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'The vehicle suddenly accelerated with our baby in it': the terrifying truth about why Tesla's cars keep crashing

The Guardian

It was a Monday afternoon in June 2023 when Rita Meier, 45, joined us for a video call. Meier told us about the last time she said goodbye to her husband, Stefan, five years earlier. He had been leaving their home near Lake Constance, Germany, heading for a trade fair in Milan. Meier recalled how he hesitated between taking his Tesla Model S or her BMW. He had never driven the Tesla that far before. He checked the route for charging stations along the way and ultimately decided to try it. Rita had a bad feeling. She stayed home with their three children, the youngest less than a year old. At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. "The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing," investigators would write later. The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn't unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.


Left-leaning actress Natasha Lyonne leading efforts to lobby Trump admin on AI regulation

FOX News

The'Outnumbered' panel discusses how celebrities have reportedly authored a letter to President Donald Trump seeking his protection against artificial intelligence after smearing his name for years. Left-leaning actress Natasha Lyonne is at the forefront of Hollywood efforts to get the government to address creators' concerns about AI infringing on their work. "My primary interest is that people get paid for their life's work," Lyonne said in a report in the Wall Street Journal. The story detailed Lyonne's efforts to lobby Hollywood heavyweights to sign onto her letter to the Trump administration in March, urging against the loosening of regulations around AI, which they deem a potential threat to their intellectual property without proper protections in place. REPUBLICANS SCRAP DEAL IN'BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL' TO LOWER RESTRICTIONS ON STATES' AI REGULATIONS Natasha Lyonne is among Hollywood figures lobbying the Trump administration to rein in AI. (Photo by Araya Doheny/Getty Images) The Hollywood letter said the companies "are arguing for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America's creative and knowledge industries, despite their substantial revenues and available funds. Lyonne and more than 400 others, including such figures as Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Ben Stiller, signed the letter. Lyonne, known for her roles in the series "Poker Face" and "Russian Doll," is a partner in a new studio called Asteria, which describes itself as "an artist-led generative AI film and animation studio powered by the first clean and ethical AI model." Like many figures in Hollywood, Lyonne is not a fan of the president, endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and posting in a now-deleted X post in 2020 about turning Texas blue to defeat Trump. Earlier this year, she told The Hollywood Reporter she was concerned for marginalized communities, saying of Trump, "It's very weird to have like a showbiz guy in charge, is surreal.


The Download: India's AI independence, and predicting future epidemics

MIT Technology Review

Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap has opened largely because India has chronically underinvested in R&D, institutions, and invention. Meanwhile, since no one native language is spoken by the majority of the population, training language models is far more complicated than it is elsewhere. So when the open-source foundation model DeepSeek-R1 suddenly outperformed many global peers, it struck a nerve. This launch by a Chinese startup prompted Indian policymakers to confront just how far behind the country was in AI infrastructure--and how urgently it needed to respond.


Russia expanding chemical weapons use in Ukraine, say European spy agencies

Al Jazeera

Russia has intensified its use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian soldiers in a serious violation of international law, the Dutch and German intelligence agencies have said. On Friday, they said there was extensive evidence that Moscow's forces were using banned products, including the choking agent chloropicrin. Russia denies using the prohibited weapons, as does Ukraine. On Wednesday, Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, claimed that the Federal Security Service found a cache of Ukrainian weapons in the east of the country containing chloropicrin. "It is normalised and widespread. Chloropicrin is dropped by drones to drive soldiers out of trenches, and then kill them," Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said in a post on X. Brekelmans, who is now calling for tougher sanctions against Russia, described the use of chemical weapons as "horrible and unacceptable".


Minister demands overhaul of UK's leading AI institute

The Guardian

The technology secretary has demanded an overhaul of the UK's leading artificial intelligence institute in a wide-ranging letter that calls for a switch in focus to defence and national security, as well as leadership changes. Peter Kyle said it was clear further action was needed to ensure the government-backed Alan Turing Institute met its full potential. In a letter to ATI's chair, seen by the Guardian, Kyle said the institute should be changed to prioritise defence, national security and "sovereign capabilities" – a reference to nation states being able to control their own AI technology. The call for new priorities implies a downgrading of ATI's focus on health and the environment, which are two of three core subjects for the institute, alongside defence and security, under its "Turing 2.0" strategy. "Moving forward, defence and national security projects should form a core of ATI's activities, and relationships with the UK's security, defence, and intelligence communities should be strengthened accordingly," Kyle wrote.


Inside India's scramble for AI independence

MIT Technology Review

Historically known as the global back office for the software industry, India has a tech ecosystem that evolved with a services-first mindset. Giants like Infosys and TCS built their success on efficient software delivery, but invention was neither prioritized nor rewarded. Meanwhile, India's R&D spending hovered at just 0.65% of GDP ( 25.4 billion) in 2024, far behind China's 2.68% ( 476.2 billion) and the US's 3.5% ( 962.3 billion). The muscle to invent and commercialize deep tech, from algorithms to chips, was just never built. Isolated pockets of world-class research do exist within government agencies like the DRDO (Defense Research & Development Organization) and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), but their breakthroughs rarely spill into civilian or commercial use.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,226

Al Jazeera

Here are the key events on day 1,226 of Russia's war on Ukraine.Smoke is seen following what local authorities called a Ukrainian drone attack, in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Sergiyev Posad, outside Moscow, Russia July 4, 2025 [Head of the Sergiyev Posad municipal district Oksana Yerokhanova via Telegram/Handout via Reuters]Published On 4 Jul 20254 Jul 2025


Kyiv hit by barrage of drone strikes as Putin spurns Trump's truce bid

BBC News

Friday's attacks were the latest in a string of major Russian air strikes on Ukraine that have intensified in recent weeks as ceasefire talks have largely stalled. War in Ukraine has been raging for more than three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Following his conversation with Putin on Thursday, Trump said that "no progress" to end the fighting had been made. "I'm very disappointed with the conversation I had today with President Putin, because I don't think he's there, and I'm very disappointed," Trump said. "I'm just saying I don't think he's looking to stop, and that's too bad."


Non-exchangeable Conformal Prediction for Temporal Graph Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conformal prediction for graph neural networks (GNNs) offers a promising framework for quantifying uncertainty, enhancing GNN reliability in high-stakes applications. However, existing methods predominantly focus on static graphs, neglecting the evolving nature of real-world graphs. Temporal dependencies in graph structure, node attributes, and ground truth labels violate the fundamental exchangeability assumption of standard conformal prediction methods, limiting their applicability. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce NCPNET, a novel end-to-end conformal prediction framework tailored for temporal graphs. Our approach extends conformal prediction to dynamic settings, mitigating statistical coverage violations induced by temporal dependencies. To achieve this, we propose a diffusion-based non-conformity score that captures both topological and temporal uncertainties within evolving networks. Additionally, we develop an efficiency-aware optimization algorithm that improves the conformal prediction process, enhancing computational efficiency and reducing coverage violations. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world temporal graphs, including WIKI, REDDIT, DBLP, and IBM Anti-Money Laundering dataset, demonstrate NCPNET's capability to ensure guaranteed coverage in temporal graphs, achieving up to a 31% reduction in prediction set size on the WIKI dataset, significantly improving efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/ODYSSEYWT/NCPNET.


Statistical Inference for Responsiveness Verification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many safety failures in machine learning arise when models are used to assign predictions to people (often in settings like lending, hiring, or content moderation) without accounting for how individuals can change their inputs. In this work, we introduce a formal validation procedure for the responsiveness of predictions with respect to interventions on their features. Our procedure frames responsiveness as a type of sensitivity analysis in which practitioners control a set of changes by specifying constraints over interventions and distributions over downstream effects. We describe how to estimate responsiveness for the predictions of any model and any dataset using only black-box access, and how to use these estimates to support tasks such as falsification and failure probability estimation. We develop algorithms that construct these estimates by generating a uniform sample of reachable points, and demonstrate how they can promote safety in real-world applications such as recidivism prediction, organ transplant prioritization, and content moderation.