Mercedes Takes On Tesla, Sinks $1 Billion Into Electric Production In Alabama

Diamler AG announced plans to spend $1 billion producing Mercedes-Benz electric vehicles in Alabama – pitting the world’s largest luxury-car company against Tesla, Inc. ($TSLA), whose flagship Model S sedan outsold both the Mercedes S-Class BMW 7-series last year in the U.S.

The announcement comes on the heels of a 10 billion Euro commitment to green cars – unveiling an electric hatchback SUV at this month’s Frankfurt auto show.

The German automaker also plans to build its fifth global battery plant at the Alabama site slated for the assembly of electric SUVs, creating over 600 jobs while directly competing with Tesla’s Model X.

“We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary at our production facility in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and we’re taking this as an opportunity to expand the operation and further fuel growth,” production chief Markus Schaefer said in a Bloomberg TV interview. “We’re very confident for future growth in the U.S. in the long-term. ”

Diamler gearing up for a surge in electric

Diamler’s $1 billion investment is the latest evidence of the carmaker’s global shift towards electric vehicles.

The German luxury-car maker has announced deposits on its upcoming SUV in Norway, likely to bear the “EQC” badge, after the Northern European nation instituted a ban on fossil-fuel powered cars by 2025. Customers can plunk down a refundable $2,560 down payment towards the vehicle, set for delivery sometime in 2019.

The EQC is expected to have a range between 250 and 310 miles, and will be powered by two electric motors producing 405 horsepower through an all-wheel drivetrain.

Battery packs on the EQC is expected to have a capacity of more than 70 killowatt-hours, and have fast-charging capabilities providing 62 miles of range in just 5 minutes.

Self driving electric someday?

In March, San Francisco residents glimpsed the future, as a Mercedes-Benz driverless concept car – the F015 Luxury in Motion, was spotted driving around town.

Some kind of @MercedesBenz concept car promo at Taylor and Columbus in San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/6gFYvxoVNx

— Marty Falatic (@MartyMacGyver) March 5, 2015

Once Mercedes figures out how to make these self-driving electric vehicles fly, it’s basically the Jetsons.

The Securities and Exchange Commission quietly announced on Wednesday night that a 2016 breach of their online filing system, EDGAR, resulted in “access to nonpublic information” which may have been used for “illicit gain through trading.”

While the hack took place last August, the SEC apparently didn’t figure out until recently that the hackers may have used the nonpublic filings to profit from movements in the market – according to a 5,000 word statement on cybersecurity released at 11 p.m. EST on Wednesday. Buried within the report, 1500 words in, is one paragraph disclosing the hack.

“In August 2017, the Commission learned that an incident previously detected in 2016 may have provided the basis for illicit gain through trading.  Specifically, a software vulnerability in the test filing component of our EDGAR system, which was patched promptly after discovery, was exploited and resulted in access to nonpublic information.  We believe the intrusion did not result in unauthorized access to personally identifiable information, jeopardize the operations of the Commission, or result in systemic risk.  Our investigation of this matter is ongoing, however, and we are coordinating with appropriate authorities.”

Insecurity Everywhere

Between the 8,000 documents posted by Wikileaks detailing the CIA’s own hacking methods, a 2015 breach of the Office of Personal Management in which sensitive data on 21 million people was stolen, and several state websites which were hacked with a pro-ISIS message – one thing is clear; our ‘trusted’ government institutions need to beef up their cybersecurity.

Forget the nukes and the ill fitting uniforms, North Korea has committed perhaps the greatest offense known to Donald Trump’s home state – stiffing New York on over $156,000 in unpaid parking tickets dating back to the 1990s.

The peacocked investigators at New York’s NBC 4 uncovered more than 1,300 parking violations racked up by the regime.

A man who identified himself as secretary of North Korea’s UN mission told channel 4 that the ticket information must be in error because New York City has the right to pull diplomatic parking privileges from countries which accumulate too many tickets.

“It’s not true,” Jong Jo said. “It is false. Whenever we have a ticket, we pay. Because, you know, if we have three tickets the city does not allow us to renew their permission.” –NBC 4

While this is true today, most of the tickets were issued before New York City and the U.S. State Department agreed upon the rule in 2002.

Know thy enemy

North Korea isn’t the only country skipping out on parking tickets;

Among the notable scofflaws:

• Syria, with $362,550 in parking debt
• Iran, with $184,987 in parking debt
• Russia, with $104,231 in parking debt
• China, with $398,736 in parking debt

How does it feel, New Yorkers, to know that YOU are expected to pay for that 16 minute ticket in a 15 minute zone – with a bonus penalty if it isn’t 30 days, while enemies of the United States make a mockery of our laws?

The U.S. State department takes the issue ‘very seriously,’ mind you – issuing a statement saying just that, with the caveat that diplomats can do whatever the fuck they want:

“The Department strictly enforces the rules and associated consequences concerning our extension of driving privileges to foreign mission members in the United States. This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, meaning we ensure that, irrespective to an individuals’ entitlement to immunity, there are consequences when a foreign mission member fails to comply with U.S. motor vehicle laws.. . . With this said, it is important for police to treat foreign diplomatic and consular personnel with respect. It is not an exaggeration to say that police handing of incidents in this country could have a direct effect on the treatment of US diplomatic and consular personnel serving abroad.”

Keep paying your parking tickets plebs. Until you’re a petulant dictator lobbing missiles over Japan, you’re just another cog in the machine.

Hurricane Maria savaged Puerto Rico Wednesday with a direct hit at Catagory Four, leaving the island without power in what is being called the ‘worst storm in living memory’ to hit the bankrupt U.S. territory that is home to 3.4 million people.

Devastating Footage From San Juan, Puerto Rico – #Maria

pic.twitter.com/zwA0tlkjHf

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 20, 2017

“There is no power on the island and there is very little communications,” according to Ricardo Castrodad, a public health official with the US Coast Guard’s San Juan sector.

Thousands fled to shelters as the storm caused flooding in the capital, after killing at least nine people in the Caribbean earlier in the week.

Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz broke down in tears as she described the utter devastation she witnessed.

“Many parts of San Juan are completely flooded,” Yulin Cruz told reporters, adding “Our life as we know it has changed… There is a lot of pain and a lot of devastation.”

Initially gusting near Category Five speeds of 150 mph (240 kph), the storm slowed down a bit when it hit San Juan.

“The wind sounds like a woman screaming at the top of her lungs!” Mike Theiss wrote on Twitter, sheltering in a safe room in the eye of the storm.

“We are getting absolutely hammered right now.”

Imy Rigau, who was riding out the storm in her apartment in San Juan, said water had “cascaded” through her ceiling.

“We are taking refuge in the hallway as there is about a foot of water in my apartment,” she told AFP.

“I boarded up the windows but with all of this, it seems they are going to be blown away. One of them was smashed up, so we are here in the hallway where there are no windows.” –Yahoo

Limited shelters

Residents took cover in the 500 shelters around the island as officials warned of massive flooding and an announced overnight curfew in effect till Saturday.

Governor Ricardo Rossello implored residents to remain civil, stating “I urge the people of Puerto Rico to commit to peace, understanding, and good judgment during these difficult times for our island.”

Footage from the island

#BREAKING NEW FOOTAGE:#Maria video is from #Guayama, #PuertoRico #HurricaneMaria #PrayForPuertoRico
pic.twitter.com/sQHdRjxcZs

— Trumpism 9.0™ (@Team_Trump45) September 20, 2017

My aunt's house in Puerto Rico #HurricaneMaria #PuertoRicoStrong pic.twitter.com/SVtBVpwnrx

— Marcos (@MarcosAmparo3) September 20, 2017

Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico “100% without power," according to spokesperson from Puerto Rico governor's office https://t.co/6gpCmMFWRP pic.twitter.com/Gmhhd4YPOl

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) September 20, 2017

Video of San Juan as Hurricane Maria moved through Puerto Rico with winds topping 155 mph

(Via @GadiNBC) pic.twitter.com/qNvLRWsp2Z

— ??Patriot 24/7?? (@TrumpTrain45Pac) September 20, 2017

Shares of AMD ($AMD) spiked over 6 percent in after hours trade following a CNBC report that carmaker Tesla has teamed up with the chip maker develop a custom A.I. processor for self-driving technology.

The carmaker has received the first batch of samples from the chipmaker, a source told CNBC.

The new relationship with AMD likely signals a shift away from Nvidia, which is currently providing a small processing chip for Tesla’s current version of their self-driving system.

Via CNBC:

Current Tesla vehicles use Nvidia graphics processing units as part of the Autopilot self-driving hardware. Previously Tesla used chips from Mobileye, but the two companies parted ways last year after an accident involving a Mobileye-powered Tesla. Earlier this year Intel acquired Mobileye for more than $15 billion.

Notably Tesla is not working with Intel, which has enjoyed a long working relationship with Alphabet’s Waymo car group.

Shares of Nvidia ($NVDA) dropped after hours;

CNBC also reports that “Alphabet has already built two generations of an AI chip that can work as a GPU alternative. Microsoft is working on its own AI chip for the HoloLens. And Apple has incorporated an AI chip into its top-of-the-line iPhone X.”

Via The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board,

Congress needs to learn how the FBI meddled in the 2016 campaign.

When Donald Trump claimed in March that he’d had his “wires tapped” prior to the election, the press and Obama officials dismissed the accusation as a fantasy. We were among the skeptics, but with former director James Comey’s politicized FBI the story is getting more complicated.

CNN reported Monday that the FBI obtained a warrant last year to eavesdrop on Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager from May to August in 2016. The story claims the FBI first wiretapped Mr. Manafort in 2014 while investigating his work as a lobbyist for Ukraine’s ruling party. That warrant lapsed, but the FBI convinced the court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to issue a second order as part of its probe into Russian meddling in the election.

Guess who has lived in a condo in Trump Tower since 2006? Paul Manafort.

The story suggests the monitoring started in the summer or fall, and extended into early this year.

While Mr. Manafort resigned from the campaign in August, he continued to speak with Candidate Trump.

It is thus highly likely that the FBI was listening to the political and election-related conversations of a leading contender for the White House.

That’s extraordinary – and worrisome.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was even more specific that “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against—the President-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.”

He denied that any such FISA order existed.

Were they lying?

The warrant’s timing may also shed light on the FBI’s relationship to the infamous “ Steele dossier.” That widely discredited dossier claiming ties between Russians and the Trump campaign was commissioned by left-leaning research firm Fusion GPS and developed by former British spy Christopher Steele—who relied on Russian sources. But the Washington Post and others have reported that Mr. Steele was familiar to the FBI, had reached out to the agency about his work, and had even arranged a deal in 2016 to get paid by the FBI to continue his research.

The FISA court sets a high bar for warrants on U.S. citizens, and presumably even higher for wiretapping a presidential campaign. Did Mr. Comey’s FBI marshal the Steele dossier to persuade the court?

All of this is reason for House and Senate investigators to keep exploring how Mr. Comey’s FBI was investigating both presidential campaigns.

Russian meddling is a threat to democracy but so was the FBI if it relied on Russian disinformation to eavesdrop on a presidential campaign. The Justice Department and FBI have stonewalled Congressional requests for documents and interviews, citing the “integrity” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

But Mr. Mueller is not investigating the FBI, and in any event his ties to the bureau and Mr. Comey make him too conflicted for such a job. Congress is charged with providing oversight of law enforcement and the FISA courts, and it has an obligation to investigate their role in 2016. The intelligence committees have subpoena authority and the ability to hold those who don’t cooperate in contempt.

Mr. Comey investigated both leading presidential campaigns in an election year, playing the role of supposedly impartial legal authority. But his maneuvering to get Mr. Mueller appointed, and his leaks to the press, have shown that Mr. Comey is as political and self-serving as anyone in Washington.

No investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign will be credible or complete without the facts about all Mr. Comey’s wiretaps.

Researchers in Toronto, Canada have published a peer-reviewed study in Environmental Health Perspectives which finds that increased exposure to fluoride in utero is associated with lower IQ in children.

In a study spanning more than a decade, the researchers analyzed 1,576 samples from nearly 300 sets of mothers and children in Mexico where fluoride is not added to public water supplies, and is instead absorbed through naturally occurring concentrations in public water and fluoridated products. The IQ of children included in the study was tested twice up to the age of 12, which revealed a decrease in IQ scores for every .5 milligram-per-liter increase in fluoride exposure beyond 0.8 milligrams per liter of a pregnant mother’s urine. 

What about exposure out of the womb?

While the Canadian researchers did not find a correlation between fluoride intake and lowered IQ once a child was born, there have been over 50 studies on the impact from the industrial byproduct on the human body as of September 2016.

CNN reports “Previous studies have found fluoride to be a potential neurotoxin at extremely high levels. Many of these studies have been conducted in China, where fluoride levels in water can be as high as 30 milligrams per liter. The Environmental Protection Agency has set a limit of 4 milligrams per liter.”

And in a 2012 meta-analysis of 27 such studies published in Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) in conjunction with China Medical University in Shenyang reported that ‘fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children,’ adding ‘children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-fluoride areas.’

“Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury, and other poisons that cause chemical brain drain,” said Harvard researcher Phillippe Grandjean. “The effect of each toxicant may seem small, but the combined damage on a population scale can be serious, especially because the brain power of the next generation is crucial to all of us.”

In  a follow-up study, the Harvard-led research team concluded that ‘fluoride in drinking water may produce developmental neurotoxicity.’

“Results of our pilot study showed that moderate and severe dental fluorosis was significantly associated with deficits in WISC-IV digit span. Children with moderate or severe dental fluorosis scored significantly lower in total and backward digit span tests than those with normal or questionable fluorosis. These results suggest a deficit in working memory.” -via Sciencedirect.com

And who’s been talking about the dangers of fluoride for nearly a decade? Why, Alex Jones of Infowars!

No wonder he’s known as the ‘humble water filter salesman’ around the interwebs.

Following the Chinese central bank’s decision to ban initial coin offerings in early September, the government has ordered all Bitcoin exchanges in Beijing and Shanghai to submit plans for winding down their operations by September 20.

China’s top exchange, BTCC, said it would stop trading at the end of the month.

The BBC reports:

Chinese authorities decided to ban digital currencies as part of a plan for reducing the country’s financial risks.

A website set up by the Chinese central bank warned that cryptocurrencies are “increasingly used as a tool in criminal activities such as money laundering, drug trafficking, smuggling, and illegal fundraising”.

Strict instructions

According to a document leaked online by users on the social network Weibothat was seen by Coindesk, Chinese regulators ordered all cryptocurrency exchanges in Beijing to stop registering new user registration by midnight local time on 15 September, and to notify users publicly when they formally close.

All exchanges are required to send regulators a detailed “risk-free” plan of how they intend to exit the market before 18:30 local time on Wednesday 20 September.

The regulator also ordered the exchanges to submit DVDs containing all user trading and holding data to the local authorities.

Shareholders, controllers, executives, and core financial and technical staff of exchanges are also required to remain in Beijing during the shutdown and to co-operate fully with authorities.

Being cautious

“China is shutting the exchanges down for good reasons – I think it’s right they’re being cautious at this time,” Paul Armstrong, an emerging technology adviser and author of the book Disruptive Technologies, told the BBC.

“Bitcoin is by proxy unregulated and peer-to-peer, it’s a very volatile currency.”

However, Mr Armstrong does not think that this will be the end of Bitcoin in China for good.

“They’re shutting it down for now, but it doesn’t mean that in six months or so they won’t create new Bitcoin regulations like Japan and Australia did,” he said.

President Trump told the UN today in no uncertain terms that the United States will have to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea if they don’t dismantle their nuclear program.

“It’s time for North Korea to realize that de-nuclearization is its only acceptable future.”

Trump warned that if the US must defend itself or its allies, “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” adding that “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime.”

Trump on Kim Jong Un: "Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime" #UNGA pic.twitter.com/SXKKfWiYIY

— POLITICO (@politico) September 19, 2017

White House chief of staff John Kelly reacts: 

Full address here: 

Two years after running the oldest toy company in the world, FAO-Schwarz, into the ground after just seven short years of ownership, debt-laden Toys-R-Us, Inc. has been stomped into Bankruptcy after a tumultuous decade of lost market share to online competitors who walked all over them and their 1600 brick and mortar locations.

“Today marks the dawn of a new era at Toys ‘R’ Us where we expect that the financial constraints that have held us back will be addressed in a lasting and effective way,” Dave Brandon, chairman and chief executive of Toys R Us, said in a statement. “… We are confident these are the right steps to ensure that the iconic Toys ‘R’ Us and Babies ‘R’ Us brands live on for many generations.”

Via Bloomberg:

The company listed debt and assets of more than $1 billion each in Chapter 11 documents Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Virginia. Prior to filing, the chain secured more than $3 billion in financing from lenders including a JPMorgan Chase & Co.-led bank syndicate and certain existing lenders to fund operations while it restructures, according to a company statement. The funding is subject to court approval.

The company didn’t announce plans to close stores, and said its locations across the globe would continue normal operations.

“Like any retailer, decisions about any future store closings – and openings – will continue to be made based on what makes the best sense for the business,” Michael Freitag, a spokesman for Toys “R” Us, said in an email.”

For decades, the Wayne, NJ based retailer was the preeminent toy company in the world, with its flagship location in New York’s Times Square and their well known icon, Geoffrey the Giraffe.Toys-R-Us’s fall from grace “brings to a close a turbulent chapter in the iconic company’s history,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, said in an email. “Even if the debt issues are solved, Toys ‘R’ Us still faces massive structural challenges against which it must battle. The jury is out as to whether it can adapt enough to survive.”