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FLINT, Mich. (AP) – Authorities said a man accused of stealing a car then reporting it stolen remains in custody after telling police he was robbed at gunpoint while trying to buy crack cocaine with a credit card. The Flint Journal said the man reported Thursday night that a 2003 Chevy Malibu had been stolen.

Police reports indicated the vehicle was previously stolen out of Lapeer, about 50 miles north-northwest of Detroit.

The suspect is being lodged at the Genesee County Jail.

No further details were released.

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Information from: The Flint Journal, http://www.mlive.com/flint

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rightsreserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

By Sarah Sanchez- email

Tucson, AZ (KOLD)- A plane carrying Tucson missionary Robert Park has landed in Los Angeles.

Park arrived on U.S. soil after being held by the North Korean government for more than a month.

North Korea detained him for illegally crossing its border from China on Christmas Day.

On Friday, North Korea announced it would free Park, saying he had shown “sincere repentance.”

The 28-year-old Tucson man slipped into North Korea carrying letters calling on leader Kim Jong Il to close the country’s notoriously brutal prison camps and step down from power – acts that could risk a death sentence.

The official Korean Central News Agency quoted Park as saying he was ashamed of the “biased” view he once held of the communist nation. There was no way to verify if the missionary was speaking freely or under duress.

©2010 KOLD. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. AP contributed to this report.

By MALCOLM FOSTER and YURI KAGEYAMA
Associated Press Writers

TOKYO (AP) – Toyota’s president emerged from seclusion Friday to apologize and address criticism that the automaker mishandled a crisis over sticking gas pedals. Yet he stopped short of ordering a recall for the company’s iconic Prius hybrid for braking problems.

Akio Toyoda, appointed to the top job at Toyota Motor Corp. last June, promised to beef up quality control, saying, “We are facing a crisis.”

Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder, said he personally would head a special committee to review checks within the company, go over consumer complaints and listen to outside experts to come up with a fix.

“I apologize from the bottom of my heart for all the concern that we have given to so many customers,” said Toyoda, speaking at his first news conference since the Jan. 21 global recall of 4.5 million vehicles.

Toyota’s failure to stem its widening safety crisis has stunned consumers andexperts who’d come to expect only streamlined efficiency from a company at the pinnacle of the global auto industry.

“Toyota needs to be more assertive in terms of providing consumers comfort that the immediate problem is being addressed … and that it can deal with these crises,” said Sherman Abe, a business professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.

It took prodding from the U.S. government for Toyota to recall the vehicles, about half of them in North America, for gas pedals that can stick and cause sudden acceleration.

Asked if he should have acted more quickly, Toyoda replied in hesitant English: “I will do my best.”

Toyoda was the second successive Toyota president to offer an apology for defects in the company’s cars. The first, Katsuaki Watanabe, shocked a news conference in 2006, bowing low to the group before promising to improve quality.

Toyoda bowed as he greeted reporters, but not in apology. He told the hastily called news conference that the company had not decided what to do about problems in the braking system of the Prius gas-electric hybrid. The high-mileage, low-pollution car is a leader in its field and a symbol of Toyota technology

Toyoda and Shinichi Sasaki, who oversees quality control, offered no new explanations for the braking problem.

Prius drivers in Japan and the U.S. have complained of a short delay before the brakes kick in – a flaw Toyota says can be fixed with a software programming change. The lag occurs as the car is switching between brakes for the gas engine and the electric motor – a process that is key to the hybrid’s increased mileage.

Toyota spokesman Mike Michels said Friday the company continues to weigh options on how to handle repair of the problem, and it is communicating with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Among the options are a service campaign in which Toyota would notify owners to bring their cars in for repairs, or a full-fledged safety recall. Michels said he could not say when Toyota would make a decision.

The automaker said it fixed the programming glitch in Prius models that went on sale since last month, but has done nothing on 270,000 Prius cars sold last year in Japan and the U.S.

The lack of action has raised questions about whether there is a bigger problem.

Sasaki denied any cover up.

“We have nothing to hide. We have just been investigating,” he said.

Sasaki said complaints were climbing by the day. The company was checking into them, one by one, and test-driving customer’s cars that had developed problems, he said.

But he appeared to view the problem as minor, occurring only at slow speeds.

“We don’t see it as critical because if you push on it a bit, then the car will stop,” he said of the brake pedal.

Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo, said Toyota may be trying to avoid the large costs involved with a recall. The automaker has already said repairs for the gas pedal recall and lost sales will cost it $2 billion.

“Toyota is saying … there is no real problem yet also announced they fixed the problem as of January,” he said. “Odd, given that there is no problem to fix.”

There is also high level government concern in Japan about Toyota’s quality fiasco.

Transport Minister Seiji Maehara, who oversees auto regulation, has urged Toyota to consider a recall for the brake problem.

In the past, the world’s No. 1 automaker has move quickly to address problems and the handling of its most recent problems has experts puzzled.

“There’s a sharp contrast with previous times in terms of handling these kinds of situations,” said Koji Endo, managing director of Advanced Research Japan. “I really don’t know why – if it was the change in management or if the PR office was responsible or what.”

Some experts speculated a degree of arrogance or corporate insularity may have clouded the company’s judgment this time around.

“Toyota is the top of the totem pole,” said Kenneth Grossberg, a marketing professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. “They don’t have to learn from anyone else.”

Grossberg noted that Japanese companies “have a problem with rapid decision making.”

“Until they get everyone to sign on, it takes forever,” said Grossberg, who has spent 16 years in Japan, including several years as a Citibank executive.

Toyoda said the company was cooperating with the U.S. investigation into the Prius problems and moving as quickly as it could to repair the gas pedals on a wide-range of models.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s safety database includes several hundred complaints from 2010 Prius drivers. Most of the reports, which date back to May 2009, detail problems with brakes that are slow to respond or sudden lurches of acceleration when the vehicle goes over potholes or other rough spots in the road.

“This is asking for accidents to happen and something must be done to fix this problem,” wrote one driver, who described four cases of loss of braking power and acceleration on bumps. All the complaints in the database are anonymous.

Sasaki told the news conference he was grateful that LaHood had pressed Toyota to go ahead quickly with the gas pedal recalls in the U.S.

Toyota did not have a fix for the problem at the time, and did not come out with one for more than a week, further frustrating customers. It also suspended sales and production on eight models in the U.S.

“It would have become even harder to win back the trust of customers, and the damage to the Toyota brand would have been greater,” Sasaki said solemnly. “It was hard but in hindsight I am grateful to Mr. LaHood.”

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Associated Press Writers Tom Krisher in Detroit and Stephen Manning in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama is redirecting America’s space program, killing NASA’s $100 billion plans to return astronauts to the moon and using much of that money for new rocket technology research.

The moon mission, which had already cost $9.1 billion, was based on old technology and revisiting old places astronauts had already been, officials said. The previous NASA chief, in selling the old moon plan, had even called it “Apollo on steroids.” The rockets were based on space shuttle boosters.

“Simply put, we’re putting the science back into the rocket science at NASA,” White House science adviser John Holdren said at a budget briefing Monday.

The $4 billion that NASA spends yearly on human space exploration will now be used for what NASA and White House officials called dramatic changes in rocketry, including in-orbit fueling. They said eventually those new technologies would be used to send astronauts to a nearby asteroid, a brief foray back to the moon, or the Martian moons.

The White House plan was short on details, such as where astronauts would fly next, on what type of rocketship, or when. However, officials were quick to point out the failures of the Bush administration’s moon program, called Constellation. It included the construction of two types of rockets, Ares I and Ares V, and an Orion crew capsule. All were canceled. Shutting down the program will cost about $2.5 billion, NASA said.

Former President George W. Bush proposed the moon mission after the Feb. 1, 2003, space shuttle Columbia disaster that claimed seven lives – exactly seven years ago Monday. And congressional boosters of the plan aren’t willing to give up on it just yet.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and chairman of the Senate space subcommittee, said he will hold a hearing later this month to see if Congress could rescue some parts of the Ares rocket programs.

“This is a pretty substantial change,” said MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley, who was on a special panel that looked at the future of spaceflight for the White House. “It is more change than I thought they’d take on.”

Crawley said the Bush moon plan was well thought out, but based on existing technologies and underfunded.

“We didn’t lose the moon today; we very subtly lost the moon a long time ago when the amount of money disappeared a few years ago,” Crawley said.

Besides redirecting money to new technologies, NASA is getting an extra $6 billion over five years to encourage companies to build private spaceships that NASA could rent. Many of those companies are run by Internet pioneers, including Blue Origin, headed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Another firm, SpaceX, run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, is already building private rockets.

In a teleconference Monday, Musk said that within three years of getting a contract with NASA, he could deliver astronauts to the International Space Station for about $20 million a head – cheaper than the $50 millionRussia is charging the United States.

NASA now has seven companies getting money to work on planning for some types of commercial spaceships.

Former NASA associate administrator Scott Pace, now a professor of space policy at George Washington University, said relying so much on commercial companies is taking a big chance because they might not deliver on time or on budget.

“The risks are higher, the goals are more vague,” Pace said of the new space policy. “It’s more money but probably not enough.”

NASA will also spend an additional $2.5 billion over five years for more research on how global warming is affecting Earth, including replacing a carbon dioxide monitoring satellite that crashed last year. NASA will also extend the life by several years of the International Space Station, which had been slated for retirement in 2016. NASA’s yearly budget is $19 billion.

NASA said if the private companies work well on their unproven spaceships, astronauts could fly in them to the space station as soon as 2016. After the next five space shuttle flights, NASA will have to hitch rides to the space station on Russian rockets.

“The truth is we were not on a sustainable path to get back to the moon,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a telephone conference call. “We were neglecting investments in key technologies.”

Congressional officials howled over lost programs and jobs, but it is hard for Congress to save such a large program that is being cut with redistributed money. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., called the cancellation of the moon mission the “death march for the future of U.S. human space flight.”

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AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn contributed to this report from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

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On the Net

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.