Chinese FM talks with U.S. secretary of state over Afghanistan
Wang said that China stands ready to communicate with the United States to push for a soft landing of the Afghan issue, so that a new civil war or humanitarian disaster will be prevented in Afghanistan and the country will not relapse into a hotbed and shelter for terrorism.
Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday exchanged views with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over phone on the situation in Afghanistan.
ADVERTISEMENTx
During the phone talk, Blinken expressed appreciation for China’s participation in the Doha meeting on the Afghan issue, noting that the current situation in Afghanistan is entering a crucial stage.
The Taliban should announce a clean break with extremism, opt for an orderly transfer of power and establish an inclusive government, the top U.S. diplomat said, expressing hope that China will also play an important role to this end.
The United States recognizes that the future of Afghanistan should be decided by the Afghan people, Blinken said, calling on the Taliban to ensure the safety of all those who wish to leave the country.
Wang said that China stands ready to communicate with the United States to push for a soft landing of the Afghan issue, so that a new civil war or humanitarian disaster will be prevented in Afghanistan and the country will not relapse into a hotbed and shelter for terrorism.
China encourages Afghanistan to establish an open and inclusive political framework in accordance with its own national situations, Wang added.
Chinese FM talks with U.S. secretary of state over bilateral ties
In the face of various global challenges and urgent regional hotspot issues, the two countries should carry out coordination and cooperation, which is what the international community is looking forward to, Wang added.
Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday exchanged views with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken over phone on bilateral ties.
Wang said that both China and the United States are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and important participants in the contemporary international system.
ADVERTISEMENTx
In the face of various global challenges and urgent regional hotspot issues, the two countries should carry out coordination and cooperation, which is what the international community is looking forward to, Wang added.
For his part, Blinken said that it is very important for the United States and China to maintain communication on major international and regional issues.
Blinken said he agrees that it is a common goal for the United States and China to realize peaceful coexistence, voicing hope that both sides will seek and carry out cooperation.
Of course there are also obvious differences between the two sides, Blinken said, adding that those can be gradually resolved in a constructive way in the days to come.
One “peaceful” day in Kabul, residents seeking hope amid frustration
“I am not sure about my future and the future of my children. No one knows what would happen one hour later, or my children can go to school tomorrow,” said a Kabul resident.
The Afghan capital has experienced a relatively peaceful day after the Taliban captured the city, as locals eagerly hoped for lasting peace amid the immense uncertainty.
Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital city with a population of some 6 million people, has experienced a relatively peaceful day on Monday compared with the past months as no bomb blasts or gunshots have been reported.
ADVERTISEMENTx
Taliban fighters captured the city on Sunday, ending the war in the violence-battered country as no conflict has been reported over the past 24 hours.
The militant group has warned to deal with iron hand if anyone commits crime including theft or robbery.
Although there is no head of state or government in Afghanistan since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the Taliban released a short statement on local media asking residents, including government employees, to go to their offices and continue normal work.
However, like many shops and supermarkets in Kabul, many government department offices, banks and schools remained closed on Monday as the Taliban members are patrolling the city streets either on military vehicles or on foot.
Fearing the eruption of fighting, many people have been scrambling to leave the country and the road leading to the Kabul international airport is full of Afghans including men, women and children attempting to take refuge in other countries.
Meanwhile, Western countries have been evacuating their diplomats from Kabul.
Afghan Taliban fighters stand on a military vehicle in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021.
To check mass migration, the civil aviation authority on Monday cancelled all flights, calling on passengers not to come to the Kabul airport until further notice.
Women are rarely seen on Kabul street. If anyone comes out she wears a hijab that covers her face.
“I am not sure about my future and the future of my children. No one knows what would happen one hour later, or my children can go to school tomorrow,” whispered Mohammad Aref on Monday.
Afghan Taliban fighters stand on a military vehicle in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021.
A Kabul resident who is in his 50s, Aref muttered with sorrow that his daughter is a student of Law Faculty at a private university but she did not attend her class on Monday fearing the new rulers’ retribution.
Another man Hamayon told Xinhua about his plan of fleeing the country as the outlook seems bleak for Afghanistan and for himself.
“I try to leave the country maybe today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow or anytime the fortune sides me,” he said.
The 31-year-old man, who served in the national army for nine years, expressed sorrow that he worked for years in the army but the outcome is zero.
“Afghanistan with international support has built 350,000-strong Defense and Security forces but all have been dismantled within days,” he said.
“Having security alone is not enough,” said another Kabul resident Sufi Mohammad. “In addition to ensuring security, the establishment has to provide job opportunity, respect human rights and dignity for the citizens in society,” he said.
Taliban fighters stand beside the belongings of Afghan security soldiers in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021.
Asean reports fewer new Covid-19 cases and related deaths
Southeast Asia saw a fall in new Covid-19 cases and related deaths on Monday, collated data from Asean countries showed.
Countries in the region reported 85,308 new cases on Monday, lower than Sunday’s 91,166, and 2,298 deaths, down from the previous day’s 2,522.
The number of Covid-19 cases crossed 8.78 million and deaths rose to 191,063.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo vowed on Monday during the annual state of the nation speech to parliament to keep working to reform the nation, even as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to batter Indonesia’s economy.
He said while gross domestic product grew 7 per cent in the second quarter, tighter social restrictions in place since early July to curb the spread of the delta variant were set to weigh heavily on the economy this quarter.
The president also promised to ease travel restrictions on Java island from Monday and on the four major islands on August 23.
Meanwhile a Singaporean undergraduate, who was studying acting in Britain, was convicted on Monday of exposing others to the risk of Covid-19 infection after returning to Singapore. Esther Tan Ling Ying, 24, had some Covid-19 symptoms before she flew back from London via Doha. But in breach of her stay-home notice, she had eaten at a foodcourt at the airport on March 23 last year. District Judge convicted Tan on Monday, and adjourned mitigation and sentencing to August 30. For exposing others to the risk of infection of Covid-19, Tan can be jailed for up to six months and fined up to $10,000.
Last images from the Afghan war capture a 20-year failure to acknowledge how badly the conflict was going
WASHINGTON – Two indelible, humiliating images are certain to endure from the final days of the Afghan war.
The first came in the White House on July 8 when President Joe Biden was asked if the U.S. departure from Afghanistan carried echoes of Vietnam. “None whatsoever. Zero,” he replied, testily. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy.”
The other is an image just as searing as those from the fall of Saigon: Desperate Afghans clinging to the wheel wells of a C-17 U.S. Air Force cargo jet as it taxis for takeoff at Kabul’s international airport.
Together, the two moments embody a malady that has infected the war from its earliest days and helps to explain the catastrophic collapse of the Afghan government and its military. Senior U.S. officials in Washington and Kabul have continually failed to appreciate how difficult the mission would be, how badly it was going and how little they had achieved.
“It’s not a good image . . . that we were burning documents because our embassy was going to be overrun. It is not a good image to take down the flag,” said Sue Gordon, who served 25 years in the CIA before resigning two years ago as deputy director. “These images suggest that we did not understand the situation.”
The failure to grasp the depth of the dysfunction in Afghanistan dates back to November 2001 when President George W. Bush ordered the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq. Suddenly, many of the most critical intelligence assets and the most potent ground combat forces were shifted to a focus on Baghdad. Afghanistan in the words of one Bush-era White House official became a “distraction and a sideshow.”
And it carried through until this July when Biden described the Afghan military as a force of 300,000 troops – “as well equipped as any army in the world.”
In fact, former defense and White House officials said that Biden’s figures were a fantasy and that by late 2020 as many as half of the Afghan army forces had stopped showing up for duty. “The desertion numbers were very high,” said a former senior defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. “We were told that 100,000 of their soldiers had put down their guns and that in all likelihood the numbers were much worse.”
A senior White House official said the Biden administration was prepared for the chaos in Afghanistan and had pre-staged thousands of U.S. troops in case the Taliban forces made rapid gains. “This is not the worst case scenario,” the official said. “No Americans are under fire. What we’re seeing is not Taliban attacking [the embassy]. It is desperate Afghans trying to get out.”
It’s a defense that carried little weight with even the president’s staunchest allies in Congress. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the images from Kabul’s airport and its capital “devastating.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Warner vowed to work with others in Congress to determine “why we weren’t better prepared for a worst-case scenario involving such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces.”
An entire generation of U.S. military officers came of age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War with a guiding mission to make sure the country never had to endure the sorts of humiliating images from Saigon that were repeated this week in Kabul.
“The disgraceful performance of Biden and what passes for military leadership today in managing this debacle borders on criminal,” said retired Col. Gary Anderson, who joined the Marines in the final years of that losing Vietnam effort.
In 2012, Anderson served in Bala Murghab, a remote district near Afghanistan’s border with Turkmenistan. Within a week of U.S. troops leaving the area in 2012, Anderson said, the local army commander and police chief “had cut deals with the Taliban, just as happened throughout the country this last week.”
Former senior U.S. officials said those in charge of the war effort over several administrations often seemed unwilling to accept – or unable to grasp – clear signs of failure or futility in Afghanistan.
ADVERTISEMENT
Pentagon officials were almost constantly at odds with CIA experts over “district assessments” that cast doubt on how much territory the American-backed Afghan government controlled across the country.
In 2019, U.S. spy agencies delivered a sweeping assessment known as a National Intelligence Estimate of the conflict that warned many of America’s often-stated objectives were in jeopardy even with a continued U.S. military presence, and without direct American backing all but destined to collapse.
“We would run into really serious battles with the Pentagon, which would say, ‘We’ve got boots on the ground, we know the truth,’ ” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.
The diverging views on the war were a reflection of the institutional predispositions of military planners groomed to accept even the most daunting missions and find ways to deliver results.
In Afghanistan, “you had good people who tried mightily believing they could do it,” the former intelligence official said. “And in the end are forced to face the reality that they couldn’t.”
On Monday, many of those senior military officials were operating on only a few hours sleep after staying up much of the night fielding calls from former Afghan colleagues who were stranded in the country or at the airport and were terrified that they would soon be killed. Some couldn’t understand why the White House and the Pentagon had decided to abandon Bagram air base to looters a month ago, long before Afghans who had worked for the United States and were in danger could be evacuated.
Unlike Kabul’s airport, which is located in the middle of the city, Bagram would have been far easier to secure.
“Any military official who said it is OK to leave all the airfields before we have everyone out should be fired tomorrow,” said one retired Army general who served multiple tours in Afghanistan. He asked for anonymity because he is still working with the Biden White House to get some of his former Afghan colleagues out of the country.
The only thing left of the U.S. mission is to “get out the people who sacrificed and suffered for us,” said Carter Malkasian, a longtime adviser to the U.S. military and author of the recently released history “The American War in Afghanistan.”
Malkasian defended the attempts of the military and the Biden administration to end the war in an orderly fashion. The failures spoke to the difficulty of predicting any short-term outcomes in Afghanistan and “human nature,” he said.
Biden didn’t ignore the signs of potential collapse, Malkasian said. Rather, he made a “hard choice” to end the losing war despite the “costs and consequences” that the United States and its Afghan partners would endure. Biden echoed this sentiment on Monday, saying that he was “deeply saddened” by the chaos, but that he could not allow U.S. troops to pursue a mission that was “not in our national security interests [and] not what the American people want.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., a Marine veteran, described the scene at Kabul airport as “a moral and operational failure.”
The video and pictures also spurred him to reflect on his own war.
“To your Afghanistan veterans and their families,” he said in a statement. “I am too honest to stand here today and try to convince you that your sacrifice was worth it.”
Published : August 17, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Greg Jaffe, Greg Miller
Hong Kong hikes travel curbs for 16 nations on delta threat
Hong Kong tightened its travel curbs for residents returning from 16 countries — including the U.S., France and Spain — less than two months after it started easing some of the worlds strictest quarantine measures.
The abrupt reversal reflects a fear of reopening as the delta variant drives resurgences across the world. Fifteen countries were moved up to the “high-risk” category, which means that vaccinated Hong Kong residents returning home must spend 21 days in hotel quarantine upon arrival, triple the previous length of stay. Tourists and unvaccinated residents from those places are no longer allowed entry.
The new restrictions take effect starting Aug. 20, according to a government statement Monday. Residents and tourists with antibody test results proving they had been vaccinated previously had to spend a week in hotel quarantine.
The flip flopping creates additional uncertainty and risks further diluting Hong Kong’s attractiveness as a business destination. The city implemented new rules to allow visitors from all but ten places to enter on Aug. 9.
ADVERTISEMENTx
Hong Kong is caught between its desire to reopen and its zero tolerance for any cases of covid-19. Meanwhile, it’s rival financial hub in Singapore has announced plans to ease covid restrictions on daily life and begin slightly loosening border controls, citing vaccination rates that rank among the best in the world.
Hong Kong’s success with covid-19 has come through its strict mitigation measures, including lengthy hotel quarantines for those newly arriving. Just 39% of its population is fully vaccinated, less than many other developed economies. Mainland China, which is also following a Covid-zero strategy, has committed to tightly sealed borders to stamp out the virus, risking leaving it isolated for years.
“This is a devastating announcement in terms of the inability for businesses to plan,” said Tara Joseph, president of the American Chamber of Commerce Hong Kong, in a WhatsApp message. “We respect the worries over the need to keep infections down, but business and people need to connect overseas and plan for the future.”
The about-turn comes after a resident returning from the U.S. tested positive for the virus several days after completing a seven-day quarantine, sparking fears that the eased travel rules would allow the delta variant to slip into the Asian financial hub. Hong Kong has enjoyed a streak of over two months with nearly no local virus cases, even as neighbors like Singapore and mainland China struggled to contain the mutation.
“The global covid-19 epidemic situation is under serious threat from the delta variant, with acute surges in the number of confirmed cases within a short period of time in many countries,” the government statement said. The measures are meant to “uphold the local barrier against the importation of covid-19,” it said.
Hong Kong is once again seeing its border rules tighten as the delta variant spreads in neighboring areas. It also reinstated quarantine rules for its residents returning from Macao and mainland China, except Guangdong province.
The business community has struggled for the past 18 months with an economy that’s been starved of big-spending tourists and business travelers. Hong Kong had about 99.9% fewer visitor arrivals in the first half this year than in the same period in 2019.
Hong Kong’s economy has faced an uneven recovery from two years of contraction. Retailers and tourism-related businesses, which are some of the biggest employers of Hong Kong’s working class, were particularly hard hit as borders remained closed and travel was curtailed. Financial services and the property market are booming, though, exposing a deepening wealth imbalance.
Published : August 17, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Jinshan Hong, Bruce Einhorn
Spain soared to record high of 117 degrees Saturday amid historic heat wave
Amid a prolonged, unforgiving heat wave in southern Europe and northern Africa, the temperature in the city of Montoro, Spain, soared to 117.3 degrees Saturday, setting a record high for Spain. This topped the previous record of 117.1 degrees in July 2017.
Montoro is a city of about 9,500 people in southern Spain, about 100 miles east of Seville. The record was confirmed by AEMet, Spain’s meteorological agency.
The record was one of scores set in the broader region since the middle of last week. In addition to Spain, punishing heat scorched portions of Portugal, Italy, Morocco and Algeria. Notably, the temperature in Syracuse, Sicily, skyrocketed to 120 degrees Wednesday, potentially setting a new all-time heat record for all of Europe.
ADVERTISEMENTx
Other notable records in the region set in recent days include:
_ Agadir Airport in southwest Morocco soared to 120.4 degrees Monday, the country’s highest temperature on record during August, according to Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and expert on world weather records.
_ Madrid tied its all-time high (for any month) on Saturday, soaring to 105.3 degrees, while establishing a new August record, according to Etienne Kapikian, a meteorologist with MeteoFrance, France’s meteorological agency.
_ Cordoba, Spain, tied its all-time high (for any month) Saturday, soaring to 116.4 degrees, while establishing a new August record, according to Kapikian.
The excessive heat is linked to an intense zone of high pressure or heat dome sprawled over the region for the past 5 to 6 days. Parked over the Mediterranean initially, it has drifted southwest and is now centered just west of Morocco. The heat dome reached historically intense levels Friday into the weekend.
At the height of the heat wave on Saturday, 16 cities in Italy and 14 districts in Portugal were put under a red alert due to the dangerously high temperatures, according to the Associated Press.
The extreme heat increased the wildfire risk over the region and may have intensified ongoing blazes in Italy, Turkey, Greece and Algeria, the AP reported.
The record-setting temperatures hit the same week that the Intergovernmental on Climate Change released its landmark report warning that these extreme events are expected to become more frequent and intense as global temperature rise due to the burning of fossil fuels.
“A warmer planet makes it easier to break extreme heat thresholds,” tweeted Scott Duncan, a meteorologist based in London. “This is what we are seeing continually all over the globe.”
The heat dome responsible for the blistering temperatures is forecast to drift further offshore Africa in the coming days allowing temperatures to moderate closer to seasonal norms by the middle of the week.
Aid workers scramble to save Haiti earthquake victims as storm approaches
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Rescue workers and doctors with little equipment worked feverishly Monday to save victims of the massive earthquake in southwestern Haiti as a powerful storm threatened to unleash flooding and further snarl aid efforts.
Heavy rains started dousing the country on Monday afternoon, creating yet another crisis for exhausted, newly homeless people who needed shelter. Officials estimated that Tropical Depression Grace would dump 5 to 10 inches of rain on the region by Tuesday. The U.S. National Hurricane Center warned that Grace, while downgraded from a tropical storm, could still cause flash flooding and mudslides in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
“We’re pleading for help,” Marie-Helene L’Esperance, mayor of the harbor town of Pestel, told Haiti’s Pacific Radio. “Every house was destroyed, there’s nowhere to live, we need shelters, medical help and especially water. We’ve had nothing for three days and injured victims are starting to die.”
She said the prospect of heavy rain had “spread fear through residents who had nothing left but to pray.”
ADVERTISEMENTx
The 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck Saturday morning has killed at least 1,419 people, according to the country’s civil protection office, but that figure was expected to climb. Schools, medical centers, churches, bridges and more than 84,000 homes collapsed or were damaged in the temblor, which struck a region already battered by Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
The tragedy was the latest for the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation – coming on top of a coronavirus outbreak, rising gang violence, an economic crisis and acute political instability after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last month. Haiti was devastated 11 years ago by an earthquake that reduced the capital to ruins.
On Monday, aid began to trickle in to some of the worst-hit areas. A 65-member search-and-rescue team from Fairfax County, Va., dispatched by USAID, arrived in Haiti and headed for Les Cayes, a city of about 100,000 people on the country’s southwest peninsula. UNICEF said it had sent medical kits for 30,000 people to the city, roughly 90 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the capital. The U.S. Coast Guard was ferrying injured victims to the capital.
Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Chile and other countries also sent assistance. Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry pledged to speed up the relief effort. “From this Monday, we will move faster. Aid provision is going to be accelerated,” he wrote on Twitter.
Elizabeth Riley, executive director of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, said the Haitian government was prioritizing cash donations, because supplies could be purchased in the capital and other areas not pummeled by the quake.
ADVERTISEMENT
But aid workers expressed concern about violent gangs that have largely cut off the main road from the capital to the southwest in recent months. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said local authorities were negotiating with the armed groups to gain access, and a six-vehicle U.N. aid convoy had traveled the route without incident on Sunday.
“We do hope that roads will be increasingly be accessible and non-risky,” Muhamed Bizimana, the assistant country director for CARE, said in a phone interview from Port-au-Prince. He said the aid group’s prepositioned supplies were running low in some areas.
Violent gangs weren’t the only problem. Jerry Chandler, head of Haiti’s civil protection agency, said Colombian search-and-rescue teams that planned to travel from Port-au-Prince to the northern part of the affected area – including the port town of Jeremie – were unable to get through on Monday. “The difficulty is that the bridge over the Glace River collapsed,” blocking travel over National Route 7, a crucial artery, he said. The bridge was later repaired, but debris continued to block smaller roads.
In Beaumont, normally a two-hour drive south from Jeremie, residents were still waiting Monday afternoon for any signs of help, according to former mayor Alexi Faveur, a member of the community development association. He said the 31,850 residents were on their own as the rains approached.
“Eighty percent of all homes have been destroyed, and any passable road has been blocked by mudslides,” he said in a telephone interview. Outlying communities were accessible only by foot, he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Martinor Gerardin, mayor of L’Asile, a town of 52,000 northeast of Les Cayes, said most homes there, too, were destroyed or severely damaged. He estimated that 50 residents had been killed and 500 injured. Scores of cows and goats in the rural community had been buried under rubble, he said, threatening the inhabitants’ livelihoods. No aid from the government or nonprofit groups had arrived by Monday, he said. “We needs tents and water urgently,” he said.
David Geleste, a physician in the seaside city of Baradères, called the situation there “catastrophic.”
“Medical help is urgently needed,” he told Radio Caribe. “It’s critical in the first two to four days. We have many injured with fractured limbs and need to mobilize basic materials like painkillers, bandages, braces. We have to perform urgent operations but don’t have the equipment.”
Hospitals in heavily damaged towns were overwhelmed, with patients lying on cots or mattresses outside because of a lack of space, according to photos. Lucette Gedeon, a pediatrician volunteering in the neonatal unit at the main hospital in Les Cayes, told Reuters that the facility had exhausted its supply of antibiotics and anesthesia.
“There have been babies that came in needing limbs amputated after they were trapped under the rubble,” Gedeon said.
Haiti’s health system was already fragile. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Until last month – when the U.S. government donated 500,000 shots of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine through the Covax aid initiative – Haiti was the only country in the Americas that hadn’t received a single vaccine dose.
Among those who died in Saturday’s quake was Ousmane Touré, en epidemiologist from Guinea “who helped beat Ebola in West Africa & Congo & was deployed to Haiti for the #COVID19 response,” tweeted Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization. He said he was “devastated” by the loss.
The earthquake pushed Haiti’s stressed hospitals to the brink of collapse.
“Basically all the health facilities are overwhelmed, all the referral hospitals are full,” said CARE’s Bizimana. “And there are still people coming in.”
Published : August 17, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Ingrid Arnesen, Mary Beth Sheridan, Widlore Merancourt
Tesla Autopilot faces U.S. safety regulators scrutiny after crashes with emergency vehicles
The nations top auto safety watchdog has launched a formal investigation of Teslas driver-assistance system after nearly a dozen crashes involving parked emergency vehicles occurred while Autopilot was engaged.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration inquiry, which was opened Friday and detailed in a document made public Monday, covers 765,000 Teslas – models Y, X, S and 3 – produced from 2014 to 2021. In 11 crashes recorded since 2018, one person was killed and 17 people injured.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based automaker, which has disbanded its public relations department, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
The investigation comes as the auto industry races toward a driverless future. Tesla’s driver-assistance suite – starting with Autopilot and then its “Full Self-Driving” package – is among the most ambitious in its efforts to complete many driving tasks automatically. Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, is also working on a self-driving car, along with an array of competitors sporting names such as Aurora, Cruise and Zoox.
Although regulators and industry experts caution that driver-assistance features do not make a vehicle autonomous, Tesla has sought to capitalize on the perception that such technology will one day enable their vehicles to drive themselves.
ADVERTISEMENTx
The investigation creates a potential wrinkle in those plans. Tesla has put “Full Self-Driving” in hundreds of vehicles with the caveat that drivers still must be alert while their cars are in motion. Regulators, so far, have taken a relatively hands-off approach; experts say they are wary of any perception they might be stifling innovation.
The inquiry may also signal a new regulatory environment. In June, authorities started requiring manufacturers, including Tesla, to report crashes involving such technology within a day of learning of the incident. On Monday, an NHTSA spokeswoman told The Post that the preliminary investigation will focus on Tesla’s autopilot system and “technologies and methods used to monitor, assist, and enforce the driver’s engagement with driving while Autopilot is in use.”
Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Edward Markey, D-Mass., who serve on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said NHTSA is “rightly investigating” Tesla’s autopilot after a series of crashes.
“This probe must be swift, thorough, and transparent to ensure driver and public safety,” they said in a joint statement. “It should inform the agency’s recommendations on fixes the company must implement to improve the safety of its automated driving and driver assistance technology and prevent future crashes.”
Tesla shares tumbled following word of the federal probe, falling 4.3% to close Monday at $686.17.
ADVERTISEMENT
The agency is examining two systems: Tesla Autopilot and the Traffic Aware Cruise Control. Both are “partial” self-driving car systems designed to recognize and avoid oncoming traffic while a human driver retains control of the vehicle. Neither qualifies as fully autonomous, and drivers are expected to be at the ready even when the systems are turned on.
The investigation carries several touchpoints that suggest a more sophisticated, focused approach to ensuring self-driving and semiautonomous cars are safe. The difference, experts say, is that authorities now appear to be taking a hard look at how human drivers interact with these new automated systems.
According to the announcement, investigators will look into the so-called “operational design domain,” a term which refers to the range of places and situations in which the autopilot can be turned on. Under current Tesla design, the driver can turn on autopilot essentially anywhere. Investigators will also look into aspects of the vehicle’s “operational event detection and response” technology, which refers to how the vehicle understands its surroundings.
Probing both concepts will bring NHTSA ― a relatively obscure unit of the Department of Transportation whose work typically involves more mundane matters like parts recalls ― into deeply technical debates about how drivers interact with automated technology.
The crashes that are the basis for the federal investigation bear some common threads, even beyond the presence of first-responder vehicles. Most, for example, occurred late at night.
ADVERTISEMENT
In one incident from late February, a Tesla rear-ended a police cruiser that was conducting a traffic stop after 1 a.m., according to the local ABC affiliate. Local news reports describe a dramatic chain reaction crash that totaled two police cars; five officers and a police dog sustained minor injuries. One officer who had been underneath the vehicle at the time of the collision grabbed onto the car and was pulled along. A person who had been standing on the shoulder of the road when the crash happened was taken to the hospital in critical condition, ABC reported at the time.
The earliest crash cited by NHTSA occurred in January 2018 in Culver City, Calif. Robin Geoola, a carwash owner, had been driving his Tesla Model S to work with the autopilot on when it slammed into a firetruck.
“All I remember seeing is just my car stopped and my windshield was shattered, and I didn’t know what happened,” Geoola recalled in a recent interview. “After I became a little bit more aware, I opened the door. I came out I saw my car was under a firetruck.”
Authorities concluded that both driver and vehicle were at fault. The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the crash and concluded that Geoola’s “inattention and overreliance” on autopilot, as well as Tesla’s design of the system, caused the crash. Geoola said he wasn’t ticketed, saying “I didn’t break any law.”
Geoola had to replace his vehicle after the crash and chose another Tesla, crediting his Model S with saving his life.
“Same color, same year,” he said. But there was one key difference: The new one wasn’t capable of using Autopilot.
In a May 2018 crash in Laguna Beach, Calif., David Scott Key recalled in a recent interview that he was driving through an area where he likes to go mountain biking and was looking out at the trails. His 2015 Tesla Model S was on autopilot.
“All of a sudden I slammed into a police car,” Key said.
The Laguna Beach Police Department concluded that Key caused the crash by driving too quickly, according to the report of its investigation, but a department spokesman said he wasn’t issued a ticket.
Key, an engineer, said he remains confident in the vehicle’s autopilot system despite the crash.
“It’s much, much safer to be on autopilot than it is to be a human driving, however that does not mean there won’t be accidents,” he said.
Ed Niedermeyer, communications director for the nonprofit Partners for Automated Vehicle Education, said it’s critical for drivers to understand that these systems cannot drive on their own.
He said his organization “welcomes regulators’ engagement with these serious issues and affirms the importance of clear communication about the human role in any driving automation system.”
Published : August 17, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Aaron Gregg, Ian Duncan, Faiz Siddiqui
Jeff Bezos Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract
Jeff Bezos Blue Origin space company on Monday pressed its campaign to win a slice of NASAs lucrative lunar lander contract, filing a suit in federal court in an attempt to force NASA to fund a second spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.
The suit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims, comes about two weeks after the Government Accountability Office rebuffed Blue Origin’s protest of the NASA decision to award the $2.9 billion contract to develop the so-called Human Landing System solely to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The suit filed Monday was under seal. But in a statement, Blue Origin said it was “an attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA’s Human Landing System. We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.”
The contract is one of the most significant NASA programs in some time and has been a target for Blue Origin for years. In 2017, before there was even a formal request for proposals, the company pitched NASA on a lunar lander for cargo. At the time, Bezos told The Post that he would invest a significant amount of his personal fortune to fund the spacecraft.
ADVERTISEMENTx
Blue Origin subsequently teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, bulwarks of the American defense system, to bid for the program. And last year NASA awarded the Blue Origin-led team the biggest award in the initial phase of contracts. Blue Origin won $579 million, Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor, was awarded $253 million and SpaceX received $135 million.
But in April, NASA selected a single winner, SpaceX, to develop the spacecraft for what would be the first human landing on the moon since the last Apollo mission, in 1972. Given the funding for the initial round, the award was considered a major upset.
It was also a surprise, since NASA had said it wanted to fund two companies’ spacecraft. But it said it did not have enough money to pay for two lunar lander programs, and GAO ruled it was justified in offering the single contract. NASA has maintained that it would open competition for future moon landings.
SpaceX has proved itself to be one of NASA’s most trusted partners, flying three crews of astronauts to the International Space Station, for example, when the other participant in that program, Boeing, has stumbled badly. And its bid for the lunar landing contract was half Blue Origin’s $6 billion offering.
Since then, Blue Origin has tried every lever at its disposal – lobbying Congress, filing the suits and waging a public relations war – to overturn the SpaceX award. Blue Origin has claimed that SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft that would become the lunar lander is an “immensely complex and high risk” path for NASA to take since it would involve as many as 16 flights to fully fuel the spacecraft for a lunar landing.
ADVERTISEMENT
Many in the space community have bristled at that bare-knuckles approach, especially since it was aimed at SpaceX, which has won legions of fans for its success in creating a reliable transportation network to space. For years SpaceX has ferried cargo and supplies to the space station, and more recently astronauts. It has moved quickly on Starship’s development, even landing the vehicle on a recent test flight that went some six miles high.
Blue Origin, by contrast, has never flown to orbit, and the engines it is developing for that rocket, known as New Glenn, are behind schedule.
Musk has pushed back against Blue Origin’s claims about Starship’s complexity, writing on Twitter that “16 flights is extremely unlikely.” The maximum he said would be eight flights – and it could be as few as four – to fill the 1,200-ton tanks of the Starship version designed for the moon.
“However, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem,” he wrote. “SpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & and has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our won ship) over 20 times.”
He also tweeted an unflattering photo of a mock-up of Blue Origin’s lander being set up at a conference, writing, “Somehow, this wasn’t convincing.”
ADVERTISEMENT
There is already some concern among members of Congress that NASA is funding companies run by billionaires, and Bezos’ attempt to force more funding for his company is not a good look, said Lori Garver, who served as deputy NASA administrator during the Obama administration.
“In the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,” she said. “It causes a negative backlash that we need to move beyond.”
Earlier this year, Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state, where Blue Origin is headquartered, introduced legislation that calls for NASA to fund another lunar lander. But so far Congress has not appropriated any additional funds.
Last month, Bezos wrote an open letter to NASA administrator Bill Nelson that said Blue Origin would make up for the funding shortfall that prevented NASA from awarding two contracts. Bezos offered two waive up to $2 billion in development costs over the next two years “to get the program back on track right now.”
NASA has not responded publicly to the offer, however, and has moved ahead with working with SpaceX on its Starship program, paying it a first installment of $300 million soon after the GAO rendered its decision, which lifted an automatic stay imposed by the protest.
But there is no automatic stay in the Court of Federal Claims, said Alan Chvotkin, a contracts attorney with the firm Nichols Lui. Blue Origin has asked for an injunction to block further NASA spending on the contract, a spokesperson for NASA said. The Justice Department is expected to object on NASA’s behalf.
Afghan Taliban fighters stand on a military vehicle in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021.
Afghan Taliban fighters stand on a military vehicle in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021.
Taliban fighters stand beside the belongings of Afghan security soldiers in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021.
SootinClaimon.Com 