MIAMI — A Miami jury decided that Elon Musk’s car company Tesla was partly responsible for a deadly crash in Florida involving its Autopilot driver assist technology and must pay the victims more than $240 million in damages.

The federal jury held that Tesla bore significant responsibility because its technology failed and that not all the blame can be put on a reckless driver, even one who admitted he was distracted by his cellphone before hitting a young couple out gazing at the stars. The decision comes as Musk seeks to convince Americans his cars are safe enough to drive on their own as he plans to roll out a driverless taxi service in several cities in the coming months.

The decision ends a four-year long case remarkable not just in its outcome but that it even made it to trial. Many similar cases against Tesla have been dismissed and, when that didn’t happen, settled by the company to avoid the spotlight of a trial.

“This will open the floodgates,” said Miguel Custodio, a car crash lawyer not involved in the Tesla case. “It will embolden a lot of people to come to court.”

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The case also included startling charges by lawyers for the family of the deceased, 22-year-old, Naibel Benavides Leon, and for her injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. They claimed Tesla either hid or lost key evidence, including data and video recorded seconds before the accident. Tesla said it made a mistake after being shown the evidence and honestly hadn’t thought it was there.

“We finally learned what happened that night, that the car was actually defective,” said Benavides’ sister, Neima Benavides. “Justice was achieved.”

Tesla has previously faced criticism that it is slow to cough up crucial data by relatives of other victims in Tesla crashes, accusations that the car company has denied. In this case, the plaintiffs showed Tesla had the evidence all along, despite its repeated denials, by hiring a forensic data expert who dug it up.

“Today’s verdict is wrong,” Tesla said in a statement, “and only works to set back automotive safety and jeopardize Tesla’s and the entire industry’s efforts to develop and implement lifesaving technology,” They said the plaintiffs concocted a story ”blaming the car when the driver – from day one – admitted and accepted responsibility.”

In addition to a punitive award of $200 million, the jury said Tesla must also pay $43 million of a total $129 million in compensatory damages for the crash, bringing the total borne by the company to $243 million.

“It’s a big number that will send shock waves to others in the industry,” said financial analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities. “It’s not a good day for Tesla.”

Tesla said it will appeal.

Even if that fails, the company says it will end up paying far less than what the jury decided because of a pre-trial agreement that limits punitive damages to three times Tesla’s compensatory damages. Translation: $172 million, not $243 million. But the plaintiff says their deal was based on a multiple of all compensatory damages, not just Tesla’s, and the figure the jury awarded is the one the company will have to pay.

It’s not clear how much of a hit to Tesla’s reputation for safety the verdict in the Miami case will make. Tesla has vastly improved its technology since the crash on a dark, rural road in Key Largo, Florida, in 2019.

But the issue of trust generally in the company came up several times in the case, including in closing arguments Thursday. The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, Brett Schreiber, said Tesla’s decision to even use the term Autopilot showed it was willing to mislead people and take big risks with their lives because the system only helps drivers with lane changes, slowing a car and other tasks, falling far short of driving the car itself.

Schreiber said other automakers use terms like “driver assist” and “copilot” to make sure drivers don’t rely too much on the technology.

“Words matter,” Schreiber said. “And if someone is playing fast and lose with words, they’re playing fast and lose with information and facts.”

Schreiber acknowledged that the driver, George McGee, was negligent when he blew through flashing lights, a stop sign and a T-intersection at 62 miles an hour before slamming into a Chevrolet Tahoe that the couple had parked to get a look at the stars.

The Tahoe spun around so hard it was able to launch Benavides 75 feet through the air into nearby woods where her body was later found. It also left Angulo, who walked into the courtroom Friday with a limp and cushion to sit on, with broken bones and a traumatic brain injury.

But Schreiber said Tesla was at fault nonetheless. He said Tesla allowed drivers to act recklessly by not disengaging the Autopilot as soon as they begin to show signs of distraction and by allowing them to use the system on smaller roads that it was not designed for, like the one McGee was driving on.

“I trusted the technology too much,” said McGee at one point in his testimony. “I believed that if the car saw something in front of it, it would provide a warning and apply the brakes.”

The lead defense lawyer in the Miami case, Joel Smith, countered that Tesla warns drivers that they must keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel yet McGee chose not to do that while he looked for a dropped cellphone, adding to the danger by speeding. Noting that McGee had gone through the same intersection 30 or 40 times previously and hadn’t crashed during any of those trips, Smith said that isolated the cause to one thing alone: “The cause is that he dropped his cellphone.”

The auto industry has been watching the case closely because a finding of Tesla liability despite a driver’s admission of reckless behavior would pose significant legal risks for every company as they develop cars that increasingly drive themselves.

Condon reported from New York.

On July 11, the U.S. State Department imposed sweeping layoffs as part of a large-scale reorganization. Why should this matter to you? Violence is surging across the globe — 2024 saw the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in over 70 years. In our globalized world, instability affects us whether we like it or not.

This means now is a very bad time to undermine our diplomatic capabilities, which is exactly what this will do.

Diplomacy is our least expensive and least risky foreign policy tool, and the State Department leads it. Much like preventative health care, the more effectively we invest in it early on, the fewer costly and dangerous crises we face later. If we don’t, we’ll have to rely on riskier and costlier tools to defend our national security interests, such as economic coercion or military intervention.

Because it’s less visible, diplomacy is often underrated and overlooked. It’s hard to take credit for the crises we avoid. But American diplomacy — backed up by our military might — is what kept us out of a hot war with the Soviet Union, has prevented war between China and Taiwan, and ended conflict between Egypt and Israel, to name a few. I’ve seen diplomacy mitigate conflict in places such as Kenya, Burundi and Somalia.

As a former U.S. diplomat, I know that these sloppy cuts at State will cost us a lot. As the world moves undoubtedly into a more conflict-ridden future, we are undermining our own ability to navigate that world safely.

Our military leaders have long understood this. As Gen. James Mattis said during testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services in 2013, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

Effective diplomacy requires skilled diplomats and regional and subject matter experts. It relies on investment in the long game, building strong relationships and addressing underlying causes of conflict and instability. This administration is tossing that all aside with little concern for the consequences.

No career civil servant would deny that the State Department could use serious, thoughtful reform. But this is not that. Like the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts that came before, the State Department “reorganization” has been conducted with little appreciation or understanding of what it does, how it works and why it matters.

This is no surprise given who was put in charge of it. Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former DOGE staffer with no prior experience with the State Department or diplomacy, has taken the lead. He was promoted this month to undersecretary, the department’s third-highest ranking. He’s been assisted by Lew Olowski, an entry-level Foreign Service officer who was recently tapped to lead the human resources department, a position typically held by a long-serving member of the Senior Foreign Service. Their qualifying criteria apparently consist of being loyal to the administration of President Donald Trump and willing to break things.

The result is costly and dangerous. Delaware Sen. Chris Coons highlighted some of the most egregious outcomes during a recent Senate hearing. While grilling the deputy secretary of state for management, Coons pointed out, “You literally just fired department experts on nuclear proliferation, including experts with decades of expertise on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, (on) ending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Other casualties included key parts of the counterterrorism bureau; the entire office for countering violent extremism; half of State’s cybersecurity bureau (which had a leading role in countering China’s cyberattacks); most of the office focused on science, technology cooperation and critical technologies, including artificial intelligence; much of the office addressing fraud prevention for visas and passports; and the offices focused on drug trafficking and energy diplomacy, both areas that the administration had specifically indicated were top priorities.

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Widespread cuts to the Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA) were met with shock, since it serves Americans directly and is self-funded through service fees. CA issues passports and visas and is responsible for the welfare of Americans abroad.

The Office of Casualty Assistance, for example, assists victims of crime and terrorist attacks and helps repatriate bodies of Americans who die overseas. It was eliminated. I’ve made those heartbreaking calls to families to tell them a loved one has died. I’ve helped them navigate hospitals, criminal investigations, repatriation and grief — with critical support from Washington. You’ll feel these cuts if you find yourself in trouble in a foreign country.

I also know many people who were let go: experts with extensive language skills, knowledge and relationships cultivated over decades. These are taxpayer-funded investments that cannot be rebuilt overnight.

Not that this administration intends to try. It ultimately plans to slash the State Department budget by almost half, to $28 billion. For comparison, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” increased military spending to over $1 trillion, which is $156 billion more than the Department of Defense asked for. This means the U.S. military got a tip nearly six times the entire planned State Department budget.

If you don’t mind a future with more war, we can just keep buying more ammunition. But if you want a safer world, tell your government to invest in the tools of peace.

Elizabeth Shackelford is senior policy director at Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The National Science Foundation can continue to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from researchers in several states until litigation aimed at restoring it plays out, a federal court ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge John Cronan in New York declined to force the NSF to restart payments immediately, while the case is still being decided, as requested by the sixteen Democrat-led states who brought the suit, including New York, Hawaii, California, Colorado and Connecticut.

In his ruling, Cronan said he would not grant the preliminary injunction in part because it may be that another court, the Court of Federal Claims, has jurisdiction over what is essentially a case about money. He also said the states failed to show that NSF’s actions were counter to the agency’s mandate.

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The lawsuit filed in May alleges that the National Science Foundation’s new grant-funding priorities as well as a cap on what’s known as indirect research expenses “violate the law and jeopardize America’s longstanding global leadership in STEM.”

Another district court had already blocked the the cap on indirect costs — administrative expenses that allow research to get done like paying support staff and maintaining equipment. This injunction had been requested to restore funding to the grants that were cut.

In April, the NSF announced a new set of priorities and began axing hundreds of grants for research focused on things like misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion. Researchers who lost funding also were studying artificial intelligence, post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans, STEM education for K-12 students and more.

Researchers were not given a specific explanation for why their grants were canceled, attorney Colleen Faherty, representing the state of New York, said during last month’s hearing. Instead, they received boilerplate language stating that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

NSF has long been directed by Congress to encourage underrepresented groups like women and people with disabilities to participate in STEM. According to the lawsuit, the science foundation’s funding cuts already halted efforts to train the next generation of scientists in fields like computer science, math and environmental science.

A lawyer for the NSF said at the hearing that the agency has the authority to fund whatever research it deems necessary — and has since its inception in 1950. In the court filing, the government also argued that its current priorities were to “create opportunities for all Americans everywhere” and “not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”

The plaintiff states are trying to “substitute their own judgement for the judgement of the agency,” Adam Gitlin, an attorney for the NSF, said during the hearing.

The science foundation is still funding some projects related to expanding representation in STEM, Cronan wrote in his ruling. Per the lawsuit filed in May, for example, the University of Northern Colorado lost funding for only one of its nine programs focused on increasing participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields.

The states are reviewing the decision, according to spokespeople from the New York and Hawaii attorney general offices. The National Science Foundation declined to comment.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

SHREWSBURY, Pa. — A truckload of hot dogs spilled across a Pennsylvania interstate Friday after a crash that briefly clogged the heavily traveled artery in both directions.

Crews were stuck with a job they did not relish — rolling up the scattered tube steaks for disposal.

“Once those leave the truck and hit the road, that’s all garbage, and it’s still pretty warm,” Shrewsbury Fire Company Chief Brad Dauberman said.

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State police said the tractor trailer had an unspecified mechanical problem on Interstate 83 a few miles north of the Maryland line as morning rush hour was wrapping up, causing it to push into a passenger vehicle. When the truck scraped along a concrete divider, its trailer was ripped open and the contents scattered.

Four people required medical attention, Dauberman said, for injuries that police said were not life-threatening.

A front-end loader was used to scoop up the hot dogs and drop them into a dump truck.

Dauberman said emergency crews couldn’t help but see the humor in the situation, and his daughter texted him a photo of a hot dog-themed T-shirt.

“I can tell you personally, hot dogs are very slippery,” the fire chief said. “I did not know that.”