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Chrysler showed astrong sales rebound in Sept. 2011 with sales of 127,334 vehicles, a 27% increase from the prior year. Truck sales were up 33% from the prior year and car sales 12%. The Jeep Wrangler, Dodge Grand Caravan, and Ram pickup showed strong sales.

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Intel is pushing the Ultra Notebook in 2012, with 75 new designs based on the superthin lightweight look of the MacBook Air expected from manufacturers in 2012. The MacBook Air is priced around $999. Intel's strategy is to bring the price down to where this becomes a popular choice for mainstream customers. Intel setup a $300 million fund in 2011 to support the development of displays and batteries for the superthin notebooks.

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Intel's CEO is reversing his position that Intel Corp. will not operate as a general purpose fabrication facility. This is intended to keep operating its new chip fabricating facilities at full capacity by manufacturing other companies chip designs. As PC sales decline each quarter this is part of the new strategy.

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Yale University professor Robert Shiller, founded CAPE, the cyclically adjusted and inflation adjusted S&P price earnings ratio. It takes the average of the 10 past years of earnings and the inflation adjusted S&P 500 index to arrive at this CAPE P/E ratio. Here he looks at CAPE in 2000, 2007 and 2013, to get a sense of where the U.S. stock market stands today and investor confidence. In 2000 CAPE reached 46, in 2007 it was at 27 and in 2013 it has reached 23. The historical average for CAPE is 15- this goes back in data to 1871. Zweig in the WSJ March 8, 2013, cites data from the last 50 years showing the historical adjusted P/E at 19.7. The investor confidence in the stock market or "valuation confidence" based on work done by Shiller is at 72% for institutional investors and 62% for individual investors in 2013, it was about 80% for both categories before the market peak in 2007. This data is on the website of the Yale School of Management. Shiller says the levels of optimism can fluctuate and change easily, requiring careful thinking by investors. He confirms Browning's assertion in the WSJ March 6, 2013, that in inflation adjusted terms investors are not ahead in the last 13 years, when compared to 2000, based on the inflation corrected S&P Composite total return index....

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Manjoo of the NYT describes Apple's new product HomePod which is similar to the Amazon Echo, a smart speaker that has inside it a Amazon virtual assistant. The price tag of $349 is twice that of the Echo.

Manjoo says the surround sound is better and can be customized to the room you are in, though from a distance Echo works better. Apple is now building its capabilities in the cloud services and artificial intelligence field to do better than Amazon in the home assistant product segment. This will help Apple make its personal assistant Siri handle requests better, in many languages. This is a part of the transformation at Apple as it shifts from focus on hardware to focus on "deep learning," and " machine learning.," fields that are now considered transformative.

 

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The role played by diplomat Bernard Aronson in the Havana, Cuba peace talks between the Santos government in Colombia and FARC guerilla group. Aronson's diplomatic efforts helped bring peace to Salvador and Nicaragua after years of conflict.

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The WSJ's Amol Sharma's interview with India's Gujarat state chief minister, Narendra Modi.

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The show "Dreams About Russia," put together by Konstantin Ernst, director of Channel One, Russia' largest state owned television network. His emphasis on classical music and scenes from literature including Tolstoy, Gogol and ancient fairy tales mixed with a girl duo t.A.T.u for the preshow with the song "Not Gonna Get Us." Pulling it all together was Lisa Temnikov, a 11 year old daughter of two taxi drivers from Krasnodar in the Sochi region, who won the part in a casting call. She played Lyubov, which means love, and led the journey across centuries of Russia's past with domes of St. Basil's Cathedral seen in the background. As much a celebration of Russia's past as a break from decades of stifling of individuality under communism.

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Jeff Boyer is made the new vice president for Global Vehicle Safety, reporting directly to CEO Barra.

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Weak capital expenditure by Japanese corporations reduced economic growth in the second quarter of 2013. GDP growth was at an annualized rate of 2.6% in the second quarter of 2013, declining from 3.8% in the first quarter 2013. Compared with the prior quarter the Japanese economy growth was 0.6%. Consumption growth was 0.8%, but capital expenditures declined by 0.1%.

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The Indian rupee drops to a low of 62.13 in trading on Aug. 16, 2013. The Bombay Sensex index drops by 4%.