What We’re Reading

Alcohol Industry Cheers CBP Rollout of CBMA Claims

Customs and Border Protection issued guidance allowing reduced excise tax rates for alcoholic beverage imports and released documents needed to claim them.  (American Shipper)

 

Shipping Regulators Plan to Cut Greenhouse-Gas Emissions

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the United Nations body responsible for the world’s shipping, has decided to reduce the amount of sulphur allowed in bunker fuel from 3.5% to 0.5% by 2020. Sulphur is nasty stuff. When burned, it forms sulphates, which cause acid rain and pollute the air. A paper published last February in Nature Communications, by Mikhail Sofiev of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, found that the IMO’s new rule could stop between 139,000 and 396,000 premature deaths a year.  (The Economist)

 

Amazon Turns to Robots, to Hire 20,000 Fewer Temp Workers

This is the “first time on record they’ll actually hire fewer this holiday season than a year ago,” Citi analyst Mark May told CNBC. ”[This] corresponds very closely with the use of robots and automation within their facilities.”

Hiring can help analysts predict expense growth at companies, May said, “which has become an important theme within the internet sector.”

Robots and automation, which the Seattle-based company began adding to its warehouses about three years ago, “are making them more efficient,” he explained. (CNBC)

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