By JOSH FUNK, AP Transportation Writer

The family of one of the 67 people killed when an airliner collided with an Army helicopter over Washington, D.C., on Wednesday sued the government and the airlines involved, accusing them of failing to recognize the warning signs after more than 30 documented near misses in the area.

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Other families are expected to join this first lawsuit that seeks to hold the Federal Aviation Administration, the Army, American Airlines and its regional partner, PSA Airlines, accountable for the the deadliest U.S. plane crash since 2001. PSA Airlines operated Flight 5342 that crashed Jan. 29.

The lawsuit says the airlines and government agencies “utterly failed in their responsibilities to the travelling public.”

The widow of Casey Crafton from Connecticut, who is raising three young boys without her husband, filed the lawsuit. Her lawyers also represent the majority of the families of people who died in the crash.

The National Transportation Safety Board has already highlighted a long list of things that likely contributed to the crash, although the final report identifying the cause won’t be ready until next year.

The Black Hawk helicopter was flying well above the 200-foot (60-meter) limit, but even if it had been at the correct altitude, the route it was flying provided a scant 75 feet (23 meters) of separation between helicopters and planes landing on Ronald Reagan International Airport’s secondary runway. The flight data recorder showed the helicopter was actually flying 80 feet to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters) higher than the altimeter showed the pilots before the two aircraft collided.

The NTSB has also said the FAA failed to recognize an alarming pattern of near misses at the busy airport in the years before the crash and ignored concerns about helicopter traffic around the airport. Investigators also said that overworked controllers were trying to squeeze as many planes as possible into the landing pattern with minimal separation on a regular basis. If any of those things — or a number of other factors — had been different that night, the collision might have been avoided.

FILE – Crosses are seen at a makeshift memorial for the victims of the plane crash in the Potomac River near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, file)

The lawsuit says the airlines failed in their duty to protect the passengers because they were aware of numerous incidents in which helicopters flew close to commercial aircraft around Reagan airport but failed to adequately train pilots and didn’t inform them about the helicopter routes or take other action to mitigate the risks. Other airline policies, such as allowing pilots to accept an alternative runway that intersects with the helicopter route and heavily scheduling flights in the second half of every hour may have contributed.

The lawsuit says the PSA pilots should have reacted sooner when they received an alert about traffic in the area 19 seconds before the crash instead of waiting until the last second to pull up. The lawsuit says a yellow icon appeared on the pilots’ warning system showing the relative direction and altitude of the Army helicopter.

Among the jet’s passengers were several members of the Skating Club of Boston, who were returning from an elite junior skaters’ camp following the 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas. A figure skating tribute event in Washington raised $1.2 million for the crash victims’ families.

Others on the flight from Wichita included a group of hunters returning from a guided trip in Kansas; four members of a steamfitters’ union in suburban Maryland; nine students and parents from schools in Fairfax County, Virginia; and two Chinese nationals. There were also four crew members on the plane and three people in the helicopter’s crew who were killed.

For decades, home sellers typically covered both their own agent’s commission and the fee for the buyer’s broker, a structure that left little room for negotiation. But a recent legal settlement has shaken up that system, opening the door for buyers and sellers to haggle over who pays what — and how much.

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In the Bay Area, many agents ask for a 2.5% or 3% commission — a rate they say is justified given their experience and market knowledge, and the time they take to help clients navigate the process of buying and selling a home. Agents may also face pressure from brokerages, which may receive anywhere between 15% to 30% of that commission, to keep fees close to 2.5%.

Although some agents don’t budge on their rates, some will under the right circumstances. Here’s how a buyer or seller can strengthen their hand in negotiations:

Show that you’re serious. Matt Castillo, an East Bay agent, said that part of the reason agents set their fees around 2.5% is because it’s so uncertain whether their client will actually close — and the agent will get paid. “You might be working with someone for a year, and they may never buy,” he said.

As a buyer, show an agent that you’ll make their time worthwhile. Get preapproved for a loan. Make sure you understand your budget and how much home you can afford. If an agent feels that you’re likely to buy a home with them, they may be more willing to negotiate.

As a seller, make it clear that you’re motivated to sell, so that the agent doesn’t think there’s a risk that you’ll take the property off the market.

Define how much help you really need. Some buyers want their agent to come along to every showing. Others want someone who will come in at the end and help negotiate the price. If you don’t need an agent who will hold your hand, tell them.

The same goes for sellers — if you’re handling certain parts already, like the staging or the photos, you may be able to get a price reduction.

“That’s a good way for clients to negotiate, is defining what services they need from an agent,” said Kyle Henry, an agent in Burlingame.

Price matters. If you’re buying or selling a more expensive property, you may be able to reduce your fee since the agent’s overall payout will be larger.

Use the same agent for multiple transactions. If you’re selling one home and buying a new one with the same agent, they may reduce their fee, since they earn two commissions.

Shop around. Knowing the market and what others charge will put you in a better position to negotiate.

Point out that you don’t want to be at a disadvantage to others who do negotiate. Stephen Brobeck, senior fellow at the Consumer Policy Center, a consumer advocacy group, had advice for buyers and sellers.

If an agent insists that their fee doesn’t matter because the sellers are the ones who pay, push back. Buyers should ask, “Won’t that put my offer at a disadvantage if another buyer has successfully negotiated a lower rate?” he said.

Sellers should instruct the agent not to offer a specific rate to inquiring buyer agents, and simply say it is negotiable. Then offer a rate a half a percentage point below what the buyers ask, Brobeck said. “Many buyer agents will accept that, and they will amend their agreement with the buyer.”

When Eric Itakura listed his Mountain View, California, condo last year, he hoped to save some money on commissions.

The rules over how agents’ fees are set had recently been rewritten as part of a landmark settlement reached between the National Association of Realtors and a group of home sellers. For decades, sellers typically paid a fee between 5% or 6%, split between their own broker and the buyer’s. The new rules, industry watchers predicted, might finally chip away at that standard by forcing buyers and their agents to negotiate separately.

RELATED: How to negotiate commissions with your real estate agent

But Itakura found that not much had changed. Two buyers made offers, both asking that he cover their agent’s fee. One wanted 2.5%, the other 3%. Itakura knew he could say no — but he also knew the buyers could walk.

“There’s a convention that’s been in place for a long time,” Itakura said. “The more you try to buck against that standard, the more potential problems you create for yourself.”

Across the country, sellers like Itakura are discovering that while the settlement changed the rules on paper, the practice of sellers paying commissions remains the same — and so have the fees. Nationwide, the average buyer’s agent commission in the second quarter of 2025 was 2.43 percent, according to Redfin — almost identical to a year earlier, before the rule change. On a median-priced Bay Area home of $1.3 million, that’s about $31,600 going to the buyer’s agent.

In the past, a buyer didn’t have to sign a contract with their agent — in fact, they may have been oblivious to their agent’s fee, given that the seller typically paid. The practice was enforced by an NAR rule that required a seller to communicate their commission split to the buyer’s agent for any listing uploaded to the NAR-affiliated multiple listing services, or MLS, the private databases where agents can see homes for sale.

Eric Itakura stands at his home in Los Gatos, Calif., on Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025. (Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group)

A group of home sellers in Missouri sued the NAR in 2019, arguing that the practice kept fees artificially inflated. A jury sided with them, and in a settlement, the Realtors association agreed to “decouple” the commissions. It instated a new rule requiring buyers to sign a buyer-broker representation agreement before making an offer, stating the agent’s fee and that the buyer will pay if a seller declines.

The contracts have played a role in maintaining the industry’s fees, especially in a slow housing market. Even though a seller can always say no, they may feel that they have to cover a buyer’s agent, because if they don’t, the buyer would be locked into paying the agreed-to fee out-of-pocket — a cost many buyers can’t afford.

“These contracts put sellers under great pressure to accept the agent’s normal rates, almost always either 2.5% or 3.0%,” said Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at the Consumer Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice expressed concerns about the new requirement. In a filing last year related to the case, the DOJ warned that the rule “may harm buyers and limit how brokers compete for clients.”

The National Association of Realtors says the contracts help define the relationship between a buyer and their agent, add transparency to the transaction and allows a buyer to negotiate their fee. “Written buyer agreements are pro-consumer and pro-competition,” the association wrote in statement.

Realtors have enshrined the practice in law across several states, including California. In 2024, the California Association of Realtors sponsored a bill that requires buyers to sign these agreements. It passed easily, with bipartisan support.

“Sellers understand that it’s to their benefit to pay the compensation,” said Janelle Boyenga, an agent based in Los Altos. “Especially since prices are so high, buyers don’t want to come up with extra money. It’s hard enough to buy a home in Silicon Valley.”

The standard buyer-broker agreement form drafted by the California Association of Realtors even includes a box that agents can check to say “Buyer does not have sufficient funds to pay broker.” The message to the seller is clear: Don’t pay commission, and the buyer may walk.

In a statement, CAR said that “each seller is free to make their own decision whether to contribute towards the buyer’s broker compensation.”

“You’re free to tell them no,” said Berkeley agent Daniel Stea. “But if you tell them no, that could change their offer, because then suddenly they’re going to have to find a way to pay their agent.”

Before they sign, buyers can try to haggle for a lower fee with their agents to bring a more competitive offer to the table. Agents say their fees are negotiable, and always have been.

But the industry is defensive of its fees. In the Bay Area, a dozen agents interviewed said that 2.5% remains the standard fee for buyers’ agents, although a few “discount” and flat-fee brokerages charge less. Some agents say they would rather lose out on a client than lower their price.

“I don’t typically go lower than 2.5%, because that’s my value,” said Ricky Flores, an agent with Sotheby’s in Menlo Park. “I work hard, and what I bring to buyers is worth more than dropping my commission down.”

Some agents interviewed said the brokerages they work for pressure agents to keep fees at 2.5% or higher. Brokerages typically receive 15% to 40% of their agents’ commissions.

This news organization asked several brokerages whether they enforce a 2.5% fee. Coldwell Banker declined to comment. Sotheby’s and Christie’s did not respond. A Compass spokesperson said in a statement, “Compass believes that all commissions are negotiable and not set by law.”

Because most of them work solely on commission, agents also have little incentive to offer discounts. Many work as both listing agents and buyer’s agents and don’t want to see the industry standard lowered.

“It’s a cooperative industry,” said Brobeck. “That makes it a lot easier to maintain the standards of the culture.”

Agents said that they’ve seen some buyers cover their own commission, particularly wealthy ones looking to sweeten their offers. In hot markets where they have more leverage, a seller can also push back against a buyer’s request to cover the compensation. The buyer’s agent, desperate to close a sale, may even tear up their original contract and agree to lower their fee.

But rarely does it come to that, agents say. Most sellers just consider their net earnings after commissions and choose an offer from there. Inspections, closing dates or the offer price come up in negotiations more often than commissions.

Ultimately, that’s how Itakura felt — even though he bristled at the 3% fee, he took that offer because the buyer seemed more likely to close.

“We didn’t want to fight for something on principle,” he said. “The bigger picture was getting the condo sold.”

By Shalina Chatlani, Stateline.org

A new Trump administration rule bars immigrants living in the United States under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from buying health insurance from Affordable Care Act marketplaces.

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The change, announced in June, took effect at the beginning of this month. It reverses a policy change enacted by the Biden administration for last November’s annual enrollment period.

DACA, which President Barack Obama established in 2012, applies to certain immigrants who are here illegally but were brought to the U.S. as children. The program was enacted to protect them from deportation and allows them to work for renewable two-year periods. To be eligible, an immigrant must have come to the U.S. at age 15 or younger before June 15, 2007. DACA participants also must be high school graduates, high school students or veterans of the U.S. military.

The oldest are now in their early 40s, some with children of their own.

Even though there are some 525,000 active DACA recipients, only about 10,000 were getting their health insurance from the marketplaces before the policy change, according to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. However, critics of the new Trump administration rule say participation would have grown as more people became aware of their eligibility.

DACA recipients from 19 states were blocked from the marketplaces, though, because of pending litigation. More than 20% of all DACA recipients reside in just two of those states: Texas (17%) and Florida (4%).

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that backs stricter immigration rules, said DACA was an “abuse of executive authority” and should not have entitled some immigrants to benefits. The rule change simply restores the status quo, Vaughan said.

“It was kind of an experiment or an end run around our legal immigration system that was set up by the rules that were set up by Congress to try to offer an amnesty to this particular group,” Vaughan said. “Because it’s not a legal status, these individuals are not, under the law, eligible for certain public benefits, and one of them is subsidized health insurance.”

But critics of the change say it’s cruel to cancel health care coverage for people who were brought to the country as children.

“Health care is a fundamental human right all of us, no matter where we were born, how much money we have, what we look like, what language we speak, we should be able to access quality and affordable care when we need it,” said Isobel Mohyeddin, a policy associate at the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for immigrants.

Mohyeddin and her colleagues surveyed 433 DACA recipients in 2024, before DACA recipients were eligible for the marketplace. Eighty-one percent had health coverage, the vast majority through their employer or a union or professional association. But nearly 20% lacked coverage, more than twice the national uninsured rate of 8%.

Mohyeddin said that many of the DACA recipients without coverage reported skipping recommended medical and dental appointments or declining to fill prescriptions, because they couldn’t afford it or were fearful of being targeted for their status.

“The stripping of eligibility is a devastating step backwards, not only for DACA recipients, but families and immigrant communities in general,” Mohyeddin said.

While DACA recipients were only recently allowed to purchase coverage on the marketplace, it was a huge step toward better health outcomes for them, said Arline Cruz Escobar, director of health programs at Make the Road New York, a group that provides legal and social services to immigrants.

“We see a lot of mixed-status households, and so I think people are just very confused about what this means for them, and what it means for their families,” Cruz Escobar said. “We already know that the immigrant community doesn’t access enough preventive care and screenings and so, I can only imagine that we will see an increase in a lot of chronic conditions, or undiagnosed chronic conditions that could have been prevented.”

The impact of the new Trump administration rule on DACA recipients will vary, as some states offer other health care options to noncitizens.

States are going to have to decide whether they can afford to offer state-subsidized health coverage to DACA recipients and other immigrants who are no longer eligible for federal help, said Jessica Altman, executive director of California’s marketplace exchange, Covered California.

California has the most DACA recipients, at 147,440. Altman said more than 2,300 of them have purchased plans on the California marketplace and will lose their coverage. She said many DACA recipients in the state were not aware of their eligibility, and more would have enrolled if the Trump administration hadn’t made the policy change.

California provides state-funded health coverage to all income-eligible immigrants, regardless of their legal status. But Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in June signed a budget that scales back that coverage because of budgetary issues.

In light of federal changes and financial obligations on states, Altman said, California will have to make the same choices as other states about how or whether to help DACA recipients with their health care.

“The hard part is, to actually make coverage affordable for the populations that we’re talking about, you have to fund financial assistance at least somewhat comparable to what’s available on the federal marketplace,” Altman said. “So the state dollars are really where the rubber meets the road.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.