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      Elon Musk Is Focused on DOGE. What About Tesla?

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      Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s main advisers, has not outlined a plan to reverse falling sales at the electric car company of which he is chief executive.Elon Musk’s role as President Trump’s cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appears to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. Mr. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Mr. Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Mr. Trump’s home in Florida — far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling start-up to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla’s success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Mr. Musk the world’s richest person.But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could have serious ramifications for his company and the auto industry, which employs millions of people worldwide.Even before he joined the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk’s running multiple companies had led investors and corporate governance experts to wonder whether he was spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Mr. Musk controls and runs SpaceX, whose rockets carry astronauts and satellites for NASA and others; X, the social media site; and xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence. And he wants to colonize Mars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Send Us Your Views on Airplane Safety and the D.C. Reagon Airport Crash

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      We want to hear your perspective on the circumstances that led to the Jan. 29 midair collision near Reagan National Airport, and on air safety and regulation in general. What works and what does not?The Jan. 29 collision of a passenger jet and a military helicopter close to Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport was the worst in nearly a quarter of a century, taking 67 lives. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash, and a combination of flawed communications and congested airspace in the area appear to be part of the explanation.The Reagan National crash was only the first in a string of recent aviation accidents spanning from Philadelphia to Nome, Alaska. On Feb. 17, another U.S. passenger jet crash-landed in Toronto, injuring more than a dozen people.In the interests of educating the public and shining a brighter light on aviation safety, we want to better understand what has happened in Washington and beyond. Are you a pilot who has spotted a detail we haven’t reported on? Are you a passenger who has been affected by the Reagan National crash or others? Maybe you are a current or former government employee with oversight of these matters who has a suggestion for us in our reporting? If any of this sounds like you, we would like to hear your perspective.We’ll read every response to this questionnaire and contact you if we’re interested in learning more about your story. We won’t publish any part of your response without following up with you first, verifying your information and hearing back from you. And we won’t share your contact information outside the Times newsroom or use it for any reason other than to get in touch with you. More

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      in US Politics

      Top US prosecutor quits over pressure to investigate Biden climate spending

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      A top federal prosecutor has quit after refusing to launch what she called a politically driven investigation into Biden-era climate spending, exposing deepening rifts in the US’s premier law enforcement agency.Denise Cheung, head of criminal prosecutions in Washington, resigned on Tuesday after Trump appointees demanded she open a grand jury investigation into Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants based largely on an undercover video, multiple people familiar with the matter told CNN.The directive came from the acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove through Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for Washington DC US attorney. Officials wanted Cheung to investigate EPA contracts awarded during Biden’s tenure and freeze related funding, CNN reported.In her resignation letter, Cheung wrote to Martin that she and other prosecutors had determined there was insufficient evidence to warrant grand jury subpoenas, even if senior officials cited the Project Veritas video as justification.“When I explained that the quantum of evidence did not support that action, you stated that you believed that there was sufficient evidence,” Cheung wrote to Martin. “You also accused me about wasting five hours of the day ‘doing nothing’ except trying to get what the FBI and I wanted, but not what you wanted.”The dispute stems from the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin’s claim last week about $20bn in climate law funding being held in a Citibank account.The resignation adds to broader upheaval within the justice department, where prosecutors considered unaligned with current leadership have faced termination, particularly those involved in January 6 investigations. More

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      Army Helicopter Might Have Missed Critical Instruction Before Midair Crash

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      Investigators said that an air traffic controller had instructed the Black Hawk crew to pass behind a nearby passenger jet, but that information might have got lost.National Transportation Safety Board officials said on Friday that they were investigating what appeared to be confused communications inside the cockpit of an Army Black Hawk helicopter moments before colliding with an American Airlines jet last month near Ronald Reagan National Airport.N.T.S.B. investigators are still trying to determine whether and how the miscommunications contributed to the collision that killed all 67 people in both aircraft over the Potomac River on Jan 29. The American Airlines regional jet was arriving at National Airport from Wichita, Kan. The Black Hawk crew was carrying out a training mission so the pilot could perform a required annual evaluation flight.During a news conference, the investigative board’s chair, Jennifer Homendy, gave two instances of when the air traffic controller had given instructions to the Black Hawk three-person crew on how to weave through the busy National Airport airspace that the crew may not have completely received.The first instance, Ms. Homendy said, involved the helicopter crew members’ possibly not hearing the air traffic controller inform them that the American Airlines jet was “circling” to switch runways for landing. She said investigators could hear that word when replaying the controllers’ communications but noticed it was missing from the Black Hawk’s cockpit voice recorder.The airplane, American Airlines Flight 5342, was making its final descent after having been transferred from Runway 1, a regular landing strip for commercial regional jets, to Runway 33, a strip used far less often.Later, Ms. Homendy said, the air traffic controller told the Black Hawk helicopter to pass behind the plane that was seconds away from landing. But based on cockpit voice recorder data from the helicopter a “portion of the transmission that stated ‘pass behind the’ may not have been received by the Black Hawk crew,” Ms. Homendy said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Musk’s Lost Boys and Trump’s Mean Girls

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      Tom Stoppard wrote in “The Real Thing,” his enticing play about infidelity: “To marry one actress is unfortunate. To marry two is simply asking for it.”Here’s a political corollary: To elect one Emperor of Chaos is unfortunate. To let two run the government is simply asking for it.Presidents Trump and Musk have merged their cult followings, attention addictions, conspiratorial mind-sets, disinformation artistry, disdain for the Constitution, talent for apocalyptic marketing and jumping-from-thing-to-thing styles.With a pitiless and mindless velocity, they are running roughshod over the government — and the globe.Queasy D.C. denizens are waiting anxiously to see if judges can save the country from the scofflaws running it.The two unchecked and unbalanced billionaires are entwined in a heady and earth-shattering relationship.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

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      Trump says he will appoint himself chair of Kennedy Center

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      Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is appointing himself as chairman of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, adding that he is immediately terminating multiple people from the board of trustees and the current chairman.“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.The Kennedy Center is the country’s national cultural center and is run through a public-private partnership. The idea for such a center began with Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s and was authorized by Congress in 1958 . It’s doors officially opened in 1971. The center is known for hosting music, theater, dance, artwork and performance art, and has hosted acts ranging from Tina Turner to Led Zeppelin.A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center said in a statement it was aware of Trump’s Truth Social post, but that it had “received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to our board of trustees”.Some members of the board have received termination notices from the administration, the spokesperson said.The Kennedy Center’s current chairman is David Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist and the co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group. Rubenstein has held the position since 2010 and was set to retire this year. After Trump was elected, the Kennedy Center said it had failed to find a new chair to replace Rubenstein and that he would stay on until September 2026.Rubenstein served as a policy adviser to Jimmy Carter and is reportedly close to Joe Biden. He was first appointed by George W Bush.Members of the board of trustees are typically appointed by the president. Currently, the attorney general Pam Bondi, lobbyist Brian Ballard and singer Lee Greenwood – all Trump supporters – are on the board, according to the Hill. Several Biden appointees are still on the board too, including press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. First ladies are honorary members and Congress can also designate ex-officio members.“We have had a collaborative relationship with every presidential administration,” the Kennedy Center spokesperson said, adding that it has long had “a bipartisan board of trustees that has supported the arts in a non-partisan fashion”.Rubenstein’s position, which Trump says he is now seizing, has always been appointed by the center’s board members, according to the act authorized by Congress in 1958.“There is nothing in the center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members,” the center’s spokesperson said. “However, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”Trump said the reason for terminating Rubenstein and some members of the board of trustees is that they don’t “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”. In his Truth Social post, he also brought up the topic of queer people, something he has raised repeatedly since being sworn into office, saying that the Kennedy Center “featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth – THIS WILL STOP”.The Atlantic first reported Trump’s decision to appoint himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center. During his first term, he didn’t attend a single annual gala event at center – a tradition US presidents have long partaken in. Trump had a prickly relationship with the center after artists protested against his administration and threatened to boycott events at the White House.Now, it seems, Trump wants back in. Capping off his Truth Social post, he wrote: “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” More