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Press, Toyota's president said he is putting new auto plants on hold for three years and reshaping the automaker's structure to give more autonomy to regional divisions and foreign executives.
• During his four years at Toyota's helm, Toyoda has learned the hard way the costs of blindly pursuing growth, a strategy inherited from his predecessor that he ruefully acknowledges got him slammed by a cascade of recalls.
• The spectacular recall debacle in the U.S., which began in 2009 and involved millions of vehicles, got him grilled at U.S. Congressional hearings over safety, but also rallied American dealers to his side. Toyoda wept openly during one emotional show of support from Toyota dealers in the U.S. Then in 2011, an earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan wiped out auto suppliers and Toyota's vehicle production plunged. Yet the automaker's comeback has been stunning. It sold a record 9.75 million vehicles last year, regaining the crown of world's No. 1 automaker from General Motors Co.
• Despite the turnaround, caution lingers.
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Today in History
The Associated Press
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• Today is Thursday, March 7, the 66th day of 2013. There are 299 days left in the year.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff's posse in what came to be known as "Bloody Sunday."
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• On this date:
• In 1793, during the French Revolutionary Wars, France declared war on Spain.
• In 1850, in a three-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.
• In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his telephone.
• In 1912, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen arrived in Hobart, Australia, where he dispatched telegrams announcing his success in leading the first expedition to the South Pole the previous December.
• In 1926, the first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversations took (Continued on page 32)
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