Industry Week In the past couple of days, Bryance Metheny, a Birmingham, Alabama labor attorney, has heard plenty from his manufacturing clients about the Department of Labor’s new proposal on overtime pay. "They’re up in arms about it," says Metheny, who primarily represents manufacturing employers.

AGMA is providing eleven quality advanced courses at Gear Expo 2015 this October in Detroit. Topics include everything from the Basics of Gearing to Taming Tooth Deflections, Cylindrical Gear Inspection, and How to Specify a Gear System. Get complete information at the Gear Expo website at www.gearexpo.com.

Manufacturing.net Amazon, now through its Amazon Business site, is apparently doing quite well. Just recently, Amazon launched a new website for business in Mexico with an announcement that customers would now have access to millions of products. It will be expanding its business sites to many other countries in the next year, so someone, somewhere, is buying products for business.

Manufacturing.net A recent report projected that the cost of manufacturing in the U.S. will fall below costs in China within the next three years, in large part due to the rise of fracking.

Industry Week The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) released its June report on manufacturing.

JOC.com Mexico is no longer the low-wage sourcing location for low-value consumer products for the U.S. market that it was two decades ago when the North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. and Canada was implemented.

CBC News The federal government should be putting Canada's manufacturing potential in the spotlight, says Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, who believes the country needs to have a national manufacturing strategy to help boost job prospects in places like southwestern Ontario. "We need to make sure that we're pitching Canadians' advantage over other countries to draw in global investment," he told CBC Radio'sAfternoon Drive in an interview.

WorldCarFans BMW's M division is signaling the demise of the manual gearbox on future, fully-fledged M models. Speaking to Autocar, BMW M chief Frank van Meel said the manual gearbox will eventually be phased out as fewer customers are configuring their M models with a manual transmission and also because dual-clutch and automatic gearboxes are faster and enable lower fuel consumption and emissions. It won't be eliminated in the near future as it still has enough customer base to justify its existence, but "the future doesn't look bright."

The Post and Courier The commercial aerospace industry, including Boeing Co., promises to be among the best-performing sectors over the next 18 months, according to a North American manufacturing outlook that projects stable, but unspectacular, growth across the board.

Machine Design Electric and hybrid drivetrains are a good solution for reducing a car’s carbon footprint during operation. However, vehicle and fuel manufacturing processes behind the end systems often have a much larger impact on the environment than the product itself. Divergent Microfactories (DM) addressed that aspect with a new manufacturing process for greener results in automobile production and when the vehicles hit the road.

Power The Environmental Protection Agency’s emission factor resource, AP-42, is not your only option for developing particulate matter (PM) emission rates. Results of a prominent PM emissions measurement research program for gas-fired plants have been successfully used to support development and application of alternate PM2.5 emission factors by both regulatory agencies and permit applicants.

The Guardian The biggest issue in the Australian economy remains the transition from the mining boom. Figures out late last week showed how quickly mining investment has shrunk and how greatly the transition is dependent upon investment in dwellings. That’s a rather large concern, given worries about a housing bubble. One graph can often convey what is going on with amazing clarity. This is the one that demonstrates why the end of the mining boom is a problem for Australia’s economy.

Manufacturing.net Americans again bought vehicles that sit up high and come loaded with features like backup cameras and smartphone capabilities in June. Horsepower was also in; gas-sipping not so much. SUVs of all sizes continued to fly off dealer lots. Sales of the larger Ford Explorer rose 30 percent, Nissan's Rogue small SUV posted a 54 percent jump, and sales of the Jeep Cherokee gained 39 percent.

Canadian Manufacturing Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, Greg Rickford, and India’s Minister of State for the Petroleum and Natural Gas Industry, Dharmendra Pradhan, met in Calgary for the second India-Canada Ministerial Energy Dialogue on July 5. The parties discussed enhancing energy cooperation between the two countries in the areas of oil, natural gas, clean energy, power transmission, and skill development.

O’Reilly Radar The current approach for manufacturing automobiles is expensive, wasteful, and energy-intensive; it hurts our environment as well as our economy. When it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to start a car factory, innovation becomes nearly impossible. As we triple the number of cars on the road in the next 30 to 40 years, the conventional approach will not be sustainable.

MIT Technology Review The inventor of a new kind of 3-D printer says his research group will build a massive machine capable of mass-producing competitively priced plastic parts within two years.

MIT Technology Review Automakers and tech companies are racing to bring safer and more useful smartphone-style interfaces to cars. Can any of them go further and reprogram vehicles completely?