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• Tesla staged a video showing its self-driving capability, according to a company engineer’s testimony.
• Tesla’s director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy, revealed the information in a deposition in July 2022.
• Tesla has come under increasing scrutiny recently for its self-driving technology.

In October 2016, Tesla posted a video on its site titled “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas.”

Hit play, and chyrons flash against a black screen reading: The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.

As “Paint It, Black” by the Rolling Stones plays in the background, the car maneuvers through city roads, highways, and parking lots. Here and there, a man’s hands appear, gently cupping the bottom of the steering wheel. 

But that video was partially staged, according to a new report from Reuters. Moments where the car stops at a red light and accelerates at a green light reflect capabilities the vehicle didn’t have.

Reuters’ report is based on a transcript from Ashok Elluswamy, the director of Autopilot software at Tesla, who was questioned in a deposition in July 2022 that’s being used as evidence in a lawsuit against Tesla for a lethal car crash involving a former Apple engineer in 2018, according to Reuters.  

While Tesla’s technology can help with things like braking, steering, and lane changes, according to the company’s website, “the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous.” 

Musk, however, posted that video on Twitter in 2016 as evidence that Tesla could drive itself. 

The video used “3D mapping”— a way of creating three dimensional views of objects— on a predetermined route from a house in Menlo Park, California, to the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Reuters reported citing Elluswamy’s comments. 

“The intent of the video was not to accurately portray what was available for customers in 2016. It was to portray what was possible to build into the system,” Elluswamy said in a transcript that was seen by Reuters.

In footage that didn’t make it into the final video, according to TechCrunch, the test car crashed into a fence in Tesla’s parking lot, Elluswamy said in his deposition, according to Reuters.  

Tesla has come under increasing criticism and regulatory scrutiny for its autopilot systems recently. In 2021, the US Department of Justice began looking into Tesla’s claims about Autopilot.

Tesla did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for a comment. 

Andrew Kelly/Reuters / Zheng Huansong/Xinhua via Getty Images

• Organizers of the World Economic Forum in Davos are pushing back on Elon Musk’s claim that he declined an invitation because it’s “boring af.”
• A WEF spokesperson told the AP that Musk was last invited in 2015 to the yearly gathering of business execs and world leaders.
• Musk has repeatedly bashed the WEF, even tweeting today, “How is WEF/Davos even a thing?”

Elon Musk and the World Economic Forum are at odds over the reason for his absence from the global conference.

The World Economic Forum takes place every year in Davos, Switzerland, where billionaire CEOs, world leaders, and other influential figures gather to discuss a range of global issues, from climate change to the cost-of-living crisis.

Musk, a vocal critic of the conference who was the world’s richest person until December, recently said he was invited to the conference but chose to skip it. The organizers of the WEF, however, beg to differ: They say the Twitter CEO hasn’t been invited in nearly a decade.

WEF spokesperson Yann Zopf told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the last time Musk was invited was “not this year and not recently — last time in 2015.” Musk never registered or attended on the handful of occasions he was invited to the conference in the 2010s, Zopf told the AP.

Meanwhile, Musk wrote in a tweet last month, “I was invited to WEF, but declined.”

In another tweet a week later, Musk added, “My reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring af lol.”

Musk didn’t specify in the tweets if he was referring to the 2023 conference, but the timing of those tweets a month before this year’s convention suggests as much.

The Tesla CEO has also criticized the WEF more recently. In response to a video of the conference’s opening speech on Monday, Musk tweeted, “How is WEF/Davos even a thing?”

Say what you like about Donald Trump, (go on, say what you like), but among his many, er, attributes, is a complete lack of a sense of humor. I am not being partisan when I say this, but I cannot recall a single witty remark, amusing saying or joke that Trump has ever uttered or written. Trump has never come up with a quotable quote, either. To be sure, Donald Trump has made utterances worthy of mockery, but nothing anyone would ever recruit with which to make a point, win an argument or construct a meme.

It is a curious feature of the average MAGA fascist and could in fact point to an intrinsic difference between “them and us.” If you think about it, the same dreary legacy of unquotable utterances applies to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the late Rush Limbaugh, despite vast chronicles of speeches and writings available to us today. They left nothing of value behind, only hate. Meanwhile, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Jon Stewart, to name three members of the good guys, are veritable cornucopias of quotable wit.

The answer could lie in how we are wired, and may go a long way in accounting for why today’s conservatives are unreachable by the most formidable arguments. To quote Scientific American, “The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives.”

In other words, conservatives tend to be more resistant to self-correcting behaviours and are more emotional and defensive. Brevity isn’t the only thing that’s the soul of wit. So is the ability to see the comic in us all, something that requires a healthy amount of the kind of introspection that leads to self-correcting behaviour. That could explain why liberal comedians vastly outnumber conservative comedians, and they are also much funnier. They are, simply put, better equipped for the job than their conservative counterparts.

Before someone in the comment field points it out, I will point it out for them. In my example above I use Winston Churchill as an example for the liberal camp, who ended the larger part of his career famously as a member of Britain’s Conservative Party. But Churchill was an atypical example of a Conservative, and demonstrates that the difference between the groups is statistical, not individual. Besides, Churchill was a member of the Liberal Party for some twenty years.

Conservatives’ brains are wired such that they are also more prone to seek out and worship heroes. They like rule-based systems where strong men are in charge and answers are simple, rules are many and punishments severe. So it’s little wonder that American evangelicals readily embraced Trump, despite the clear and obvious fact that Trump is most emphatically not one of them. Evangelicals are all-too willing to ignore Trump’s serial infidelities, blasphemous language and multiple marriages — as long as he upholds and supports their draconian anti-choice and bigoted biases.

Evangelicals sometimes justify their tolerance for a man like Trump by pointing out that, even though David pursued Bathsheba with notoriously underhanded methods, God was able to use him anyway. It’s an infuriating escape clause that wouldn’t work so easily on people whose brains weren’t, tragically, wired accordingly.

So if you’ve ever wondered why conservatives are so stupid, now you know why. A peek under the hood will show you that their engines aren’t just different, they’re inferior, and have, on average, less horsepower. Sadly, it means that many of them are unreachable with even the most penetrating and irrefutable logic.

But the good news is that we outnumber them and, for the time being anyway, the good guys live in democracies. So we can always vote them out. Which is another reason why MAGA Republicans want to do away with voting. Remember, it only took a third of Germany and some incredibly bad luck to put Hitler in charge. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

The post Another difference between them and us appeared first on Palmer Report.

A failed Republican candidate in New Mexico was charged on Tuesday with contracting four gunmen to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials after he visited them to dispute his 2022 election defeat.

Solomon Pena, who lost a November state House of Representatives race, faces at least a dozen charges for masterminding Albuquerque drive-by shootings on residences of two county commissioners and two state legislators since Dec.4, according to the county prosecutor’s office.

Pena, described as a “radical right election denier” by Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, was arrested on Monday.

No one was hurt in the shootings, which followed sometimes heated arguments as Pena visited the homes of three county commissioners and state Senator Linda Lopez to allege fraud in a House race he lost by 47 percentage points, police said.

In the final attack on the home of Lopez on Jan. 3, the legislator’s 10-year-old daughter was awoken and felt dust fall on her face as bullets hit her bedroom ceiling, a criminal complaint said.

Pena was annoyed no one was hit in previous attacks and told gunmen to carry out the shooting, which he took part in, earlier in the evening, according to the filing.

“Solomon wanted them to aim lower and shoot around 8 pm because occupants would more likely not be laying down,” the complaint said, citing an unnamed source.

Police said a person involved in the conspiracy is cooperating with investigators. At least two gunmen are in custody. Pena, who has previously been convicted of felonies such as burglary, faces a 1 p.m. pre-trial detention hearing on Wednesday.

It was not immediately possible to identify lawyers representing suspects in the case.

Pena on Nov. 15 tweeted a photo of himself wearing a “Make America Great Again” sweatshirt and a message saying “researching my options” as he was not conceding his election.

Pena is a supporter of false theories spread by prominent New Mexico-based election denier David Clements, according to Pena’s website and messages in a Telegram group run by Clements’ wife.

“Hang them until dead!” Pena wrote in July in the New Mexico Audit Force Telegram group in response to a claim of fraud in Nevada. “They helped overthrow Donald J. Trump.”

Clements, an evangelist for myths about rigged voting machines, did not immediately respond to a request for information about his links to Pena.

Australia confirmed on Wednesday it would buy 40 Black Hawk military helicopters from the United States for an estimated A$2.8 billion ($1.96 billion), finalising a sale signed off by the U.S. State Department last August.

The Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) UH-60M Black Hawks will replace the Army’s fleet of MRH-90 Taipan choppers, which have been plagued for years by maintenance issues. Delivery of the new helicopters will begin this year.

“We’ve just not got the flying hours out of the Taipan that we would need,” Defence Minister Richard Marles told ABC news on Wednesday. “We’re confident that we can get that from the Black Hawks. It’s a platform we’re familiar with.”

Australia has been boosting its defense spending over the past few years as China looks to step up its presence in the Indo-Pacific region.

A 2021 decision to ditch French-made submarines for nuclear submarines to be built by the United States and Britain sparked a bitter diplomatic dispute with France.

Marles said he had spoken with his French counterpart several times and was confident the U.S. helicopter deal “won’t interrupt” the renewed relationship with France. The Taipans are made by Airbus (AIR.PA), partly owned by France.

Australian industry will be involved in logistics, warehousing, engineering as well as the helicopter’s global supply chain, said the Defence Department in a statement.

($1 = 1.4316 Australian dollars)

Federal prosecutors will not seek the death penalty for the man accused of killing 23 people and injuring dozens more in a hate crime targeting people of Mexican descent at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, a court document filed on Tuesday showed.

Prosecutors say Patrick Wood Crusius drove 11 hours to El Paso, which sits on the U.S. border with Mexico, from his hometown of Allen, near Dallas, on Aug. 3, 2019, and then fired at shoppers with an AK-47 rifle inside the Walmart store. He surrendered to officers who confronted him outside.

Crusius, who also faces state charges in Texas, is set to stand trial in 2024 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, facing 23 counts of committing a hate crime resulting in death, and 23 counts of using a firearm to commit murder, among other charges.

Crusius pleaded not guilty in 2020 to 90 federal hate crime charges in the case. Proceedings were delayed while prosecutors decided whether to pursue the death penalty against him. In 2020, his lawyers argued that Crusius, then 21, had been diagnosed with severe, lifelong neurological and mental disabilities and should not face execution if convicted.

Last year, a Texas judge put off a state trial in the case as federal prosecutors determined whether they would seek capital punishment.

In a notification to the court and to the defendant filed Tuesday, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Margaret Leachman said the government would not seek death in the case.

When he was taken into police custody minutes after the shooting, Crusius was in a psychotic state and treated with anti-psychotic medication, according to mental health professionals employed by the jail, a court filing said.

A manifesto that prosecutors say was posted online by Crusius on 8chan, a now-defunct message board often used by extremists, said the Walmart attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Denial is never a fun place to be. For Donald Trump, it’s especially toxic. For years now, Trump has been in full-on denial. He has tried unsuccessfully to blame others for his own malfeasance.

He has ranted and raved. He has screamed. He has, over and over again, shown his guilt because we all know innocent individuals do not act like this. But Trump’s denial reached new heights this week. Now he is resorting to what appears to be, from my viewpoint, full-on threats.

On Monday, early in the morning, Trump again took to truth social. Truth social has become Donald Trump’s confidante and best friend. It has become his ONLY friend. It is his only light in darkness. Truth social doesn’t judge him. On the contrary, it listens patiently and sympathetically to all his bizarre tantrums. It is always there for him, plugged in and ready to hear his latest lunatic rant.

It is the bedrock of Trump’s life, the only thing preventing him from perhaps speaking to walls. So yes, on Monday morning, his good buddy Truth Social was waiting for him. And Trump once again began ranting about how HIS case was false and that he did nothing wrong. But then Trump did something new. He began to threaten.

It was five words. Five little words that Trump evidently thought could save him and alter his demise. “I have INFO on everyone!” Well, now! There are fighting words, Mr. Trump. Of course, Twitter and the rest of the world want answers. To whom was Mr. Trump referring? Whom does he have “info” on? Is he making threats? Is this a little blackmail attempt? Hmm.

It is quite sad that Trump also chose to do this on Martin Luther King Jr. day. But do it he did, and once again, he has made a complete fool of himself. The fact is his situation isn’t going to change. Nobody is dropping investigations into him. He can make all the empty threats in the world, but that will not alter his situation.

Because he has threatened, cajoled, and harassed in the past, Trump obviously thinks he can keep on doing it. All his life, the man has gotten away with things. Only he’s not going to get away with anything now. Posting this only shows what an embittered loser he is and how utterly desperate he is becoming.

The post Donald Trump is drowning in denial appeared first on Palmer Report.

(NewsNation) — Jaw-dropping surveillance video out of Beech Grove, Indiana, shows a toddler wielding a loaded gun. The child’s father has been arrested for felony child neglect.

The video first aired live on the show “On Patrol: Live” hosted by Dan Abrams on Friday and Saturday nights on the Reelz network.

“On Patrol: Live” cameras followed Beech Grove police to an apartment complex Friday night. Neighbors reported a diaper-clad toddler pointing a handgun at them.

“My son opened the door and the little boy upstairs was standing there with a firearm. I was like, ‘Shut the door, he’s got a gun,’” one woman said.

Police went to a second-floor apartment and encountered the child’s father, Shane Osborne, who says he did not know anything about his son playing with a gun and claimed he does not even own a gun himself.

Officers urged Osborne, 45, to watch over his son and started to file out of the complex. That’s when another neighbor approached police and gave them surveillance footage from a prior incident: The same little boy playing with a Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter handgun in a hallway near a stairwell of the apartment building.

“The neighbors, of course, were right. All of us on the ‘On Patrol: Live’ desk were just stunned watching that video as it came in,” Abrams said.

Having just watched the video, officers re-entered the apartment to start looking for the gun. Following a brief search, the toddler appeared to lead the officers to a roll top desk. Once the desk was opened, officers reported finding a handgun with 15 rounds in the magazine and no rounds chambered. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Officers arrested the father for felony child neglect. The little boy was taken to his mother’s home.

So, what’s next in the case?

Aaron Freeman, former deputy prosecutor in Marion County, Indiana, told NewsNation’s “Rush Hour” that neglect of a dependent is a level six felony. That gives a sentence range of anywhere between six months and two and a half years if the father is found guilty.

“Thank God this little boy is OK, first and foremost. Dad’s got some real criminal liability here,” Freeman said.

He added: “It could’ve been worse. God forbid this toddler was injured or worse. Obviously then the crime gets worse, the punishment gets worse.”

According to Freeman, prosecutors will have to show that the father had some custodial reason or legal obligation to be watching the child and then that the child accessed a gun.

“In Indiana, neglect of a dependent is a situation that endangers the life and health and safety of a child. Clearly you have that here. Again, thank God that it didn’t get worse,” Freeman said.

He said the state will have to prove that the child’s parent knowingly or intentionally endangered the child’s life.

Osborne insisted the gun wasn’t his and told police it belonged to a cousin who sometime left the gun there. He says he was not certain if the gun was there at the time or that his son knew of the weapon.

“Whether he owned a gun, didn’t own a gun, it was his, it wasn’t his, in any measure, this young toddler has no business having access to a gun. That’s on dad. If dad has a defense, he’s going to need a good lawyer to prove it,” Freeman said.

“No child should be put in this situation,” he added.

Freeman said more information about the case is expected to come out at Osborne’s initial hearing on Thursday. He assumes Osborne will also face a Child In Need of Services (CHINS) proceeding. He’s almost certain the state’s child services department will become involved in the case if they are not already.