Government

The U.S. trade deficit widened 18% in September, the most in more than a decade, the Commerce Department said Friday.

A Tennessee state highway that is close to the site of a recent big rock slide near the North Carolina border will be closed for at least three weeks due to another rock slide, state officials said.

Intermodal traffic volume fell 16.4% in the third quarter, an improvement over the second quarter’s decline of 18.7%, the Intermodal Association of North American said Thursday.

States faced with big budget deficits will continue to grapple with diminished revenue until at least 2012, according to a new survey, Bloomberg reported.

American Trucking Associations and two state ATA affiliates, Maryland and Virginia, are taking issue with the District of Columbia’s new thrust on truck lengths and credential requirements.

The chairwoman of a House subcommittee has scheduled a field hearing Monday in Baltimore on a controversial House bill that would prohibit the transportation of flammable liquids in unprotected product piping on both existing and newly-manufactured cargo tank trucks.

Officials in Vermont and New York have decided the Crown Point Bridge connecting the two states at the southern tip of Lake Champlain is too badly deteriorated to repair.

FedEx Corp. said an Internal Revenue Service audit team has proposed that no assessment of federal employment taxes be made against the company’s ground parcel unit for 2002, an important step in FedEx’s continuing legal battle over whether some of its workers are independent contractors or employees.

Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last week approved a cap-and-trade bill that opponents said would cause a spike in the cost of diesel fuel.