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Fire trucks and concrete mixers, semis, heavy-duty pickups and all trucks in between will, for the first time, have to trim fuel consumption and emissions of heat-trapping gases under new efficiency standards announced Tuesday by President Barack Obama.

The White House said the standards will save businesses billions of dollars in fuel costs, help reduce oil consumption and cut air pollution. The standards apply to vehicle model years 2014 to 2018.

The new targets affect three categories of vehicles. Big rigs or semis will have to slash fuel consumption and production of heat-trapping gases by up to 23 percent. Gasoline-powered heavy-duty pickups and vans will have to cut consumption by 10 percent, or by 15 percent if the vehicles run on diesel fuel.

The standards also prescribe a 9 percent reduction in fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for work trucks, which include everything from fire trucks and concrete mixers to garbage trucks and buses.

In a statement, Obama said the new standards had the support of companies that build, buy and drive medium and heavy-duty trucks.

The president had planned to unveil the standards at a trucking business in Virginia, a state crucial to his re-election hopes, but the White House canceled the trip Tuesday morning without explanation. Instead, the president he met privately at the White House with industry officials to discuss the initiative.

The White House projected savings of 530 million barrels of oil and $50 billion in fuel costs over the expected lives of the vehicles covered by the new standards, along with improved air quality and public health.

The administration released no miles-per-gallon equivalent for the new standards, saying that doing so would be confusing given the different categories of vehicles, the different types of vehicles in each category and the varying payloads that each one carries.

Officials did stress that the costs of making the trucks more fuel-efficient _ ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars per vehicle _ will be recouped through reduced fuel costs over the lifetime of the vehicles.

It’s the second round of fuel efficiency standards in the past month.

Last month, Obama announced a deal with automakers to double overall fuel economy to 54.5 mpg by 2025, starting in model year 2017. Cars and light trucks now on the road average 27 mpg.

That followed a 2009 deal committing cars and trucks to averaging 35.5 mpg by model year 2016.

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Greece’s opposition leader wasn’t invited to Thursday’s European Union summit but he became its hapless star.

Antonis Samaras wants to block spending cuts, tax increases and economic reforms that Greece has to approve to win more loans next month and avoid what some fear would be economic catastrophe.

Samaras came to Brussels for a meeting on the sidelines of the summit and pushed other European conservative leaders to back a “corrected” version of the plan.

But he swiftly came under fire from the leaders of Germany, Netherlands and Sweden _ in an unusual case of collective meddling by EU leaders in a member country’s domestic politics.

EU leaders have been struggling for more than a year to keep Greece’s debt woes from bringing the rest of the eurozone down, and some appear to be losing patience.

Germany’s Angela Merkel said Samaras’ conservative party _ which was in power for years before rival Socialists took over and acknowledged crushing debt problems _ should take its “historical responsibility.”

Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said: “It is very important that no Greek political leader tells the Greek people that they have a shortcut.”

Samaras acknowledged that he came under pressure Thursday by other European conservative leaders to lift his objections to the bailout agreement. But it’s unclear how much they chipped away at his resolve.

“European leaders listen to our view. Some agreed with our position, but most stuck to their own positions,” Samaras told Greek state-run NET television. “I explained to them that we cannot give our backing to a mistake.”

Samaras, a U.S.-educated economist, is a controversial figure in Greek politics, too.

He spent years in political exile after forming a breakaway party in the early 1990s that caused a damaging split in the conservative electorate.

A few months after he was elected leader of the New Democracy party, he expelled his predecessor after she voted for last year’s international rescue package for Greece.

Without the next euro12 billion ($17 billion) installment of its existing euro110 billion bailout, Greece will default on its massive debt my mid-July. The country is also negotiating a second rescue package as it remains stuck in recession and locked out of international debt markets.

Samaras’ party has stubbornly refused to back Socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou over the bailout program, arguing that its excessive reliance of tax hikes is counterproductive and locking Greece’s economy in recession.

Surprise talks with Papandreou this month to form a grand coalition government collapsed. Samaras’ party recently took a slim lead in opinion polls, after trailing for three years.

As a result, Samaras is demanding early elections.

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond withdrew on Monday his nomination for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, complaining that Republicans who have blocked his confirmation for more than a year failed to understand the importance of his work on unemployment.

Diamond announced his withdrawal in an opinion article in The New York Times with the headline “When a Nobel Prize Isn’t Enough guaranteed unsecured personal loan.”

“Last October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve

Spanish financial markets slumped Monday after voters angry about austerity measures dealt the governing Socialist party a painful loss in local and regional elections, raising doubts over the country’s ability to enforce debt cuts.

Investors worried that the government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero had lost support in its drive to heal public finances and faced a period of political uncertainty. Daily protests against both the Socialists and the opposition conservatives, meanwhile, were spreading to cities across the country and expected to last for days.

The Ibex 35 index on the Madrid stock market closed down 1.4 percent and the yield on Spanish 10-year bonds on the secondary market was up to 5.5 percent. That indicates investors are more cautious about the country’s ability to repay its debts.

The spread, or difference in yield between that bond and the equivalent benchmark German one, stood at about 250 basis points in the afternoon, up from 240 on Friday. A basis point is one-one hundredth of a percent.

The governor of the Bank of Spain said the country cannot sustain spreads of more than 200 basis points for a long period because this will raise government borrowing costs and leave less money available for providing financing for companies and getting stagnant credit flowing again.

Miguel Angel Fernandez Ordonez also said in a speech that the government needs to press ahead quickly with labor market reforms to create jobs and reassure investors. He called for more flexibility in how collective bargaining agreements are negotiated. Economists say the current system is too rigid because in a given sector it treats money losing and profitable companies with the same terms when it comes to giving workers raises.

Investor appetite for Spanish bonds will be tested Tuesday with a treasury auction of 3- and 6-month bills.

Alejandro Varela of brokerage Renta 4 in Madrid said that besides debt worries spilling over from other troubled countries such as Greece, investors feared that conservatives taking over town halls and regional governments might discover bigger debt piles than had been previously disclosed.

That’s what happened late last year when the wealthy and powerful Catalonia region held similar elections. The center-right Catalan nationalists took over from a Socialist-led coalition and recently announced the region’s deficit was much bigger than previously known. Catalonia did not vote on Sunday.

In 13 other regions that were up for grabs Sunday, the conservative opposition Popular Party won virtually all of them from the Socialists, causing new debt concerns to sprout, Varela said.

“There had been speculation to this effect for a week and now that melon will be sliced open,” Varela said.

The Popular Party also cleaned up at municipal elections by winning 2 million more votes than the Socialists with a margin of victory of about 10 percentage points. The party said those numbers show Spain is hungry for change.

Varela said he expects Zapatero to call early elections and that it would be good for the country, although the prime minister said Sunday night as he acknowledged defeat by his party that he would not and plans to serve out his term. General elections must be held by next March. Zapatero has said he will not seek a third term.

Varela said, “Spain is in a very weakened situation and this transitory period is particularly dangerous.”

The Popular Party favors early elections but on Monday refrained from calling for them outright.

“Spain can’t wait another year,” said party Secretary General Maria Delores de Cospedal. “No more time should be lost.”

She ruled out, however, trying to push a no-confidence vote through Parliament where the Socialists still have enough allies to reject it.

The elections were local and regional, but many Spaniards said they had the national picture in mind as they voted. The country is saddled with a eurozone-high jobless rate of 21.3 percent and is struggling to recover from nearly two years of recession triggered by the collapse of a real estate bubble and the end of an overzealous period of free-flowing credit.

For the past week, central Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza has been home to a makeshift protest camp to mainly young Spaniards angry over their bleak economic prospects _ the youth jobless rate exceeds 40 percent. The protesters dismiss both Socialist and conservative politicians as inept, corrupt and distant from the plight of everyday people and said the elections result made little difference to them.

“It’s not that important because this protest never had an electoral goal,” said Javier Perez, one of the Madrid camp’s spokespersons. “In the end, the results are another example of Spain’s two-party system and how it fails to resolve the anger, the indignation and our problems.”

United behind the slogan “Real Democracy Now”, the Madrid protest has drawn tens of thousands of people of all ages and spread to dozens of other cities. On Monday, the activists debated how to proceed with their campaign after voting Sunday to stay on for at least another week. They discussed gradually dismantling the camps and taking the protests to city neighborhoods to get more people involved.

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Royal Dutch Shell PLC will construct the biggest floating man-made object ever, a natural gas processing plant longer than four football fields and more massive than any aircraft carrier.

The “Prelude FLNG” facility, to be anchored off the Australian coast, will be made of 260,000 tons of steel _ five times more than Sydney’s famed Harbour Bridge, Shell said Friday.

It is designed to take in the equivalent of 110,000 barrels per day in gas from undersea fields 200 kilometers (125 miles) off Australia’s Northwest coast and cool it into liquefied natural gas, known as LNG.

Shell claimed the plant will be able to withstand category 5 cyclones, the worst type of storms, and is planned to remain moored above the Prelude gas field for 25 years after completion.

Shell said the facility will be built in a South Korean shipyard but did not say how much it would cost.

A company spokeswoman declined to set a date for the platform’s completion date, but noted the Prelude gas field is scheduled to start production around 2017.

“We don’t give specific guidance on project level spend, but we are making a substantial investment in Australia LNG,” said spokeswoman Kirsten Smart in an email.

Shell plans $30 billion in various investments in Australia over the coming five years, the company has said.

“This project is certainly competitive with more traditional Australian LNG developments on a cost and economics basis,” Smart wrote.

Financial newswire Dow Jones cited Australia’s Resources Minister Martin Ferguson as saying the project will benefit the country’s economy by creating around 1,000 jobs and contributing A$12 billion ($12.8 billion) in tax revenues over 25 years.

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Sales at U.S. retailers probably climbed in April, reinforcing evidence that employment gains are allowing Americans to weather higher fuel costs, economists said before reports this week.

The projected 0.6 percent gain in purchases would follow a 0.4 percent increase in March, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey ahead of Commerce Department figures May 12. Another report may show the cost of living increased.

Demand at chains including Limited Brands Inc. and Macy’s Inc. (M) topped analysts’ estimates last month as payrolls nationally increased more than projected. While mounting fuel and food costs are pinching household budgets, improving job prospects mean consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy, can keep growing.

Industrywide light-vehicle sales ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 13.2 million in April, topping the 13 million pace for the third straight month, according to researcher Autodata Corp. Detroit-based cash advance.bloomberg.com/general-motors-co/” href=”http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=GM:US” density=”sparse” title=”Get Quote” ticker=”GM:US” class=”web_ticker”>General Motors Co. (GM)’s U.S. deliveries jumped 26 percent, while Dearborn, Michigan- based Ford Motor Co. (F) had a 13 percent gain.

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The federal government sued Deutsche Bank Tuesday, saying the bank committed fraud and padded its pockets with undeserved income as it repeatedly lied so it could benefit from a government program that insured mortgages.

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeks to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance claims that the government has had to pay when homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. The lawsuit also asked for punitive damages. The government said the bank made substantial profits between 2007 and 2009 from the resale of the risky mortgages, leaving the government to foot the bill for loans that defaulted. The mortgage insurance is issued by the Federal Housing Administration.

The lawsuit said the bank carried out the fraud through its subsidiary, MortgageIT, which employed more than 2,000 people at branches in all 50 states. Deutsche acquired MortgageIT in 2007.

At a news conference, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said the bank “repeatedly and brazenly” engaged in a pattern of reckless lending practices for mortgages “that were really ticking time bombs,” sometimes failing even to verify that a mortgage applicant had a job.

“In fact, they often seemed to treat red flags as if they were green lights,” he said.

Still, the prosecutor said the government found no evidence of the criminal intent necessary to take the case beyond a civil lawsuit.

“Every lie is not a crime,” he said.

In a statement, Deutsche spokeswoman Renee Calabro said the bank had received the complaint and was reviewing it.

“We believe the claims against MortgageIT and Deutsche Bank are unreasonable and unfair, and we intend to defend against the action vigorously,” she said.

Calabro said nearly 90 percent of the activity described in the lawsuit occurred before Deutsche Bank acquired MortgageIT, which had been an FHA lender operating with government oversight for almost a decade.

Since last fall, federal regulators and attorneys general of all 50 states have been investigating lenders accused of cutting corners and using flawed documents to foreclose on many homeowners. In some cases, employees of financial institutions engaged in so-called robo-signing _ approving documents in foreclosures without actually reading them. Foreclosure-fraud class-action lawsuits are also piling up against major banks nationwide.

Bharara said it “would not be a fantastical stretch to think we are looking at other lending institutions as well.”

The lawsuit against Deutsche Bank sought to recover more than $386 million that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has paid out in FHA insurance claims and related costs arising out of MortgageIT’s approval of more than 3,100 mortgages, among 1,400 loans that have defaulted so far. It said HUD had paid more than $97 million in FHA claims and related costs arising out of more than 600 mortgages that defaulted within six months.

HUD sets the rules for the FHA mortgage insurance program, including requirements relating to the adequacy of the borrower’s income to meet mortgage payments, the borrower’s creditworthiness and the appropriateness of the valuation of the property being purchased.

The lawsuit said Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT failed to comply with HUD rules and regulations regarding required quality control procedures, and then lied about their purported compliance.

The government said the quality control violations were egregious, including the failure to review all early payment defaults and to implement minimal quality control processes.

The lawsuit noted that MortgageIT hired an outside vendor, Tena Companies Inc., to conduct quality control reviews of closed FHA-insured loans in 2004 but then never read letters that Tena wrote identifying serious underwriting violations.

“Instead, MortgageIT employees stuffed the letters, unopened and unread, in a closet in MortgageIT’s Manhattan headquarters,” the lawsuit said.

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Treasuries rose for a second week as investors speculated that efforts to cut the Federal budget deficit may damp economic growth and awaited a policy statement next week from the Federal Reserve.

Ten-year note yields fell to the lowest level in a month even as Standard & Poor’s put the U.S. government on notice that it risks losing its AAA credit rating. Gains were tempered by advances in stocks. The U.S. will sell $99 billion in notes in the coming week, and the Federal Open Market Committee opens its two-day meeting on April 26.

“You are looking at an economy that’s just getting off low levels,” said David Coard, head of fixed-income trading in New York at Williams Capital Group, a brokerage for institutional investors. “The market is looking for guidance from the FOMC. We’re looking for clues as to when the Fed may possibly begin to change course with respect to monetary policy.”

Two-year note yields dropped three basis points, or 0.03 percentage point, to 0.66 percent in New York, from 0.69 percent on April 15, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices. The 0.75 percent security due in March 2013 rose 7/32, or $2.19 per $1,000 face amount, to 100 6/32.

Ten-year note yields fell one basis point to 3.40 percent, from 3.41 percent on April 15.

Treasuries were headed for their first monthly gain since January, a 0.54 percent return, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Treasury Master index.

Shortened Week

Volume declined in a shortened week. Treasuries trading closed at 2 p.m. in New York on April 21 and were shut April 22 for the Good Friday holiday under a Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association recommendation. About $980 billion in U.S. debt changed hands this past week, compared with $1.5 trillion in the five days ended April 15, according to Icap Plc, the world’s largest interdealer broker.

Fed policy makers will leave the target rate for overnight lending between banks unchanged in the coming week at zero to 0.25 percent, where it’s been since December 2008, according to all 80 economists in a Bloomberg survey. Officials, who last met on March 15, may discuss what path the central bank will take when its program to purchase $600 billion in Treasuries ends in June.

“The last time the Fed met it was right after the catastrophe in Japan, so there could have been a sense the Fed held back to see how the markets and economies reacted to those troubling circumstances,” said Jim Vogel, head of agency-debt research at FTN in Memphis, Tennessee, referring to Japan’s record earthquake on March 11. “The Fed may be freer to discuss their general economic outlook. That will have people tuned to the FOMC.”

Economic Data

Treasuries gained on Thursday, April 21, as the Philadelphia Fed’s general economic index tumbled to 18.5 in April, the lowest level since November, while initial claims for unemployment benefits decreased to 403,000 in the week ended April 16, Labor Department data showed. Bloomberg surveys forecast an index reading of 36.9 and a jobless-claim decline to 390,000.

U.S. gross domestic product slowed to a 1.8 percent annual growth pace in the first quarter, according to the median forecast of 32 economists in a Bloomberg News survey, down from 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter and 2.6 percent in the third. The Commerce Department reports the data on April 28.

Treasury gains were limited this past week as stocks rose on better-than-estimated corporate earnings reports. The S&P 500 Index (SPX) gained 1.3 percent, while the MSCI World Index climbed 1.6 percent, the biggest weekly gain in a month.

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President Nicolas Sarkozy says France will intensify its airstrikes in Libya at the request of opposition forces.

France’s Foreign Ministry also said Wednesday it already has military liaison officers on the ground in the rebel-held city of Benghazi. The officers are trying to help the rebels organize and bolster the NATO air campaign that has failed to rout Moammar Gadhafi’s military.

A presidential aide said Sarkozy, after meeting a Libyan opposition leader Wednesday, said: “We will intensify the strikes.” The aide was not authorized to be publicly named according to presidential policy.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

ROME (AP) _ Italy has announced it is sending military instructors to train the rebels fighting in Libya guaranteed cash advance.

Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa said 10 instructors will be going. Details are being worked out. He spoke Wednesday after meeting with his British counterpart, Liam Fox.

France and Britain already have announced they will be sending military officers to Libya to help rebel forces organize and bolster the NATO air campaign that has failed to rout Moammar Gadhafi’s military.

La Russa again ruled out that Italy would send ground troops.

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Americans paid more for food and energy in February, but outside those volatile categories inflation was tame.

The Labor Department says the Consumer Price Index rose 0.5 percent in February, the largest increase since June 2009. But excluding food and energy costs, core prices rose 0.2 percent, the same as in January.

Gas prices jumped 4.7 percent in February, above January’s increase but below December’s rise. Food costs increased 0.6 percent, the most in two and a half years personal business card.

Costs for other goods and services, such as health care and cars, are also rising. Core consumer prices increased 1.1 percent in the past year, up from a 0.6 percent annual increase in October. Still, that’s below the Fed’s preferred range of 1.5 percent to 2 percent.

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