Bus Drivers

If your New Year's resolutions didn't include hanging up that cellphone when behind the wheel, several states plan to do it for you. A slew of new laws taking effect this year aims to curb distracted driving. Beginning Tuesday, all commercial drivers — including truck and bus drivers — are banned from using hand-held and push-to-talk cellphones. The new law will affect an estimated 4 million commercial drivers, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which instituted the ban. New automotive laws are taking effect in a variety of states too. In Nevada, those who violate a 3-month-old law that bans texting while driving will receive tickets instead of warnings; a grace period for residents to familiarize themselves with the new law had ended as of Sunday.

A suspect has been detained in the fatal shooting of a Metro bus driver Sunday morning in West Hollywood, authorities said. Shortly after 9 a.m. the 51-year old bus driver on Route 105 was leaving an MTA layover area near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and West Knoll Drive when the shooting occurred, said MTA spokesman Rick Jager. The driver was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and died at 9:30 a.m. The name of the driver, a five-year veteran of the agency, has not been released.

Marvin Diaz quit a $700-a-week job delivering magazines to learn how to drive a public transit bus. He excelled behind the wheel but flunked out of the training program. The native Nicaraguan speaks English but had trouble reading and comprehending the test questions. "It was a little confusing," said Diaz, 38, of Sun Valley.

Frank Edward Ray, the school bus driver hailed as a hero for helping to lead 26 children to safety after a bizarre kidnapping in the San Joaquin Valley town of Chowchilla 36 years ago, has died. He was 91. Ray died Thursday in Chowchilla of complications of cirrhosis of the liver, said his granddaughter, Susan Ray. On the next-to-last day of summer school in July 1976, Ray was driving a busload of children home when he slowed down on tree-lined Avenue 21 for a white van blocking the road.

An Orange County school bus driver convicted of molesting and taking pornographic photographs of young girls was sentenced Thursday to 151 years to life in prison, authorities said. Terry Lee Shields, 55, of Buena Park was convicted earlier this month on 15 felony counts, including kidnapping, forcible lewd acts on a minor child and using a minor for sex acts, according to the Orange County district attorney's office. Shields lured his victims -- ages 5, 7, and 11 -- by gaining the trust of their families and in one case by promising a trip to Disneyland, prosecutors said.

Striking bus drivers planned to return to the picket lines today after no progress was made in restarting negotiations with the Los Angeles Unified School District's biggest transportation contractor. Representatives of Teamsters Local 572 and the bus company, Laidlaw Education Services, did not meet over the weekend and have not scheduled negotiations, a union spokesman said. As a result, schedule disruptions affecting 20,000 students are expected to continue into a second week.

Nine days after walking off the job, Santa Clarita bus drivers on Thursday reached a tentative labor agreement with the city's private transit operator, which could end the strike by this weekend, a company spokesman said. The 105 drivers of Teamsters Union Local 572 will vote on the three-year contract proposal today, said Art Sohikian, spokesman for ATC Vancom, the bus operator. If a contract is approved, the drivers will return to work as soon as Saturday morning, he said.

Name: Pam Herberich-Peters Company: Orange County Transit District Thumbs up: "I like being out with the public, working with the passengers. I've met people from all over the world. I like the freedom of driving and being outdoors all the time." Thumbs down: "If I could, I would change the attitude of the other drivers on the road. You know a bus is going to have to stop some time. Go around us. Don't cut us off--and don't flip us off."

Two dozen Orange County bus drivers are fighting to save their jobs after they received demerits for failing to announce the names of major bus stops during random inspections. The drivers and their union have filed grievances against the Orange County Transportation Authority in an effort to remove the demerits from their records.

Orange County bus driver Jon Jackson put his driving skills to the test Tuesday. He maneuvered his 40-foot-long bus through an obstacle course that included precision steering around a row of barrels. At one point, he drove straight toward a cone and stopped just inches before hitting it. And when it was over in just 5 minutes, 54 seconds, he stepped from his machine, broke into a wide grin and gave a thumbs up to cheering supporters.

If your New Year's resolutions didn't include hanging up that cellphone when behind the wheel, several states plan to do it for you. A slew of new laws taking effect this year aims to curb distracted driving. Beginning Tuesday, all commercial drivers — including truck and bus drivers — are banned from using hand-held and push-to-talk cellphones. The new law will affect an estimated 4 million commercial drivers, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which instituted the ban. New automotive laws are taking effect in a variety of states too. In Nevada, those who violate a 3-month-old law that bans texting while driving will receive tickets instead of warnings; a grace period for residents to familiarize themselves with the new law had ended as of Sunday.

The magnitude 6.3 quake that hit the Canterbury region of New Zealand’s South Island last month may have staggered its residents, but not for long, says one of its native sons. “You can knock down a building, but you can’t knock down a Cantabrian,” says Phil Keoghan , host of CBS’ “ Amazing Race ,” who was born and raised just outside the city limits of Christchurch. “They’re going to dust themselves off and get back up again.” Keoghan, whose parents own a bed and breakfast there, went home last week to check in with his mom and dad and friends in the area, which was also struck in September by a magnitude 7.2 quake.

The U.S. Air Force says two of its airmen have been killed and two wounded in a shooting outside Frankfurt airport. Spokeswoman Maj. Beverly Mock said German police have the suspect in Wednesday afternoon's shooting in custody and that she could not release any further details on the victims until their next of kin have been notified. The gunman opened fire on a bus carrying the airmen as it sat outside Terminal 2 at the airport, Frankfurt police spokesman Manfred Fuellhardt said.

The California Supreme Court on Monday upheld the death sentence of an African American man convicted of killing an elderly white couple in Riverside County, a decision that prompted two justices to dissent on the grounds that prosecutors may have improperly challenged prospective black jurors. In a majority ruling written by Justice Ming W. Chin, the state high court affirmed in a 5-2 decision the guilty verdict and death sentence against Albert Jones, who was 29 when he hog-tied, robbed and fatally stabbed James Florville, 82, and his wife, Madalynne Florville, 72, in their Mead Valley home in 1993.

Three teenage boys triggered chaos in a Boyle Heights neighborhood Monday afternoon when their car ran a red light, killed a pedestrian and upended a school bus, injuring the driver and 20 Roosevelt High School students, authorities said. Two of the teenagers were arrested after they were chased down and apprehended by a construction workers, California Highway Patrol Officer Miguel Luevano said. A third youth was arrested after arriving at an area hospital later in the evening, seeking medical treatment.

A crash involving a Greyhound bus en route from Los Angeles to Sacramento killed six people and injured 20 others, according to the California Highway Patrol. The deadly sequence of events began shortly before 2 a.m. Thursday as three young women in a dark-blue Chevrolet Trailblazer were traveling north on California Highway 99 in Fresno. The Trailblazer made a sharp left turn from the right-hand lane, struck the median rail, rolled over and blocked the fast lane, said CHP Central Division Chief Jim Abrames.

One of the first things that the Old Town Trolley Tour's 32 employees do when they report for work is sit down and "play the machine." That's what the San Diego tour bus company's drivers and ticket-takers call a high-technology system that, according to its developers, simply and effectively screens employees whose on-the-job performance might be impaired by drugs, alcohol, emotional stress or other causes.

A grand jury in Dallas declined to indict a bus driver in connection with the deaths of 23 passengers killed in a fire that destroyed the vehicle as they fled Hurricane Rita in September. The sheriff's department had said Juan Robles Gutierrez, 37, did not inspect the bus periodically on the 16-hour trip from Houston and didn't help the nursing home patients when the fire broke out.

A disgruntled bus driver stopped his vehicle and allegedly sprayed gunfire Tuesday on a construction crew he was transporting to a work site south of Cairo, killing six laborers and wounding 16, security officials said. A security official told the state-run Middle East News Agency that Mahmoud Taha Swellem was driving 22 people, including a finance manager and a department head, to a site near Giza when he suddenly took out an automatic weapon and opened fire. Swellem, who had worked for the company for 20 years, was arrested at the scene.

BlackBerry maker profit jumps 37% BlackBerry phone maker Research in Motion Ltd. reported sharply higher earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter, yet its stock dropped as results failed to meet Wall Street expectations. RIM said it earned $710.1 million, or $1.27 per share, up 37% from a year earlier and nearly in line with analysts' predictions of $1.28 per share. Yet revenue of $4.08 billion, while rising 18% over the same period a year earlier, was short of the $4.31 billion expected by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.