Arrest: Police in Arizona have arrested a 21-year-old man suspected of being the sniper who has hit 11 cars with bullets in recent weeks, mostly along the I-10 freeway in Phoenix. Leslie Allen Merritt, Jr, who works as a landscaper, was arrested at a Walmart outside of Phoenix Thursday night. Police say they linked Merritt’s gun to four of the 11 cars hit.

No one was seriously injured in the shootings.

The suspect’s father said is son had too much respect for life and for firearms to have been the shooter. “Whoever said my son is the freeway shooter is a moron,” he said from his home in Mesa. “It’s got to be some sort of mistake or someone wanted the reward. This is just preposterous.”

Permawar: As Russian warplanes arrive in Syria, talks have begun between military leaders from the US and Russia about how to avoid confrontations while aircraft from the two countries operate over Syrian airspace against a common enemy while differing on support of the Syrian regime. Russia is propping up Syria’s dictator Bashar al Assad.

Syria’s military, in the meantime, has conducted a series of air strikes against Islamic State targets in the city of Palmyra. At least 26 people are reported to have been killed.

Nation: The Obama administration yesterday ordered Volkswagen to recall 500,000 cars that had been installed with a computer system designed to evade smog-reducing emissions standards.

The government accuses the German company of outfitting diesel-powered cars with a system that made the vehicles perform well on emissions tests and then relax during actual use on the road. It’s been called a “defeat device.” During normal driving the cars’ computer spewed 40 times as much pollution as allowed. An Environment Protection Agency executive said, “we expected better from Volkswagen.”

Econ 101: In the wake of the Federal Reserve’s decision not to raise interest rates, our Chief Economic Correspondent Mark Nussbaum has drawn our attention to Japan, which lowered interest rates to near zero 20 years ago and has been unable to raise them since.

An article from Reuters news service says, “Market behavior in the four years after the Bank of Japan first experimented with near-zero borrowing costs in 1995 tells a sobering tale: The economy sank into a cycle of falling wages, prices and output from which it has still not emerged, a specter that has haunted policymakers across the developed world since the 2008 financial crisis.”

The stock market, which quivers at any thought of higher interest rates, seems to have convinced the Fed that reasonably higher interest rates and moderately rising inflation is not actually a good thing for the economy, contrary to experience.

Times a Changin’: President Obama has nominated a man to be secretary of the Army who would be the first openly gay secretary of a military branch. Eric K. Fanning is a close civilian adviser to Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter.

Meanwhile the Marine Corps and its civilian bosses are publicly disagreeing about integrating women into combat units by the 2016 deadline set by the Obama administration. A $36 million study found that male/female combat units were slower, had more injuries, and were less accurate when firing weapons. The Marines say that putting women in infantry combat units would limit their effectiveness.

Politics: Trailing presidential candidate Jeb Bush stepped up for President Obama last night in Michigan saying, “Barack Obama is a talented man. And, by the way, he is an American, he is a Christian.”

Two days ago Donald Trump failed to respond to a supporter who said Obama is a Muslim and not an American citizen. Millions of Americans believe that and Trump appears happy to court the “birther” vote.

-30-