Latest news with #Cummings
RTÉ News
2 days ago
- Health
- RTÉ News
Starving Gaza children say they wish to die, charity says
Children in Gaza have told the charity 'Save the Children' that they wish to die because they cannot access food and clean water, according to the charity's humanitarian director Rachel Cummings. Speaking on RTÉ's News At One, Ms Cummings said the war in Gaza has inflicted an enormous toll on the mental health of Palestinian children. "We have children in our child friendly spaces, where we provide psychological support, sharing with us that they now wish to die because there is food and water in heaven. "And their family members, their mothers and fathers, are there and they wish to be with them," she said. "It is absolutely catastrophic the impact that this is having immediately on children, but this medium and longer-term impact on children is really, really concerning," she added. The charity has also observed many children and pregnant and breast-feeding women showing signs of malnutrition. Ms Cummings said no food has been available to purchase in the market in Deir al-Balah over the last five days, which is typical of the wider situation in Gaza. She added her team working in the territory also cannot find or buy food. "The situation gets worse and worse every day, which is impossible and incredible to think about. "This is symptomatic of the wider picture being that people don't have enough food to eat. "They're rationing food for their children and this is the situation in the whole of Gaza." People are 'hungry, exhausted and terrified' Ms Cummings said that everyone in Gaza is hungry, exhausted and terrified and have to make very difficult choices when it comes to food. "They're bulking out whatever food they have with water they know to be dirty, that they know may cause their children to be sick." Save the Children in Gaza is loated around 3km away from the area which Israel has demanded people evacuate from as it continues its air and ground attacks. Ms Cummings said they can hear "active" and "heavy" gunfire and bombardments. "There is nowhere safe in Gaza and people being displaced further south into al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, along the beach. "It's very, very congested already, overcrowded, and we know that people have nowhere to go. They have no means to move and people making the impossible decision to stay," she added.
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Business Standard
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Business Standard
Tesla spars in court over autopilot alert 2 seconds before 2019 crash
Tesla is seeking to show a jury that the company's technology performed as it should and that the driver is fully to blame for running through a stop sign at a T intersection Bloomberg The final two seconds before a Tesla Model S crashed into a parked SUV took center stage Thursday in a court showdown over who's responsible for the 2019 collision — the distracted driver or his car's Autopilot system. Tesla is seeking to show a jury that the company's technology performed as it should and that the driver is fully to blame for running through a stop sign at a T intersection in the Florida Keys and ramming into a Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a woman who stood next to the SUV and seriously injuring her boyfriend. A three-week trial in Miami federal court over a suit filed by the woman's family and the boyfriend is putting close scrutiny on a decade-long experiment with semi-autonomous driving at Elon Musk's electric vehicle maker. A verdict against Tesla would be a blow at a time when the company is staking its future on self-driving and pushing to launch a long-promised robotaxi business. The first few days of the trial have taken jurors deep into how the technology works and what its limitations are. The company's lawyer, Joel Smith, pressed a key witness for the plaintiffs to agree that an audible alert 1.65 seconds before impact — when the car's automated steering function aborted — would have been enough time for the driver to avoid or at least mitigate the accident. Smith demonstrated what the alarm sounds like for jurors to hear. Data recovered from the car's computer shows that driver George McGee was pressing the accelerator to 17 miles (27.4 kilometers) per hour over the posted speed limit, leading him to override the vehicle's adaptive cruise control before he went off the road. He hit the brakes just .55 seconds before impact, but it remains in dispute whether he saw or heard warnings from the Model S while he was reaching to the floorboard for his dropped cell phone. Safety expert Mary 'Missy' Cummings, an engineering professor at George Mason University, acknowledged in her second day on the witness stand that McGee may have braked in response to the alert, but she suggested his reaction time was too slow to know for sure. Cummings, who has criticized Tesla's technology in the past and previously served as an adviser to the National Highway Safety Administration, didn't yield much to Smith's questioning. At one point the lawyer highlighted past comments by Musk, in which the Tesla chief executive officer said the use of 'beta' to describe the Autopilot system is meant to convey that the software is not a final product and to discourage drivers from 'complacency' and taking their hands off the steering wheel. 'I do not have any evidence in front of me that the word 'beta' is trying to communicate anything to drivers,' Cummings said. 'What it is trying to do, in my professional opinion, is avoid legal liability.' The jury also heard Thursday from an accident reconstruction specialist, Alan Moore, who argued that if Tesla had programmed its software not to operate on roadways it wasn't designed for — like the one on Key Largo — 'this crash would not have happened.' But he also testified that McGee had a history of disregarding alerts. Moore explained to jurors that Autopilot automatically disengages if a driver fails to put hands on the wheel after receiving three audible warnings. 'Almost every time he commuted from his office to his condo, he would get a strikeout,' Moore said. When that happened, McGee would pull over, put the car in park, shift it back into drive and turn Autopilot back on, the witness said. In his opening argument, Smith had said the data history for McGee showed that he'd safely traveled through the intersection where the crash happened almost 50 times in the same Model S. 'The only thing that changed was his driver behavior,' Smith told the jury. 'He dropped something and was trying to pick it up.'
Mint
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Mint
Tesla Spars in Court Over Autopilot Alert 2 Seconds Before Crash
(Bloomberg) -- The final two seconds before a Tesla Model S crashed into a parked SUV took center stage Thursday in a court showdown over who's responsible for the 2019 collision — the distracted driver or his car's Autopilot system. Tesla is seeking to show a jury that the company's technology performed as it should and that the driver is fully to blame for running through a stop sign at a T intersection in the Florida Keys and ramming into a Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a woman who stood next to the SUV and seriously injuring her boyfriend. A three-week trial in Miami federal court over a suit filed by the woman's family and the boyfriend is putting close scrutiny on a decade-long experiment with semi-autonomous driving at Elon Musk's electric vehicle maker. A verdict against Tesla would be a blow at a time when the company is staking its future on self-driving and pushing to launch a long-promised robotaxi business. The first few days of the trial have taken jurors deep into how the technology works and what its limitations are. The company's lawyer, Joel Smith, pressed a key witness for the plaintiffs to agree that an audible alert 1.65 seconds before impact — when the car's automated steering function aborted — would have been enough time for the driver to avoid or at least mitigate the accident. Smith demonstrated what the alarm sounds like for jurors to hear. Data recovered from the car's computer shows that driver George McGee was pressing the accelerator to 17 miles (27.4 kilometers) per hour over the posted speed limit, leading him to override the vehicle's adaptive cruise control before he went off the road. He hit the brakes just .55 seconds before impact, but it remains in dispute whether he saw or heard warnings from the Model S while he was reaching to the floorboard for his dropped cell phone. Safety expert Mary 'Missy' Cummings, an engineering professor at George Mason University, acknowledged in her second day on the witness stand that McGee may have braked in response to the alert, but she suggested his reaction time was too slow to know for sure. Cummings, who has criticized Tesla's technology in the past and previously served as an adviser to the National Highway Safety Administration, didn't yield much to Smith's questioning. At one point the lawyer highlighted past comments by Musk, in which the Tesla chief executive officer said the use of 'beta' to describe the Autopilot system is meant to convey that the software is not a final product and to discourage drivers from 'complacency' and taking their hands off the steering wheel. 'I do not have any evidence in front of me that the word 'beta' is trying to communicate anything to drivers,' Cummings said. 'What it is trying to do, in my professional opinion, is avoid legal liability.' The jury also heard Thursday from an accident reconstruction specialist, Alan Moore, who argued that if Tesla had programmed its software not to operate on roadways it wasn't designed for — like the one on Key Largo — 'this crash would not have happened.' But he also testified that McGee had a history of disregarding alerts. Moore explained to jurors that Autopilot automatically disengages if a driver fails to put hands on the wheel after receiving three audible warnings. 'Almost every time he commuted from his office to his condo, he would get a strikeout,' Moore said. When that happened, McGee would pull over, put the car in park, shift it back into drive and turn Autopilot back on, the witness said. In his opening argument, Smith had said the data history for McGee showed that he'd safely traveled through the intersection where the crash happened almost 50 times in the same Model S. 'The only thing that changed was his driver behavior,' Smith told the jury. 'He dropped something and was trying to pick it up.' More stories like this are available on
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Business Standard
7 days ago
- Automotive
- Business Standard
Tesla failed to prevent misuse of autopilot system, safety expert testifies
Tesla Inc. hasn't done enough to protect against drivers misusing its Autopilot system, a safety expert testified at a trial over a 2019 fatal collision. Mary 'Missy' Cummings, an engineering professor at George Mason University, told jurors in Miami federal court that the Tesla owner's manual, which contains critical warnings about how the system works, is difficult for drivers to access. 'Do you have any opinion as to why Tesla chose not to geofence its tech in 2019 and create a safe operational domain when other manufacturers were?' Cummings was asked by a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Brett Schreiber. 'I believe they were using that as a way to sell more cars,' said Cummings, who previously served as a senior adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A Tesla representative declined to comment on Cummings' testimony. She is expected to return to the witness stand Thursday when lawyers for Tesla will have a chance to question her. The trial, which began Monday and is expected to take three weeks, is among the first to test Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk's claims that his cars are the safest ever made. It comes at a critical juncture for Tesla, which is making a big push to roll out a robotaxi business as the company stakes its future in part on autonomous driving. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Naibel Benavides Leon, who was killed, and Dillon Angulo, who was seriously injured when a Tesla Model S went through a T-intersection in Key Largo and off the pavement, striking their parked Chevrolet Tahoe as they were standing next to it. The plaintiffs' lawyers allege that Tesla's driver-assistance system was defective and that the company failed to warn users about its limitations. Tesla maintains that the crash was caused by driver error, a defense the company has successfully used to win two previous California trials when Autopilot was blamed for accidents. George McGee, the driver of the Model S, had engaged the driver-assistance system, but had dropped his mobile phone and wasn't watching the road while reaching for the device on the floorboard. Lawyers for Angulo and the estate of Benavides Leon told the jury that the collision was a 'preventable tragedy' and that the automated system built into the car failed to respond when it detected the end of the roadway, regardless of how McGee was driving. They have repeatedly shown jurors augmented video clips captured by cameras on the car that show the system identifying the edge of the road, paint on the roadway indicating a stop sign, the Tahoe parked off road and a pedestrian standing nearby. But Tesla argues that no technology that was on the market in 2019 would have been able to prevent the crash, and that McGee was fully at fault because he was pressing the accelerator and overriding the vehicle's adaptive cruise control before he went off the road. Cummings was asked by Schreiber about a letter to NHTSA in which Tesla asserted that 'Autopilot has the most robust set of warnings against driver misuses and abuse of any feature ever deployed in the automotive industry.' She told the jury, 'I saw no evidence that would back up this claim that they have the most robust set of warnings.' When Cummings was appointed as a safety adviser for NHTSA in 2021, Musk called her 'extremely biased against Tesla' and Tesla fans signed a petition against her. Cummings has served as an expert witness in at least two other lawsuits against Tesla related to the Autopilot system, according to court filings. The professor said McGee was very clear speaking after the accident that he thought this car was his copilot and that it would stop for obstacles in the road. Like many Tesla drivers, she said, McGee felt he could rely on Autopilot to navigate when he dropped his phone. 'The car is doing a good job of driving so I'm going to reach down and pick it up because my copilot is driving,' she said. The case is Benavides v. Tesla, 1:21-cv-21940, US District Court, Southern District of Florida (Miami).
Spectator
16-07-2025
- Business
- Spectator
Broke Britain: how the Bank of England wrecked the economy
In February 2020, a few weeks before Britain was thrown into lockdown, Sajid Javid resigned as chancellor of the exchequer over a bust-up with the prime minister's chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. The fight was thought to be over Cummings's attempts to dictate who could and could not work in No. 11. In fact, it was just one skirmish in a long-running and bitter power struggle between the two men. Two months before his resignation, Javid had claimed victory in a different battle against Cummings – one over who would occupy the governor's office at the Bank of England. Cummings wanted Andy Haldane, then the Bank's chief economist, who he believed was intellectually curious, allergic to groupthink and might give the Bank the shake-up it needed. Javid put his foot down: it had to be Andrew Bailey, then chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority. Five years on, the British economy is teetering on the brink. Beneath it lies a deep fiscal hole, created by billions of pounds of unfunded spending – never-ending health promises, a spiralling welfare bill and a triple lock on the state pension which will cost three times as much as originally estimated. Then there is the crushing burden of debt interest, which costs twice the defence budget, pulling the nation closer to financial collapse. The Bank and its Governor have one job that matters above all: keeping inflation under control. Bailey and the other eight members of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) are legally required to keep inflation at 2 per cent. For 46 of the 64 months that Bailey has been Governor, inflation has been above that target. At worst, it was in double digits. Politicians deserve much of the blame for the country's economic state. But behind four prime ministers over the past five years has been Bailey – the banker who has enabled their recklessness and whose decisions will determine the extent to which we can recover. Britain is addicted to cheap money and Bailey has been happy to deal it out. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, central banks across the world slashed interest rates and flooded markets with cash. Bailey was chief cashier of the Bank during this period. His signature appeared on the notes being printed. He was a symbol of this new age of cheap money, as well as an architect. Later, to finance pandemic spending during the Covid lockdowns, including the £70 billion furlough scheme, he let the money printers go into overdrive. Initially, the Bank created £200 billion. This was followed by another £100 billion and then a further £150 billion, just in time for Christmas. At the peak of his quantitative easing (QE) programme, nearly half a trillion pounds of new money had been pumped into the economy – suspiciously close to the amount the government ended up borrowing. During the 2008 crash, QE at least stayed largely confined within the banking system. In the Covid era, with the government's furlough scheme as the conduit, billions of pounds entered households and businesses directly. Inflation shot up. 'It's QE that's really put us up the shitter,' says one bank staffer. Every developed country printed money during the pandemic. But as prices started rising, Bailey appeared unconcerned. Even as inflation was reaching double the Bank's 2 per cent limit, he kept describing it as 'transitory'. Haldane, by comparison, spent the summer of 2021 warning that an inflation spiral was coming and the only way to counter it was to raise interest rates urgently. Bailey shrugged off the suggestion. 'Raising interest rates won't produce more gas,' he said in the autumn of that year. 'It won't produce more semiconductor chips.' Bailey's allies also treated warnings of a lasting inflationary risk with derision. One close confidant was seen rolling their eyes during a lecture on Friedrich Hayek – the free-market economist who warned that once inflation starts to spiral, it's nearly impossible to stop it. Now, after runaway inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, the Bank is desperately trying to play catch-up through quantitative tightening (QT) – essentially shredding the money it printed. But the cost of its mistakes is evident. According to the Financial Times, the process of buying and selling gilts to fund money-printing has led to a spectacular loss: four times what the US Federal Reserve lost. There is perhaps no one angrier at Bailey than Liz Truss. The former prime minister and her allies believe the Bank destroyed her premiership – and there are those in the world of finance who agree. 'Bailey is an absolute weapon and completely out of his depth,' says one investment banker. 'He's largely responsible for the fall of Truss.' Truss's defenders argue that the pension crisis, which came about in the days after her September 2022 mini-Budget and threatened to crash the entire bond market, is evidence of the Bank's fatal complacency, rather than her recklessness. Liability Driven Investments (LDIs), used by pension funds, were far more vulnerable to changes in interest rates then the Bank ever predicted. And it was Bailey's interest rate policy – ultra-low borrowing costs followed by sharp hikes – that made the system so volatile. The Bank announced gilt-selling just days before the mini-Budget, further pushing yields up. When the sell-off began, Bailey intervened – but gave pension funds only three days to 'get this done', which insiders say worsened the panic. The Bank later admitted the system was unstable before Truss's Budget. Regulators – overseen by Bailey – overlooked the risks. The Bank's own figures suggest nearly two-thirds of the spike in yields was not because of the mini-Budget but the LDI sell-off. The bomb had been armed long before 2022; Truss just happened to strike the match. One of the Bank's big problems is its failure to produce accurate forecasting. A review led by Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, found that its forecasting process was riddled with outdated models – its main one, 'Compass', was deemed unfit for purpose. Bernanke concluded that the Bank's performance was merely 'middle of the pack' – a blow to the credibility of the world's sixth-largest economy. In November 2021, after more than £500 billion was printed in just under two years, the Bank forecast inflation would peak at 4.8 per cent. In fact, it hit 11 per cent. During the pandemic, Threadneedle Street's GDP projections were the worst among major central banks. Britain was flying blind, refusing to acknowledge the disastrous state it was in. The result of all this, according to one former City chief executive, has been a generational delusion. 'If you think you can borrow close to zero, you are out of your mind,' he says. 'A large part of the population [suffered] when cheap debt suddenly became expensive debt. Bailey was asleep at the wheel.' The willingness of Bailey and his MPC to indulge the fantasy of 'free money' has had consequences beyond persistent inflation. It has created a drag on growth which is likely to continue for years. It has distorted the mortgage market even further, as a third of mortgage-holders still haven't had to grapple with refinancing since interest rates spiked. Perhaps most importantly, it has rewired how a generation of politicians and the public think about government spending and emergency support. Even as inflation rises again – the current rate is 3.6 per cent, almost double the Bank's supposed limit – Bailey talks about the prospect of interest rate cuts. Experts can't believe what they're hearing: the job of driving down inflation is not yet done, and yet the MPC has become, in the words of one former member, 'gung-ho'. Bailey's term as Governor isn't over until 2028. The only way governors leave office is by resigning or by going personally bankrupt. Mostly, it's a job you keep as long as you want it. But some in the City say it shouldn't be. 'If you were out by five times in normal businesses, you'd be sacked,' one former CEO tells me, referring to the Bank's missed inflation target. Still, Bailey has his defenders. They shift the blame for the concept of 'free money' on his predecessor Mark Carney, who normalised money printing after the financial crash. Others point out that Bailey is just one vote of nine on the MPC. The Governor can have great influence on the direction of monetary policy, but he is not an all-ruling king. Where Bailey's critics and friends agree is that he's 'steady and dull'. Perhaps, though, these times demand someone braver. One of Bailey's greatest sins has been to let groupthink take over the Bank. 'We need an operator, not a technocrat,' one senior industry figure says. Mervyn King, the former governor, has privately questioned Bailey's management and communication ability. Reform UK, who are at around 30 per cent in the polls, want to overhaul the Bank's independence and take particular issue with the interest paid on printed money given to banks and the losses experienced under QT. But one senior trader warns that any change to Bank independence risks a 'Reform premium' of two to four points on the cost of borrowing – tens of billions of pounds. Either way, many economists believe we're hurtling towards a crisis. Last year Britain's fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), warned debt could pass 600 per cent of GDP in 50 years. Yet it's hard to get a definitive idea from anyone of what that future crisis looks like. That's because it may not take the form of a sudden collapse, but more a constant state of anxiety. It's why the Treasury now operates like a liquidity manager, with departments scrambling just to keep up with inflation. It's why the government lives in fear of how the bond market will react to its announcements. It's why Peter Mandelson spent the run-up to last year's general election warning Keir Starmer that he could not afford to govern like a new Tony Blair. It's why one MP recently asked why 'just a few billion' from the government's welfare U-turn requires tax rises. It's why, as the OBR puts it, public expectations of the state 'seem to be rising' and yet many voters seem to believe that their expectations can be met without higher taxes. They can't be. But this is what monetary complacency looks like. This is what Bailey has enabled. Perhaps no one can say what a crisis will look like because we're not hurtling towards one – we're already living through it.
