The government has fined U.S. tree-trimming company a record $95 million for knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants.

U.S. prosecutors said the fine against Philadelphia-based Asplundh Tree Expert Co. was the largest criminal penalty ever imposed in an immigration case.

Prosecutors said company managers deliberately looked the other way while supervisors knowingly hired thousands of undocumented workers between 2010 and 2014.

The prosecutors said this gave Asplundh a large workforce ready to take on emergency weather-related jobs across the country, putting its competitors at an unfair disadvantage.

A federal investigation into Asplundh was opened in 2015 and the company said it had since taken a number of steps to end “the practices of the past.”

“We accept responsibility for the charges as outlined, and we apologize to our customers, associates and all other stakeholders,” company Chairman Scott Asplundh said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Oppressor or liberator? Feminist in a silk robe, or pipe-smoking exploiter? Opinions were flying a day after Hugh Hefner’s death over just what he did — and didn’t do — for women.

On one side, there were those who saw Hefner’s dressing women in bunny costumes with cottontails on their rears, or displaying them nude in his magazine with a staple in their navels, as simple subjugation of females, no matter how slick and smooth the packaging. On the other were those who felt the Playboy founder was actually at the forefront of the sexual revolution, bringing sexuality into the mainstream and advancing the cause of feminism with his stand on social issues, especially abortion rights.

“I think it’s disgusting,” said feminist author Susan Brownmiller, of the praise she’d been seeing on social media since Hefner’s death Wednesday at age 91. “Even some of my Facebook friends are hewing to the notion that, gee whiz, he supported abortion, he supported civil rights. … Yes he was for abortion, [because] if you convince your girlfriend to get an abortion because she got pregnant, you don’t have to think about marrying her! I mean, that was his point.”

Most offensive to Brownmiller was what she called Hefner’s equating the word “feminist” with “anti-sex.”

“It wasn’t that we were opposed to a liberation of sexual morality,” she said, “but the idea that he would make women into little bunnies, rabbits, with those ears. … That was the horror of it.”

It was Brownmiller, in fact, who confronted Hefner nearly a half-century ago on Dick Cavett’s talk show, saying to his face, “Hugh Hefner is my enemy.” As a startled Hefner fiddled with his pipe, she added: “The day that you are willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to YOUR rear end …” The audience roared.

Brownmiller attributed some of the glowing tributes to Hefner in part to “an American tradition of saying nice things about the departed.”

For Kathy Spillar, executive editor of Ms. Magazine, the accolades were a result of something deeper: a decades-long public relations strategy of Playboy to sanitize what she called an empire devoted to the subjugation of women.

“From the beginning, they tried to sell it as women’s liberation,” said Spillar, who also directs the Feminist Majority Foundation. “And so they made huge outreach efforts over the years to women’s rights groups.” But there was nothing liberating about it, Spillar said: “Those photographs of women certainly aren’t empowering of those women. They’re there for the pleasure of men.”

“He was right about one thing,” Spillar added. “Sex sells. But it sells to men. And to put women in those horrible costumes that Gloria Steinem wrote about! Talk about sexual harassment, talk a hostile work environment.” She was referring to the famous magazine expose that a young Steinem went undercover to write, training as a Playboy bunny in a New York club — bunny suit and all.

Hefner himself, obviously, saw it very differently.  “The truth of the matter is the bunnies were the pre-feminist feminists,” Hefner told the Associated Press in 2011. “They were the beginning, really, of independent women. The bunnies were earning more money than, in many cases, their fathers and their husbands. That was a revolution.”

To Kathryn Leigh Scott, a former bunny at the New York club, much of what Hefner said then rings true. Scott trained at the club in January 1963, at age 19, she says, with six other bunnies, one of them Steinem. She said she had fun, and made good money. She later wrote a book, The Bunny Years, to counter the view that Steinem portrayed in her article.

“I did not feel exploited,” Scott says now. “As a matter of fact, I felt that I was exploiting Playboy — because I was earning very good money in a very safe environment, certainly safer than that many of my friends were working in at the time.”

Did Hefner advance or exploit women? Scott says she can see both sides. “But when you think of what he did to support Roe v. Wade for example, and civil rights, and what I know from his treatment of me, he did a lot to help women,” she said.

In the wake of Hefner’s death, many celebrities tweeted affectionate messages. “Thank you for being a revolutionary and changing so many people’s lives, especially mine,” wrote television personality and former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy. “We’ve lost a true explorer, a man who had a keen sense of the future,” wrote writer-producer Norman Lear. “We learned a lot from you Mr. Hefner.”

For feminist author and blogger Andi Zeisler, the main question was why Hefner was getting so much credit.

“He’s getting a disproportionate amount of credit for the sexual revolution,” said Zeisler, founder of the nonprofit Bitch Media. “It was a confluence of factors. He had nothing to do with the development of oral contraception, which I could argue was really the main driver of the sexual revolution where women were concerned.

“I think it’s safe to say that anything progressive that Hugh Hefner was for, he was for because it also benefited white men,” Zeisler said.

As for Steinem, who briefly wore that bunny suit in the early `60s, she preferred not to comment so close to Hefner’s death.

“Obit time,” she wrote in an email, “is not the time for truth-telling. People will now be free to tell it, but later.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Giant pandas Cai Tao and Hu Chun arrived Thursday to fanfare in Indonesia where a new “palace” like home that cost millions of dollars has been built for them.

The male and female pair landed at Jakarta’s international airport from Chengdu and will be quarantined at Taman Safari zoo outside the capital for about a month before the public can visit.

The zoo hopes the 7-year-olds will mate and add to the giant panda population. It’s built a special enclosure and facilities that cost about 60 billion rupiah ($4.5 million), Taman Safari President Tony Sumampouw told The Associated Press.

There are less than 1,900 giant pandas in their only wild habitats in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu.

China gifted friendly nations with its national mascot in what was known as “panda diplomacy” for decades.

Countries now pay to be loaned pandas but they remain a potent symbol of Chinese soft power at a time when Beijing is seeking Southeast Asia cooperation for its ambitions plans to create a modern-day Silk Road that enhances its economic and political clout.

Zoo spokesman Yulius Suprihardo said the living quarters for Cai Tao, the male, and Hu Chun, the female, resemble a three-tier temple.

It’s on a hill surrounded by about 5,000 square meters of land and equipped with an elevator, sleeping area, medical facilities and indoor and outdoor play areas.

He said after the quarantine period a “soft launch” for public viewing could be held by late October or early November.

“During this time we can only see the adorable pandas from images, videos or television. In the near future, Indonesian people can see panda directly,” Suprihardo said. “And we hope they can breed here, that’s part of our goal.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Would you buy a car that sprayed soothing odors when you’re stuck in rush-hour traffic? Or how about a robot that smells like a human being?

Scientists say that new technology means we will soon be using devices like these in our everyday lives. At this month’s British Science Festival in Brighton, researchers from Britain’s University of Sussex offered a demonstration of the technology that could be just around the corner.

The 3D animations of Virtual Reality have become commonplace. Now scientists have created virtual worlds that even smell like the real thing. When users open a virtual door and step into a new world, in this case into a rainforest, diffusers spray the appropriate scent for added authenticity.

Immersive experience

“It is a really immersive experience that you have because you’re exploring this environment and you have smells that correspond with it,” festival visitor Suzanne Fisher-Murray told VOA.

Smell technology has been tried before, famously in the United States with Smell-O-vision movies in the 1960s. Multisensory researcher Emanuela Maggioni of the University of Sussex says it’s on the cusp of a comeback.

“The connection with emotions, memories, and the potential to use the sense of smell, the odors, under the threshold of our awareness — it is incredible what we can do with technology,” Maggioni said.

And not just for entertainment. In another corner of the room, a driving simulator has been fitted with a scent diffuser.

“In this demonstration, we wanted to deliver the smell of lavender every time the driver exceeds the speed limit. We chose lavender because it’s a very calming smell,” co-researcher Dmitrijs Dmitrenko said.

Scent and human behavior

Scientists are experimenting with using scent instead of audible or visual alerts on mobile phones. Businesses already are using scent to influence customers’ behavior.

“Not only for marketing in stores, so creating the logo brand. But on the other side, you can create and stimulate impulse buying. So you’re in a library and you smell coffee and actually you are unconsciously having the need to drink a coffee,” Maggioni said.

She adds that scent is vital in human interactions — for example, when men smell tears, levels of testosterone are reduced and they show more empathy. That physiological reaction can be applied to new technology.

“In the interaction with robots — how we can build trust with robots if the robots smell like us,” Maggioni said.

It portends an exciting, and perhaps for some, daunting future. Scientists say the sense of smell, until now largely unexploited, is about to stimulated by the march of technology.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Would you buy a car that sprayed soothing aromas when you are stuck in rush-hour traffic? Or how about a robot that has the scent of a real person? Scientists say that new technology means we will soon be using devices like these in our everyday lives. Henry Ridgwell visited this month’s British Science Festival in Brighton, England, to find out more.
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From: MeNeedIt

Can children who have never been to school teach themselves basic reading, writing and math skills using only a tablet computer? Elon Musk and the XPrize Foundation are betting $15 million on the idea that they can. VOA’s Tina Trinh has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

Researchers say the likelihood of scorching summer temperatures in southern Europe is increasing because of man-made climate change.

Hotter-than-usual temperatures in the Mediterranean region – including an August heatwave in Italy and the Balkans dubbed ‘Lucifer’ – resulted in higher hospital admissions, numerous forest fires and widespread economic losses this summer.

The World Weather Attribution team says it combined temperature measurements and computer simulations, concluding that greenhouse gas emissions linked to human activity have increased the chances of such heatwaves four-to-tenfold.

They warned Wednesday that summers like this one could become the norm in the Euro-Mediterranean region by 2050 if emissions continue to rise.

The team’s techniques are widely accepted among scientists as a means of determining whether climate change plays a role in extreme events.
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From: MeNeedIt

A decades-old propaganda film has become a lightning rod again in Indonesia. The 1984 film called “The Treachery of the September 30th Movement/ Communist Party of Indonesia,” was sponsored by and became a propaganda tentpole of the Suharto military dictatorship.

It presents a revisionist account of an attempted coup on September 30, 1965, when six generals were assassinated. The murders were orchestrated, according to the film, by the Indonesian Communist Party, or PKI. The failed coup was the pretext for a military-led massacre of up to one million suspected communists and leftists, which subsequently helped General Suharto ascend to a 31-year authoritarian presidency.

More than five decades after the coup attempt and 33 years after the film was made, Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo announced last week that the movie would be shown to all military personnel, drawing criticism from some senior figures, who advised the military not to reopen old wounds.

But President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo himself suggested there should be a remake of the film for the “millennial generation.”

The film — often abbreviated to G30S, for “Gerakan 30 September” or the September 30th movement — was required viewing during the Suharto regime, which ended in 1998. According to a 2000 poll, 97 percent of students had seen it, most of them multiple times.

Renewed debate

The fiery military chief Gatot, who has made waves with his freewheeling statements and actions, such as unilaterally suspending military cooperation with Australia, spoke about the G30S film while visiting founding President Sukarno’s tomb in East Java last week.

“We cannot let the younger generation become fragmented again,” said Gatot. “The goal is not to discredit anyone who is wrong, but to give the full picture, so as not to let those bitter and black events happen again.”

President Jokowi, somewhat surprisingly, echoed Gatot’s suggestion, saying “millennial children” need movies as an entry point to history.

“Let them understand the dangers of communism, let them know about the Indonesian Communist Party,” he said to reporters in Central Java last week.

The president’s acquiescence illustrates “the weak reality of Jokowi’s leadership and the long feud between human rights defenders and the military,” according to Arbi Sanit, a political analyst at the University of Indonesia. “Jokowi’s weak assumptions allow him to be stepped over by press statements like those of the Commander,” and essentially be pressured into public agreement, said Sanit.

Sidharto Danusubroto, a member of the president’s advisory council, stated that rehashing the events of 1965 would be counterproductive to Jokowi’s economic and social agenda, and he discouraged both the military’s promotion of the film and recent discussions of the killings at the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute.

“Frankly, don’t hold [either of] them,” said Sidharto. “For us to fight to become the world’s fifth economic power, there needs to be political stability; if there are these movies, that seminar, some other noise here and there, those things don’t support the national interest,” he said at the council’s office.

Approaching anniversary

The pitch of the debate is only rising as the anniversary of the attempted coup approaches. There will be a number of informal screenings across Indonesia this week, as there have been, on and off, since the fall of Suharto.

The late president’s youngest son, Tommy Suharto, chimed in over the weekend to say that the film represents the “true version of history, and nobody could change that.”

The film’s narrative has been widely disputed by historians for at least two decades. Its major communist characters are eye-gouging gangsters, and it shows a leftist women’s group literally castrating military generals. Despite a runtime of over four hours, the film is not without artistic value, according to many latter-day Indonesian directors.

But the director of the Jakarta Arts Institute, writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma, disagrees, saying recently, “The film sucks.”

“Every year it was just a ritual all over Indonesia, and the movie was just terrible,” said Reza Muharam, now an activist with the International People’s Tribunal, which seeks justice for the human rights violations of 1965. “Imagine a bunch of 10-year-olds watching an interminable film with that much violence… it was just horror, you couldn’t sleep after that.”

Muharam hopes that a wider revival of G30S film is not in the cards.

“I think it was the biggest hoax ever made in Indonesia,” he said. “And everyone believed it.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Can children who have never been to school teach themselves basic reading, writing and math skills using only a tablet computer?

The World Bank and XPrize are betting $15 million on the idea.

“It’s a little bit out there, it’s a little bit of a crazy idea,” said Matt Keller, senior director of the Global Learning XPrize, a competition funded by the XPrize Foundation, a non-profit that spurs inventors to tackle global problems such as climate change and universal healthcare.

The inaugural Global Learning XPrize competition awards $10 million dollars to the team or company that develops the best educational app for children who have never set foot in a classroom. According to UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics, approximately 263 million children around the world are not in school.

“Can you develop something that’s so intuitive, so inferential, so dynamic that you give it to a child who is illiterate in a very remote part of the world — she picks it up, she touches it and she begins to learn how to read? That’s the challenge we put out to the world,” said Keller.

The finalists

At least 198 teams were up to the challenge. From that pool, five finalists were recently selected and awarded $1 million dollars each.

The finalists will begin testing their educational apps this November. Nearly 4,000 children from 150 villages in the Tanga region of Tanzania will use tablets donated by Google to access the apps and teach themselves.

A subset of students initially will be tested on literacy and numeracy comprehension using the early grade reading assessment (EGRA) and early grade math assessment (EGMA) models. After 15 months, the same students will be re-tested. The grand prize of $10 million will be awarded to the developer team with the highest proficiency gains among students. 

XPrize is working with UNESCO, the World Food Program, and the government of Tanzania to distribute and maintain the tablets.

“Most development organizations and most aid agencies and most governments are focused on building new schools and training new teachers,” Keller told VOA News, “What we’re saying is there are a lot of kids out there who don’t access school and there are a lot of kids out there who access really bad schools. So, can you give technology to a child that’s so good that it doesn’t supplant, but supplements a learning process that she may or may not have?”

Goals for the future

By 2030, the world will need to recruit 68.8 million teachers in order to meet the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal of universal primary and secondary education, according to a 2016 report by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics.

“That’s simply not possible,” said Jamie Stuart, co-founder of educational non-profit Onebillion, which is one of the five Global Learning XPrize finalists. “So we have to look for radical alternatives in terms of children’s learning,” said Stuart.

Developers at Onebillion already have field-tested their app, Onecourse, for the past 10 years in Malawi. The app is designed so that children can use it with little or no adult assistance, and teaches children reading and numeracy using a teacher character that speaks their language.

Testing brings many challenges, the least of which involves working with populations that often never have interacted with a tablet before.

“Keeping it simple, keeping it focused on the individual needs of the child, and adapting to how they learn are the key ingredients,” said Stuart.

The other finalists are Curriculum Concepts International (CCI), a lesson-based app that incorporates games, videos and books, Chimple, which focuses on play and discovery-based learning, Kitkit School , which originally was designed for special needs children, and RoboTutor, which was developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“If we can prove that a child needs no instruction other than what’s on that device, then we begin a series of events that will lead inexorably to a device that is designed for that child, in that part of the world, with a teacher on it,” said Keller.
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From: MeNeedIt

Toyota Motor Corp. announced a $374 million investment Tuesday at five U.S. plants to support production of its first American-made hybrid powertrain.

The upgrades at Toyota’s factories in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia are part of a previously announced $10 billion in U.S. spending by the Japanese automaker. It “underscores Toyota’s confidence in the capability and global competitiveness of our North American manufacturing,” Jeff Moore, Toyota North America’s senior vice president of manufacturing, said in a statement.

Toyota said 2.5-liter engines made in Kentucky and transmissions produced in West Virginia will be used in North American-made hybrid vehicles, such as the Highlander SUV manufactured in Princeton, Indiana.

Toyota will create 50 jobs at its Huntsville, Alabama, plant, which will build engines for its cost-saving New Global Architecture production strategy to share common parts and components among different vehicles. None of the other upgrades announced Tuesday will result in immediate net job gains.

The investment includes $106 million at the Huntsville plant, a $121 million expansion of a 2.5-liter engine capacity at Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, and $115 million to add hybrid vehicle transmission production in Buffalo, West Virginia.

Toyota also is investing $17 million to increase production of 2.5-liter cylinder heads at its Bodine Aluminum facility in Troy, Missouri. A $14.5 million upgrade at a Bodine plant in Jackson, Tennessee, will accommodate production of hybrid transmission cases and housings and 2.5-liter engine blocks.

“This investment is part of our long-term commitment to build more vehicles and components in the markets in which we sell them,” said Toyota Motor North America CEO Jim Lentz.
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From: MeNeedIt

The United States has imposed sanctions on eight North Korean banks and 26 bank executives amid escalating tensions with Pyongyang over its nuclear program.

“This further advances our strategy to fully isolate North Korea in order to achieve our broader objectives of a peaceful and denuclearized Korean Peninsula,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday in a statement.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for new economic sanctions against individuals and businesses that finance trade with Pyongyang’s reclusive communist regime and fund its weapons development.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis emphasized Tuesday that the U.S. sought a peaceful resolution to escalating tensions with North Korea, despite the regime’s claim that a tweet Monday by Trump was tantamount to a declaration of war.

In New Delhi for talks with Indian officials about strengthening U.S.-India ties, Mattis said that while the U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula was necessary to deter North Korea’s threats, it also supported diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict peacefully.

“And that is our goal, to solve this diplomatically, and I believe President Trump has been pretty clear on this issue,” Mattis said, following a meeting with India’s defense minister.

Hope for diplomacy

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday also stressed that the U.S. would “continue to pursue our diplomatic efforts and hope that’s the way we’ll solve this”

On Monday, Trump commented on Twitter that if North Korea carried out its threats, Kim Jong Un’s regime “won’t be around much longer.”

Speaking to reporters near U.N. headquarters in New York, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said, “Given the fact that this comes from someone who is currently holding the seat of the United States presidency, this is clearly a declaration of war.”

The world should clearly remember, he added, that “it was the U.S. who first declared war on our country.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Ri’s characterization of the tweet “absurd.”

“We’ve not declared war on North Korea,” she said.

Although North Korea has declared “war” many times in the past, now “we’ve entered a bona fide crisis,” Van Jackson, senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, told VOA.

“Even if we’re not in a war right now, we seem to be doing everything in our power to make one happen by actions and statements that make deterrence more likely to fail,” said Jackson, a former director for Korea policy and a defense strategy adviser at the U.S. Defense Department.

Threat to bombers

Ri warned that his country might shoot down U.S. strategic bombers, even if they were not in North Korean airspace. According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency Tuesday, Lee Cheol-woo, the chief of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, said Pyongyang was spotted readjusting the position of its warplanes and boosting its defensive capabilities along its east coast.

A fighter jet from North Korea in 1969 shot down an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane, outside North Korean territorial airspace in the Sea of Japan, killing 30 sailors and one marine on board.

Speaking at a security conference on Monday, Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said the United States hoped to avoid war with North Korea, “but what we can’t do is discount that possibility.”

The Army lieutenant general added that the U.S. had thought through several different ways the problem with North Korea could be resolved, and “some are uglier than others.”

However, McMaster, told the conference, hosted by the Institute for the Study of War, that “there’s not a precision strike that solves the problem.”

One peaceful solution, according to McMaster, would be for Pyongyang to give access to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. But any diplomatic negotiations, McMaster said, would “have to happen under conditions that are different from previous talks.” He said, however, he was not going to come up with a list of preconditions.

Beijing’s role

Some analysts see the path to talks still running through Beijing, which recently moved to cut banking ties between China and North Korea, shut off the supply of liquefied natural gas to the North Koreans and stop imports of their textiles.

“I think that the Chinese are sending a signal to the North that they are skating on thin ice,” said T.J. Pempel, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

The North Korean foreign minister threatened on Saturday that his country could conduct an atmospheric hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean.

Mattis responded Monday that if North Korea carried out its threat, “this would be a shocking display of irresponsibility toward global health, toward stability, toward nonproliferation.”

U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers from Guam escorted by F-16 fighter jets from a U.S. base in Japan on Saturday flew in international airspace over waters east of North Korea.

The Pentagon said the show of force, meant to display some of the military options available to Trump, was “the farthest north of the demilitarized zone any U.S. fighter or bomber aircraft have flown off North Korea’s coast in the 21st century.”

VOA’s William Gallo contributed to this report from New Delhi.
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From: MeNeedIt

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen acknowledged Tuesday that the Fed is puzzled by the persistence of unusually low inflation and that it might have to adjust the timing of its interest rate policies accordingly.

Speaking to a conference of economists, Yellen touched upon key questions the Fed is confronting as it tries to determine why inflation has remained chronically below its inflation target of 2 percent annually. The Fed chair said officials still expect the forces keeping inflation low to fade eventually. But she conceded that the Fed may need to adjust its assumptions.

In noting the persistence of low inflation, Yellen suggested that the Fed will take care not to raise rates too quickly. But she also said the central bank should avoid raising rates too slowly. Moving too gradually, she suggested, might eventually force the Fed to have to accelerate rate hikes and thereby elevate the risk of a recession.

Most analysts expect the central bank to raise rates in December, for a third time this year, in a reflection of economic improvement. But the Fed has said its rate hikes will depend on incoming data.

In her speech in Cleveland to the annual conference of the National Association for Business Economics, Yellen went further than she has before in suggesting that the Fed could be mistaken in the assumptions it is making about inflation.

“My colleagues and I may have misjudged the strength of the labor market, the degree to which longer-run inflation expectations are consistent with our inflation objective or even the fundamental forces driving inflation,” Yellen said.

The Fed seeks to control interest rates to promote maximum employment and stable prices, which it defines as annual price increases of 2 percent. While the Fed has met its goal on employment, with the jobless rate at 4.4 percent, near a 16-year low, it has continued to miss its inflation target.

Chronically low inflation can depress economic growth because consumers typically delay purchases when they think prices will stay the same or even decline.

Inflation, which was nearing the 2 percent goal at the start of the year, has since then fallen further behind and is now rising at an annual rate of just 1.4 percent.

Yellen has previously attributed the miss on inflation this year to temporary factors, including a price war among mobile phone companies. She and other Fed officials have predicted that inflation would soon begin rising toward the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target, helped by tight labor markets that will drive up wage gains.

In her remarks Tuesday, Yellen said this outcome of a rebound in inflation is still likely. But she said the central bank needed to remain alert to the possibility that other forces not clearly understood might continue to keep inflation lower than the Fed’s 2 percent goal.

The Fed chair cautioned that if the central bank moved too slowly in raising rates, it could inadvertently allow the economy to become overheated and thus have to raise rates so quickly in the future that it could push the country into a recession.

“It would be imprudent to keep monetary policy on hold until inflation is back to 2 percent,” Yellen said.

During a question-and-answer session, Yellen said the Fed would be “looking at inflation very carefully” to determine the timing of upcoming rate hikes. But she said the data is likely to be difficult to assess, in part because of the effects of the recent devastating hurricanes, which have forced up gasoline prices.

Yellen’s remarks came a week after Fed officials left their benchmark rate unchanged but announced that they would start gradually shrinking their huge portfolio of Treasury and mortgage bonds. Those holdings had grown from purchases the Fed made over the past nine years to try to lower long-term borrowing rates and help the U.S. economy recover from the worst downturn since the 1930s.

The Fed did retain a forecast showing that officials expect to boost rates three times this year. So far, they have increased their benchmark lending rate twice, in March and June, leaving it at a still-low range of 1 percent to 1.25 percent.

Last week, the Fed said the reductions in its bond holdings would begin in October by initially allowing a modest $10 billion in maturing bonds to roll off the $4.5 trillion balance sheet each month.

Asked about how long-term loan rates might respond to reductions in the Fed’s bond portfolio, Yellen cited a study that estimated that the increase in its bond holdings had lowered such rates by about 1 percentage point.

But she said the reduction in the holdings wouldn’t likely raise rates by as much as a percentage point given that the Fed intended to keep the size of its balance sheet significantly higher than it was before the financial crisis. She said any upward pressure on rates would likely be gradual and take place over several years.

Crutsinger reported from Washington, Kang from Cleveland.
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From: MeNeedIt