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UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting considered targeted attack, police say
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GM to stop funding troubled Cruise autonomous vehicle unit, abandoning robotaxis
General Motors says it will move away from the robotaxi business and cease funding its money-losing Cruise autonomous vehicle division.
According to a press release issued Tuesday and subsequent conference call that included GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra, the Detroit automaker will instead focus on development of partially automated driver-assist systems like its Super Cruise, which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel.
GM said it would get out of robotaxis “given the considerable time and resources that would be needed to scale the business, along with an increasingly competitive robotaxi market.”
The company said it will combine Cruise’s technical team with its own to work on advanced systems to assist drivers.
“The Cruise Board of Directors and the Cruise leadership team are collaborating closely with GM on next steps,” Cruise CEO Marc Whitten told CBS News.
GM bought then San Francisco-based start-up Cruise Automation in 2016 for at least $1 billion with high hopes of developing a profitable fleet of robotaxis. At the time, Cruise Automation, along with Google, was among the few companies with permits from the state of California to test the cars.
Over the years GM invested billions in the subsidiary and eventually bought 90% of the company from investors.
GM even announced plans for Cruise to generate $1 billion in annual revenue by 2025, but it scaled back spending on the company after one of its autonomous Chevrolet Bolts dragged a pedestrian on a San Francisco street who was hit by another vehicle in 2023.
The California Public Utilities Commission alleged the company covered up details of the crash and suspended Cruise’s driverless testing permit. Soon afterwards, Cruise pulled all its driverless cars off the road nationwide.
The incident sparked widespread criticism of the company and its autonomous vehicles. Cruise had already been under fire for a number of collisions that led the company to cut its operating robotaxi fleet in during the summer of 2023.
The problems triggered a purge of its leadership — in addition to layoffs that jettisoned about a quarter of its workforce.
In January of this year, the company offered to pay $75,000 to settle the investigation by California state regulators into Cruise’s failure to disclose details regarding the collision.
Despite its troubles, Cruise was still attempting to return to viability. In June, General Motors named Marc Whitten — one of the key engineers behind the Xbox video game console — as the division’s new chief executive. In August, Cruise announced its robotaxis would join Uber’s ride-hailing service in 2025 as part of a multiyear partnership bringing together two companies that once appeared poised to compete for passengers.
However, more recent Cruise developments have been costly for GM. In September, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration officials announced the division would pay a $1.5 million penalty as part of a consent order. Last month, Cruise agreed to an additional $500,000 fine after admitting to filing a false report following the San Francisco pedestrian crash.
According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office of the Northern District of California, the San Francisco-based company entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in which Cruise admits and accepts responsibility.
“Companies with self-driving cars that seek to share our roads and crosswalks must be fully truthful in their reports to their regulators,” said Martha Boersch, Chief of the Office of the U.S. Attorney’s Criminal Division, said in a statement.
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UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting spawns range of online merchandise
Shirts, mugs and stickers bearing the words “Deny Defend Depose” are appearing for sale on e-commerce websites just days after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death in New York City.
Those words were scrawled on three shell casings found at the scene of the Dec. 4 shooting in Manhattan, according to law enforcement sources, and loosely echo the title of a book about why insurance companies deny patient claims. The title — “Delay Deny Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It,” by Jay Feinman — is described on Amazon as “an exposé of insurance injustice and a plan for consumers and lawmakers to fight back.”
Feinman has declined to comment on the recent events, including on the words police say were written on the shell casings.
Sellers on online marketplace Etsy list over 800 items bearing “Deny Defend Depose,” including stickers, candles and apparel, while eBay is selling stickers, clothing, lawn signs and cell phone cases with the phrase.
In a statement to CBS MoneyWatch, eBay said the sale of items with the words does not violate its policies. But the company added that “items that glorify or incite violence, including those that celebrate the recent murder of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, are prohibited.”
Amazon said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch that it had removed similar merchandise from its platform, saying that the products violated the company’s guidelines.
Merchants often race to market wares related to dramatic current events, even when they involve violence. After President-elect Donald Trump was struck in the ear by a bullet in an assassination attempt over the summer, for example, sellers quickly started hawking merchandise with images of Trump at the rally. Many products also were sold online and in stores immediately after the 9/11 attacks.
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Arctic tundra becoming a source of carbon dioxide emissions, NOAA warns
Foreboding environmental milestones abounded again this year in the Arctic, where experts say dramatic climate shifts are fundamentally altering the ecosystem and how it operates. One recent turning point for the region involves its carbon footprint: Where conditions in the Arctic historically worked to reduce global emissions, they’re now actively contributing to them.
That’s a major transition that could reap consequences on human, plant and animal life far beyond Earth’s northernmost arena, warned a cohort of scientists whose research appears in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2024 Arctic Report Card, published Tuesday. The report is an annual assessment of the polar environment, which in recent years has become a stark alert signal marked by unprecedented and ominous observations all linked to rising temperatures from human-caused climate change.
A focus of the latest Arctic evaluation was the effects of warmer weather and wildfires on the tundra, a far-northern biome that’s typically known for extreme cold, little precipitation and a layer of permanently frozen soil, called permafrost, covering the land. Those traits collectively made the Arctic an important carbon sink for millennia, meaning the region essentially helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide by absorbing more carbon than it emitted into the atmosphere.
That has mainly been due to carbon uptake from plants, which regulate atmospheric levels of the molecule through photosynthesis, and a storage process in the permafrost, which traps carbon dioxide in the ground. But warming air temperatures in the Arctic are breaking down permafrost across the tundra, in some cases, severely. The Arctic report, for example, showed Alaskan permafrost temperatures in 2024 were the second-warmest ever recorded. That causes the soil to heat up and thaw, its carbon repositories decompose along with it.
Research included in NOAA’s Arctic report shows carbon once stored in the tundra’s permafrost is actually being released into the atmosphere. In parts of the region, it’s happening at a rate that outweighs the carbon sink and instead creates a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions — something of particular concern to climate scientists at a time when pollution from fossil fuel production has already reached a record high.
The same fossil fuels overwhelming the atmosphere and prompting ongoing admonition from top weather and climate officials at the United Nations are fueling the emissions in the Arctic, said Rich Spinrad, the administrator of NOAA, in a statement on the new report’s findings.
“Our observations now show that the Arctic tundra, which is experiencing warming and increased wildfire, is now emitting more carbon than it stores, which will worsen climate change impacts,” Spinrad said. “This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution.”
Wildfires in the Arctic have been raging at rates never seen before, and that alone drives up carbon emissions. Researchers suggest 2024 had the second-highest annual volume of wildfire emissions north of the Arctic Circle on record. Coupled with the release of carbon dioxide and methane gas from permafrost stores, they say net emissions could continue to increase in the place that climate change is heating up faster than anywhere else on the planet.