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Manufacturing activity in the Chicago region contracted in February for a fifth straight month, the Institute for Supply Chain Management-Chicago said Friday.

The U.S. economy contracted 6.2% in the fourth quarter of 2008, the largest contraction since 1982, the Commerce Department said Friday in its second of three estimates.

A change in presidential administrations — indeed, a broad shift in Washington’s political atmosphere — has provoked a change in how trucking presents its messages to federal politicians and staffers.

In response to a proposal to more than double annual registration fees on interstate trucking companies, American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves said the program created to collect and distribute the fees should be abolished.

Motor carriers, locked in a fight for freight in an imploding market, are taking some business away from rail intermodal with help from lower fuel prices, an industry analyst said.

Truck engine makers planning to use selective catalytic reduction in 2010 engines lashed out last week against what one executive called “unsubstantiated attacks leveled against SCR” by the one manufacturer that plans to use only exhaust gas recirculation to cut emissions of smog-forming nitrogen oxides.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Congressional leaders from both parties last week defended Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood after a spokesman for President Obama rebuffed LaHood’s suggestion that the government might use a vehicle miles-traveled tax to finance highways.

Concerned about losing market share to other West Coast ports, harbor commissioners with the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have voted to cut their rail container fees by 10%.