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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.

U.S. retail diesel prices jumped sharply last week, a second straight bump that raised the national average a two-week total of 20.4 cents a gallon, or about 10%, as gasoline also rose, topping the $2 a gallon mark for the first time since November, according to the Department of Energy.

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.

Initial jobless claims rose by 12,000 last week and continuing claims reached a new record, the Labor Department said Thursday.

Ward Transport and Logistics Corp. is cutting the pay of its drivers and hourly workers by 8.9%, Pennsylvania television station WTAJ reported on its Web site Tuesday.

Construction spending fell 0.9% in February, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.

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