pearson already faces federal charges, while Jones has so far not been charged.”

An attorney for Jones, Bruce Maffeo of New York, told The Associated Press that union president decided to resign before learning of the board’s action.

Hours earlier, GM filed its federal racketeering lawsuit alleging that FCA bribed UAW officials in order to get contracts allowing the company to pay some newer employees less money — known as two-tier pay — resulting in lower labor costs.

“This lawsuit is intended to hold FCA accountable for the harm its actions have caused our company and to ensure a level playing field going forward,” Craig Glidden, GM Executive Vice President and General Counsel, said in a statement.

The lawsuit alleges that FCA corrupted bargaining agreements in 2009, 2011 and 2015.

FCA responded with a statement dismissing GM’s lawsuit as “this extraordinary attempt at distraction” with claims that “are nothing more than a meritless attempt to divert attention from that company’s own challenges.”

GM’s lawsuit alleges that FCA’s former CEO Sergio Marchionne authorized bribes of more than $1.5 million paid to UAW officials. Marchionne died in 2018.

It also alleges that Marchionne hoped to force higher labor costs onto GM in hopes of furthering a plan to induce the company to merge with FCA.

As Michigan Radio’s Tracy Samilton reports,

“GM’s lawsuit piggybacks on a federal investigation into UAW corruption that began several years ago – resulting in three Fiat Chrysler executives going to prison, along with six guilty pleas (so far) by union officials.

“Federal authorities says the executives were involved in a bribery scheme meant to keep union officials “fat, dumb and happy,” (quoting one of the convicted FCA executives, Alphons Iacobelli) during contract talks.

“GM says normally, the union’s pattern bargaining results in similar labor costs for all three Detroit automakers.”

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When Gordon Sondland arrived at the Capitol last month to provide what would be pivotal testimony in the Trump impeachment inquiry, a reporter asked the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, “Are you here to salvage your reputation?”

“I don’t have a reputation to salvage,” Sondland shot back.

Until recently, Sondland, 62, had a pretty low profile outside his hometown of Portland, Ore., where he and his wife, Katy Durant, are big Republican donors and contributors to numerous arts and civic organizations.

Now, as Sondland prepares to testify publicly before congressional investigators Wednesday, he finds himself in the middle of a Category 5 political storm.

Congressional investigators are looking into whether President Trump withheld security assistance from Ukraine to pressure the government to say it was investigating former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

Sondland, who helped reach out to the Ukrainian government on Trump’s behalf, first told Congress that the president was simply interested in battling corruption. He had demanded no favors in exchange for security assistance, he claimed.

But Sondland later amended his testimony, saying the aid package was in fact contingent on an investigation into the Bidens.

A strive for prominence

The impeachment inquiry has given Sondland a notoriety he never bargained for when he became EU ambassador.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Sondland dropped out of college early and got into commercial real estate. At just 28, he bought and renovated the bankrupt Roosevelt Hotel in Seattle, where he was born.

Today, his company, Provenance Hotels, owns 14 hotels, including six in Portland.

“He sees a good property that’s kind of in the right location and makes enough of an investment in it to make it a highly desirable place to stay,” says Len Bergstein, a public affairs consultant who has worked with Sondland.

Sondland has worked hard to be seen as a civic leader and cares a lot about how he is seen, Bergstein says. When Sondland worked out a deal with local government to acquire some land for a hotel, he insisted that he be referred to as a “pillar of the community” in the press release the city put out, Bergstein says.

“He was in many ways exercising his political muscles to try and up his profile, to take him from a kind of a noted and successful businessperson in a relatively narrow sense to much larger circles of prominence in the community,” Bergstein says.

According to Oregon Business, Sondland is a big fan of Ayn Rand, whose books promoting free market capitalism are popular with many libertarian conservatives.

But he has mainly donated to moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush and even a few Democrats, according to Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics.

A complicated relationship with Trump

His relationship with Trump is complicated. Sondland publicly broke with him following the then-presidential candidate’s attack on a Gold Star Muslim family. Yet Sondland also became a “bundler” for Trump, using his network of Portland political donors to help Trump get elected.

“In that election he gave nothing to Trump but he was listed as one of Trump’s bundlers in 2016, and of course being a bundler gives you more clout than just giving a single donation,” Krumholz says.

Sondland also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration through four companies Sondland controls.

A lot of people in liberal Portland have been taken aback by Sondland’s willingness to work in the Trump administration, Bergstein says.

“It was a surprise when Gordon found Donald Trump as an acceptable candidate. That wasn’t his type of Republican that he supported,” he says.

And Sondland has already paid a price for that support.

He is sometimes confronted by demonstrators when he goes out in public. And Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who represents the Portland area, has called for a boycott of his hotels.

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The Trump administration’s plan to ban most flavored vaping products has stalled out, at least for the moment.

Two months ago, President Trump announced he was pursuing the new policy to put a dent in the youth vaping epidemic. The plan was supposed to have been unveiled in a matter of weeks.

But industry pushback and the politics of vaping appear to have derailed that process.

On Sept. 11, when the president announced that he was endorsing a Food and Drug Administration proposal to ban those products, he acknowledged there were economic consequences.

“Vaping has become a very big business as I understand it. A giant business in a very short period of time,” he told reporters at the White House. “But we can’t allow people to get sick and we can’t have our youth to be so affected.”

The policy proposal hit just as health officials were investigating lung injuries and deaths among people who vaped. Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now say that’s primarily from vaping dubious marijuana products.

But Paul Billings, national senior vice president of public policy at the American Lung Association, says the organization was also focused on the role that flavored e-cigarettes played in teen nicotine addiction.

Mint, menthol, fruit and candy flavors would all be banned under the original proposal, leaving only tobacco-flavored vaping products. Those would appeal less to teens, though most adults also prefer non-tobacco flavors.

“We were very optimistic, encouraged when the president announced he wanted to clear the markets of all flavored e-cigarettes,” Billings says, noting that these attractive flavors “play such an important role in addicting millions of kids to these products.”

However, Billings’ optimism started to fade in the following weeks when the policy did not appear as promised. “It stretched into months,” Billings says.

The FDA sent its proposal to the Office of Management and Budget for review. It cleared that process on Nov. 4. “And then everything stopped on Nov. 5,” Billings says.

The Washington Post reports that is when the political staffers advised Trump not to sign off on the new rules.

Paul Blair, director of strategic initiatives at the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, was part of the push against the new rules. “Look, there are legitimate concerns about teens experimenting with these products,” he says, “but running toward the 1920s in terms of prohibition is a vote-losing issue.”

That message hit the airwaves of Fox News, which ran commercials produced by the Vapor Technology Association that portrayed e-cigarette users who said they wouldn’t vote for a president who banned vaping products.

Advocates assert that a vaping flavor ban could tilt the election against Trump in key swing states. A few years ago, Blair’s organization polled people who vape in states such as Michigan, concluding that 3 out of 4 of them were single-issue voters — and that the issue that energized them was access to vaping products.

Some also argue that getting rid of flavored vaping products could drive people who switched to e-cigarettes back to smoking cigarettes, which are the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.

On top of that, Blair says the industry itself provides 150,000 jobs through vape shops, manufacturers and related services.

“It would be a pretty significant hit in an election year for a guy that’s focused on deregulation, spurring economic growth and not killing jobs,” Blair says.

Big Tobacco is also part of this story, says the American Lung Association’s Billings.

“The largest tobacco companies in the world, like Altria and [R.J.] Reynolds, are major players in the e-cigarette business, along with these vape shops,” he says.

And those forces appear to have won out over the public health advocates, at least at the federal level, “so we fully expect — irrespective of what the administration does or does not do — that states and localities will continue to move forward,” Billings says.

A White House spokesman says the new rules haven’t been killed, but it’s not clear what, if anything, will survive this process.

You can contact NPR science correspondent Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.

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Passengers on board Qantas flight 7879 took off from London early Thursday morning and arrived in Sydney a bit after noon on Friday — 19 hours and 19 minutes in the air.

So how do you keep people on board from going crazy — or getting deep-vein thrombosis — while they’re cooped up that long?

The Australian airline’s approach on the 11,000 mile flight was to design the meals and lighting carefully, get passengers out of their seats, and focus on the remarkable: two sunrises in one day.

In addition to Sydney, Qantas is exploring a number of new nonstop flight routes that would be longer than any currently operating, including from New York and London to Melbourne and Brisbane. And so, the 52 people on board – largely employees of the airline, along with some journalists – were guinea pigs.

Last month, Qantas landed the first nonstop commercial airline flight from New York to Sydney. That flight took 19 hours, 16 minutes. The carrier says that flight saved passengers three hours over the normal routing, which includes a stop.

Jet-lag researchers at the University of Sydney put into practice a number of strategies on the flight related to light, food, and exercise.

To help the body to adjust to the time difference, light in the cabin was correlated to Sydney time as soon as the flight took off. So though the plane took off at 6 a.m. in London, dinner was served and the lights were soon turned down.

Meals were designed to produce specific effects. Dinner was a carb-heavy steak sandwich, easy on the spice, intended to lull passengers to sleep. Drinks were offered, too — on the previous nonstop test flight between New York and Sydney, 38% of passengers said they drank alcohol to hasten sleep (though alcohol can be especially dehydrating on such extended flights).

And passengers were guided to exercise: walking in a circuit around the plane and doing stretches. That part was made easier than on a typical flight, since the plane was mostly empty.

To test the flight’s impact and measure efforts to make it less taxing, test passengers wore activity monitors, kept logs of how they felt, and played a “whack-a-mole” game on an iPad to test their reaction time and attentiveness.

Pilots and cabin crew wore activity monitors and kept sleep diaries. Pilots wore EEG monitors to track their brain activity and alertness, and gave urine samples so their melatonin levels could be used to indicate their body clock status.

The London to Sydney route was flown commercially once before, along a different route in 1989, with just 23 passengers. The longest flight currently operating is Singapore Airlines’ nonstop from Singapore to Newark, which takes 18.5 hours.

The researchers’ tactics seemed to help aboard the new Boeing 787-9 aircraft.

“I feel really well,” test passenger Andy Chevis told Reuters during the descent. “Probably a lot better than I normally would at this point in the flight.”

Unfortunately, it seems that even the most cutting-edge science can’t change that most human of desires: the wish to land.

By hour 17, reported CNN’s Richard Quest, there was “a palpable sense that people are keen to see the end of the flight. They want off as soon as possible.”

Qantas began offering a nonstop London-Perth flight last year; the company says the route has won its highest levels of customer satisfaction and has made its service to London profitable for the first time in 10 years. The cost for one such upcoming roundtrip flight is $1,087. It’s not clear what the pricing will be for the routes the airline is testing now.

The airline says it expects decide whether to go forward with the super-long-haul routes by the end of 2019, with a goal of launching the nonstop routes by 2022.

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Nissan is recalling nearly 400,000 vehicles in the U.S. because of a braking system defect that could cause them to catch fire. Owners are advised to park affected vehicles outside and away from structures if the anti-lock brake system warning light comes on for more than 10 seconds.

The Japanese automaker says a pump seal may become worn down and cause brake fluid to leak. “If the warning is ignored … the brake fluid leak may potentially create an electrical short in the actuator circuit, which in rare instances, may lead to a fire,” the company says in documents sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The recall affects four different models in the U.S.: the Nissan Murano SUV, model years 2015 to 2018; Maxima sedans, model years 2016 to 2018; and the Infiniti QX60 and Nissan Pathfinder SUVs, model years 2017 to 2019.

Nissan says in a statement emailed to NPR that it is working on a fix and that owners of affected vehicles will be notified beginning in early December 2019. “Once the remedy is available, owners will receive a final notification letter asking them to bring their vehicle to an authorized Nissan dealer or INFINITI retailer to have the remedy work completed at no cost for parts or labor,” the company says.

This isn’t the first time Nissan has had problems with brake fluid leaks. Last year, for example, Nissan recalled more than 215,000 vehicles. The automaker says vehicles in the 2018 recall that haven’t been repaired are included in the current recall.

The documents Nissan sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration do not state whether the brake system defect has caused any fires or injuries.

However, a NHTSA database of complaints from vehicle owners contained several unconfirmed reports of problems with leaks in the anti-lock brake system. One complaint from Sierra Vista, Ariz., said that a 2017 Nissan Maxima “ignited and exploded” less than a month after it was purchased. According to the owner, insurance investigators said it happened because brake fluid leaked onto the circuit board.

Earlier this year, Nissan North America recalled 1.2 million vehicles because the reverse camera could be adjusted so that the monitor appeared blank, which violates U.S. safety standards.

Paolo Zialcita is an intern with NPR’s News Desk.

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Amazon is taking the Pentagon to court. The company is alleging “unmistakable bias” on the government’s part in awarding a massive military tech contract to rival Microsoft.

This begins a new chapter in the protracted and contentious battle over the biggest cloud-computing contract in U.S. history — called JEDI, for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure — worth up to $10 billion over 10 years.

The Pentagon declared Microsoft the winner of JEDI on Oct. 25, after months of delays, investigations and controversy — at first, over accusations of a cozy relationship between Amazon and the Department of Defense, and later, over President Trump’s public criticism of Amazon.

In a statement on Thursday, Amazon’s cloud unit argued that “numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias- and it’s important that these matters be examined and rectified.” The company is appealing the contract at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

Amazon Web Services spokesperson said the company was “uniquely experienced and qualified” for the job, adding: “We also believe it’s critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence.”

Amazon was stunned by its loss of the JEDI contract. Microsoft’s cloud business Azure has been a distant second in size to AWS, which also previously won a cloud contract with the CIA. But a former Pentagon official familiar with the JEDI deal previously told NPR that Microsoft’s bid “hit the ball out of the park.”

A Microsoft representative did not immediately respond on Thursday. A Defense Department representative said: “We will not speculate on potential litigation.”

At stake is a high-profile project to move the American military to the cloud. The winner of JEDI, in simplest terms, would become the single manager of the process. This company would unify the Pentagon’s many disjointed networks and give U.S. war fighters access to cutting-edge computing technology like artificial intelligence anywhere in the world.

When bidding on JEDI opened in 2018, Amazon was seen as the only company that already matched the qualifications. Rival Oracle led a cantankerous lobbying campaign that accused the Pentagon and Amazon of a cozy relationship, pointing to Defense Department employees who had done work for AWS.

The Defense Department, the Government Accountability Office and the Court of Federal Claims reviewed the bidding and allowed it to proceed. Microsoft and Amazon were declared finalists. (Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM are among recent financial supporters of NPR.)

Though legally unsuccessful, rivals’ objections did grab the attention of several lawmakers in Congress and, eventually, Trump. The president has a well-known disdain toward Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, particularly over the businessman’s personal ownership of The Washington Post, whose news coverage Trump often criticizes.

In July, Trump told reporters that he was getting “tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon; they’re saying it wasn’t competitively bid.” He said he would ask the Pentagon “to take a look at it very closely.”

Soon after, the Defense Department announced that new Secretary Mark Esper hit pause on JEDI — before unexpectedly declaring Microsoft the winner a few weeks later.

“The acquisition process was conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations,” the Department of Defense said in announcing the award in October. “All offerors were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria.”

NPR’s Tom Bowman contributed to this report.

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