By DAVID CRARY

NEW YORK (AP) — The lawyers’ ads on the internet aggressively seeking clients to file sexual abuse lawsuits give a taste of what lies ahead this year for the Boy Scouts of America: potentially the most fateful chapter in its 109-year history.

Sexual abuse settlements have already strained the Boy Scouts’ finances to the point where the organization is exploring “all available options,” including Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But now the financial threats have intensified.

The reason: States have been moving in recent months to adjust their statute-of-limitations laws so that victims of long-ago sexual abuse can sue for damages. New York state has passed a law that will allow such lawsuits starting in August. A similar bill in New Jersey has reached the governor’s desk. Bills also are pending in Pennsylvania and California.

In New York and elsewhere, lawyers are hard at work recruiting clients to sue the Boy Scouts, alleging they were molested as youths by scoutmasters or other volunteers.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers “recognize that this is a very unique and lucrative opportunity,” said attorney Karen Bitar, who formerly handled sex-crime cases as a prosecutor in Brooklyn before going into private practice.

Attorney Tim Kosnoff, a veteran of major sexual abuse lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Church, said Tuesday that he and his team have signed up 186 clients from dozens of states in just the past few weeks who want to be part of litigation against the Boy Scouts. Kosnoff said 166 of them identified alleged abusers who have not been named in any of the Boy Scout files made public in past years.

Boy Scouts spokeswoman Effie Delimarkos said the organization continues to evaluate its financial situation, and she defended its current abuse-prevention policies. The organization serves more than 2.2 million youths.

A bankruptcy by the Boy Scouts could be unprecedented in its complexity, potentially involving plaintiffs in virtually every state, according to several lawyers. It would be national in scope, unlike the various Catholic Church bankruptcy cases in the U.S., which have unfolded diocese by diocese.

“A Boy Scout bankruptcy would be bigger in scale than any other sex abuse bankruptcy,” said Seattle-based attorney Mike Pfau, whose firm is representing more than 300 victims in New York state.

Jeffrey Schwartz, a New York-based bankruptcy expert with the firm McKool Smith, said the Boy Scouts don’t have a particularly large flow of cash and might be forced to sell off property in bankruptcy. The Boy Scouts have extensive land holdings, including camping and hiking terrain.

“They’ll play for time,” Schwartz said. “If their defense costs and settlement costs are greater than their membership fees, it could be a death spiral.”

However, Dallas-based trial attorney Michelle Simpson Tuegel, part of a team representing numerous sex abuse survivors, said bankruptcy might benefit the Boy Scouts and reduce any payouts to plaintiffs.

“It can be a tool that these institutions use to shield assets and avoid having to reveal some information,” she said. “In many ways, it’s a disservice to victims.”

Illustrating the depth of its problems, the Boy Scouts filed lawsuits last year against six of its own insurers, saying they have improperly refused to cover some of the sex abuse liabilities incurred by the organization. The insurers say the coverage obligation is voided because the Boy Scouts failed to take effective preventive measures such as warning parents that scouts might be abused. The suits are still pending.

The intensifying pressures on the Boy Scouts coincide with the mounting threats to the U.S. Catholic Church in regard to its own long-running sex abuse scandal. Catholic bishops will be meeting in Baltimore in June to discuss the next steps.

Both the church and the Boy Scouts are iconic, historically well-respected institutions now known as having been magnets for pedophiles trying to exploit the trust of boys and their parents.

“When you cloak people in badges of respect, you create the perfect opportunity for bad people to get access to children,” said Chris Hurley, whose Chicago law firm is representing 11 former scouts in sex abuse trials scheduled on a monthly basis this year.

Another common denominator for the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts: Both kept voluminous secret files with names of suspected abusers, yet balked at sharing the information with the public.

Since the 1920s, the Boy Scouts have been compiling “ineligible files,” which list adult volunteers considered to pose a risk of child molestation. About 5,000 of these files have been made public as a result of court action; others remain confidential.

Delimarkos said when any BSA volunteer is added to the database for suspected abuse, “they are reported to law enforcement, removed entirely from any Scouting program and prohibited from re-joining anywhere.”

Minnesota-based attorney Jeff Anderson, who had led many lawsuits against the Catholic Church, released a court deposition in New York on Tuesday in which an expert hired by the Boy Scouts said she tallied 7,819 individuals in the “ineligible files” as of January, as well as 12,254 victims.

Anderson expressed hope that litigation triggered by New York’s new Child Victims Act would increase pressure on the Boy Scouts to make public more of the still-confidential files.

Some of the files were ordered released after a 2010 sexual abuse case in Portland, Oregon, that led to a nearly $20 million judgment against the Boy Scouts on behalf of a man molested by a Scout leader in the 1980s.

Paul Mones, the plaintiff’s lawyer in that case, said there are no overall figures on Boy Scout abuse settlements because the details are kept confidential.

Both the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church say they now have policies in place to sharply curtail abuse that abounded in past decades. In the Boy Scouts ′ case, the steps included requiring criminal background checks for all staff and volunteers, and requiring two or more adult leaders be present with youth at all times during scouting activities.

___

This story has been corrected to show that Effie Delimarkos is a spokeswoman, not a spokesman.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE and TOM KRISHER

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to start converting the company’s electric cars into fully self-driving vehicles next year as part of an audacious plan to create a network of robotic taxis to compete against Uber and other ride-hailing services.

The vision sketched out Monday during an event at Tesla’s Silicon Valley headquarters requires several leaps of faith — something that the zealous investors and consumers who view Musk as a technological genius often are willing to take.

But self-driving car experts fear Musk is shirking public safety in an effort to boost Tesla’s stock and sell more of the company’s electric cars. This amid lingering questions about whether the 15-year-old automaker can consistently make money.

“It sounds like a pipe dream that he’s selling people,” said Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “I think it’s basically overpromising, which is typical of Elon Musk.”

To prove his skeptics wrong, Musk will have to persuade regulators that Tesla’s technology for transforming potentially hundreds of thousands of electric cars into self-driving vehicles will produce robots that are safer and more reliable than humans.

And to do that, Musk will have to be correct in his bet that Tesla has come up with a better way to produce self-driving cars than virtually every other of the more than 60 companies in the U.S. working toward the same goal.

Some of those companies are aiming to have their fully autonomous cars begin carrying passengers in small geographic areas as early as this year, but many experts don’t believe they’ll be in widespread use for a decade or more.

Unlike most of those other companies, Tesla’s cars won’t come with the light beam sensors called Lidar that many industry experts consider to be essential equipment for robotic vehicles to navigate the road.

Musk trashed Lidar as a “fool’s errand” and “frigging stupid” in a putdown of companies such as Google spin-off Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise Automation that are including the light beam sensors in their systems.

“They are going to dump Lidar,” Musk assured investors and analysts gathered at Tesla’s Palo Alto, California, office for the 2 ½ hour presentation.

Musk, widely known for his swagger as much as his smarts, spent much of the time trying to persuade both the investors and consumers that he had figured out a better way to teach robots how to drive.

“It is fundamentally insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,” Musk said at one point, arguing that purchasing a vehicle from any other automaker would be like getting a horse.

Musk’s quasi-sales pitch came two days before Tesla is expected to report a disappointing performance for the first three months of the year. Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $305.5 million first quarter net loss based on disappointing car sales, a setback after Musk pledged heading into the second half of last year that Tesla would be profitable from that point onward.

Tesla’s stock sank by nearly 4 percent to close Monday at $262.75.

From Musk’s vantage point, Tesla has a huge advantage over autonomous vehicle competitors because it gathers a massive amount of data in the real world. This quarter, he said Tesla will have 500,000 vehicles on the road, each equipped with eight cameras, ultrasonic sensors and radar gathering data to help build the company’s neural network, which will serve as the digital equivalent of the self-driving cars’ consciousness.

The network allows vehicles to recognize images, determine what objects are and figure out how to deal with them. To become fully self-driving, the cars also need a special computer that fits behind the glove box and is powered by a special chip Musk boasted is better than any other processor in the world “by a huge margin.”

Currently the self-driving computer costs $5,000, but the price rises to $7,000 if it’s installed after delivery.

Finally, Tesla will deliver software updates to those computers to make it possible for its electric cars to be driven by a robot, without a human in position to take over in case something goes awry. There will be a slight chance of some “fender benders,” Musk acknowledged Monday, and indicated Tesla will be liable for accident caused by a vehicle under the control of its robot.

“People will die,” Rajkumar predicted. “I can tell you that right now. Because in the real world, crazy things happen.”

Musk predicted that the technology for fully self-driving Tesla will roll out at some point from April to June next year. Then, Tesla will need to get regulatory approval for the fully autonomous cars to drive on roads, something Musk predicted would happen in a few states by the end of next year. He didn’t specific where Tesla will try to gain approval first.

California, Tesla’s biggest U.S. market, requires proof that fully autonomous cars can drive safely on public roads, but most other states aren’t as stringent. And experts say there’s no federal law requiring preapproval for fully autonomous driving, as long as a vehicle meets federal safety standards, which Teslas already do.

Within three years, Tesla will be manufacturing self-driving cars that don’t even have steering wheels or brake pedals in them, Musk said.

If they’re allowed on the roads, fully driverless cars would allow Musk to carry out his plan to expand into the ride-hailing market with a fleet of sleek Teslas. Owners of Teslas with the company’s self-driving computer could plug into an app-based network to pick up fare-paying passengers when they didn’t need to use their vehicle.

Musk theorizes that a ride-hailing service similar to Uber and Lyft will boost Tesla’s revenue and make it easier for the company to sell its cars to consumers who could effectively lower the cost of ownership by making money on the side. Tesla would get 20{99cd714f394079a7f0ed2eb1518dd31342ff3ceb5b6c267c3ad8acd5b5a7d66b} to 25{99cd714f394079a7f0ed2eb1518dd31342ff3ceb5b6c267c3ad8acd5b5a7d66b} of each fare in the network.

Tesla also intends to convert all the electric cars under leasing contracts to be turned into robotaxis upon their return.

Uber and Lyft also consider driverless cars to be one of the keys to making money from their still unprofitable services, but haven’t set a specific timetable for achieving that breakthrough while they continue to work on their own autonomous technology.

Waymo rolled out a ride-hailing service using self-driving vehicles late last year in the Phoenix area, but it only available to a small pool of passengers who were previously enrolled in a test program. And all the cars in Waymo’s ride-hailing service still have a human behind the steering wheel ready to take control.

The Waymo cars also have Lidar, something experts remain convinced must be part of any fully self-driving car, despite Musk’s colorful contentions otherwise.

“Vehicles that don’t have Lidar, that don’t have advanced radar, that haven’t captured a 3-D map are not self-driving vehicles,” Ken Washington, Ford’s chief technical officer, said during a recent interview with Recode. “They are great consumer vehicles with really good driver-assist technology.”

___

Krisher reported from Detroit.

By MARCIA DUNN

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX has suffered a serious setback in its effort to launch NASA astronauts into orbit this year.

Over the weekend, the Dragon crew capsule that flew to the International Space Station last month was engulfed in smoke and flames on an engine test stand. SpaceX says it was testing the Dragon’s abort thrusters at Cape Canaveral, Florida, when Saturday’s accident occurred. The company says the test area was clear and no one was injured.

This Dragon was supposed to be used in a launch abort test in June, with another capsule making the first flight with a crew as early as July.

NASA said Monday it’s too early to revise the target launch dates.

Earlier this month, NASA announced major delays for test flights of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule.