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The U.S. Coast Guard is beginning to review how biometric devices should be added to federal transport security cards that are becoming mandatory for truckers and everyone else who wants access to secure port areas.

An accounting rules shift could trigger fundamental changes in a truck leasing market worth as much as $70 billion by reducing the attractiveness of renting equipment and reducing fleets’ access to debt.

Budget committees in Congress have approved draft versions of spending-revenue plans for next year that reject an Obama administration proposal to remove the firewalls that have traditionally protected the Highway Trust Fund and other transportation-related funds.

PHOENIX — As an Arizona highway patrol officer for 14 years in the 1970s and ’80s, Dick Landis chased illegal immigrants, drunken college students, speeding motorists and even hardened drug dealers up and down just about every strip of concrete slicing through the state’s scalding, lonely desert.

The Department of Transportation will develop a proposal to reopen the United States to trucks from Mexico before President Obama visits President Felipe Calderon there later this month, a spokeswoman told Transport Topics.

Less-than-truckload carrier Con-way Freight will take over the final leg of express shipments from Europe under a new partnership with Dutch transportation and logistics firm TNT.

Manufacturing in the U.S. improved in March but showed contraction for a 14th straight month, the Institute for Supply Management said Wednesday.

Daimler AG plans to cut its labor costs by 2 billion euros, or about $2.7 billion, by trimming hours and wages for 73,000 non-production workers in Germany and by delaying a pay increase, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Manufacturing activity in the Chicago region showed contraction in March for a sixth straight month, the Institute for Supply Chain Management-Chicago said.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — China International Marine Containers introduced the first trailer it is marketing in the United States under its own name, a refrigerated unit it said contains a proprietary insulation system that will eliminate the 3% to 7% in condensation weight that typical reefers build up in a year.