Seat Heaters

A bucket seat is a seat contoured to hold one person, distinct from bench seats which are flat platforms designed to seat multiple people. Bucket seats are standard in fast cars to keep riders in place when making sharp or quick turns.

In suitably equipped cars, seats and mirrors can be adjusted using electric controls. Some vehicles let the driver(s) save the adjustments in memory for later recall, with the push of a button. Most systems allow users to store more than one set of adjustments. This allows multiple drivers to store their comfort settings, or a single driver to store several different occupant positions. Some vehicles associate memorized settings with a specifically numbered, remotely operated key fob, resetting a seat to the position associated with that fob when the vehicle is unlocked (e.g. key fob #1 sets seats to memory position #1, #2 to #2, etc.)

MOUNTAIN HOME, Idaho – If Marion Lewis had his way, he'd take Washington, D.C.-area sniper John Allen Muhammad into the Idaho desert near his home and kill him slowly, over three days.
"He would be screaming the whole time. That's why I can't claim to be a good Christian," said Lewis, whose 25-year-old daughter was killed in Maryland in the 2002 sniper spree.
But instead of personal retribution, Lewis would settle for being present in the Virginia death chamber Nov. 10 when Muhammad is scheduled to die.
He doesn't have the money for the trip to see his daughter's killer breathe his last breath. The 57-year-old construction worker says he has been waylaid by the recession, hasn't held a steady job for two years and has been collecting unemployment on-and-off since 2007. He's trying to unload a house near Boise in a short sale.
Though Lewis acknowledges he feels "a little ghoulish," he called syndicated news program Inside Edition looking for help to pay for a journey he believes will put some semblance of closure on his daughter's murder. He has learned that justice has its price.
On Thursday morning, he said the New York-based show has agreed to finance a four-day trip to Virginia, in exchange for interviews before and after Muhammad's execution. Lewis says he'll return about $900 in donations he received from private citizens since his story started getting attention this week, along with sending the donors thank-you notes.
"There's never been any question about watching that animal die, for me," said Lewis, who lives with his wife, Jo, and two beagles in a scruffy home two miles from the tidy cemetery where his daughter is buried.
His daughter, Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, was vacuuming her minivan Oct. 3, 2002 at a gas station near where she lived in Silver Spring, Md., when Muhammad and his young accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, gunned her down. She was one of 10 people killed in the three-week killing spree.
Lewis' living room walls are covered in pictures reminding him of the tragedy: Lori on her wedding day; Lori and Nelson Rivera, the Honduran landscaper she met at a Mormon church and married; their daughter, Jocelin, now 10.
Patricia Allue, director of the Prince William County Victim/Witness Program in Virginia, said Lewis contacted her office looking for assistance but she didn't have funds available. Officials in Maryland, where Lori Rivera was killed, didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
And the Virginia Department of Corrections doesn't provide financial assistance to victims' families to attend executions. Officials there have been in contact with relatives of Muhammad's and Malvo's victims, including those killed in Maryland and Washington, D.C., in part because the facility in rural southern Virginia where the execution will take place has limited capacity for those wanting to watch Muhammad die.
Larry Traylor, a prisons spokesman, said his agency does help families like Lewis' with logistics: Directions to the execution spot, nearby hotels, details about how family members enter execution viewing rooms after other witnesses, then leave first after it's over, to protect their privacy.
"We try to chat with them, to explain what the process is, to put their mind at ease and help them make the decision as to whether they want to attend," Traylor said. "Then, it's really up to them."
Fearful he'd miss the execution, Lewis called Inside Edition, a 20-year-old news program that mixes celebrity news, investigations and human-interest stories.
The show will pay for Lewis to fly to Virginia on Nov. 8, attend the execution two days later, and then return to Idaho after Muhammad is dead. Lewis said he isn't quite sure what attending will bring, but he doesn't want to miss it.
"As far as closure, this will never be closed," he said.
Lewis said his daughter's death has changed his family in ways both big and small. Jocelin, Lori's daughter, lives with her father and his new wife in Northern California. Her mother was murdered when the then 3-year-old was too young to understand she was never coming back, Lewis said.
Lewis quit a job four years ago working at a gravel pit near Boise. The lulls between each new load of rock into the crusher he was operating gave him too much time to think about his daughter.

The only thing better than being in the death chamber Nov. 10 would be to personally execute Muhammad, he said.

"Pushing the button, yeah," Lewis said. "During the trial, I never went to the court because I didn't figure I needed to end up in jail. His guards wouldn't have been able to keep him from me."

WASHINGTON – Federal investigators are scrambling to determine what happened aboard a Northwest Airlines jetliner whose crew flew 150 miles past its destination while air traffic controllers, other pilots and even a flight attendant back in the cabin tried to get their attention.
Investigators don't know whether the pilots may have fallen asleep, but National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said Friday that fatigue and cockpit distraction will be looked into.
The plane's flight recorders were brought to Washington Friday, but the cockpit voice recorder is an older model that contains only the last 30 minutes of conversation. That makes the investigation more difficult since that time would be taken up by the flight back to Minneapolis — the intended destination — and the landing there Wednesday night.
Flight 188's recorders were delivered to the NTSB's Washington office. The pilots, both temporarily suspended, are to be interviewed by investigators next week. The airline, acquired last year by Delta Air Lines, is also investigating.
The crew told authorities they were distracted during a heated discussion over airline policy, the NTSB said.
Wednesday night, the airliner with more than 140 passengers aboard zoomed past Minneapolis at 37,000 feet at what was supposed to be the end of a flight from San Diego. Worried about who was actually at the controls, officials asked the crew to prove who they were by executing turns after they finally were contacted.
On the ground, police and FBI agents prepared for the worst, and the Air National Guard put fighter jets on alert at two locations as the drama unfolded.
Pilots from two other planes in the vicinity were finally able to reach the pilots using a different radio frequency, a controllers union spokesman said. A flight attendant in the cabin also was able to contact them by intercom, said a source close to the investigation who wasn't authorized to talk publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
By that time, the Airbus A320 was over Eau Claire, Wis., and the pilots had been out of communication with air traffic controllers for over an hour. They turned back and landed safely in Minneapolis, the plane's scheduled destination.
The plane passed over Minneapolis at 37,000 feet just before 8 p.m. local time. Contact with controllers wasn't established until 14 minutes later, NTSB said.
Air traffic controllers in Denver had been in contact with the pilots as they flew over the Rockies, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said. But as the plane got closer to Minneapolis, she said, "the Denver center tried to contact the flight but couldn't get anyone."
Denver controllers notified their counterparts in Minneapolis, who also tried to reach the crew without success, Brown said.
Officials suspect Flight 188's radio might still have been tuned to a frequency used by Denver controllers even though the plane had flown beyond their reach, said Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Union. Controllers worked throughout the incident with the pilots of other planes, asking them to try to raise Flight 188 using the Denver frequency, he said
That was unsuccessful until two pilots working with Minneapolis controllers finally got through just before the plane turned around, Church said. Minneapolis controllers don't have the capability of using the Denver frequency, but pilots do, he said.
After re-establishing contact with the plane, controllers asked the pilot in charge to execute a series of turns to show he was in control of the aircraft, Church said.
"Controllers have a heightened sense of vigilance when we're not able to talk to an aircraft. That's the reality post-9/11," he said.
Passenger Lonnie Heidtke said he didn't notice anything unusual before the landing except that the plane was late.
The flight attendants "did say there was a delay and we'd have to orbit or something to that effect before we got back. They really didn't say we overflew Minneapolis. ... They implied it was just a business-as-usual delay," said Heidtke, a consultant with a supercomputer consulting company based in Bloomington, Minn.

Once on the ground, the plane was met by police and FBI agents. Passengers retrieving their luggage from overhead bins were asked by flight attendants sit down, Heidtke said. An airport police officer and a couple other people came on board and stood at the cockpit door, talking to the pilots, he said.

"I did jokingly call my wife and say, 'This is the first time I've seen the police meet the plane. Maybe they're going to arrest the pilots for being so late.' Maybe I was right," Heidtke said.

The pilots' explanation that they were distracted by shop talk "just doesn't make any sense," said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. "The pilots are saying they were involved in a heated conversation. Well, that was a very long conversation."

The FAA is updating rules governing how many hours commercial pilots may fly and remain on duty. The NTSB also cautioned government agencies this week about the risks of sleep apnea contributing to transportation accidents.

In January 2008, two pilots for go! airlines fell asleep for at least 18 minutes during a midmorning flight from Honolulu to Hilo, Hawaii. The plane passed its destination and was heading out over open ocean before controllers raised the pilots. The captain was later diagnosed with sleep apnea.

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AP Airlines Writer Joshua Freed and AP Writers Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis and Dave Koenig in Dallas contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

FlightAware.com tracking of Northwest Flight 188: http://bit.ly/2QV9hX

National Transportation Safety Board http://www.ntsb.gov

LONDON – The head of Britain's domestic spy agency said Friday that Britain's security services try to make sure they do not collude in the torture or mistreatment of detainees by foreign governments, but acknowledged it was not possible to guarantee that it never happened.
Jonathan Evans, director-general of domestic security agency MI5, said that following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, Britain had to work with other countries that had more experience dealing with al-Qaida related terrorism, even if those countries operated on different standards.
"Our intelligence resources were not adequate to the situation we faced and the root of the terrorist problem was in parts of the world where the standards and practices of the local security apparatus were very far removed from our own," he said.
Evans made his comments at a speech at his former college, Bristol University, in the west of England Thursday evening. The speech was made public Friday.
"Given the pressing need to understand and uncover al-Qaida's plans, were we to deal, however circumspectly, with those security services who had experience of working against al-Qaida on their own territory, or were we to refuse to deal with them, accepting that in so doing we would be cutting off a potentially vital source of information that would prevent attacks in the West?" he said in the speech.
"In my view we would have been derelict in our duty if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this country from attack," he said.
Evans said Britain's security services "work hard to ensure that we do not collude in torture or mistreatment."
"Enormous effort goes into assessing the risks in each case, But it is not possible to eradicate all risk. Judgments need to be made," he said.
Evans' comments come a month after Britain's foreign intelligence agency, MI6, reported one its officers to authorities amid concerns over the U.K.'s possible complicity in torture. Police are also investigating claims that an MI5 officer was complicit in the mistreatment of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee.
The British government was forced to admit last year that one of its remote outposts — the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia — had twice been used by the United States as a refueling stop for the secret transfer of two terrorism suspects. Human rights group say the practice of transferring suspects without formal extradition proceedings opens the door for third-party countries to torture and interrogate suspects outside international standards.
Evans said he could not comment on specific cases. He said he did not condone all aspects of U.S. policy but said intelligence sharing with U.S. authorities was vital.
"I do not defend the abuses that have recently come to light within the U.S. system since 9/11," he said. "But it is important to recognize that we do not control what other countries do, that operational decisions have to be taken with the knowledge available."
Evans said he accepted criticisms from the British parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee — a panel of lawmakers that meets in private to scrutinize intelligence work — which said Britain's security services were slow to detect patterns in U.S. practice after Sept. 11, 2001, but added: "The U.K. has gained huge intelligence benefits from our cooperation with the U.S. agencies in recent years, and the U.S. agencies have been generous in sharing intelligence with us."