Latest USA Headlines
All the headlines from our USA Topic Page, ordered by recency.
Juries to Decide If Uber, Lyft Drivers Are Independent Contractors
Mar 12 2015 // Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. lost an early round of a fight with drivers in lawsuits that could upend the companies’ nationwide business models. The on-demand car services will need to make the case to juries...
U.S. Safety Agency Says Trinity Did Not Hide Guardrail Defects
Mar 12 2015 // The Federal Highway Administration rejected assertions from two guardrail-industry professionals who said Trinity Industries Inc. tried to hide defects in its roadway safety system by secretly developing a version of the...
Canada Proposes Tough New Oil Tank Car Standards
Mar 12 2015 // Canada proposed tough new oil tank car standards on Wednesday and said even improved tank cars coming into service now would have to be off the rails by 2025 at the latest. The announcement comes after a rash of fiery...
Kansas Hotel Owner Going to Prison for Hiring Illegal Workers
Mar 12 2015 // A suburban Kansas City hotel owner has been sentenced to 27 months in prison in a case that highlights the U.S. Justice Department’s shift to targeting employers who knowingly hire immigrants not authorized to work...
Part of Houston Ship Channel Closed After Tanker, Carrier Collide
Mar 11 2015 // A portion of the busy Houston Ship Channel was shut on March 9 after two ships collided in fog, causing a leak of flammable liquid. Methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or MTBE, a gasoline additive aboard the Danish-flagged...
Earthquake Risks Are Rising, but Take-Up Isn’t
Mar 11 2015 // The West Coast’s risk of ruin is even greater than we previously feared. According to the just-released Third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast, the likelihood that California could see an earthquake of...
Bipartisan Think Tank to Tackle Insurance Regulation
Mar 11 2015 // Washington is getting a new task force focused on insurance regulation. The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) is launching the task force to assess the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act...
U.S. Consumer Bureau Moves to Restrict Mandatory Arbitration Clauses
Mar 10 2015 // Financial companies routinely use mandatory arbitration to block class-action lawsuits, making it difficult for consumers to win big payouts in disputes over credit cards and other products, a U.S. regulator found. When...
Consumer Credit Agencies Agree to Address Errors, Medical Debt
Mar 10 2015 // Buying homes, getting jobs and borrowing money will be easier after an agreement by the three biggest U.S. consumer credit reporting services with New York. “This is huge,” Chi Chi Wu, an attorney at...
Epic Snows Brought Economic Woes to New England
Mar 9 2015 // Ignore anyone who tells you snow is free. Every workday lost during New England’s winter has meant millions of dollars taken out of the regional economy. IHS Global Insight, an economic analysis firm, estimates...
Kansas Hotel Owners Hired Illegal Immigrants, Didn’t Pay Taxes, Workers’ Comp
Mar 9 2015 // When a suburban Kansas City couple bought two Clarion hotels, they systematically replaced lawfully employed workers with immigrants not authorized to work in the United States, cutting labor costs by 40 percent. Not only...
P/C Insurers Face $1 Billion Tab for February Storms in U.S.
Mar 9 2015 // February storms in the U.S. are expected to cost insurers more than $1 billion, according to the latest Global Catastrophe Recap from Aon Benfield’s Impact Forecasting. Five separate storm systems hit the U.S. during...
Oklahoma, U.S. Differ in Earthquake Calculations
Mar 9 2015 // The Oklahoma Geological Survey reported fewer than half the number of 4.0 magnitude and higher earthquakes in Oklahoma last year as the U.S. Geological Survey, according to agency records. While OGS reported six...
Report: Wildfire Reconstruction of West’s Riskiest Homes – $237B
Mar 9 2015 // In the Western United States there are nearly 900,000 homes representing an estimated reconstruction cost of more than $237 billion considered at “very high” or “high” risk from wildfires, a report...
What’s Driving Nonstandard Auto – Technology, Consolidation, Population Changes, Fuel Specialty, Opportunity
Mar 9 2015 // The nonstandard auto market is characterized by substandard operating performance. Since 2007, carriers writing nonstandard auto policies have reported deteriorating operating performance and many are struggling to...
Google to Face Same Obstacles Selling Insurance Online, Says Overstock’s Byrne
Mar 9 2015 // Those now running comparison insurance shopping websites believe that they could be helped if Google enters into the business because the giant search engine could draw more attention to buying insurance online. However,...
BP Drops Opposition to Gulf Oil Spill Claims Chief It Criticized
Mar 8 2015 // BP has abruptly switched legal strategies—again—in the multi-billion-dollar liability fight stemming from the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The company dropped a campaign to oust a settlement administrator it...
Another Los Angeles Hospital Hit by ‘Superbug’ Infections
Mar 6 2015 // A second Los Angeles hospital is reporting that patients have been infected with an antibiotic-resistant “superbug” linked to a type of widely used medical scope. The latest cases came at Cedars-Sinai Medical...
Holding Multiple Jobs Increases Risk of Injury: Liberty Mutual
Mar 6 2015 // Researchers with the Liberty Mutual Research Institute’s Center for Injury Epidemiology have concluded that individuals who work multiple jobs — approximately 14 million U.S. residents – have a greater...
Aon Benfield Cat Report Focuses on U.S. Snow/Ice and $1 Billion+ Losses
Mar 6 2015 // Impact Forecasting, Aon Benfield’s catastrophe model development team, has released the latest edition of its monthly Global Catastrophe Recap report, which evaluates the impact of the natural disaster events that...
