Tesla says its cars’ suspension systems have no safety problems, and the electric automaker calls an allegation that it has pressured customers not to report safety problems “preposterous.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it is looking into reports of a suspension system failure on Tesla’s Model S vehicles. The New York Times reports that since October, NHTSA has received 33 complaints of suspension parts breaking.

One account of the problem came from a Tesla owner going by the name “gpcoraro” on a Tesla blog. He said he was driving slowly, about 5 mph, in his Model S:

The road was rough so my air ride was at it max lift. As I was proceeding down a steep hill I heard a snap and felt my steering wheel pull to the left. I stopped the car for further inspection only to discover that my left front hub assembly separated from the upper control arm. Needless to say the car was inoperable due to a loss of steering. Thank goodness I was not traveling at a high rate of speed. This could of been a tragic accident causing injury or even death.

Tesla said in a statement, “There is no safety defect with the suspensions in either the Model S or Model X.”

Tesla says since it operates all its own service facilities, it tracks potential safety issues very closely. And the carmaker suggested in its statement that this appeared to be a one-of-a-kind situation based on the treatment of the car by the customer:

The suspension ball joint experienced very abnormal rust. We haven’t seen this on any other car, suggesting a very unusual use case. The car had over 70,000 miles on it and its owner lives down such a long dirt road that it required two tow trucks to retrieve the car. (One to get the car to the highway and one to get it from the highway to the service center.) When we got the car, it was caked in dirt.

But whether or not there is a legitimate safety question to be examined here, another issue apparently is troubling to regulators: the allegation that Tesla has been trying to induce or pressure its customers to keep quiet about potential safety issues when they arise.

After the customer “gpcoraro” notified Tesla that his suspension snapped, he says Tesla told him the parts were not under warranty. But, he said in a blog post that Tesla offered to pay for half of the $3000 repair, but only if the customer signed an agreement.

The customer posted the agreement online that he says Tesla sent him, which included this prerequisite:

You agree to keep confidential our provision of the Goodwill, the terms of this agreement and the incidents or claims leading or related to our provision of the Goodwill.

The customer took that to mean basically, we’ll give you $1500 toward your car repair if you keep quiet about this problem you had.

Tesla counters in its statement that the agreement does not represent an attempt to keep customers from reporting safety problems. “Tesla has never and would never ask a customer to sign a document to prevent them from talking to NHTSA or any other government agency.” Tesla says that idea is “preposterous.”

Tesla says when it offers to pay for a repair that’s not covered by warranty, that the company sometimes asks customers to sign a “Goodwill Agreement.” Tesla says, “The basic point is to ensure that Tesla doesn’t do a good deed, only to have that used against us in court for further gain.”

For its part, the NHTSA says this in a statement:

NHTSA is examining the potential suspension issue on the Tesla Model S, and is seeking additional information from vehicle owners and the company.

An NHTSA spokesman Bryan Thomas said Tesla’s nondisclosure agreement is “troublesome.” His statement continues:

The agency immediately informed Tesla that any language implying that consumers should not contact the agency regarding safety concerns is unacceptable, and NHTSA expects Tesla to eliminate any such language. Tesla representatives told NHTSA that it was not their intention to dissuade consumers from contacting the agency. NHTSA always encourages vehicle owners concerned about potential safety defects to contact the agency by filing a vehicle safety complaint at SaferCar.gov.

Tesla says it meets regularly with safety regulators and in the past has performed voluntary recalls even when there is only a “slight” risk of a safety issue.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Tom Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s first venture capitalists, died this week.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the financier died at 84 at home in Tiburon, Calif., of natural causes. The firm he helped co-found, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, confirmed the news to NPR.

Perkins and Eugene Kleiner co-founded a venture capital firm in 1972 — “at a time when parts of Silicon Valley were still largely fruit orchards,” as the Times points out. The firm later grew into a behemoth, propelling a new approach to investment, the Times reports:

“Perkins and his partners popularized a model of investment that involved putting small amounts of money into promising young start-ups in return for a stake in the companies, giving them advice and counsel to spur their growth.”

In a statement given to NPR on Thursday, KPCB co-founders Brook Byers and Frank Caufield called Perkins a pioneer in the venture capital industry, who witnessed the “start of the biotech industry and the computer revolution.”

“He defined what we know of today as entrepreneurial venture capital by going beyond just funding to helping entrepreneurs realize their visions with operating expertise,” they wrote. “Tom was our partner and friend, and we will miss him.”

Over the years, KPCB has invested in numerous tech giants, including Google, Twitter, Amazon, Square, Airbnb, Uber, Spotify and various biotech and energy firms.

Perkins served on the board of directors of several companies, such as the biotech firm Genentech, that bloomed into successful corporations.

As a board member, Perkins played the pivotal role in a phone-spying scandal that embroiled Hewlett-Packard in 2006 and resulted in the resignation of chairwoman Patricia Dunn and an overhaul of the board, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time:

“The California attorney general charged [Dunn] on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy, saying she led the H-P board into criminal violations of privacy when the company pried into personal phone records to investigate boardroom leaks.

“Mr. Perkins set the charges in motion by storming off the board and alerting authorities to the phone snooping. He contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission and California’s attorney general, pressing them to take action.”

In 2014, Perkins also landed in the headlines for a letter published in the Journal that compared the San Francisco protests against the “one percent” of rich tech entrepreneurs to the 1938 series of coordinated attacks by Nazis against the Jews.

His firm, KPCB, distanced itself at the time, tweeting that it was “shocked by his views” and he “has not been involved” with the firm in years.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The idea: a drone taxi that can transport a single passenger for up to 23 minutes.

A Chinese company called EHang and the state of Nevada are trying to make this happen by moving forward with testing the EHang 184 drone. It’s billed as the “world’s first passenger drone capable of autonomously carrying a person in the air for 23 minutes,” as The Guardian reported.

“I personally look forward to the day when drone taxis are part of Nevada’s transportation system,” Tom Wilczek, Aerospace and Defense Industry Specialist for the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, said in a statement.

As The Guardian points out, that could take a while: “Given that fully autonomous road vehicles are unlikely to be widely available until the middle of the next decade, the time when commuters can simply jump in a flying autonomous taxi drone to get to work appears to be some time off yet.”

The GOED and the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems reached an agreement with EHang last month and “will help guide EHang through the FAA regulatory process with the ultimate goal of achieving safe flight,” according to the GOED statement.

The drone was first introduced in Nevada at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas. Testing is expected to begin this year at the Nevada FAA UAS Test Site, though no specific dates have been announced.

You can see the drone in action here:

According to the video, the designer was inspired to design “an absolute safe aerial vehicle” after two of his friends were killed in airplane crashes.

The experience is meant to be extremely simple for the passenger. The company explains: “After setting up the flight plan with a single click, user can take off on any location, sit, relax and enjoy the flight.”

It’s that simplicity that has raised safety questions. As Business Insider wrote after the drone was unveiled, “The first question I had was what would happen if the flight-control tablet crashed or some technical issue arose mid-flight.” Similarly, “there weren’t any physical controls such as a steering wheel or joystick to be found.” The site says that according to EHang, there are “multiple fail-safes in place to take over if there’s a specific failure,” and a flight control center that “can intervene if necessary.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

There’s no evidence that Aubrey McClendon, the oil industry veteran who died one day after being charged with antitrust conspiracy, meant to kill himself when his car hit a wall at high speed in March, police say.

“Our investigators found no information which would compel us to believe this was anything other than a vehicular accident,” Oklahoma City Police Department spokesman Capt. Paco Balderrama tells NPR. He also said that the final report will not be released to the public.

News that the police had reached a conclusion was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The findings come three months after McClendon’s death; the medical examiner has not released their report on the case.

The police findings stand in stark contrast to the thinking of observers who had speculated McClendon, 56, might have ended his own life rather than face the federal charge against him — which had followed debt problems at Chesapeake Energy Corp.

After analyzing the crash and speaking with people who knew McClendon, police investigators found no reason to suspect anything other than an accident, The Journal reports.

For background on McClendon, StateImpact Oklahoma reports:

“McClendon founded Chesapeake Energy, making billions of dollars during the height of the U.S. shale gas boom. He founded American Energy Partners after he was ousted from Chesapeake in 2013.

“Despite those troubles, it’s impossible to overstate McClendon’s role in the revitalization of Oklahoma City.”

McClendon had called the charge against him “wrong and unprecedented.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

A lot of famous and important people have felt the sting of Donald Trump’s invective in recent months, including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, British Prime Minister David Cameron and even the pope.

And then there’s Bob Guillo, of Manhasset, N.Y.

The 76-year-old Long Island retiree found himself singled out by Trump in a speech on May 27 because he had criticized Trump University, one of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s most controversial business ventures.

Guillo paid nearly $35,000 to be part of Trump University’s “Gold Elite” program, taking money out of his individual retirement account to pay for it. It was a decision he would come to regret.

“At first it was embarrassing,” Guillo says in an interview with NPR. “Then I became very, very angry that the man that scammed me out of all that money had the audacity to run for president. And I’m still angry.”

Guillo’s involvement with the program began in 2009, when he accompanied his grown son, Alex, to a program that promised to teach people how to make money in real estate. The three-day event cost $1,495 to attend.

The session took place at a hotel on Manhattan’s East Side. Guillo remembers signs in the hotel lobby that read, “This Way to Success.” Inside the auditorium was a large cardboard cutout of Trump, and attendees had their picture taken alongside it.

The people running the session were more like motivational speakers than trained real estate professionals, and they were very persuasive, Guillo says.

“The first thing they said was, ‘Guys, Mr. Trump is a multibillionaire and he doesn’t need your money. He’s doing this to be benevolent and to allow people like you to become successful like he is,’ ” Guillo says.

Almost immediately, the speakers began pressuring people to sign up for more classes, and when someone balked at spending more money or asked for time to think about it, they turned up the heat, Guillo says.

“They try to embarrass you, saying, ‘Why do you have to talk to your wife? Why do you have to talk to your husband? Can’t you make decisions by yourself? We’re offering you an opportunity of a lifetime here,’ ” he says.

In fact, Trump University sales people were actively encouraged to sell programs to attendees and were taught ways to overcome their resistance when possible, according to confidential documents released last week.

After signing up for the Gold Elite status, a kind of year-long program of mentoring sessions and educational seminars, Guillo says he realized pretty quickly that the information it provided was largely worthless. Attendees were told to use the real estate website Trulia.com to find properties, or to go to the website of the Internal Revenue Service, irs.gov, to learn about federal tax deductions, he says.

“I knew about those websites before I walked into Trump University. So the more and more I got involved in Trump University, the more and more I found out that I had truly been scammed,” he says.

It’s a picture that Jill Martin, vice president and assistant general counsel at the Trump Organization, disputes.

Far from being worthless, the Gold Elite program featured numerous valuable seminars on different aspects of the real estate industry, allowing attendees to choose what they wanted to focus on, Martin says. In fact, many people complained the classes were too detailed, she says.

But, Martin adds, “No education can guarantee success. Education can only give the students the tools they need to apply in the real world to be successful.”

Ultimately, when Guillo contacted Trump University officials to demand his money back, he was turned down. He subsequently filed a complaint with the office of the New York attorney general.

The office already had heard numerous complaints about the program, according to current Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and was about to file civil fraud charges against it. Meanwhile, class-action suits had been filed against Trump University in California.

Guillo subsequently appeared in an anti-Trump TV commercial funded by a group with ties to Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was then running against Trump in the Republican primary.

Trump maintains that the legal challenges against the program are politically motivated. He also says the vast majority of attendees were satisfied with the program and filled out cards giving it highest marks. Among the critics he cited by name was Guillo.

“You have this guy, Bob Guillo,” Trump said during his May 27 speech. “He appeared in TV attack ads, even though he rated the programs a five — meaning excellent, the top mark, across the board.”

Guillo acknowledges that he gave the program high marks in comment cards submitted when it was nearly over, but says he and the other attendees were pressured to do so by instructors.

“They would say, ‘OK, if you don’t rate me a five, I’m not going to come back here, and I’ve got a wife and kids,’ and most of the people who were there said, ‘It doesn’t cost me anything,’ ” he says.

But Guillo says none of the attendees knew the cards would later be used by Trump as a defense against lawsuits.

Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, adds, “The Trump system was to have people fill out an evaluation form with the instructor standing right in front of them, and it was not an anonymous form.”

That exerted pressure on the attendees to give high marks, he says.

But Martin, the Trump Organization attorney, says those allegations are “not credible” and insists that instructors were not even in the room nearby when the cards were filled out.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

You’ve heard that you should eat more kale. Now a small but growing industry wants you to eat more kelp.

Seaweed production has long been a big industry in Asia. But recently, American entrepreneurs have launched new enterprises that grow fresh and frozen seaweed right here in the States.

Just off the Maine coast, I caught up with Peter Fischer, Peter Arnold and Seth Barker, whose new venture, Maine Fresh Sea Farms, is yielding its first full harvest. From a small skiff out in the clean waters of Maine’s Damariscotta estuary, they winch up a rope that’s heavy with floppy sheets of glistening kelp.

Back in September, they set tiny starter plants of three varieties of edible seaweed out here: kelp, dulse and alaria. Now they have several wide lines of biomass that extend out for yards, bulging just under the water’s surface.

“These have been growing really fast,” Arnold says, marveling at the seaweed’s speedy growth. “Some of them are well over 10 feet.”

These men are all older than 65, and they’ve worked various marine endeavors for decades. They’ve watched the decline of some of Maine’s traditional fisheries: sardine, cod, and more recently, shrimp.

For this latest venture, they’re getting some financial help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and from a local nonprofit development agency. Arnold says the hope is that seaweed farming can boost and diversify existing infrastructure and expertise in the state’s seafaring communities.

“No one was really doing fresh, at least here in this market,” Arnold says. “So we thought, ‘That’s an opening.’ “

Maybe they’ve found one. The greens are selling for up to $15 a pound at retail; restaurants pay a bit less. Another Maine company, Ocean Approved, is selling truckloads of frozen Gulf of Maine seaweed to hospitals and schools — including the universities of Iowa and Texas.

People have foraged wild seaweed off the Eastern Seaboard for centuries. And some small businesses have grown up around harvesting wild seaweed for human and animal consumption. But now a much more active effort to grow seaweed in the U.S. is afoot.

“You know what? Kelp is the new kale,” says Barton Seaver, who directs Harvard’s Healthy and Sustainable Food Program. A former D.C.-area chef, he’s all-in for seaweed and has even published a seaweed cookbook. “Watch out, ’cause it’s coming, and it’ll be everywhere in the next decade,” he says.

The virtues of macro-algae are many, in Seaver’s eyes: They require no fertilizer, no pesticides, no fresh water, no arable land. Their nutritional profile is admirable, he says, providing healthy doses of iodine as well as potassium, calcium and other micro-nutrients, protein, soluble fiber, and Omega-3 fatty acids.

And seaweed’s benefits aren’t just for humans. It’s quick growth means quick carbon dioxide uptake, which can reduce ocean acidification. Seaweed can filter excess nitrogen and phosphorous from the water, too. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-funded project in Washington State’s Puget Sound is aiming to prove that farmed seaweed can create a “protective halo” around stressed sea habitats.

It’s not just a sustainable crop: Seaver says it’s restorative.

“And that’s a very real difference and a major evolutionary point in the sustainability dialogue,” he notes. “We’re not at a point where we’re just focused on doing no harm. We’re really beginning to investigate and discover food-production methods that allow us to restore and heal environments.”

“And,” Seaver adds, “it’s delicious.”

Really?

“I grew up in Maine, and this is what you used to abuse your younger sister on the beach — whipping her with kelp,” says Neal Harden, the chef at a soon-to-open vegetarian version of New York City’s Michelin-rated ABC Kitchen. He acknowledges that seaweed can seem like a funny choice for haute cuisine.

But Harden says he loves the stuff. “It brings a sort of brininess and this oceanic flavor,” he says, as he tosses together dressing for a fettuccine dish he’s developing for his new restaurant. “This dish just has so much umami, between the giant hen [of-the-woods] mushrooms I just threw in there and the seaweed.”

Harden has been looking for a source of fresh ocean greens for his new menu. He says he’s lucky to have found the Maine product, which he plans to incorporate into several dishes — including the fettuccine and a morel and dulse salad — while it’s in season (seaweed grows best in the colder months).

He’s not the only one getting into kelp. Several chefs in Maine’s vibrant food scene, true to the locavore ethic, are giving Maine sea greens a try.

The collective American palate may still take some time to fully embrace farmed U.S. macro-algae. But if the seaweed revolution hasn’t quite arrived yet, like the kelp in Maine’s Damariscotta River, it’s showing some pretty rapid growth.

Fettucine With Maine Seaweed, Market Mushrooms And Spring Onions

Recipe courtesy of Neal Harden, chef de cuisine at ABCV — the forthcoming vegetarian venture from ABC Kitchen

Ingredients:

½ cup mixed fresh Maine seaweed (sugar kelp, winged kelp, kelp stipes), blanched and shocked in ice water, cut or torn into bite-sized pieces

¼ cup spring onion, white parts, cut into thin rings + 1 tsp. sliced spring onion greens

4 whole shiitake caps, cut in half

½ cup (loosely packed) oyster mushrooms, stems removed, torn or cut into bite-sized pieces

1/8 tsp. salt

1 pinch kelp powder (optional but delicious)

5 grinds of fresh black pepper (plus more to finish)

2-3 tsp. extra virgin olive oil

1 cup fresh fettucine

7 sprigs of fresh dill

Directions:

Bring a small pan to medium-low heat. Sweat the spring onions in the olive oil until they soften and begin to get translucent. Add the mushrooms, salt, pepper and kelp powder. Turn up the heat just slightly. Cook until mushrooms are cooked through and releasing lots of juices. Add the seaweed and cook until it’s heated through and all flavors are melded. Add additional salt to taste.

Add cooked and drained fettuccine to the saute pan. Cook until pasta absorbs the juices, adding a bit of pasta water if sauce begins to dry out. Finish with additional fresh pepper and dill sprigs. Top with fresh, grated Parmesan if desired.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The federal government is moving to ban virtually all sales of items containing African elephant ivory within the U.S. For a long time it’s been illegal to import elephant ivory. This new rule extends the ban to cover ivory that’s already here.

The new regulations come out of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service which says the move will further limit the market for traffickers of illegal ivory. They say the problem is that smugglers currently can evade detection and bring illegal ivory into the U.S. Once here, it’s impossible for people to know whether that billiard cue or pocket knife they’re buying was made with sanctioned or illegal ivory.

Research by wildlife protection groups has found that the U.S. is one of the largest markets for illegal ivory. So under the new system, officials hope that the near-total ban on sales will largely shut down the U.S. as a buyer of the illegal ivory.

“Today’s bold action underscores the United States’ leadership and commitment to ending the scourge of elephant poaching and the tragic impact it’s having on wild populations,” said Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.

Of course, any regulation can have unintended consequences. And one group that you might not expect to be worried about this is The League of American Orchestras. It turns out that many professional musicians play stringed instruments that have pieces of ivory used in their construction, for example ivory tuning pegs. Some antique violins and cellos are quite valuable both in terms of their price tags and their value to the musicians who play them. So the orchestra association says it worked with the Obama administration to craft the new regulations in a way that will allow for the sale and interstate transport of such instruments.

There are also some other limited exemptions for bona fide antiques and items with small amounts of ivory that federal regulators say are not “drivers of poaching.”

The move is part of a broader effort by the Obama administration. In 2013, the president issued an executive order on combating wildlife trafficking. The government has the authority to regulate ivory sales under the Endangered Species Act.

The administration is encouraging other nations to follow suit. China is another very large market for illegal ivory. And the new regulations were announced ahead of a trip to China by Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

The National Rifle Association is opposed to the new regulations. A statement on the NRA website that appears underneath a photo of an antique ivory-handled pistol reads:

“While the NRA supports efforts to stop poaching and the illegal trade of ivory, these proposals would do nothing to protect elephants in Africa and Asia, but would instead make sellers of legal ivory potential criminals overnight, as well as destroy the value of property held by countless gun owners, art collectors, musicians and others.”

Regulators, though, say they have carved out protections for gun owners. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said in a statement:

“We listened carefully to the legitimate concerns raised by various stakeholder groups and, as a result, are allowing commonsense, narrow exceptions for musicians, musical instrument makers and dealers, gun owners and others to trade items that have minimal amounts of ivory and satisfy other conditions.”

Regulators say they will provide additional implementation guidance on the rule before it goes into effect on July 6 of this year.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday is proposing new regulations to protect consumers from predatory lending practices that the CFPB’s top regulator calls “debt traps.”

Americans are being “set up to fail” by payday and auto-title lenders, Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tells NPR.

“The way these products are structured, it’s very difficult to repay the loan and therefore people end up borrowing again and again and paying far more in fees and interest than they borrowed in the first place,” Cordray says.

Under the proposed rule, so-called “payday,” “auto-title,” and other short-term lenders would be required to determine that people they loan money to can afford the payments and fees when they come due, and still meet basic living expenses and major financial obligations.

With interest rates of 300 percent and higher, these lenders have fallen under greater scrutiny at both the state and federal level. In March of last year, President Obama said he supported tougher regulations for payday lenders who profit by charging borrowers super-high interest rates. “If you’re making that profit by trapping hard-working Americans in a vicious cycle of debt, you’ve got to find a new business model,” the president said.

Payday Loans: A Helping Hand Or Predatory Quicksand?

Let’s say a low-wage worker’s car breaks down. She has to get to work and take her kids to school. But she has bad credit, no credit cards, and no way to pay for the car repair. A payday lender might in effect say, “No problem I’ll give you the money you need right now to get your car fixed, and you give me your bank account number and when you get paid in 2 weeks I’ll withdraw the money you owe me from your checking account.”

The industry says these loans are needed to help working Americans through a cash squeeze and that the new regulations are unwarranted. “The CFPB’s proposed rule presents a staggering blow to consumers as it will cut off access to credit for millions of Americans who use small-dollar loans to manage a budget shortfall or unexpected expense,” says Dennis Shaul, CEO of the payday lending industry group, the Community Financial Services Association.

But regulators say the problem is that the terms are so onerous that many borrowers can’t afford to pay the loans back and still have enough for their rent and other essentials. And so they end up taking out another loan, and then another loan after that, again and again for months or sometimes years sinking deeper into a quagmire.

Cordray says with these loans consumers think they are getting into a one-time loan but they get “trapped” by this cycle. He says it is like, “getting in a taxi just to drive across town and you find yourself in cross country journey that can be ruinously expensive.”

The CFPB studied the payday lending industry before crafting the proposed rule and found that 4 out of 5 of these single-payment loans are reborrowed within a month. In the case of auto-title loans where borrowers put their cars up as collateral, 1 in 5 borrowers end up having their car or truck seized by the lender for failure to repay.

Consumer Groups Applaud The Rule But Wary of Loopholes

Watchdog groups for decades have been critical of payday lenders. “The lesson from the last 20 years since this industry started is that it’s been remarkably effective at evading attempts at regulation and using a very high-powered lobbying machine to push for loopholes,” says Mike Calhoun, the president of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Calhoun says he supports the proposed rule from the CFPB, but he’s still concerned the industry will find a way to work around it.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)