Free Republic

Brighton, N.Y. (WHAM) — Gov. Kathy Hochul said she has taken steps to address the ongoing road salt shortage in New York state, including suspending the hours of service requirements for all truck drivers to increase deliveries. Hochul was in the Rochester area Friday and answered questions 13WHAM had about the rock salt shortage that has caused concern across the state and locally. More than 150 trucks lined up and down Lakeside Drive in Ontario to purchase rock salt earlier in the week. Several municipalities are also dealing with shortages and delivery delays from American Rock Salt.

Desalination won’t end water shortage Re “Scrap high-speed rail” (Letters, Dec. 28): Don Anderson’s letter advocates scraping the bullet train and using the money for desalination plants in Southern California. Our water problems have been caused by drought, which is a symptom of global warming. One of the causes of global warming is our dependence on burning fuel for transportation. Desalination would exacerbate the problem. It takes 1,500 kilowatt-hours to produce a million gallons of desalinated water. That’s a lot of carbon being put into the atmosphere. The solution to global warming isn’t to make more air conditioners, and the...

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said President-elect Trump has “no shortage of nerve” for asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to block the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his classified documents and election interference cases. “They have no shortage of chutzpah. No shortage of nerve,” Schiff said during a Monday evening appearance on MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” “But for the attorney general to grant it, I think, would be indefensible for the reasons that you mentioned,” he added. Smith’s two-volume report could be released as early as Friday if Garland doesn’t decide to seal the...

Iran is in the midst of a fuel shortage and an electricity crisis, causing essential utilities to be shut down in the middle of a cold winter. The regime has failed to provide for its own people but has spent billions of dollars on terror abroad. Al Jazeera reported Wednesday: Tens of millions of people across Iran are facing major disruptions as authorities shut down services in the face of an exacerbating energy and currency crisis amid historic regional tensions. This week, government offices, schools, banks and businesses in major provinces and in the capital Tehran have been largely closed...

Oh the weather outside is frightful — enough to kill off Christmas trees. Yuletide firs are dying from a severe drought that’s plagued parts of the Northeast for weeks — with some farmers losing 25% of this year’s crop and predicting a future shortage, according to WBZ-TV. “They’re all yellow on the inside. The needles are falling off,” said Chris Moran, who runs Vandervalk Farm in Mendon, Massachusetts. “Without water we can’t grow anything.” Dry weather killed roughly 500 of his 2,700 Christmas tree seedlings — fragile, 1-foot-tall babies — after they were planted past spring, he said.

Starting today, Coles supermarkets in Australia will implement a temporary purchase limit on eggs due to shortages linked to bird flu outbreaks. Customers will be restricted to buying two cartons each at all stores except in Western Australia. The bird flu strain has disrupted the supply chain, leading to fewer eggs being laid. It’s a challenging situation for egg suppliers, with some predicting that the cost of a carton of eggs could potentially triple within the next few weeks. While Aldi and Woolworths have also seen shortages, they do not currently plan to impose purchase limits.

Are you a pickle connoisseur? If so, extreme weather in Mexico may be impacting the availability of the snack in the U.S. Every year, Americans consume more than 20 billion pickles, but recently, consumers have noticed some restaurants warning of a "national pickle shortage." The warnings from restaurants such as Firehouse Subs, local delis and others are generally bona fide, as both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and experts from North Carolina State University say that the combination of reliance on imports and extreme weather could impact supplies.

Drug shortages have reached an all-time high in the United States, pharmacists are warning.During the first three months of 2024, there were 323 active medication shortages, according to American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) and Utah Drug Information Service. Previously, the record high was 320 shortages in 2014.This ASHP started tracking shortages in 2001.MORE: Patients, health care providers face shortages of critical drugs, Senate report finds"All drug classes are vulnerable to shortage," Dr. Paul Abramowitz, CEO of ASHP, said in a statement. "Some of the most worrying shortages involve generic sterile injectable medications, including cancer chemotherapy drugs and emergency medications...

Let's file this one in the "you can't make this up" category. Down Mexico way, they are running out of farm workers. This is the story: For decades, Mexicans crossed the border to pick Americans’ lettuce, grapes and strawberries. Mexico had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of farmhands — tough, hard-working men who did the jobs most Americans didn’t want. But the country is running short of farmworkers.The workforce is graying; nearly three-quarters of Mexican campesinos are over 45. Young people are turning up their noses at farm jobs. And those willing to do migrant work have other options. Nearly 300,000...

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday it will relocate control of the Newark, New Jersey, airspace area to Philadelphia to address staffing issues ... The FAA, which has struggled with air traffic staffing issues, said it and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) signed a memorandum to relocate control of Newark at New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) (N90) to Philadelphia Tower/TRACON by the end of June. The FAA said the change will help "meet continued traffic demand in the busy Northeast Corridor." Several controllers are expected to voluntarily transfer to Philadelphia. New York TRACON is...

The fast-food chain Chick-fil-A backtracked from its decade-old “no antibiotics ever” pledge intended to help prevent human antibiotic resistance linked to the rampant use of the drugs in livestock production. Instead, the company said in a statement that it will embrace a standard known as “no antibiotics important to human medicine,” often abbreviated as NAIHM, which entails the avoidance of medications commonly used to treat people and limits the use of animal antibiotics to cases of actual animal illness. SNIP Chick-fil-A said it will begin shifting to the new policy in the spring of 2024. A company spokesman added that...

The 60,000 patients diagnosed with ovarian cancer over the next three years could be out of luck for a treatment, thanks to Biden and congressional Democrats.Less than 18 months after Democrats rammed through a series of price controls on what Medicare pays for prescription drugs — the better to pay for Tesla subsidies and other green pork — and guess what has happened? Drugmakers are responding to the (bad) incentives Democrats created.Just before the holidays, Bloomberg reported on how many pharmaceutical companies have delayed bringing products to market to maximize the revenue they can generate before Medicare gets to “negotiate”...

Joe Biden's economy is a disaster, but that doesn't mean it can't get worse. A couple of little publicized commerce/transport events make new problems, specifically, shortages of consumer goods, all but certain. Start with what's going on around the Saudi Arabian peninsula, where Houthi rebel rocket and drone attacks on ten commercial ships has reached crisis levels, and major shipping lines, such as Maersk, have opted to go around the horn of Africa the way Magellan had to do, in order to deliver their cargo loads to Europe and beyond.According to the trade publication Insurance Journal:Shipping in the Red Sea...

Vista Outdoor, a parent company to many firearms businesses, told Newsweek that it will substantially increase its ammunition prices due to "an anticipated global shortage of gunpowder."The Minnesota-based company confirmed the authenticity of a December 1 letter sent to customers that it would go ahead with an across-the-board increase of its ammunition and gunpowder prices on January 1."Due to world events our suppliers have notified us of unprecedented demand for and an anticipated global shortage of gunpowder, and thus has increased our prices substantially," Vice President of Sales, Sporting Products Brett Nelson said in the letter. "We must therefore raise...

Just this summer, the nation's pharmaceutical shortage reached a ten-year high, but the problem since then has only gotten worse — and in more ways than one. The shortage was already "extremely concerning" for cancer patients, with oncologist Dr. Ajay Bhatnagar saying, "Hopefully, it can be rectified soon, but currently it’s a concern of how we figure out how to formulate an adequate treatment for these patients without having to ration or delay treatment."That was in July. This week, "Drug shortages hit record highs," according to a DC News Now report on a Senate Finance Committee hearing. (Don't click the...

Recruitment and retention challenges have led the U.S. Coast Guard into a system-wide service retreat. A 3500-person shortfall—a nearly 10% shortage in the enlisted ranks—is forcing the Coast Guard to take ten cutters out of service, transfer five tugs to seasonal activation, and shutter 29 boat stations. The moves, couched as a bland “AY 24 Force Alignment Initiative”, present an unprecedented loss of maritime capability at a time when the United States is facing an array of complex challenges at sea. But the Coast Guard simply “cannot maintain the same level of operations” going forward. Behind the scenes, the service...

The tiny, half-pint cartons of milk served with millions of school lunches nationwide may soon be scarce in some cafeterias, leaving districts across the country scrambling to find alternatives. The problem is not a shortage of milk itself, but the cardboard cartons used to package and serve it, according to dairy industry suppliers and state officials. Pactiv Evergreen of Lake Forest, Illinois, which bills itself as “the leading manufacturer of fresh food and beverage packaging in North America” acknowledged in a statement Friday that it “continues to face significantly higher than projected demand” for its milk cartons.

The number of homes for sale on the market fell for the fifth straight month in September amid the already severe housing shortage. A new report from Realtor.com shows that the total number of homes for sale, including homes that were under contract but not yet sold, fell by 4% in September compared with the same time a year ago. On top of that, available home supply remains down a stunning 45.1% from the typical amount before the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, according to the report

For over 35 years, the American political system has been unable to make any significant change to U.S. immigration policy. In June 2023, a bipartisan coalition of representatives introduced the Dignity Act, a comprehensive immigration reform bill. This followed a poll showing that four out of five Americans support bipartisan cooperation on immigration that would address labor shortages and inflation. While U.S. politics may continue to prevent an immigration grand bargain, there are many commonsense reforms the government could take to fill gaps in our current workforce. American policymakers need to wake up to a new reality: The country is...

This seems to be an increasingly common theme on a global scale. We are continually warned that the United States is running low on arms and munitions and may not be prepared to supply Taiwan if China invades. We are similarly assured that we need to continue spending vast amounts of money we don’t have to arm Ukraine or they will likewise run low and be unable to fend off the Russians. But now their enemy in that conflict is making an identical claim. Vladimir Putin told a group of pro-war bloggers this week that his country is running very...