Canada charges VW over faking car emissions tests

OTTAWA, Ontario – The Canadian government said Monday it is charging Volkswagen for importing cars into Canada that company executives knew violated emissions standards.

The German automaker faces 58 charges of violating the Canadian Environmental Protection Act for bringing 128,000 cars into Canada with illegal emissions between 2008 and 2015. The company faces two other charges of providing misleading information.

Volkswagen issued a statement saying it has co-operated with Canadian investigators and that a deal is prepared ahead of the company’s first court appearance in Toronto on Friday.

George Laurer, inventor of ubiquitous UPC, dies at 94

WENDELL, N.C. – George J. Laurer, whose invention of the Universal Product Code at IBM transformed retail and other industries around the world, has died. He was 94.

Laurer was an electrical engineer with IBM in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park in the early 1970s when he spearheaded the development of the UPC, or bar code.

Fed likely to send message of continued low rates

WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve is expected to send a clear message when its policy meeting ends Wednesday: Interest rates will likely stay ultra-low for the foreseeable future.

Behind that message is a view that has gained support at the Fed as the U.S. economic expansion has entered a record 11th year: That contrary to long-standing thinking, a robust job market won’t necessarily fuel high inflation. This view has freed the Fed’s policymakers to keep their benchmark shortterm interest rate low.

The unemployment rate is just 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years. And yet inflation is still below the Fed’s 2% target level.

Ex-Fed Chair Volcker dies

Paul Volcker, who as Federal Reserve chairman in the early 1980s elevated interest rates to historic highs and triggered a recession as the price of quashing double-digit inflation, has died, according to his office. He was 92.

Volcker took charge of the Fed in August 1979, when the U.S. economy was in the grip of runaway inflation. Consumer prices skyrocketed 13% in 1979 and then by the same pace again in 1980.

Volcker raised the Fed’s benchmark interest rate from 11% to a record 20% by late 1980 to try to slow the economy’s growth and thereby shrink inflation.

Those high interest rates made it so expensive to borrow that the economy weakened steadily. By January 1980, a recession had begun. It lasted six months. A deeper and more painful downturn took hold in July 1981. It endured for 18 months and sent unemployment up to 10.8% in November and December 1982, the highest level since the Great Depression.

In a statement Monday, former President Jimmy Carter, who had chosen Volcker to be Fed chairman, called him a “giant of public service.”

“Paul was as stubborn as he was tall, and although some of his policies as Fed chairman were politically costly, they were the right thing to do,” Carter said.

Associated Press