Tesla owners sour on Musk’s venture into US politics

Tesla owners sour on Musk’s venture into US politics
Investors are yet to see strong evidence that the billionaire’s politics are hurting Tesla’s business. (AFP)
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Tesla owners sour on Musk’s venture into US politics

Tesla owners sour on Musk’s venture into US politics
  • Musk has already divided Americans by helping President Donald Trump slash government spending

WASHINGTON: Tom Blackburn was so proud of his Tesla, he even bought one in bright red to stand out. But with company CEO Elon Musk’s foray into US politics, he’s sworn never to buy from the electric carmaker again.
Musk has already divided Americans by helping President Donald Trump slash government spending in moves denounced as illegal and immoral by critics.
Now the controversy may be ricocheting against Tesla — his pioneering brand once adored by environmentally conscious buyers.
“I’m just a little embarrassed to be driving it at this point,” retired attorney Blackburn told AFP of the Tesla he bought more than a decade ago. “I have pretty much soured on Tesla as a brand.”
A bumper sticker reading “I bought this before I knew he was crazy” has adorned his car since last year.
The 76-year-old from Virginia jokes: “Now I think I need something stronger.”
Musk became chief executive of Tesla in 2008, overseeing the company’s rise to the world’s most valuable automaker in terms of market capitalization.
But analysts say Musk’s political endeavors — including backing far-right parties in Europe and sharing conspiracy theories online — could isolate Tesla’s traditionally liberal market base.
“I think he will have a long-term damaging effect on the brand and the business,” said Daniel Binns, global CEO of Elmwood Brand Consultancy.
He said that Tesla needs to “disassociate” from Musk in its marketing, warning of a “perfect storm” looming as an aging lineup of cars puts it at risk of losing customers to rival companies.
“The brand on so many levels is not aligned with its audience and the market is filled with fantastic competitors,” Binns told AFP.
Tesla’s share price slumped by nine percent this week as it reported disappointing sales in Europe, which traders at least partly attributed to issues with how buyers view Musk.
However, investors are yet to see strong evidence that the billionaire’s politics are hurting Tesla’s business.
“Increased political activity does create a risk that Tesla may alienate some consumers from buying a Tesla, but it’s too early to say there is an impact to the company,” said Seth Goldstein, equity strategist at Morningstar.
Controversies generated by Musk, including what resembled a Nazi salute — he said it was not one — at a Trump rally, have nonetheless already prompted a backlash.
Kumait Jaroje, a physician from the Boston area, told AFP he is trying to sell his Tesla Cybertruck to avoid harassment after a note reading “Nazi F*** Off” was stuck on it.
The 40-year-old, who supported Trump in November’s election, bought the futuristic-looking vehicle in gold last year to advertise his cosmetic surgery, but said he has since been sworn at and cut off by other motorists.
“I’m avoiding driving it,” said Jaroje, adding that “Tesla has become a label for people who like Musk — which is not true.”
Around 54 percent of Americans hold unfavorable views of Musk, according to a Pew Research Center poll, though the results are split on party lines with Democrats far more critical than Republicans.
Some are showing their opposition to Musk by protesting at Tesla showrooms and encouraging owners to “Dump your stock” to devalue the vehicles.
American singer Sheryl Crow sold her Tesla in protest of Musk this month and said the proceeds would go to NPR, a US radio network that faces cuts in its government funding.
Yet Luis Garay, an independent who voted Democrat in the election, told AFP he can separate Musk’s political views from Tesla.
“We love Tesla cars, we don’t like Elon Musk’s political views,” said the 68-year-old from Maryland.
For self-described liberal Margaret Moerchen, from US capital Washington, it is crucial she makes clear that “our driving a Tesla does not endorse Elon Musk.”
Her Tesla, which she bought in 2015 to reduce her carbon emissions, is now covered in stickers reading “Up with EVs, down with Musk” and the LGBTQ pride flag.
The 45-year-old astronomer said she won’t be buying Tesla again and instead cited her interest in competitor Rivian.
“Tesla’s not the only game in town anymore,” she said.


A whale caught in fishing nets has been freed off Poland’s Baltic coast

A whale caught in fishing nets has been freed off Poland’s Baltic coast
Updated 26 February 2025
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A whale caught in fishing nets has been freed off Poland’s Baltic coast

A whale caught in fishing nets has been freed off Poland’s Baltic coast
  • It took about an hour for the rescuers to cut and remove the nets and allow the whale to swim into the open
  • The rescuers used boathooks on long poles, rather than knives, to loosen and remove the nets

WARSAW: Teams of sea rescuers and wildlife experts on Wednesday successfully freed a whale that got caught in fishing nets near a popular Baltic Sea resort in Poland.
It took about an hour for the rescuers to cut and remove the nets and allow the whale to swim into the open sea, close to the popular summer resort and beach in Miedzyzdroje, where the stranded animal was spotted in the morning.
Konrad Wrzecionkowski from WWF Poland, a conservation organization, said the whale made a “great and positive impression” on him but the action was potentially dangerous for the rescuers and was very stressful.
“You have to approach these animals with a lot of respect and we knew that if it chose to wave its tail, we would all find ourselves in the water,” Wrzecionkowski told The Associated Press.
“The situation was very stressful for him, but with time, when the nets were getting looser, he seemed to understand that we were trying to help him and the untangling became easier. And then he swam off into the sea,” Wrzecionkowski said.
He said the boat he was in was some 3 meters (10 feet) long and the animal was at least twice as long. The rescuers used boathooks on long poles, rather than knives, to loosen and remove the nets, rather than cutting them with knives, in order to avoid harming the animal.
Whales normally live in the open waters of oceans, but sometimes individual animals swim from the Atlantic Ocean into the Baltic Sea through the Danish Straits.
The rescuers hope the whale will find its way back to the Atlantic because the Baltic is not a suitable environment for whales.


Shanghai man scammed of $28,000 by AI ‘girlfriend’: state media

Shanghai man scammed of $28,000 by AI ‘girlfriend’: state media
Updated 26 February 2025
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Shanghai man scammed of $28,000 by AI ‘girlfriend’: state media

Shanghai man scammed of $28,000 by AI ‘girlfriend’: state media
  • Scammers used generative artificial intelligence software to create realistic video and still images of a young woman

SHANGHAI: A man in Shanghai lost nearly $28,000 after being tricked into a long-distance “relationship” with an AI-generated girlfriend, Chinese state media reported on Wednesday.
Scammers used generative artificial intelligence software to create realistic video and still images of a young woman in order to pose as the fictional “Ms. Jiao,” according to state broadcaster CCTV.
The victim transferred nearly 200,000 yuan (nearly $28,000) to what he believed was his online lover’s bank account, after the scammers used the fake images to convince him that his “girlfriend” needed funds to open a business and help a relative with medical bills.
The scammers even created a fake ID and medical reports to support the ruse, CCTV reported.
The operation was conducted by a “scammer team sending video and photos that were all created through AI or made by combining multiple images,” CCTV said, citing a police investigation.
“Throughout the process, (the victim) Mr. Liu never met Ms. Jiao in person,” it added.
A CCTV video showed photos of a woman in different scenarios including posing with a paint palette and standing on a city street.
The emergence of AI tools able to generate convincing text, images and even live video has resulted in increasingly sophisticated scams around the world.
Earlier this month US social media behemoth Meta warned Internet users to be wary of online acquaintances promising romance but seeking cash, noting that scams making use of generative AI were on the rise.


Anti-US sentiment bubbling up in the West Bank bolsters demand for a local Coke-alternative

Anti-US sentiment bubbling up in the West Bank bolsters demand for a local Coke-alternative
Updated 25 February 2025
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Anti-US sentiment bubbling up in the West Bank bolsters demand for a local Coke-alternative

Anti-US sentiment bubbling up in the West Bank bolsters demand for a local Coke-alternative
  • Chat Cola has seen its products explode in popularity across the occupied West Bank in the past year
  • Palestinian consumers, angry at America’s steadfast support for Israel, protested with their pockets

SALFIT, West Bank: Order a Coke to wash down some hummus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank these days and chances are the waiter will shake his head disapprovingly – or worse, mutter “shame, shame” in Arabic – before suggesting the popular local alternative: a can of Chat Cola.
Chat Cola – its red tin and sweeping white script bearing remarkable resemblance to the iconic American soft drink’s logo – has seen its products explode in popularity across the occupied West Bank in the past year as Palestinian consumers, angry at America’s steadfast support for Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza, protest with their pockets.
“No one wants to be caught drinking Coke,” said Mad Asaad, 21, a worker at the bakery-cafe chain Croissant House in the West Bank city of Ramallah, which stopped selling Coke after the war erupted. “Everyone drinks Chat now. It’s sending a message.”
Since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack triggered Israel’s devastating military campaign in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian-led boycott movement against companies perceived as supportive of Israel gained momentum across the Middle East, where the usual American corporate targets like McDonald’s, KFC and Starbucks saw sales slide last year.
Here in the West Bank, the boycott has shuttered two KFC branches in Ramallah. But the most noticeable expression of consumer outrage has been the sudden ubiquity of Chat Cola as shopkeepers relegate Coke cans to the bottom shelf – or pull them altogether.
“When people started to boycott, they became aware that Chat existed,” Fahed Arar, general manager of Chat Cola, said from the giant, red-painted factory, nestled in the hilly West Bank town of Salfit. “I’m proud to have created a product that matches that of a global company.”
With the “buy local” movement burgeoning during the war, Chat Cola said its sales in the West Bank surged more than 40 percent last year, compared to 2023.
While the companies said they had no available statistics on their command of the local market due to the difficulties of data collection in wartime, anecdotal evidence suggests Chat Cola is clawing at some of Coca-Cola’s market share.
“Chat used to be a specialty product, but from what we’ve seen, it dominates the market,” said Abdulqader Azeez Hassan, 25, the owner of a supermarket in Salfit that boasts fridges full of the fizzy drinks.
But workers at Coca-Cola’s franchise in the West Bank, the National Beverage Company, are all Palestinian, and a boycott affects them, too, said its general manager, Imad Hindi.
He declined to elaborate on the business impact of the boycott, suggesting it can’t be untangled from the effects of the West Bank’s economic free-fall and intensified Israeli security controls that have multiplied shipping times and costs for Palestinian companies during the war.
The Coca-Cola Company did not respond to a request for comment.
Whether or not the movement brings lasting consequences, it does reflect an upsurge of political consciousness, said Salah Hussein, head of the Ramallah Chamber of Commerce.
“It’s the first time we’ve ever seen a boycott to this extent,” Hussein said, noting how institutions like the prominent Birzeit University near Ramallah canceled their Coke orders. “After Oct. 7, everything changed. And after Trump, everything will continue to change.”
President Donald Trump’s call for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, which he rephrased last week as a recommendation, has further inflamed anti-American sentiment around the region.
With orders pouring in not only from Lebanon and Yemen but also the United States and Europe, the company has its sights set on the international market, said PR manager Ahmad Hammad.
Hired to help Chat Cola cash in on combustible emotions created by the war, Hammad has rebranded what began in 2019 as a niche mom-and-pop operation.
“We had to take advantage of the opportunity,” he said of the company’s new “Palestinian taste” logo and national flag-hued merchandise.
In its scramble to satisfy demand, Chat Cola is opening a second production site in neighboring Jordan. It rolled out new candy-colored flavors, like blueberry, strawberry and green apple.
At the steamy plant in Salfit, recent college graduates in lab coats said that they took pains to produce a carbonated beverage that could sell on its taste, not just a customer’s sense of solidarity with the Palestinians.
“Quality has been a problem with local Palestinian products before,” said Hanna Al-Ahmad, 32, the head of quality control for Chat Cola, shouting to be heard over the whir of machines squirting caramel-colored elixir into scores of small cans that then whizzed down assembly lines. “If it’s not good quality, the boycott won’t stick.”
Chat Cola worked with chemists in France to produce the flavor, which is almost indistinguishable from Coke’s – just like its packaging. That’s the case for several flavors: Squint at Chat’s lemon-lime soda and you might mistake it for a can of Sprite.
In 2020, the Ramallah-based National Beverage Company sued Chat Cola for copyright infringement in Palestinian court, contending that Chat had imitated Coke’s designs for multiple drinks. The court ultimately sided with Chat Cola, determining there were enough subtle differences in the can designs that it didn’t violate copyright law.
In the Salfit warehouse, drivers loaded “family size” packages of soda into trucks bound not only for the West Bank but also for Tel Aviv, Haifa and other cities in Israel. Staffers said that Chat soda sales in Israel’s predominantly Arab cities jumped 25 percent last year. To broaden its appeal in Israel, Chat Cola secured kosher certification after a Jewish rabbi’s thorough inspection of the facility.
Still, critics of the Palestinians-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, say that its main objective – to isolate Israel economically for its occupation of Palestinian lands – only exacerbates the conflict.
“BDS and similar actions drive communities apart, they don’t help to bring people together,” said Vlad Khaykin, the executive vice president of social impact and partnerships in North America for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. “The kind of rhetoric being embraced by the BDS movement to justify the boycott of Israel is really quite dangerous.”
While Chat Cola goes out of its way to avoid buying from Israel – sourcing ingredients and materials from France, Italy and Kuwait – it can’t avoid the circumstances of Israeli occupation, in which Israel dominates the Palestinian economy, controls borders, imports and more.
Deliveries of raw materials to Chat Cola’s West Bank factory get hit with a 35 percent import tax – half of which Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians. The general manager, Arar, said his company’s success depends far more on Israeli bureaucratic goodwill than nationalist fervor.
For nearly a month last fall, Israeli authorities detained Chat’s aluminum shipments from Jordan at the Allenby Bridge Crossing, forcing part of the factory to shut down and costing the company tens of thousands of dollars.
Among the local buyers left in the lurch was Croissant House in Ramallah, where, on a recent afternoon, at least one thirsty customer, confronting a nearly empty refrigerator, slipped to the supermarket next-door for a can of Coke.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Asaad, the worker. “We want to be self-sufficient. But we’re not.”


Court convicts preschool teacher of child-beating that shocked France

Court convicts preschool teacher of child-beating that shocked France
Updated 22 February 2025
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Court convicts preschool teacher of child-beating that shocked France

Court convicts preschool teacher of child-beating that shocked France
  • Video footage of the incident, filmed by a parent at the school in central Paris, went viral
  • The 52-year-old teacher was given a $3,140 fine, half of it suspended

PARIS: A French court on Friday fined a preschool teacher for having beaten a three-year-old child in class, a case that sparked nationwide anger and a shocked response from the then-education minister.
Video footage of the incident, filmed by a parent at the school in central Paris, went viral after it was posted online.
The 52-year-old teacher was given a 3,000-euro ($3,140) fine, half of it suspended, after admitting to having lost her cool in the incident last September.
Prosecutors had asked for a four-month suspended sentence.
The court opted not to record the fine as a criminal conviction, ruling that the teacher had been under intense pressure and that it had been a one-off incident.
But she was ordered to pay 1,600 euros to the mother of the child concerned.
The incident happened on September 3, the day after French pupils returned to school from the summer break.
At the time, the then-education minister Nicole Belloubet described the images filmed as “terribly shocking and unacceptable,” adding that she had immediately ordered the teacher’s suspension.
After Friday’s ruling, the teacher’s lawyer Laurent Hazan told reporters that his client was “relieved.”
In court, she said the girl had been having a meltdown in class worse than any she had seen in 30 years of teaching.
The girl had thrown a chair, which had nearly hit another child, she added.
But of the blow, she admitted, in tears, “I lost my cool,” and offered her apologies to the child and her family.


‘Queen of Pop’ Madonna lambasts ‘King’ Trump

‘Queen of Pop’ Madonna lambasts ‘King’ Trump
Updated 23 February 2025
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‘Queen of Pop’ Madonna lambasts ‘King’ Trump

‘Queen of Pop’ Madonna lambasts ‘King’ Trump
  • “I thought this country was built by Europeans, escaping living under the rule of a King, to establish a New World governed by the people,” Madonna said on X
  • “Currently we have a president who calls Himself Our King. If this is a joke, I’m not laughing“

WASHINGTON: Pop superstar Madonna has reignited her campaign against President Donald Trump, upbraiding the US leader for calling himself “the King.”
Trump declared “LONG LIVE THE KING” to end a social media message on Wednesday stating that he had killed a New York plan to impose a peak congestion charge of $9 for cars entering much of busy Manhattan.
The White House reposted the message on its social media with an illustration showing Trump wearing a diamond-studded crown.
“I thought this country was built by Europeans, escaping living under the rule of a King, to establish a New World governed by the people,” Madonna, widely known as “The Queen of Pop,” said late Thursday on the X platform.

 


“Currently we have a president who calls Himself Our King. If this is a joke, I’m not laughing,” added the 66-year-old singer.
Madonna had criticized Trump during his first term as president and she took part in a demonstration by Trump opponents after his January 20 inauguration.
Opponents frequently criticize Trump for adopting a regal tone. He said in his inaugural address that he was “saved by God to make America great again,” after surviving an assassination attempt in July.
The Republican leader campaigned against New York’s congestion charge, the first in the United States, during his presidential campaign.
The US Department of Transportation directed New York authorities this week to halt the charge.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said lawyers have initiated court action to halt the federal order.
But Trump triumphantly said on his Truth Social platform that “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!“