Volkswagen AG’s current chairman and chief executive were alerted by the carmaker’s former CEO to the use of illicit emissions-control software in the United States two weeks before the carmaker disclosed the scale of its manipulations, Bild am Sonntag reported, without citing the source of the information. Martin Winterkorn, who resigned within a week of Volkswagen’s (VW) biggest-ever corporate scandal becoming public on Sept. 18, briefed VW’s executive board on Sept. 8 that the carmaker had admitted the use of “defeat devices” to U.S. authorities, the newspaper said. Participants in the Sept. 8 meeting included then-finance chief Hans Dieter Poetsch and then-CEO of Porsche, Matthias Mueller, according to Bild am Sonntag.

Dangerous heavy metals used in oil production in war-torn South Sudan have leaked into drinking water sources used by 180,000 people with life-threatening health risks, a rights group said Friday. Toxicological tests carried out on hair samples from 96 volunteers living around the Thar Jath oil processing plant in South Sudan’s northern Unity region revealed they were “highly intoxicated with pollutants such as lead and barium,” said Klaus Stieglitz, from the German-based Sign of Hope organisation. “The total toxic stress — as found in the hair samples — of the human population of the area is life-threatening,” said Klaus-Dietrich Runow, from Germany’s Institute for Functional Medicine and Environmental Health, one of two separate independent toxicologists who assessed the samples.