Tesla offers Model Y customers a cheat code to get delivery quicker – Fox Business

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Canaccord Genuity Managing Director Jed Dorshetmer and Miller Tabak Chief Market Strategist Matt Maley discuss their outlook for Tesla.

Tesla, billionaire Elon Musk'spurveyor ofelectric cars, is urging Model Y buyers to change their order preferences if they want to jump behind the wheel of the all-electric SUV more quickly.

Drivers who ordered the Model Y Performance or the Model Y Long Range AWD with a seven-seat interior can get the vehicle by March if they downsize to a standard five-seat interior, the digital outlet Electrek reported.

The change will also remove the $3,000 interior upgrade charge from their bills, the automaker wrote in an e-mail to buyers obtained by Electrek. Tesla has also confirmed March delivery for customers who chose the standard interior.

TESLA CYBERTRUCK PRE-ORDERS TOP 535K, UNOFFICIAL TALLY SAYS

The notificationssuggest current output of the five-seatconfiguration is outpacing demand, since the seven-seater isn't scheduled for production until next year, the outlet reported. Palo Alto, California-based Tesla has struggled with production issues in the past, though Musk says enhanced techniques now help it to deliver cars more efficiently.

TESLA'S CYBERTRUCK MADE INTO HOT WHEELS RC CARS

The carmaker unveiled the all-electric Model Y in March 2019, hoping to tap the most popular segment of the auto market.Before its debut, Musk compared the model's specifications to the company's lower-cost sedan, the Model 3.

The Model Y Performance starts at $55,000 while the long-range model starts at $47,000. Its competitors include the all-new EQC from Mercedes-Benz and theI-Pace from Jaguar, according to the research firm LMC Automotive.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Teslas Followers Are Trying to Piggyback Off Elon Musks Sales Wins – Yahoo Finance

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(Bloomberg) -- Tesla Inc. has been a trailblazer for direct-to-consumer sales, but the path for other electric-vehicle startups is still pretty thorny.

Plug-in truck maker Rivian Automotive Inc., which aims to begin selling its R1T pickup and R1S SUV late this year without a franchised dealer network, had hoped to build its first store in Colorado, where Tesla has three. But almost a year after raising the idea with state legislators, its still lobbying them -- with EV enthusiasts and car dealers lining up to testify for and against.

Rivian will instead open its first showrooms in California, which makes it easier for newcomers than most other states that have tough, decades-old franchise laws designed to protect car dealers.

Tesla has spent years lobbying states to loosen these laws, which ban car manufacturers from owning or operating their own stores. Tesla, which sells cars at fixed prices online, now has showrooms or galleries - spaces to display vehicles without technically selling them -- in 28 states. It did that largely by finding loopholes and negotiating deals limited to its own business.

The Model 3 maker reached a settlement last month in the home state of General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. when a Michigan court effectively allowed Tesla to bypass laws preventing most auto manufacturers from selling directly to consumers.

To pry open the door further, Rivian is waging a state-by-state campaign on behalf of its operations and those of others to come. The effort is led by Jim Chen, a former Tesla lobbyist whos now vice president of public policy at the Michigan-based startup.

These laws were never intended to shut out competition between different brands, Chen said by phone last month. A manufacturer should freely be able to choose whether it wants to enter the franchise system or sell directly.

Dealers, of course, feel differently. They say cars arent suited for online-only sales and that franchise laws protect consumers. Tim Jackson, president of the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association and a vocal Tesla critic, helped kill Rivians proposal last year, which would have allowed any company solely making EVs to sell them in Colorado without dealers.

We dont want to further broaden, or further make accessible the factory-to-consumer direct sales model, Jackson said in an interview last month. We prefer, of course, the franchise model.

Jackson was back at the legislature in Denver on Feb. 18 with a posse of dealers to thwart Rivians latest proposal, which would expand the carve-out to any car manufacturer with EVs to sell. The bill has survived in the state senate so far, in part with new language that addresses dealers fears by reiterating their exclusive rights to sell existing brands in specific geographic areas.

One might think Colorado, which became the 10th state to adopt Californias electric-vehicle mandate last September, would be relatively friendly territory for Rivian. But even with bipartisan sponsorship and the backing of newly elected Democratic Governor Jared Polis, passage seems far from assured.

With an onslaught of new electric models coming from automakers like Ford and Volkswagen AG, dealers worry that such exceptions could give all manufacturers free rein to compete directly against them.

Traditional carmakers are already beginning to shake up their retail models to sell EVs. Volkswagen announced Feb. 19 its using a new approach in Germany for its ID family of electric cars. Dealers will receive a commission and bonus but will no longer negotiate price or arrange financing or insurance -- an important profit source.

Other startups intend to follow Teslas lead. California-based Lucid Motors Inc. wants to sell its luxury electric sedan, the Air, through its own network of stores.

Rivian, which raised nearly $3 billion last year from investors including Amazon.com Inc. and Ford, has also introduced bills in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania. At the same time, it plans to open stores in friendlier states including California, Florida, Massachusetts and Utah, Chen said. The first ones will open around Los Angeles and San Francisco in the next year.

Like Tesla, Rivian will allow people to set up a test drive, configure, order online and take home delivery.

Story continues

Its also planning a subscription service that will include finance and insurance, following the lead of Porsche and Volvo Cars, Chief Executive Officer R.J. Scaringe said in an interview last month. Volvo dealers in California last year petitioned state regulators to investigate the companys Care by Volvo program, arguing it violates franchise laws.

The plan to service cars is still a bit opaque, leaving Rivian open to criticism that it cant provide adequate maintenance for its vehicles. But Chen told legislators at the hearing in Denver this month that Rivian plans to establish service centers and mobile service teams -- like Tesla does -- and that it may rely on its strategic investors for help with infrastructure to distribute auto parts.

The automotive arm of privately held Cox Enterprises Inc., which owns a stable of auto businesses including Kelley Blue Book and Manheim auction services, put $350 million into Rivian in September. Thats raised the hackles of some dealers, who share data and buy ads and used cars from Cox.

We do business with Cox Automotive, said Thom Buckley, a Colorado dealer who testified at the hearing. Im very concerned about doing business with a vendor who will compete with us.

--With assistance from Ed Ludlow.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gabrielle Coppola in New York at gcoppola@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net, Chester Dawson

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Teslas Followers Are Trying to Piggyback Off Elon Musks Sales Wins - Yahoo Finance

Tesla’s Biggest Advantage in the Auto Industry – Motley Fool

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One of the advantages of being a new, disruptive company is that you can change the business model that legacy companies are stuck in. Marketing, distribution, and even production can be rethought in a way that makes sense in 2020, instead of being built for 1950.

Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) biggest advantage over competing automakers today is how it has updated the auto business model. Bloated dealerships are out of the picture, marketing budgets can be slashed, and Tesla can now generate more money on each sale than competitors can. And the new model might give Tesla a financial advantage for a while.

A Tesla Model Y. Image source: Tesla.

When it came to rethinking the auto business model, Tesla started with where we buy vehicles. In the case of the auto industry, dealers have always played an outsized role in the sales process, but for relatively antiquated reasons by 2020 standards.

Dealers at one time gave scale to manufacturers and allowed for local service and sales that theoretically gave local communities better choice and service, rather than being controlled by a global behemoth. But with information so readily available in 2020, the dealer model is looking very out of date.

Manufacturers like Ford (NYSE:F) and General Motors (NYSE:GM) are stuck with the existing dealer model, and that can actually hurt their margins. Dealers take part of the profit of each sale, so you can see that margins are lower than at Tesla.

TSLA Gross Profit Margin (Annual) data by YCharts.

Even if legacy manufacturers wanted to get out of the dealer business, it would be very difficult. Franchises have contracts that are nearly impossible to get out of, and there are hundreds of dealers to negotiate with if they wanted to move in that direction.

To make matters worse, dealers can be the reason that companies don't make big product and culture shifts quickly. Look at the Chevy Bolt, which was a focus of GM corporate but was drowned out by dealers who are more interested in selling SUVs and trucks. Tesla can change on a dime if it wants to, while companies like Ford and GM are forced to handle dealerships all over the country if they want to change strategies. That's a big advantage to Tesla as the auto industry changes.

One of the big advantages Tesla has is that it doesn't have to spend on marketing the way other manufacturers do. Automakers spend billions on TV, radio, print, and search ads just to tell customers about their products. When Tesla launches a new product, it has a direct line to customers and gets lots of free media attention.

Elon Musk is arguably the most valuable CEO in the industry today, and his ability to market Tesla's products without spending any money is a big reason why.

The argument for Tesla disrupting the auto business is that it's simply too hard to turn a giant automaker like Ford, GM, or Toyota, which have spent decades perfecting their existing business model. Changing to electric vehicles involves everything from design to manufacturing to building a charging network -- and that's before we make it to the dealer network.

Tesla has been able to rethink enough of the auto business that it could grow faster and have higher margins than competitors. That's the bullish case for the stock and why investors keep pushing it higher right now.

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Tesla's Biggest Advantage in the Auto Industry - Motley Fool

Turnpike Authority teams with Tesla to more than triple EV chargers – NJBIZ

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New Jersey Turnpike Authority commissioners approved an agreement Tuesday that will bring new electric vehicle charging stations to eight Turnpike service areas, increasing the total of EV chargers on the Turnpike from 20 to 76.

The authority says the licensing agreement allows Tesla to install eight V3 Superchargers, the newest version of the companys proprietary charging technology, at each of six service areas and to double the number of Superchargers already in place at two other service areas. Tesla also will build the utility infrastructure necessary for third-party providers to install at least two dozen additional non-Tesla charging stations on the Turnpike.

Tesla has 223 Superchargers in New Jersey.

Gov. Phil Murphy unveils New Jerseys Energy Master Plan and signs an executive order directing a new suite of climate regulations at Stockton University on Jan. 27, 2020. EDWIN J. TORRES/GOVERNORS OFFICE

Our ambitious goal to register 330,000 zero emission vehicles by 2025 is only possible with a collaborative effort across state agencies and our private sector partners to further develop New Jerseys electric vehicle ecosystem, Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement. Todays announcement builds on the momentum of legislation I signed into law last month establishing a 10-year, $300 million rebate program to incentivize electric vehicle ownership throughout the Garden State. With this important addition to New Jerseys renewable energy infrastructure, we are one step closer to achieving 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

In January, Murphy signed the most aggressive EV law in the nation, making available $300 million in zero-emission vehicle rebate funding over the next 10 years. Tuesdaysannouncement builds off these actions and investments across the state.

This is an agreement with Tesla, but Tesla owners are not the only drivers who will enjoy greater access to charging facilities on the Turnpike as a result of it, New Jersey Department of Transportation Commissioner Diane Gutierrez-Scaccetti, who serves as chair of the Turnpike board, said in a statement.

Gutierrez-Scaccetti

Tesla will install infrastructure that will offer opportunities for other providers to install non-Tesla chargers, so all electric vehicle owners who use the Turnpike will benefit, she added.

Under the amended licensing agreement, Tesla will double the number of charging stalls at Molly Pitcher and Joyce Kilmer, bringing the total at those service areas to eight apiece.The company will also install eight charging stalls each at the Clara Barton (southbound between interchanges 2 and 1), John Fenwick (northbound between interchanges 1 and 2), Walt Whitman (southbound between interchanges 4 and 3), James Fenimore Cooper (northbound between interchanges 4 and 5), Richard Stockton (southbound between interchanges 7A and 7), and Woodrow Wilson (northbound between interchanges 7 and 7A) service areas.

Tesla plans to begin installation of the new Superchargers as soon as it has the necessary permits and approvals. Once all the Tesla charging stations called for in the licensing agreement have been installed, there will be electric vehicle charging facilities at nine of the 12 New Jersey Turnpike service areas.

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Turnpike Authority teams with Tesla to more than triple EV chargers - NJBIZ

Virgin Galactic Stock Is Nothing Like Tesla Its Light-Years Worse – CCN.com

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Virgin Galactic Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya is upset that analysts are calling SPCE stock a bubble. He claims the space tourism company offers investors a unique Tesla-style narrative, along with $2.4 billion in potential revenue.

Credit where credit is due: Palihapitiyas argument is out of this world. But not in a good way.

Space tourism sounds very intriguing. Hop in a rocket and go on an awe-inspiring voyage around the Earth. The Instagram opportunities alone are unfathomably attractive.

Thats why its not entirely surprising that Virgin Galactic stock has been on an incredible run in 2020, with SPCE shares up more than 180% even after the recent stock market sell-off.

Palihapitiya, clearly fed up with all the accusations that SPCE stock is a bubble, went on cable television to make his case. Unfortunately, everything he said confirmed that Virgin Galactics rally is exactly that.

He began with this gem:

Theres a setup [in the market] where theres no real growth, theres no unique stories and theres nothing that can give you long-term outlook

Essentially what this means is that frustrated investors with capital to burn are desperately seeking to get their money out of low-yielding cash. Theyll throw it at practically anything in the hope it blasts off.

Over the last few years, this has meant the growth story is often more significant than the economic fundamentals of a business.

Beyond Meat and Tesla are examples of companies like this. (Well get to why it isnt fair to compare them to Virgin Galactic stock later.)

SPCE is the product of excessive speculation, which in many ways is the purest definition of a bubble.

Next, Palihapitiya suggested that his space tourism business has a sizeable amount of demand, some $2.4 billion. This is based on the statistic that roughly 8,000 people have expressed interest in taking a flight.

Unfortunately, this pent-up demand is rather, well, pent-up.

Currently, just one spaceship is nearing operation, with two more on the way, leaving an important question unanswered. How many passengers can even fly on a ship?

Per Virgin Galactic, just six passengers at a time.

Not sixty.

Not sixteen.

Six.

You dont have to be a market wizard to figure out that 8,000-divided-by-6 isnt exactly cash waiting to be delivered.

We wont go into how many of the 8,000 who signed up are just dreamers, or how realistic $300,000 is as a price-tag.

And according to their CEO, ticket costs could actually be as high as $1 million.

Ignoring the dreamers, how many genuine prospective passengers would casually stomach that $700,000 price hike?

Its not like there isnt plenty of well-funded competition out there.

Finally, the Virgin Galactic chairman made a questionable comparison between SPCE and Tesla.

Tesla may be controversial, but its a company that actually has a product, sells a lot of them, and is a class-leader in terms of innovation.

Sky-high cash burn links SPCE and TSLA, but thats where the fundamental similarities end.

Tesla stock has been accused of being a bubble, and thats an absolutely valid thesis at least if you prioritize conventional accounting and valuation metrics.

But Virgin Galactic is up more than double TSLA this year:

If you think Tesla is a bubble, then that makes Virgin Galactic a balloon.

Sir Richard Bransons venture into the billionaire playground of space travel looks more like Beyond Meat (NASDAQ: BYND) than Tesla.

Its the only publicly traded game in town for space travel, so it gets a larger slice of the speculative interest in that concept. BYND enjoys the same status as a company solely devoted to alternative-meat products.

Yet its probably unfair to compare Beyond Meat to Virgin as well, because BYND has shown glimmers of profitability lately.

Virgin Galactic is the very definition of a bubble, and its backers should embrace that fact not dispute it with questionable forecasts. Such optimistic guidance can often be precisely why gullible investors get hurt.

Disclaimer: This article represents the authors opinion and should not be considered investment or trading advice from CCN.com.

This article was edited by Josiah Wilmoth.

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Virgin Galactic Stock Is Nothing Like Tesla Its Light-Years Worse - CCN.com

Bombs, bats, ants and now trees Teslas big green hurdle in Germany – MarketWatch

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Bombs, bats, ants and now trees.

Elon Musks dream of opening his first Tesla TSLA, -12.81% gigafactory in Europe has been plagued by a series of obstacles involving all of the above.

Production at the site in Grnheide in the eastern state of Brandenburg near Berlin, was scheduled to start in July 2021, with plans to build 500,000 units of the Y SUV and the Model 3 sedan per year.

But this weekend, a German court ordered Tesla to stop cutting down trees on the site until it considers an appeal by environmental group Green League Brandenburg, which argues that the factory could pollute the areas drinking water and other issues.

Responding in emailed comments, a Tesla spokesperson in Switzerland said there was no official statement on the matter. Facts are the Higher Administrative Court (OVG) Berlin-Brandenburg has asked the Brandenburg Government to initiate a preliminary halt to the deforestation so it has enough time to review the filed case papers. A statement from OVG is expected for tomorrow the earliest, the spokesperson said.

Teslas plan involves cutting down 70 hectares, which is expected to be increased to 300 hectares later on. The latest holdup comes after seven U.S. World War II bombs found on the factorys site had to be defused last month.

Tesla paid 40.91 million ($44.33 million) for the factory plot, which apparently came with lots of critters. German media reported last week that the U.S. electric car manufacturer had to promise to not only plant three times the number of trees it chops down, but relocate ants, lizards and hang 400 nesting boxes for birds.

The company has just a few weeks left to complete the task ahead of the start of the breeding season for birds in March. Last month, CEO Elon Musk tweeted that Giga Berlin / GF4 will absolutely be designed with sustainability and the environment in mind.

Tesla has two other vehicle factories in the U.S. and then in China, where a Shanghai factory was up and running in under a year and a half once it got the needed permissions.

But should analysts worry about a potential thorn in the side of Tesla, whose shares have gained a whopping 91% so far this year, driven in part by analyst upgrades? David Whiston, an analyst for Morningstar Research Services, told MarketWatch via email that its too early to say whether investors should be worried.

Worst-case scenario is Tesla wastes time and some money and eventually pulls out and finds another site in Europe, but its way too early to think about that yet. Tesla needs to negotiate and work something out, said Whiston.

There is precedent in the auto industry for government making it too difficult to build a plant. Tata withdrew from West Bengal in India in 2008 for a Nano factory and built the plant in another part of the country, he added.

Politicians from Germanys Christian Democrat and Free Democrat parties have warned that the legal battle waged against the Gigafactory would inflict serious and long-lasting damage on Germanys image as a place to do business. Some were quick to suggest over Twitter on Monday, that Tesla would be welcome elsewhere if the Grnheide site doesnt work out:

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Bombs, bats, ants and now trees Teslas big green hurdle in Germany - MarketWatch

Tesla Voltage Reduced at Jefferies on Valuation Concern – TheStreet

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Teslas(TSLA) - Get Reportrun over the past few weeks has analysts at Jefferies concerned about theelectric-vehicle producer'svaluation, leading the firm to downgrade the stock to hold from buy.

Jefferies raised its price target on Tesla to $800 a share from $600. But that new target still represents 4.1% potential downside from the stocks Monday closing price of $833.79.

At last check Tesla shares were down 2.9% at $810. The stock had dropped more than 9% in the three trading days through Monday.

The Palo Alto, Calif., companys shares havejumped 60%since Jan. 14, and Jefferies says that at least some of this increase is well-deserved.

Faster debt reduction, above-consensus growth guidance in cars and energy, and battery-industry news flow over the past six weeks are all reasons for the stocks increase.

Jefferies is bullish on the auto segment, raising its price-target valuation for the division to $600 from $500 thanks to increased growth/profitability expectations.

The Jefferies note is mostly bullish. The firm calls Tesla one of the few EV manufacturers likely to grow earnings and return on capital investment over the next two years.

The firm also expects five-year compound annual revenue growth to exceed 20% as Tesla ramps up Model 3 sedan and Model Y compact crossover production.

The $800 price target factors in Tesla pursuing additional growth in storage/generation and selling batteries to third party manufacturers.

Jefferies has a market estimate for stationary storage cells between $90 billion and $235 billion by 2025 through 2030.

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Tesla Helps Solve Hit-And-Run Mystery In Olive Garden Parking Lot – CBS Denver

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LITTLETON, Colo. (CBS4) A woman in Littleton says video captured by a Tesla helped to solve a hit-and-run accident that caused more than $2,000 worth of damage to her car.

Its a been a bad situation that turned into a good situation, Rose Johnson told CBS4.

A few weeks ago, Johnson and her family were having dinner at an Olive Garden near Wadsworth Boulevard and Crestline Avenue. When they went to leave, they found their car had been hit in the parking lot. The driver of the other vehicle had left the scene.

I looked at my car, it looked pretty bad and I was like I cant believe this is happening,' she said.

Luckily, Johnson said two men saw the accident happen and were waiting in the parking lot. They told Johnson they were able to get the license plate on the vehicle that hit her car.

They were like Hey, well show up in court, well do whatever, she explained. But, by the way we actually have a Tesla and it has four security cameras. Im going to download the footage and send it to you.

Johnson showed CBS4s Makenzie OKeefe, that in the first video you can see the truck parked next to her car. In another video, you see the truck pulling out of the parking lot.

There they go, she said. They just drive away and theyre gone.

One angle of the Tesla security camera, however, actually captured the collision. The Tesla was parked next to Johnsons car and the video that was captured shows the impact of the truck hitting Johnsons car.

She hit the car so much that it rocks and the tires moved, Johnson said. So to me, you cant hit a car that hard and not know you hit it.

Paired with the license plate information, the Tesla video helped Lakewood police track down the hit-and-run driver. Officers say the driver was charged with careless driving and leaving the scene of an accident.

For Johnson, shes just thankful her family is safe and that the Good Samaritans were able to use their car to help crack the case.

It just makes me really thankful that there are cars out there, that can prove what happened so justice can happen, she said.

In September, CBS4 was the first to report on a vandalism incident in Broomfield where woman was caught on camera keying a mans Tesla. That woman later turned herself into police. Last month, a man was accused of knifing a Tesla in Conifer and that situation was also captured on the vehicles built-in camera.

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Teslas Secret Weapon In The EV Revolution – Yahoo Finance

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The future of electric vehicles around the world depends on China. While Europe has long been at the forefront of the electric car industry, with Tesla leading the charge, almost all of those European EV companies have to go through China at some point in the production process, as Chinese industry has a veritable chokehold on one of the essential components of the standard electric car.

As Oilprice reported back in 2018, China Indirectly Controls EV Markets through the nearly monopolized production of electric car batteries. The European market should start contending with the likely outcome that European car production will soon be making a mass move to China, Oilprice wrote two years ago. This will have a major impact on the region that has long counted companies like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Renault among its economic strongholds.

At the time, China produced a whopping two thirds of the global supply of lithium ion batteries, which are the most common kind of batteries used in a standard electric vehicle. Furthermore, these highly valuable batteries make up a staggering 40 percent of the cars value. As it stands, Europe is far from being able to compete with China when it comes to the production of lithium ion batteries. In fact, currently the entire continent is estimated to hold just 1 percent of the market, Oilprice went on to say. Moving the production of electric cars to China is a no-brainer for European car companies.

All this is to say that it should come as no surprise when reports this week said that in order for Elon Musk to make good on his promises to make electric vehicles more affordable and accessible to the mass market and the average consumer, China will have to be involved. Once again, the problem comes down to batteries. This time, however, the issue is not lithium, but cobalt.

Related: The Solar Sector Is Suffering From Coronavirus Contagion

According to Reuters, EV manufacturers usually use nickel-cobalt-aluminum (NCA) or nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries on passenger vehicles because of their higher energy density, which is critical in determining how far an EV can drive on single charge. Cobalt, however, is one of the primary reasons that electric car batteries are so expensive, at 40 percent of the cars value.

Tesla already has moved much of their production to China, and it is at one of the companys Chinese plants that their transition away from Cobalt is taking place. This week Reuters reported that Tesla is in advanced stages of talks to use batteries from CATL that contain no cobalt - one of the most expensive metals in electric vehicle batteries - in cars made at its China plant. Instead, the plant would adopt lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries which will be cheaper than its existing batteries by a double-digit percent.

Tesla hopes that doing so will help reverse the trend of slumping EV sales in China and abroad. As Norwegian news site CCN reports, Elon Musk envisioned the Model 3 as a mass market car but it currently competes with luxury vehicles. The article continues: Even at the luxury car price, the Model 3 now outsells the more expensive Model S and the Model X by a wide margin, demonstrating the markets hunger for more affordable EVs. Last year the Model 3 accounted for slightly over 80% of Teslas sales.

The elimination of cobalt, however, is only one part of an industry-wide problem concerning rare earth minerals. Lithium could also be a problem for the EV sector going forward. The Renewable Revolution Has A Lithium Problem, Oilprice proclaimed a year ago. First of all, this is just another opportunity for China to dominate the market, as their incredibly resource-rich environment puts them in control of many rare earth minerals markets. If all the conventionally-fueled cars in the world were replaced with electric cars overnight, the global supply of lithium would be completely depleted in just approximately fifty years, Oilprice reported. Yes, this is purely hypothetical; about three million electric cars are currently in use globally--just a drop in the automotive ocean. That being said, that number is projected to skyrocket over the next decade, reaching a global fleet of approximately 125 million by 2030.

While this increasing transition to electric vehicles could spell trouble for lithium reserves in the future, its overall a promising development towards decarbonization on the eve of potentially catastrophic climate change. And its not bad news for Tesla either.

By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com

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A Tiny Piece of Tape Tricked Teslas Into Speeding Up 50 MPH – WIRED

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This week was filled with wide-scale calamity. Hundreds of millions of PCs have components whose firmware is vulnerable to hackingwhich is to say, pretty much all of them. It's a problem that's been known about for years, but doesn't seem to get any better.

Likewise, Bluetooth implementation mistakes in seven SoCsystem on chipshave exposed at least 480 internet-of-things devices to a range of attacks. IoT manufacturers will often outsource components, so a mistake in one SoC can impact a wide range of connected doodads. The most troubling part, though, is that medical devices like pacemakers and blood glucose monitors are among the affected tech.

YouTube Gaming, meanwhile, wants to take Twitch's crown as the king of videogame streaming. But its most-viewed channels are almost all scams and cheats, a moderation challenge that it'll have to take more seriously if it wants the legitimacy it's spending big money to attain. In another corner of Alphabet's world, hundreds of Chrome extensions were caught siphoning data from people who installed them, part of a sprawling adware scheme.

WIRED reported exclusively this week that US officials have pinned a wave of cyberattacks against the country of Georgia on Russia's notorious Sandworm hackers. The hack itself was brazendefacing 15,000 websites and disrupting two TV networksbut the attribution serves mostly as a warning to Russia that it shouldn't attempt the same sort of malarky stateside.

With the firing of US director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire this week, President Trump has continued his gutting of senior national intelligence positions. Probably not a great strategy in the long run, especially since Russia is actively supporting both Trump and Bernie Sanders this year, just like it did in 2016. (In fairness, Russia only wants Trump to actually win.)

And that's not all! Every Saturday we round up the security and privacy stories that we didnt break or report on in depth but think you should know about nonetheless. Click on the headlines to read them, and stay safe out there.

Researchers at McAfee have demonstrated a new spin on an old trick. By subtly tampering with a speed limit signin this case, literally adding a two-inch strip of black tapethey were able to trick the Mobileye EyeQ3 camera on a 2016 Tesla Model X and Model S into feeding bad information to the vehicles' autonomous driving features, sending both cars into a rapid acceleration. It's a low-tech version of the well-known problem of adversarial examples, image alterations that cause machine learning systems to misinterpret data. (Intel, which owns Mobileye, disputes that it's an adversarial attack, since the tape could have fooled a human eye as well.) The good news is that the problem doesn't affect 2020 Teslas, which no longer use Mobileye technology, and newer versions of the Mobileye camera seem impervious as well. That doesn't help older models, though, which remain susceptible to the shenanigans below:

Ransomware has long targeted victims that have the most to lose. That's typically meant hospitals and governments. But lately hackers have targeted another sensitive field: critical infrastructure. The latest example comes from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which reported this week that a natural gas compression facility went down for two days as they grappled with a ransomware infection. There's not really any good news here, but it certainly could have been worse; the hackers appear not to have targeted industrial control system components specifically. They got lucky with a phishing email, and were only able to impact the Windows-based portions of the victim's network.

If you stayed at an MGM Resorts hotel sometime before 2017, the bad news is that someone hacked one of their servers and stole data relating to over 10 million guests. The worse news is that said data has since been discovered in an online hacking forum, as first reported by ZDNet. The haul includes names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, and dates of birth, and celebrities, politicians, and journalists are among those affected. (Sorry, Jack Dorsey!) It could have been worseno financial information appears to be involvedbut as with any breach, look out for phishing attempts or identity theft.

Adware is like gnats: everywhere, annoying, impossible to get rid of but relatively harmless. But you still have to try, which Google did this week by expelling nearly 600 apps both from the Play Store and its ad networks. That includes 45 apps from a single developer, China-based Cheetah Mobile. Google cited "disruptive ads" as the reason for the removal, framing it as part of a broader crackdown on fraudulent behavior.

In other data-compromise news, the Defense Information Systems Agencywhich provides secure communications support to the US president and militaryinformed potential victims this week that their Social Security numbers may have been part of a breach that occurred between May and July 2019. They'll spring for free credit monitoring if you were affected, but honestly you've already got that through Marriott or Equifax or take your pick, right?

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A Tiny Piece of Tape Tricked Teslas Into Speeding Up 50 MPH - WIRED

Tesla’s Failure To Reach $1000 Will Give Investors Bubble Vertigo – Time To Sell – Forbes

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'Starman' heads towards Mars in a Tesla roadster (Photo by SpaceX via Getty Images)

Tesla's runup is one for the record books, but its inability to reach $1000 reveals multiple signs that the party is over. Now comes the scary period for shareholders because there are only weak downside support levels. Without them, potential buyers will not have the confidence to act, setting up a runaway train scenario as current shareholders run for the exit to protect their gains (if they bought early) or limit their losses.

Disclosure: Author does not hold Tesla stock

Tesla is top dog in this stock market

No other stock in the top-performing Nasdaq 100 Index comes close to Tesla's performance. Plotting its path upwards flatlines the trillion-dollar Nasdaq leaders' price moves.

Tesla's performance compared to the four $trillion leading companies

Ranking Tesla's performance makes all other top-performing Nasdaq 100 stocks pale.

Tesla performance comparison table

So, why should it reverse now?

For the same reason it ran up so far and so fast: Over-optimism. A stock run based on excitement always runs out of fuel when the "last" person buys. Then the hopeful air that lies below the current price becomes evident. Those gap-ups in the rise that produced confidence? Now, they look like air pockets through which the stock can dive.

Tesla intraday graph (30-minute intervals)

So, as investors shift their upward gaze at Tesla's $1000 objective to the empty air below, they will suffer from bubble vertigo. Like a mountain climber that turns to admire the view, there is a stomach-wrenching reaction at the thought of falling from such a height.

Tesla's rise out-distances the moving averages

Tesla has only weak and much lower support levels

What about those fantastic developments coming?

The reality is that, in the stock market, all bubbles have fantastic developments ahead. Unfortunately, all such exciting scenarios take longer, hit road bumps and gain competitors. Foretelling the results of technological developments, product creation, consumer acceptance along with basic price vs. cost results requires wide latitude.

In other words, fantastic visions are accompanied by high uncertainties and high risks.

The bottom line

Tesla is an exciting company with ambitious plans. And all that excitement has driven Tesla's stock faster and higher than most stocks ever experience.

That rare stock performance is aided and abetted by investors attracted to fast rising stocks, which, in turn, ignites interest in others. Unfortunately, that is how stock bubbles come about, and it looks like Tesla is the latest version of that excess.

A curious situation occurs with a stock that seemingly offers easy and quick profits: High prices increase confidence in further returns instead of properly heightening concern about the true accompaniment: Rising risk.

The only "cure" is a reversal that goes "too far" to be viewed as an opportunity to buy more. Tesla stock's stupendous price rise should be seen as a corresponding rise in risk, putting it in a fragile position. Furthermore, the $1000 magic level, whether the stock touches it or not, is meaningless except to those excited about the added profits it represents.

For all these reasons, Tesla certainly looks like a sale. Love Tesla, the company? That's fine, but don't ignore what history teaches: Exciting company stocks can get ahead of reality, setting up a dramatic drop to bring them back to earth (and produce an opportunity to buy at a reasonable price, thereby creating a foundation for a non-bubble rise).

Apple experienced a bubble runup and collapse in 2012, and so can Tesla in 2020.

Apple's 2011-2013 bubble and collapse

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Tesla's Failure To Reach $1000 Will Give Investors Bubble Vertigo - Time To Sell - Forbes

Helix of an Elusive Rare Earth Metal Could Help Push Moore’s Law to The Next Level – ScienceAlert

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To cram ever more computing power into your pocket, engineers need to come up with increasingly ingenious ways to add transistors to an already crowded space.

Unfortunately there's a limit to how small you can make a wire. But a twisted form of rare earth metal just might have what it takes to push the boundaries a little further.

A team of researchers funded by the US Army have discovered a way to turn twisted nanowires of one of the rarest of rare earth metals,tellurium, into a material with just the right properties that make it an ideal transistor at just a couple of nanometres across.

"This tellurium material is really unique," says Peide Ye, an electrical engineer from Purdue University.

"It builds a functional transistor with the potential to be the smallest in the world."

Transistors are the work horse of anything that computes information, using tiny changes in charge to prevent or allow larger currents to flow.

Typically made of semiconducting materials, they can be thought of as traffic intersections for electrons. A small voltage change in one place opens the gate for current to flow, serving as both a switch and an amplifier.

Combinations of open and closed switches are the physical units representing the binary language underpinning logic in computer operations. As such, the more you have in one spot, the more operations you can run.

Ever since the first chunky transistor was prototyped a little more than 70 years ago, a variety of methods and novel materials have led to regular downsizing of the transistor.

In fact the shrinking was so regular that co-founder of the computer giant Intel, George Moore, famouslynoted in 1965 that it would follow a trend of transistors doubling in density every two years.

Today, that trend has slowed considerably. For one thing, more transistors in one spot means more heat building up.

But there are also only so many ways you can shave atoms from a material and still have it function as a transistor. Which is where tellurium comes in.

Though not exactly a common element in Earth's crust, it's a semi-metal in high demand, finding a place in a variety of alloys to improve hardness and help it resist corrosion.

It also has properties of a semiconductor; carrying a current under some circumstances and acting as a resistor under others.

Curious about its characteristics on a nanoscale, engineers grew single-dimensional chains of the element and took a close look at them under an electron microscope. Surprisingly, the super-thin 'wire' wasn't exactly a neat line of atoms.

"Silicon atoms look straight, but these tellurium atoms are like a snake. This is a very original kind of structure," says Ye.

On closer inspection they worked out that the chain was made of pairs of tellurium atoms bonded strongly together, and then stacking into a crystal form pulled into a helix by weaker van der Waal forces.

Building any kind of electronics from a crinkly nanowire is just asking for trouble, so to give the material some structure the researchers went on the hunt for something to encapsulate it in.

The solution, they found, was a nanotube of boron nitride. Not only did the tellurium helix slip neatly inside, the tube acted as an insulator, ticking all the boxes that would make it suit life as a transistor.

Most importantly, the whole semiconducting wire was a mere 2 nanometres across, putting it in the same league as the 1 nanometre record set a few years ago.

Time will tell if the team can squeeze it down further with fewer chains, or even if it will function as expected in a circuit.

If it works as hoped, it could contribute to the next generation of miniaturised electronics, potentially halving the size of current cutting edge microchips.

"Next, the researchers will optimise the device to further improve its performance, and demonstrate a highly efficient functional electronic circuit using these tiny transistors, potentially through collaboration with ARL researchers," says Joe Qiu, program manager for the Army Research Office.

Even if the concept pans out, there's a variety of other challenges for shrinking technology to overcome before we'll find it in our pockets.

While tellurium isn't currently considered to be a scarce resource, in spite of its relative rarity, it could be in high demand in future electronics such as solar cells.

This research was published in Nature Electronics.

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Helix of an Elusive Rare Earth Metal Could Help Push Moore's Law to The Next Level - ScienceAlert

Were not prepared for the end of Moores Law – MIT Technology Review

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Gordon Moores 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become known as Moores Law to a doubling of transistors on a chip every two years.

Since then, his prediction has defined the trajectory of technology and, in many ways, of progress itself.

Moores argument was an economic one. Integrated circuits, with multiple transistors and other electronic devices interconnected with aluminum metal lines on a tiny square of silicon wafer, had been invented a few years earlier by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. Moore, the companys R&D director, realized, as he wrote in 1965, that with these new integrated circuits, the cost per component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of components. It was a beautiful bargainin theory, the more transistors you added, the cheaper each one got. Moore also saw that there was plenty of room for engineering advances to increase the number of transistors you could affordably and reliably put on a chip.

Soon these cheaper, more powerful chips would become what economists like to call a general purpose technologyone so fundamental that it spawns all sorts of other innovations and advances in multiple industries. A few years ago, leading economists credited the information technology made possible by integrated circuits with a third of US productivity growth since 1974. Almost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moores prediction. It has also fueled todays breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetic medicine, by giving machine-learning techniques the ability to chew through massive amounts of data to find answers.

But how did a simple prediction, based on extrapolating from a graph of the number of transistors by yeara graph that at the time had only a few data pointscome to define a half-century of progress? In part, at least, because the semiconductor industry decided it would.

Wikimedia

Moore wrote that cramming more components onto integrated circuits, the title of his 1965 article, would lead to such wonders as home computersor at least terminals connected to a central computerautomatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment. In other words, stick to his road map of squeezing ever more transistors onto chips and it would lead you to the promised land. And for the following decades, a booming industry, the government, and armies of academic and industrial researchers poured money and time into upholding Moores Law, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that kept progress on track with uncanny accuracy. Though the pace of progress has slipped in recent years, the most advanced chips today have nearly 50 billion transistors.

Every year since 2001, MIT Technology Review has chosen the 10 most important breakthrough technologies of the year. Its a list of technologies that, almost without exception, are possible only because of the computation advances described by Moores Law.

For some of the items on this years list the connection is obvious: consumer devices, including watches and phones, infused with AI; climate-change attribution made possible by improved computer modeling and data gathered from worldwide atmospheric monitoring systems; and cheap, pint-size satellites. Others on the list, including quantum supremacy, molecules discovered using AI, and even anti-aging treatments and hyper-personalized drugs, are due largely to the computational power available to researchers.

But what happens when Moores Law inevitably ends? Or what if, as some suspect, it has already died, and we are already running on the fumes of the greatest technology engine of our time?

RIP

Its over. This year that became really clear, says Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT and a pioneer of parallel computing, in which multiple calculations are performed simultaneously. The newest Intel fabrication plant, meant to build chips with minimum feature sizes of 10 nanometers, was much delayed, delivering chips in 2019, five years after the previous generation of chips with 14-nanometer features. Moores Law, Leiserson says, was always about the rate of progress, and were no longer on that rate. Numerous other prominent computer scientists have also declared Moores Law dead in recent years. In early 2019, the CEO of the large chipmaker Nvidia agreed.

In truth, its been more a gradual decline than a sudden death. Over the decades, some, including Moore himself at times, fretted that they could see the end in sight, as it got harder to make smaller and smaller transistors. In 1999, an Intel researcher worried that the industrys goal of making transistors smaller than 100 nanometers by 2005 faced fundamental physical problems with no known solutions, like the quantum effects of electrons wandering where they shouldnt be.

For years the chip industry managed to evade these physical roadblocks. New transistor designs were introduced to better corral the electrons. New lithography methods using extreme ultraviolet radiation were invented when the wavelengths of visible light were too thick to precisely carve out silicon features of only a few tens of nanometers. But progress grew ever more expensive. Economists at Stanford and MIT have calculated that the research effort going into upholding Moores Law has risen by a factor of 18 since 1971.

Likewise, the fabs that make the most advanced chips are becoming prohibitively pricey. The cost of a fab is rising at around 13% a year, and is expected to reach $16 billion or more by 2022. Not coincidentally, the number of companies with plans to make the next generation of chips has now shrunk to only three, down from eight in 2010 and 25 in 2002.

Finding successors to todays silicon chips will take years of research.If youre worried about what will replace moores Law, its time to panic.

Nonetheless, Intelone of those three chipmakersisnt expecting a funeral for Moores Law anytime soon. Jim Keller, who took over as Intels head of silicon engineering in 2018, is the man with the job of keeping it alive. He leads a team of some 8,000 hardware engineers and chip designers at Intel. When he joined the company, he says, many were anticipating the end of Moores Law. If they were right, he recalls thinking, thats a drag and maybe he had made a really bad career move.

But Keller found ample technical opportunities for advances. He points out that there are probably more than a hundred variables involved in keeping Moores Law going, each of which provides different benefits and faces its own limits. It means there are many ways to keep doubling the number of devices on a chipinnovations such as 3D architectures and new transistor designs.

These days Keller sounds optimistic. He says he has been hearing about the end of Moores Law for his entire career. After a while, he decided not to worry about it. He says Intel is on pace for the next 10 years, and he will happily do the math for you: 65 billion (number of transistors) times 32 (if chip density doubles every two years) is 2 trillion transistors. Thats a 30 times improvement in performance, he says, adding that if software developers are clever, we could get chips that are a hundred times faster in 10 years.

Still, even if Intel and the other remaining chipmakers can squeeze out a few more generations of even more advanced microchips, the days when you could reliably count on faster, cheaper chips every couple of years are clearly over. That doesnt, however, mean the end of computational progress.

Time to panic

Neil Thompson is an economist, but his office is at CSAIL, MITs sprawling AI and computer center, surrounded by roboticists and computer scientists, including his collaborator Leiserson. In a new paper, the two document ample room for improving computational performance through better software, algorithms, and specialized chip architecture.

One opportunity is in slimming down so-called software bloat to wring the most out of existing chips. When chips could always be counted on to get faster and more powerful, programmers didnt need to worry much about writing more efficient code. And they often failed to take full advantage of changes in hardware architecture, such as the multiple cores, or processors, seen in chips used today.

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Thompson and his colleagues showed that they could get a computationally intensive calculation to run some 47 times faster just by switching from Python, a popular general-purpose programming language, to the more efficient C. Thats because C, while it requires more work from the programmer, greatly reduces the required number of operations, making a program run much faster. Further tailoring the code to take full advantage of a chip with 18 processing cores sped things up even more. In just 0.41 seconds, the researchers got a result that took seven hours with Python code.

That sounds like good news for continuing progress, but Thompson worries it also signals the decline of computers as a general purpose technology. Rather than lifting all boats, as Moores Law has, by offering ever faster and cheaper chips that were universally available, advances in software and specialized architecture will now start to selectively target specific problems and business opportunities, favoring those with sufficient money and resources.

Indeed, the move to chips designed for specific applications, particularly in AI, is well under way. Deep learning and other AI applications increasingly rely on graphics processing units (GPUs) adapted from gaming, which can handle parallel operations, while companies like Google, Microsoft, and Baidu are designing AI chips for their own particular needs. AI, particularly deep learning, has a huge appetite for computer power, and specialized chips can greatly speed up its performance, says Thompson.

But the trade-off is that specialized chips are less versatile than traditional CPUs. Thompson is concerned that chips for more general computing are becoming a backwater, slowing the overall pace of computer improvement, as he writes in an upcoming paper, The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology.

At some point, says Erica Fuchs, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, those developing AI and other applications will miss the decreases in cost and increases in performance delivered by Moores Law. Maybe in 10 years or 30 yearsno one really knows whenyoure going to need a device with that additional computation power, she says.

The problem, says Fuchs, is that the successors to todays general purpose chips are unknown and will take years of basic research and development to create. If youre worried about what will replace Moores Law, she suggests, the moment to panic is now. There are, she says, really smart people in AI who arent aware of the hardware constraints facing long-term advances in computing. Whats more, she says, because application--specific chips are proving hugely profitable, there are few incentives to invest in new logic devices and ways of doing computing.

Wanted: A Marshall Plan for chips

In 2018, Fuchs and her CMU colleagues Hassan Khan and David Hounshell wrote a paper tracing the history of Moores Law and identifying the changes behind todays lack of the industry and government collaboration that fostered so much progress in earlier decades. They argued that the splintering of the technology trajectories and the short-term private profitability of many of these new splinters means we need to greatly boost public investment in finding the next great computer technologies.

If economists are right, and much of the growth in the 1990s and early 2000s was a result of microchipsand if, as some suggest, the sluggish productivity growth that began in the mid-2000s reflects the slowdown in computational progressthen, says Thompson, it follows you should invest enormous amounts of money to find the successor technology. Were not doing it. And its a public policy failure.

Theres no guarantee that such investments will pay off. Quantum computing, carbon nanotube transistors, even spintronics, are enticing possibilitiesbut none are obvious replacements for the promise that Gordon Moore first saw in a simple integrated circuit. We need the research investments now to find out, though. Because one prediction is pretty much certain to come true: were always going to want more computing power.

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Were not prepared for the end of Moores Law - MIT Technology Review

The Unsolved Murder of Civil Rights Activist Harry Moore – Smithsonian.com

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It was late on Christmas night, 1951, but Harry and Harriette Moore had yet to open any gifts. Instead they had delayed the festivities in anticipation of the arrival of their younger daughter, Evangeline, who was taking a train home from Washington, D.C. to celebrate along with her sister and grandmother. The Moores had another cause for celebration: the day marked their 25th wedding anniversary, a testament to their unshakeable partnership. But that night in their quiet home on a citrus grove in rural Mims, Florida, the African American couple were fatal victims of a horrific terrorist attack at the hands of those who wanted to silence the Moores.

At 10:20 p.m., a blast ripped apart their bedroom, splintering the floorboards, ceiling and front porch. The explosion was so powerful that witness reported hearing it several miles away. Pamphlets pushing for voters rights floated out of the house and onto the street, remnants of a long fight for justice. Harry Moore had spent much of the last two decades earning the enmity of Floridas white supremacists as he organized for equal pay, voter registration, and justice for murdered African Americans. And yet despite his immense sacrifice and the nations initial shock at his assassination, Moores name soon faded from the pantheon of Civil Rights martyrs.

After the attack, Moores mother and daughter knew they would be unable to get an ambulance willing to transport a black victim, so nearby relatives drove the wounded Harry and Harriette to the town of Sanford, which was more than 30 miles away on a dark, two-lane road bracketed by dense foliage. Harry died shortly after arriving in the hospital, Harriette would die a little more than a week later. When Evangeline arrived at the train station the next day, She didnt see her mother and father, but she saw her aunts and uncles and family members. She knew something was wrong, says Sonya Mallard, coordinator for the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Cultural Complex, who knew Evangeline before her death in 2015. Her uncle broke the news on the drive to the hospital, and her world was never the same again. Never.

In the years before his death, Harry Moore was increasingly a marked manand he knew it. But he had begun charting this course in the 1930s, when he worked tirelessly to register black voters. He later expanded his efforts into fighting injustice in lynching cases (Florida had more lynchings per capita than any other state at the time), putting him in the crosshairs of Floridas most violent and virulent racists.

Harry T. Moore understood that we had to make a better way, we had to change what was going on here in the state of Florida, says Mallard. Traveling around the state on roads where it was too dangerous to even use a public restroom, Moores mother, Rosa, worried hed be killed, but he kept on going because he knew it was bigger than him, says Mallard.

Moore was born in 1905 in the panhandle town of Houston, Florida. His father, Johnny, owned a small shop and worked for the railroad, and died when Harry was just 9 years old. After trying to support her son as a single parent, Rosa sent Harry to live with his aunts in Jacksonville, a hub for African American business and culture that would prove to be influential on the young Moore. After graduating from Florida Memorial College, as todays university was then known, Moore likely could have made a relatively comfortable life in Jacksonville.

However, the climate in Florida as a whole as hostile to African Americans. His formative years were ones of pervasive racial violence often unchecked by officials. Before the 1920 election, displaying the impunity enjoyed by white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan marched in downtown Orlando specifically to intimidate black voters, says Ben Brotemarkle, executive director of the Florida Historical Society. When a man named July Perry came to Orlando from nearby Ocoee to vote, he was beaten, shot and hung from a light post and then the primarily African American town was burned in a mob rampage that killed dozens. For decades after, Ocoee had no black residents and was known as a sundown town; today the city of 46,000 is 21 percent African American.

In 1925, Moore began teaching at a school for black students in Cocoa, Florida, a few miles south of Mims and later assumed the role of principal at the Titusville Colored School. His first year in Cocoa, Harry met Harriette Simms, three years his senior, at a party. She later became a teacher after the birth of their first daughter, Annie Rosalea, known as Peaches. Evangeline was born in 1930.)

His civic activism flowed from his educational activism. He would bring his own materials and educate students about black history, but what he also did was bring in ballots and he taught his students how to vote. He taught his students the importance of the candidates and making a decision to vote for people who took your interests seriously, says Brotemarkle.

In 1934, Moore joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an indication of his growing interest in civic matters. In 1937, Moore pushed for a lawsuit challenging the chasm between black and white teachers salaries in his local Brevard County, with fellow educator John Gilbert as the plaintiff. Moore enlisted the support of NAACP lawyer (and later Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall, the start of their professional collaboration. The lawsuit was defeated in both the Circuit Court and the Florida Supreme Court. For his efforts, the Moores later lost their teachings jobsas did Gilbert.

In the early 1940s, Moore organized the Florida State conference of the NAACP and significantly increased membership (he would later become its first paid executive secretary). He also formed the Progressive Voters League in Florida in 1944. He understood the significance of the power of the vote. He understood the significance of the power of the pen. And he wrote letters and typed letters to anyone and everyone that would listen. And he knew that [African Americans] had to have a voice and we had to have it by voting, says Mallard. In 1947, building on the U.S. Supreme Court case in which Marshall successfully argued against Texas white primary that excluded minority voters, Moore organized a letter writing campaign to help rebuff bills proposed in the Florida legislature that would effectively perpetuate white primaries. (As the Tampa Bay Times notes, Florida was a leading innovator of discriminatory barriers to voting.)

Before his death, Moores efforts in the state helped increase the number of black voters by more than 100,000, according to the Moore Cultural Complex, a figure sure to catch the attention of influential politicians.

But success was a risky proposition. Moore was coming into a situation in Central Florida where there was a lot of Klan activity, there were a lot of Klansman who had positions in government, and it was a very tenuous time for civil rights, says Brotemarkle. People were openly being intimidated and kept away from the polls, and Moore worked diligently to fight that.

Moore was willing to risk much more than his job. He first became involved in anti-lynching efforts after three white men kidnapped 15-year-old Willie James Howard, bound him with ropes and drowned him in a river for the crime of passing a note to a white girl in 1944. The perpetual inaction in cases like Howards, in which no one was arrested, tried, or convicted, spurred Moore to effect change. In a 1947 letter to Floridas congressional delegation, Moore wrote We cannot afford to wait until the several states get trained or educated to the point where they can take effective action in such cases. Human life is too valuable for more experimenting of this kind. The Federal Government must be empowered to take the necessary action for the protection of its citizens.

Moore letters show a polite, but persistent, push for change. His scholarly nature obscured the profound courage it took to stand up to the hostile forces around him in Florida. Those who knew him recall a quiet, soft-spoken man. The fiery from the pulpit speech? That was not Harry T. Moore. He was much more behind the scenes, but no less aggressive. You can see it from his letters that he was every bit as brave, says Brotemarkle.

Two years before his death, Moore placed himself in harms way in the most prominent manner yet with his involvement in the Groveland Four incident. The men had been accused of raping a white woman; a mob went to drag them from jail and not finding them there, burned and shot into nearby black residents homes. After their arrest, conviction by an all-white jury was practically a foregone conclusion, despite attorneys assertions that the defendants confessions were physically coerced. The case also pitted Moore against Sherriff Willis McCall, who was investigated numerous times in his career for misconduct related to race.

While transporting two of the suspects, McCall shot them, killing one. McCall claimed he had been attacked, but the shootings elicited furious protest. All this took place against the backdrop of the ongoing legal battleeventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a re-trial, which again ended in the conviction of the surviving suspect, who was represented by Thurgood Marshall. (In recent years, Florida has posthumously pardoned and apologized to all four of the accused).

Moore wrote repeatedly to Governor Fuller Warren, methodically dismantling McCalls claims. He admonished Warren that Florida is on trial before the rest of the world, calling on him to remove the officers involved in the shooting. He closed with a reminder that Florida Negro citizens are still mindful of the fact that our votes proved to be your margin of victory in the [runoff election in] 1948. We seek no special favors; but certainly we have a right to expect justice and equal protection of the laws even for the humblest Negro. Shall we be disappointed again?

Compounding Moores woes, just weeks after the shooting of the Groveland suspects and weeks before his own death, he lost his job at the NAACP. Moore had clashed with the organizations national leadership for his forward political involvement and disagreements over fundraising. It was a severe blow, but he continued his commitment to the workalbeit now on an unpaid basis.

During the fall of 1951, Florida saw a rash of religious and racial violence. Over a three-month period, multiple bombs had hit Carver Village, a housing complex in Miami leasing to black tenants, in what was likely the work of the KKK; a synagogue and Catholic church were also menaced. As dark shadow of violence has drifted across sunny Floridacast by terrorist who blast and kill in the night, the Associated Press reported days after the Christmas bombing. If lesser known black residents were targeted, then Moores prominence meant his situation was especially perilous.

Moore ruffled a lot of feathers, and there was a large population of Florida that didnt want to see the type of change that he was part of, says Brotemarkle.

I tried to get him to quit the N.A.A.C.P., thinking something might happen to him some day, Rosa Moore told a reporter after the bombing. But he told me, Im trying to do what I can to elevate the Negro race. Every advancement comes by the way of sacrifice, and if I sacrifice my life or health I still think it is my duty for my race.

News of Moores Christmas night death made headlines across the country. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt expressed her sadness. Governor Warren called for a full investigation but clashed with NAACP executive secretary Walter White, who accused the governor of not doing enough. Warren said White has come to Florida to try to stir up strife and called him a hired Harlem hatemonger.

While Moore may have been out of favor with the NAACPs national leadership shortly before his death, he was venerated soon after. In March of 1952, the NAACP held a fundraising gala in New York City, featuring the Ballad of Harry T. Moore, written by poet Langston Hughes. His name was a rallying cry at numerous events.

The Moore bombings set off the most intense civil rights uproar in a decade, writes Ben Green in Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, Americas First Civil Rights Martyr. There had been more violent racial incidentsbut the Moore bombing was so personal, so singular a man and his wife blown up in their home on Christmas Day that it became a magnifying glass to focus the nations revulsion.

While the publicity helped galvanize awareness for civil rights on a national level, the assassination soon had a chilling effect on voter registration in Florida. People were petrified, they were scared, says Mallard. The KKK terrorized you, they killed you, they lynched you, they scared you. They did all that to shut you up.

Meanwhile Harriette Moore remained hospitalized for nine days, dying from her injuries one day after her husbands funeral. There isn't much left to fight for. My home is wrecked. My children are grown up. They don't need me. Others can carry on," she had told a reporter in a bedside interview. Harriettes discouragement was palpable, after years of facing the same threats side by side with Harry. She adored her husband, says Mallard.

The crime has never been definitively solved, despite commitments from notorious FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover in the bombings aftermath and from Florida Governor Charlie Crist in the mid-2000s. After almost 70 years, the identity of the killer or killers may never be pinpointed, but those who have studied Moores life and the multiple investigations of the case are confident it was the work of the KKK.

As the movements ranks swelled and the battle was carried to Birmingham, Nashville, Tallahassee, Little Rock, Greensboro and beyond, the unsolved murders of Harry and Harriette Moore, still hanging in limbo, were forgotten, Green writes. For Evangeline and Peaches Moore, the pain and heartache never ceased. The murderers of their parents still walked the streets, and no one seemed to care.

Moores life and death underscore that not all heroes become legends. Today cities like Selma, Montgomery and Memphisnot Mimsevoke images of the Civil Rights struggle. Moore worked for almost two decades without the weight of national outrage behind him. No television cameras documented the brutal violence or produced the images needed to appall Americans in other states. The Maya Lin-designed Civil Rights Memorial situated across the street from the Southern Poverty Law Centers office in Montgomery, Alabama, recognizes martyrs from 1955 until Martin Luther King Jr.s death in 1968. That was 17 years after the Moores were killed.

When you talk about the contemporary civil rights movement, [people] look at the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 as kind of the starting place for the timeline, and while that can be seen as true in a lot of ways, it overlooks a lot of activity that led up to that, says Brotemarkle.

Nonetheless Moores work and legacy helped lay the groundwork for the expansion of civil rights onto the national platform, and Moore has received some belated recognition in recent decades. The Moore Cultural Complex in Mims welcomes visitors to a replica of their home, rebuilt on the original property. Several of their personal effects are on display at the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C.

In looking back at Moores life and work, it is abundantly clear he was never motivated by name recognition in the first place. Moores goal was singular - his daughter would later remember him saying before his death that I have endeavored to help the Negro race and laid my life on the altar.

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The Unsolved Murder of Civil Rights Activist Harry Moore - Smithsonian.com

Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy expected to have little local impact – Parkersburg News

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MARIETTA Although the national organization of the Boy Scouts of America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, it shouldnt affect the operations of the local council.

We are locally controlled and operated, and unrelated financially to the Boy Scouts of America, said Ed Mulholland, executive director of the Muskingum Valley Council of the BSA. It really should not have any impact on our local programs.

Mulholland said the BSA filing for bankruptcy allows it to compensate victims of sexual abuse equally.

There are a lot since theyve lifted the statute of limitations, he explained. Some 90 percent of cases are from 30 years or before.

Thousands of Scouts have come forward alleging sexual abuse by their Scout leaders. According to the U.S. News and World Report, nearly 8,000 leaders in Boy Scouts had been accused of sexually abusing children dating back decades. Victims have come forward accusing hundreds more in the last year.

Mulholland said that in the 1980s, the organization started learning the Scouts were being abused, so it developed a two deep leadership in which a leader could not be alone with a Scout.

It protected the leader and the Scout, he said. There had to be more than one leader if they were alone with a Scout.

He said there were leaders who were kicked out of the organization over the years because children might not be safe around them. If there were serious allegations, the leader was reported to the police or children services.

We kept a list of them so if they wanted to join somewhere else, the other council will know they couldnt be in a leadership position, Mulholland added.

Bob Sheridan, River Trails District commissioner, which covers Washington County, excluding Belpre, said there have been casual discussions about the bankruptcy, but no real concerns have been raised locally. He said he doesnt see an immediate impact on local packs and troops.

They are the national council and they do a lot in program content. We have four national camps that we send a lot of boys to during the year, Sheridan said. They fall under national jurisdiction, so thats a concern. We hear a lot of the Boy Scout assets are landreal estate. If we dont have those camps, you really hurt scouting.

He said the local camps such as Camp Kootaga in Wirt County and the Muskingum Valley Scout Reservation near Coshocton are locally owned.

The local district hasnt heard a big outcry about the BSA declaring bankruptcy, he said.

When you get down to the troop and pack levels, they dont realize national exists, Sheridan said. They are focused on their packs and kids. The general conclusion isare we doing the right things for the kids. Thats where we try to keep our focus.

Mulholland explained that the local council applies to the national organization to be the ones who implement the scouting program in this area, much like a franchise.

We apply to do that each year. We collect a membership fee and that goes right through our hands to the national trust, Mulholland said. But everything we do locally, we raise our own funds.

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Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy expected to have little local impact - Parkersburg News

New lease on life for Forever 21 with acquisition out of bankruptcy – syracuse.com

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Forever 21 has been bought out of bankruptcy in a deal worth over $81 million and its new owners plan to keep the brand alive.

Authentic Brands Group, Simon Property Group and Brookfield Property Partners are jointly acquiring the retailer, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September, according to NPR. Authentic Brands owns retail brands including Aeropostale and Nine West while Simon and Brookfield are both real estate firms whose holdings include numerous malls, outlet centers and other retail properties.

Forever 21 currently has 593 stores worldwide. It has a major presence in many U.S. malls, including Destiny USA in Syracuse and other properties owned by Syracuse-based Pyramid Management Group.

The sale to the new owners closed Wednesday.

When Forever 21 first filed for bankruptcy, it said it would close up to 178 U.S. stores along with stores in Asia and Europe. The new owners now want to grow in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America and elsewhere, NPR said.

Destiny USAs Forever 21 and several others stores in New York appeared on a list of possible closures the chain released in the fall after filing for bankruptcy. The company didnt necessarily expect to close all the stores on that list and was trying to negotiate new leases and rents.

But the list did represent the chain's least profitable locations.

The Destiny location remains open. It previously underwent a major renovation that dropped its footprint from two levels in the mall to one.

Most remaining U.S. Forever 21 stores will stay open under the new ownership, according to the BBC. The chain is now seeking a new CEO and plans to launch new lines of jewelry, footwear and handbags.

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New lease on life for Forever 21 with acquisition out of bankruptcy - syracuse.com

Pizza Hut’s largest US franchisee is reportedly weighing options, including bankruptcy – CNBC

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A customer enters a Pizza Hut restaurant in Princeton, Illinois.

Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Pizza Hut's largest U.S. franchisee is weighing restructuring options, including bankrutpcy, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

NPC International, which has about $1 billion in debt, operates nearly 400 Wendy's restaurants and more than 1,200 Pizza Huts.

People familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the franchisee has begun negotiating with its lenders. The company is trying to keep the restructuring out of court but is considering the possibility of filing for bankruptcy with a pre-negotiated plan in place, according to the outlet.

In 2019, the franchisee saw its debt slide further and further into junk territory after credit downgrades from S&P Global Ratings and Moody's. Both ratings agencies downgraded NPC's debt this week after it did not make interest payments due to lenders on Jan. 31.

Yum Brands' Pizza Hut, historically known as a dine-in restaurant, has struggled because more consumers want their food delivered. High food and labor costs have eaten into profits. Same-store sales at U.S. restaurants fell 2% during the pizza chain's fourth quarter.

"There is potential for choppiness in near-term results of Pizza Hut U.S., primarily related to our largest franchisee," Yum CFO Chris Turner told analysts earlier in February.

Shares of Yum, which has a market value of $31.3 billion, were trading down 1% on Thursday morning. The stock of rival Domino's Pizza, which has a market value of $15.1 billion, surged 24% after its fourth-quarter earnings topped estimates.

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Pizza Hut's largest US franchisee is reportedly weighing options, including bankruptcy - CNBC

Pier 1 files for bankruptcy; hundreds of stores to close, 1 on the Peninsula – Williamsburg Yorktown Daily

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Screenshot of the Pier 1 Imports location in Newport News. (WYDaily/ Courtesy of Google Maps)

Pier 1 Imports, the home decor and furniture chain, is filing for bankruptcy, the company announced Monday.

The business plans to close up to 450 stores, including all of its stores in Canada.

The Peninsula has three store locations in Williamsburg, Hampton and Newport News.

Todays actions are intended to provide Pier 1 with additional time and financial flexibility as we now work to unlock additional value for our stakeholders through a sale of the Company,said Robert Riesbeck, chief executive officer and chief financial officer for the company in a Feb. 17 news release about the Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We are moving ahead in this process with the support of our lenders and are pleased with the initial interest as we engage in discussions with potential buyers.

WYDaily called all three stores on the Peninsula to see which locations were closing and when.

The Pier 1 location in Newport News, 12551 Jefferson Ave., is closing, according to an employee.

The Newport News location no longer shows up on the retail chains website store locator, according to Pier 1 Imports website.

The stores Williamsburg, 4625 Casey Blvd. Ste. 110, and Hampton, 1045 West Mercury Blvd., will remain open, according to the assistant store manager in Williamsburg and a store employee in Hampton.

WYDaily reached out to Jennifer Engstrand Reeder, spokeswoman for Pier 1 Imports as well as Leigh Parrish and Andrea Rose fromJoele Frank Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher, a public relations firm based in New York City.

Reeder, Parrish and Rose were not immediately available for comment.

We will continue to serve our customers regardless of how and where they shop with the style, value and selection of merchandise they want as we move through this process, and we are committed to working seamlessly with our vendors and partners, Riesbeck noted in the news release. We appreciate the ongoing dedication of our associates, whose efforts in providing our loyal customers with the experience they expect from our brand are critical to our success and the future of Pier 1.

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Pier 1 files for bankruptcy; hundreds of stores to close, 1 on the Peninsula - Williamsburg Yorktown Daily

Despite Bankruptcy, Forever 21 Will Live On After New Owners Step In – NPR

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When filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, Forever 21 had stated that it planned to reorganize the business and would likely close up to 178 U.S. stores. Kiichiro Sato/AP hide caption

When filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, Forever 21 had stated that it planned to reorganize the business and would likely close up to 178 U.S. stores.

Forever 21, the fast-fashion mall standby that filed for bankruptcy last year, will live on. Three companies announced Wednesday that they are jointly acquiring the retailer aimed at young shoppers and that they plan to continue to operate its U.S. and international stores.

The buyers are Authentic Brands Group, which owns major brands such as Barneys New York, Aeropostale and Nine West; and real estate companies Simon Property Group and Brookfield Property Partners.

"Forever 21 is a powerful retail brand with incredible consumer reach and a wealth of untapped potential," Jamie Salter, CEO of ABG, said in a statement. Forever 21 currently has 593 stores globally.

The deal is valued at $81.1 million, according to court records, and officially closed on Wednesday. When the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, Forever 21 had stated that it planned to reorganize the business and would likely close up to 178 U.S. stores.

But while the company said at the time that it planned to shut down stores in Asia and Europe, the new owners say they hope to expand in "South America, Western and Eastern Europe, China, Southeast Asia, Middle East, and India."

Forever 21 was founded by Korean immigrants in Los Angeles more than 30 years ago and, until now, has described itself as a "family-owned business." It enjoyed rapid expansion in the 2000s but has struggled as mall customers have dwindled. Other companies that were common sights in malls during the 1990s and 2000s such as Wet Seal and American Apparel have faced similar struggles.

"Consumers are not spending like they used to, and that has made things more competitive," NPR's Planet Money recently reported. "And in this more competitive environment, Forever 21 has been losing ground to the new crop of online retailers companies like boohoo, ASOS, Revolve and Lulus."

ABG and Simon will each own 37.5% of the company's intellectual property and operating businesses, while Brookfield will own 25%. The new owners plan to keep the company's headquarters in LA.

ABG says it plans to seek out young customers "by introducing refreshed creative, targeted digital campaigns, and influential collaborations."

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Despite Bankruptcy, Forever 21 Will Live On After New Owners Step In - NPR

Is a Bankruptcy Stay Violated by Creditor Doing Nothing? – The National Law Review

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Wednesday, February 19, 2020

If a creditor wants to continue a lawsuit against a debtor outside of bankruptcy, repossess collateral, terminate a lease, set off debts, or pursue other collection efforts, it first must obtain stay relief from the bankruptcy court. The "automatic stay" is a command to halt action, and creditors violate it at their own peril.

But what about inaction? If a creditor began collection activity before the bankruptcy, must it unwind its actions when notified of the filing? Can a creditor violate the automatic stay by doing nothing? A recent decision by a bankruptcy court in Virginia says "yes," but other courts have said "no." The United States Supreme Court is likely to resolve the uncertainty this summer. Meanwhile, creditors may want to err on the side of caution.

Attorney Griffin represented Randi Nimitz in her divorce before she filed for bankruptcy. Griffin did not pay all her legal fees, and Griffin obtained a judgment against her for $10,000. Virginia allows wage garnishment, so Griffin obtained a garnishment order against Nimitz. The state court was holding $1,000 in wage deductions, and a hearing on turning over the funds to Griffin was scheduled when Nimitz filed Chapter 7. Her bankruptcy petition listed Griffin's judgment as debt and claimed an exemption in the $1,000. Nimitz's counsel notified Griffin and demanded he terminates the garnishment. Griffin refused. He claimed that he could do nothing because he had no legal obligation to take affirmative action to terminate the garnishment.

Nimitz moved for Griffin to be held in contempt for a willful violation of the automatic stay. The bankruptcy court agreed. To prove a stay violation, a party must establish that (1) a violation occurred, the violation was committed willfully, and (3) the violation caused actual damages. The automatic stay prohibits any act to obtain possession of property of the estate or to exercise control over estate property. The bankruptcy court reasoned that property seized pre-petition, but not yet liquidated, remains property of the bankruptcy estate. The debtor's bankruptcy estate includes a possessory interest in property not held at the time of filing.

The bankruptcy court concluded that Griffin's refusal to terminate the garnishment amounted to the improper exercise of control over the debtor's property. Griffin did not assert an ownership interest or lien in the garnished funds, which did not help his argument. The bankruptcy court awarded Nimitz attorneys' fees of $2,400 to prosecute the contempt motion.

The United States Supreme Court should rule definitively on this issue sometime this summer. It is possible they will rule that mere inaction does not violate the automatic stay. But unless that happens, creditors who fail to unwind collection efforts when demanded to do so by a debtor in bankruptcy risk being held in contempt and liable for damages.

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Is a Bankruptcy Stay Violated by Creditor Doing Nothing? - The National Law Review