Minimum wage increases go into effect in these 22 states (chainstoreage.com)

The Home Depot®reported sales of $24.9 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2018, a 4.4 percent increase from the first quarter of fiscal 2017. Comparable sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2018 were positive 4.2 percent, and comp sales in the U.S. were positive 3.9 percent. Net earnings for the first quarter of fiscal 2018 were $2.4 billion, or $2.08 per diluted share, compared with net earnings of $2.0 billion, or $1.67 per diluted share, in the same period of fiscal 2017. For the first quarter of fiscal 2018, diluted earnings per share increased 24.6 percent from the same period in the prior year. Click Read More below for additional information.

With another strong showing by the juvenile nonfiction category, unit sales of print books rose 16.6% in the week ended July 18, 2020, over the comparable week in 2019, at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Units were up 40.9% in juvenile nonfiction from the week ended July 20, 2019, led by a new surge of sales for one of this year’s biggest bestsellers, My First Learn-to-Write Workbook by Crystal Radke, which sold nearly 40,000 copies in the week. The adult nonfiction category also did well, with unit sales increasing 19.9% over 2019, helped by Mary L. Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough, which sold 337,473 print copies in its first week. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo was #2 in the category, selling nearly 49,000 copies.

The recent United Nations global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, brought the world’s leaders together again to try to reach agreement on further commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. High on the agenda was preserving the health of the world’s forests – a critical natural resource for absorbing these emissions. With this heightened international attention on preventing deforestation, primarily in the developing world, now is a good time to remind ourselves that the North American forests that supply the wood fiber for our paper and packaging products are among the most sustainably managed in the world. They are so well-managed, in fact, that our forests continue to be a net absorber of carbon. In the United States, sustainable forest management practices, the regeneration of forest area and modern harvesting practices resulted in a net sequestration of carbon every year from 1990 to 2019, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.