In truth, large front-wheel-drive crossovers are made pointless by minivans.
Here we are, testingyetanotherof GM’s Lambda-platform crossovers, which include the Buick Enclave, the GMC Acadia, and the Chevrolet Traverse. But this time we’re looking at a front-wheel-drive variant powered by the direct-injected 3.6-liter V-6; it’s our first deep dive into the combo since the trio received the engine way back for the 2009 model year.
In planning our test, we theorized that such a Lambda—in this case a 2010 Chevrolet Traverse LT—would get better gas mileage, which, combined with a lower entry price, would make it a more affordable and more attractive alternative to the all-wheel-drive model. We based our theory on the fact that the front-driver is lighter by 213 pounds and has a lower amount of efficiency-sapping drivetrain friction than the all-wheel-drive model. Then we tested the thing and found out our theory was wrong: This Traverse got 17 miles per gallon, 1 mpg fewer than the all-wheel-driver we evaluated last year.
Up until today, if you lived near a certain street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and wanted some pot, you just had to go to the nearby variety store. Or the music store. Or the take-out restaurants. MyFox New York says police “made a sweep of the neighborhood” today and shut down six businesses for selling drugs either in the back or right alongside the regular merchandise. They also arrested 8 people, including a few store owners and employees, and are planning more arrests. Video below.
The vegan activists masquerading as a respectable doctors group at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) are going full bore with a campaign to expel meat and dairy foods from schools. But in recruiting Olympic athletes to support its fringe diet advice, PCRM isn’t winning any medals. In a new press release, PCRM reprints letters it likely coached several Olympic gold medalists to write to Congress. The excerpts include the following:
“I always try to set a positive example for young people,” writes Hope Solo, who led the U.S. women’s soccer team to a gold medal victory in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. “I’ve noticed a major factor affecting children’s health is the food they’re putting into their bodies. We need to make sure children grow up with eating habits and lifestyles to keep them healthy.”
And:
“I started competing in gymnastics when I was only 6, so I know how important healthful food is to children’s energy levels and development,” writes Nastia Liukin, the 2008 all-around Olympic champion and winner of five Olympic medals. “If we don’t give students the opportunity to try delicious, healthy foods now, the obesity epidemic is not likely to subside anytime soon.”
Who could disagree? But these athletes may not understand that PCRM’s interpretation of the word “healthy” means nothing but tofu, veggies, and soy milk.
Hope Solo’s profile on USSoccer.com reveals that her “favorite food is Mexican, especially her mom’s tacos.” And Nastia Liukin’s own website proclaims: “Nastia does not follow any specific diet. She eats whatever she likes but by choice she generally prefers to eat healthy foods. Her favorite food is Sushi.”
Is it hypocritical for these two to aid an effort to vegan-ize school lunches? Their own training tables prominently feature plenty of food that PCRM considers strictly off-limits. It may just be that their publicists have been fooled.
Olympic athletes could do far more good (and make a lot more sense) by supporting initiatives to promote physical education in schools. That’s the real culprit behind childhood obesity, not whether kids drink faux milk or the real thing. And as for PCRM? It’s high time the animal rights group stopped peddling its (literal) phony baloney.
For some programs, the arrival of multi-core processing power has made little difference to how they operate. Some applications, such as word processors and web browsers, are unable to split process operation over a number of cores and instead pile everything onto just one. Researchers from North Carolina’s State University have come up with a way to break up such programs into different threads, resulting in a 20 percent increase in run speed…
Today some Sprint subscribers got a text letting them know that the new Sprint Football Live app was ready and waiting for download. I went ahead and grabbed the update (after rolling back to the official Sprint software for the Hero) so I could check it out. Hit the break for thoughts and some screenshots.
2011 BMW X3 – Click above for high-res image gallery
We’re expecting the 2011 BMW X3 to debut sometime this year and judging by this latest crop of spy shots out of Munich, Bimmer’s mid-level ‘ute should be ready for prime-time when the Paris Motor Show rolls around this fall.
Although the prototype appears slightly larger than the current model, the changes will be largely cosmetic, particularly up front, where the outgoing X3’s plebeian proboscis has been dispatched in favor of BMW’s new upright fascia. The headlamps appear to have grown in size and we’re particularly digging the sculpted bumper, with it’s larger lower grille, more dramatic lip and angular air intakes.
The styling appears more standard on the sides and out back, although BMW is sure to redesign the D-pillar and fit new LED taillamps inspired by the rest of the range.
Naturally, the 2011 X3 will feature BMW’s 3.0-liter six-cylinder powerplants – either naturally aspirated or turbocharged – with a handful of diesel mills available to our friends abroad. However, don’t be surprised to hear about some kind of four-cylinder fitted to the X3 after it’s initial launch, and here’s hoping that the 335d and X5 xDrive35d’s impressive oilburner finds its way under the hood of the X3 in the U.S. in short order.
What does this have to do with deals in the Northwest? Well, I get the feeling the volume of deals is about to pop. But here’s what happened in the past week.
—Bothell, WA-based MDRNA (NASDAQ: MRNA) formed a research agreement with pharma giant Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) to take certain polymers and synthesize them into RNA interference drugs, as Luke reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
—Seattle-based venture capital firm Maveron has invested in a $1.25 million funding round for Latimer Education, a Washington, DC-based company developing an online university focused on African-American students. Angel investors and the company’s founders also participated in the round. Maveron has been active in the online education sector, having made previous investments in Capella Education Company, Livemocha, and Altius Education.
—Seattle-based Recruiting.com, formerly known as Jobster, has been acquired by Boston-area talent management firm Zapoint. Financial terms weren’t given, and it sounds like the employees of Recruiting.com (about 10 of them) won’t be moving anytime soon. Jobster was founded in 2004 and had raised more than $50 million in venture capital from Ignition Partners, Trinity Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures, and Mayfield Fund.
—Earlier in the week, MDRNA announced it is merging with Cequent Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, MA, in an all-stock deal worth $46 million, as Ryan reported. MDRNA’s investors will have a 56 percent ownership stake, with Cequent’s backers owning the rest of the company. The combined company will be headquartered in Bothell, WA, under the leadership of MDRNA’s current CEO, J. Michael French. The merger is expected to close by July of this year.
Authorities continued to search Tuesday for witnesses to a Malibu crash in which a 26-year-old driver struck and killed a 13-year-old girl on Pacific Coast Highway.
Emily Rose Shane had just left a friend’s home about 5 p.m. Saturday and was walking north on the right side of Pacific Coast Highway near Kanan Dume Road when she was struck by a blue Mitsubishi Lancer, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said. The vehicle then ran into an electric pole and turned over.
Sina Khankhanian of Winnetka was detained at the scene and later booked for murder at the Malibu-Lost Hills sheriff’s station. Authorities determined that Khankhanian may have deliberately crashed his vehicle. They do not believe he intended to hit Emily Rose.
Anyone who saw the vehicle before the crash or saw the collision is asked to call the Sheriff’s Department homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500.
Google is finally selling a car dock for the Nexus One in its web store. The dock will charge your phone’s battery, pull up the Car Home app, and keep your hands free for $55. [Nexus One Board] More »
A state appeals court panel Tuesday ordered two murder charges reinstated against a trucker whose out-of-control big rig killed a Palmdale man and his 12-year-old daughter last year in La Cañada Flintridge.
The three-justice panel from the 2nd District Court of Appeal overturned Pasadena Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench’s ruling dismissing the second-degree murder counts against Marcos Barbosa Costa. The panel found Lench erred in her decision to grant a motion by Costa’s attorney to dismiss the charges.
Costa was driving a car hauler on April 1, 2009, when his brakes failed on the steep Angeles Crest Highway descent into La Cañada Flintridge. The big rig hit a small red Ford, killing Angel Posca and his daughter Angelina instantly, then collided with several other vehicles before smashing into a bookstore and a nail salon.
Despite being warned about “the condition of his brakes, the nature of the steep, winding road ahead and the fact many drivers would be on the road at the time, Costa decided to drive his 25-ton, 18-wheel truck into La Cañada. His brakes continued to put out more and more streams of smoke, yet he decided to drive past two turnouts while the brakes were barely working, ultimately driving onto Foothill Boulevard and killing Angel and his daughter,” wrote Presiding Justice Tricia A. Bigelow on behalf of the panel.
Costa, 44, of Everett, Mass. was indicted in June on multiple counts, including two of second-degree murder.
In October, however, Lench dismissed the murder charges at the request of the defense. She agreed there was insufficient evidence to show Costa intended to kill the victims. Prosecutors appealed.
In her ruling, Bigelow noted that there was sufficient evidence “for assuming the possibility that Costa decided to continue to drive his truck down Angeles Crest Highway with an actual awareness of the great risk of harm his actions created, resulting in the deaths of two people.”
The 2011 Ford Mustang is without a doubt my favorite petrol-powered car out right now. At least among those I can afford… I mean, who wouldn’t want a Bugatti Veyron if they could afford it? It has gotten more powerful, and more fuel efficient, and as many media outlets are reporting, it can also handle in the twisties quite well.
But despite all of this, if Ford is truly serious about its “One Ford” strategy of sharing parts and components between different global markets, that means the Mustang won’t be exclusive to America for much longer. But in order to meet stringent European emissions standards, Ford would have to make some drastic changes like… a diesel engine?!?
The first iPhone shipped without an App Store, but with a handful of useful apps—many of which are conspicuously missing on the iPad. Here’s how to replace them, for free. More »
F for Forgery, Fraud and Florida (photo: Leo Reynolds via Flickr)
According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida has launched an investigation into the alleged fabrication of documents purporting to transfer mortgages to entities which are now foreclosing upon homeowners.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Imagine that a bank sets up a mortgage backed security. The security is backed by a trust that holds all the mortgages and notes. The trust document says that all of the mortgages to be included in this particular security had to be transferred into the trust by a particular date. That date is long since passed.
You are now in foreclosure, and attached to the summons and complaint is a copy of an assignment of your mortgage; the assignment has been executed within the last several days before the date of the summons and complaint, transferring your mortgage into the trust.
So what does this mean?
It means that the trustee did not actually own your mortgage. All the mortgage payments you’ve made, were paid to the wrong party.
Why? Because the mortgage was not transferred into the trust before your payments were directed to the trust. The assignment after-the-fact doesn’t remedy the situation; the trustee was required to stop adding mortgages to the trust by a date long since passed. So the trustee accepted payments from you even though your mortgage was not a part of that trust. You were paying the wrong party.
To add insult to injury, the trustee is trying to take your home away.
Lynn Szymoniak, attorney and editor at Fraud Digest Online has many more details (PDF). She also explains that the last minute assignment might be a forgery. Ain’t that just the icing on the cake?
Clerks at DOCX, LLC, are signing these documents pretending to be employees of varies banks and other financial institutions. The firm is engaged by banks and mortgage lenders to “expedite” mortgage foreclosures, including processing assignments. Szymoniak reveals that clerks at DOCX are signing these documents pretending to be employees of various banks and other financial institutions – and that’s forgery.
Szymoniak has outlined all this in a letters to an Assistant U.S. Attorney, as well as Phil Angelides, Sheila Bair, Barney Frank, a Clerk of the Court in Florida, and a Florida State’s Attorney. Let’s hope her efforts gain some traction before too many more homeowners are forced to deal with this situation on their own.
Erica and her fiance are tired of waiting for a lamp to arrive from Lamps Plus, especially now that it’s been three months and the company hasn’t kept any of its promises so far. She wants to know what to do next.
Here’s a portion of the letter she snail-mailed to the company over a week ago, because she couldn’t find working email addresses and the company’s web form wasn’t working. She says she hasn’t received any response from them yet.
On December 28th, my fiancé and I came into your Lamps Plus store in San Diego in order to find a floor lamp for one of our rooms.
Not finding our lamp of choice in the showroom, an employee brought our attention to your Berkeley bent three-light lamp, which was available from another warehouse. We decided on it and made a down payment of $90. We were told by your employee to expect our lamp within six to eight weeks.
Four weeks passed during which we received no word from your store. I looked on my receipt and discovered that special orders could take from six to eight weeks for delivery, so I waited four more weeks before calling in with my query. I was told that my lamp would be delayed until March 15th.
I waited till then and once again called the store when I had not heard from them. I was greeted with a salesperson who had no clue what sort of order I was talking about. I was transfered to another sales rep who told me to call later the next day when the original employee who took the down payment would be in. I did so and talked to him, and he assured me the lamp was on its way, and that someone would call me when it arrives because they “wouldn’t want it taking up space in their storeroom either.”
Perhaps he was trying to be jovial, but with the abysmal service I have experienced while trying to purchase one floor lamp, I did not find the situation to be such a lighthearted affair. As I write this letter, it is exactly three months since we placed our order, and I am still without a lamp.
At this point, we just want a reasonable assurance that we will get our lamp soon or to have our down payment refunded. This is the first and last time my fiancé and I will shop here.
Erica, I hope you put that down payment on a credit card, because if so you should just initiate a charge back for non-receipt of goods. Since Lamps Plus doesn’t have any reliable way of contacting them for customer service, this may in fact be the best way of making sure someone takes notice.
It’s hard to believe that City Hall was in the doldrums so long it was hard to stay awake during their endless exercises in self-aggrandizement and self-service and now just look at what’s happening — it takes your breath away.
Let’s start with the City Council grilling David Freeman and calling him in the liar he is, leaving him dissembling and mumbling even as he insisted the DWP is going broke despite a billion dollars sitting idle in the bank.
Hopefully, it was his last stand for deceit and ripoff of the public with his disastrous term as general manager ending next week. It’s as hard to believe he could make David Nahai as it is the Antonio Villaraigosa could make us long for boring Jimmy Hahn.
Speaking of the mayor, he responded immediately to the Council’s calling on him to sit down with them and DWP officials to work out the transfer of $73 million to the general fund so the city doesn’t run out of cash May 5 and have to shut down.
The mayor has other ideas: He ordered the City Administrative Officer to prepare to close all city departments two days a week starting Monday with the exception of police, fire and revenue-generating agencies.
Now there’s a plan for the history books, a profile in courage in the mayor’s mind.
“There are no easy decisions or simple ways to solve this budget crisis,” Mayor Villaraigosa said. “But as the CEO of this great city, it is
my responsibility to make these difficult but necessary decisions to
steer the city out of this crisis and onto solid financial ground.”
The guys wants the public to pay 20 to 30 more for electricity to pay the inflated salaries of his pals in the IBEW who he keeps giving more raises to and spend lavishly on a crash program for green energy that will kill untold thousands of jobs and squeeze already strained budgets of residents.
What’s worse there isn’t even a plan to do what he says, his trust fund lockbox is a total fraud (even Freeman admitted that today) and he’s encircled by green-washers and green-feeders who stand to profit handsomely from his plan.
In just a few weeks of desperate and bungling miscalculation, the mayor has left himself with no friends other than those who are getting rich off of him, payback for sure for how well he has wined and dined off of them.
The public is angry at him. The Council is unanimous in their disgust with him with the exception of RIchard Alarcon and Tony Cardenas who duck every vote involving the DWP that they can.
And after being slugged with a 40 percent pay from losing two days of work, the Coalition of City Unions reached the point of no return putting out this statement:
LA City
Workers to Mayor: ‘This Is Not a Game’.
Residents who rely on city services and workers who provide those services are about to become collateral damage in a political fight around DWP funds. This is playing brinksmanship and city residents will pay the price. This is not a game, it shouldn’t be treated as a game. Los Angeles has a serious crisis, but we are doing something about it. We need to change how our city does business, to resolve budget problems and preserve services for the future. City workers are putting together a real plan, not political games. We call on everyone to come together as one City, put residents first, and work our way cooperatively through the very real challenges we face.
“Closing
libraries
two days a week will hurt thousands of children we see every day, who
rely on our libraries as places to study, discover their creativity, and
find
safety,” added Madeleine Kerr, a librarian who works with children and
teens. “Closing recreation facilities affects child care, sports and
after-school programs for Los
Angeles
families. The mayor is reacting not leading.”
Lithium-air batteries are one of those technologies that could be truly revolutionary. With a theoretical maximum energy storage capacity 10 times greater than your garden variety lithium-ion battery, lithium-air batteries could be much smaller and lighter but still provide a huge range. How’s 500-700 miles per charge for you?
Unfortunately, as is usually the case with these sorts of things, the lithium-air revolution has hurdles aplenty. But fortunately, lithium-air batteries have some big guns doing research on them. For instance, IBM has been doing research on lithium-air batteries for the better part of a decade.
And just this week, scientists at MIT have announced that when they substituted gold and platinum for the standard carbon electrodes in lithium-air cells, they were able to obtain much higher efficiencies. The find was significant enough for MIT to claim that their research could lead to lithium-air batteries with 3 times the energy density of lithium-ion. That alone would be a big step forward.
A Ventura County firefighter underwent five hours of surgery at UCLA Medical Center after suffering a serious eye injury while fighting a house fire in Thousand Oaks.
Paul Torres, 36, was hurt when ammunition stored inside the home went off during the blaze. Doctors at UCLA worked to save the vision in Torres’ right eye, said Ventura County Fire Department Capt. Ron Oatman.
Doctors were guardedly optimistic that the operation was a success, but it’s too early to know the degree to which the injury will effect his vision, officials said.
Family, friends and Fire Department colleagues have been holding vigil at UCLA.
Torres was one of several firefighters to respond to a house fire the erupted Monday afternoon on Laurelwood Court. According to the Fire Department, the fire caused propane canisters and hundreds of rounds of ammunition to explode. Some of that material hit Torres.
2009 Toyota Camry – Click above for high-res image gallery
Edmunds has officially announced the rules concerning its $1 million quest to get to the bottom of the Toyota unintended acceleration woes. If you think you can replicate the series of events that causes the sedans to go ballistic, you’ll need to write up a 1,000 word summary packed full with what you think causes the problem, why your cause is plausible, a brief account of your test protocol and what you’ve found. Throw in an in-depth, step-by-step test protocol and get it all in by October 29, 2010 at 5 p.m. PST in order to be considered for the prize.
Edmunds says it will announce the winner(s) on March 31, 2011. If there is more than one winner, the purse will be split evenly between the victors. Be warned, though, Edmunds isn’t about to pay out for causes that have already been identified by Toyota, the NHTSA or anyone else for that matter. The winning cause has to be completely unique and has to feasibly occur in the real world.
The good news is the competition isn’t just limited to Toyota models. Edmunds will let you run your tests on any stock consumer vehicle sold in the U.S. between 2006 and 2011. Let the games begin. You can check out the full rules and all the fine print here.
While we didn’t experience any troubles when we tested the iPad’s Wi-Fi, some owners are having difficulties connecting and reconnecting to wireless networks. Apple confirmed that it’s aware of the issues and posted some suggestions on how to fix them: More »
U.S. taxpayers earned an annualized 8.5 percent return from the government’s bailout of 49 financial firms, underscoring efforts by the industry to speed up repayments and warrant repurchases, according to a report by SNL Financial.
Firms such as Citigroup, (C) which still has common shares held by the U.S. Treasury Department, and rivals that have made partial redemptions were excluded from the analysis, SNL Financial said in a statement on Monday.
Proceeds from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) warrant repurchases and auctions led to a surge in returns through March 30, SNL said. So far, since the start of the program in late 2008, 64 institutions have fully repaid government aid.
A Ventura County firefighter underwent five hours of surgery at UCLA Medical Center after suffering a serious eye injury while fighting a house fire in Thousand Oaks.
