• Elon Musk did not defame a British cave explorer when he called him "pedo guy" in an angry tweet, a Los Angeles jury found Friday. Vernon Unsworth, who participated in the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped for weeks last year in a Thailand cave, had angered the Tesla CEO by belittling his effort to help with the rescue as a "PR stunt." Musk said Unsworth's comments in an interview with CNN were an unprovoked attack on his sincere and voluntary efforts to help in the rescue. Musk had engineers at his companies, including Space X and The Boring Co., develop a minisubmarine to transport the boys. Despite working around the clock to build the sub, Musk arrived in Thailand late in the rescue effort and the craft was never used. Musk, who said his stock in Tesla and SpaceX is worth about $20 billion, insisted in his testimony that the phrase he tweeted off-the-cuff "was obviously a flippant insult, and no one interpreted it to mean pedophile." A jury of five women and three men deliberated for less than an hour in the afternoon in U.S. District Court.
• Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley told conservative radio host Glenn Beck on Friday that the Confederate battle flag represented "service, sacrifice and heritage" for people in her state before mass murderer Dylann Roof "hijacked" its meaning. Roof killed nine black churchgoers during an evening Bible study in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. He was an avowed white supremacist, who posed for photos with the flag. A week after the massacre, Haley, then the governor, announced her support for removing the Confederate banner from statehouse grounds. In discussing the issue with Beck on his podcast, Haley seemed to suggest that the Confederate battle flag was not a symbol of hate before Roof made it so. "Here is this guy who comes out with his manifesto holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of," Haley said, according to a video of the interview on BlazeTV. "We don't have hateful people in South Carolina. There's always the small minority who are always going to be there, but people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it." Haley also blamed the "national media" for "wanting to define what happened." "They wanted to make this about racism, they wanted to make it about gun control, they wanted to make it about the death penalty," Haley said. Haley responded on Twitter to what she calls the mischaracterization of her remarks. Haley wrote that "2015 was a painful time for our state. The pain was and is still real." She linked to a transcript of her 2015 remarks as governor about removal of the flag and said: "I stand by it."
A Section on 12/08/2019