Daily Mail

Home improvement retailer Lowe’s has laid off thousands of workers as the company begins the process of outsourcing them to third-party companies.

The company is eliminating thousands of maintenance and assembly workers who put together products such as wheelbarrows and grills.    Continue reading “Home improvement firm Lowe’s lays off thousands of workers amid plans to outsource assembly and maintenance jobs”

Daily Mail

Horrifying dash cam footage shows the moment an out-of-control semi-trailer truck plowed into a church van on a Florida interstate, killing five children and two adults on their way to Disneyland.

The newly-uncovered video of the fiery crash, obtained by DailyMail.com, shows the truck, driven by 59-year-old Steve Holland, cross over the median before smashing into the driver side of the van before hitting another truck.  Continue reading “Moment a truck plows into a church van killing five children and two adults”

Reuters – by Humeyra Pamuk

WASHINGTON, July 30 (Reuters) – More than half of the Trump administration’s $8.4 billion in trade aid payments to U.S. farmers through April was received by the top 10% of recipients, the country’s biggest and most successful farmers, a study by an advocacy group showed on Tuesday.

Highlighting an uneven distribution of the bailout, which was designed to help offset effects of the U.S.-China trade war, the Environmental Working Group said the top 1% of aid recipients received an average of more than $180,000 while the bottom 80% were paid less than $5,000 in aid.  Continue reading “Bulk of Trump’s U.S. farm aid goes to biggest and wealthiest farmers -advocacy group”

Overdrive – by  Matt Cole

The U.S. DOT announced Tuesday it has increased fines across the board for violations of federal trucking regulations.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is required by Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015 to adjust fine amounts each year based on inflation. Continue reading “Fines for trucking regs violations increased”

Yahoo News

(Bloomberg) — Low mortgage rates and thriving employment should be the recipe for a strong housing market. Instead, they’re deepening America’s affordability crisis.

What began on the coasts, in areas like New York and San Francisco, is now radiating into the nation’s heartland, as well as to cities from Las Vegas to Charleston, South Carolina. Entry-level buyers are scrambling to purchase homes that are in short supply, sending values soaring.  Continue reading “America’s Housing Affordability Crisis Spreads to the Heartland”

SF Gate

BEIJING – A court in southwestern China has handed an unusually heavy punishment – 12 years imprisonment – to one of the country’s most prominent activists despite appeals for clemency from international rights organizations and United Nations experts.

Huang Qi, the founder the 64 Tianwang website that aired accounts of government abuse, corruption and fecklessness from across China for two decades, was sentenced for “deliberately disclosing state secrets,” the Mianyang Intermediate People’s Court in Sichuan Province said in a brief online announcement Monday.  Continue reading “China sentences trailblazing online activist to 12 years in prison”

Daily Mail

This is the moment a homeowner pulled his gun on two teens who tried to rob him in his own front yard.

The suspects had allegedly been terrorizing the Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a spate of robberies on Wednesday, when they approached the victim.  Continue reading “Teens who terrorized homeowners are arrested”

American Trucker

When Ingrid Brown started driving a truck in 1979, it was rare for her to see another woman on the road. Back then, the owner-operator knew of six other female drivers who ran a regular route from North Carolina to California, and they would leave handwritten notes for each other at truck stops.

“We didn’t have cell phones, but we kept in touch with each other. There was a bond,” said Brown, who drives for Rabbit River, based in Holland, MI.  Continue reading “Women in trucking”

Overdrive

The American Trucking Associations on Wednesday asserted that the gap between the number of available, qualified drivers and the number of drivers needed by fleets is widening. The ATA report forecasts what it considers a “driver shortage” will reach 160,000 by 2028, if current trends continue.

ATA estimates there will be a driver shortfall of 59,500 this year, down slightly from its estimate of 60,800 for 2018, but well above the 2017 estimate of 50,700.  Continue reading “ATA casts ‘driver shortage’ as worsening”