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Why GameStop’s stock surge is shaking Wall Street

NEW YORK — It’s not just you. What’s going on with GameStop’s stock doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. The struggling video game retailer’s stock has been making stupefying moves this month, wild enough to raise concerns from professional investors on Wall Street to the hallways of regulators and the White House in Washington. The frenzy hit new heights Thursday when several trading platforms limited their customers from making certain trades with GameStop. It’s all forcing hard questions about whether the stock market is in a dangerous bubble and whether a ...

Widespread internet outages hit northeast U.S.

Internet users across the northeast U.S. reported widespread outages Tuesday. Verizon reported a cut fiber in Brooklyn via Twitter, although it's not clear if that issue is responsible for the entire outage. The telecom giant didn't have any estimate when the problem spot would be ...

Indoor farmer AppHarvest starts shipping tomatoes

AppHarvest — an indoor farming company backed by Martha Stewart — thinks the agriculture sector is ripe for disruption. And now, its tomatoes are ripe for eating. The Morehead, Kentucky-based company said Tuesday it has begun shipping beefsteak tomatoes to Kroger, Walmart, Publix and ...

Unemployment rate stable as payrolls shrink

HARRISBURG (AP) — Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate remained stable and on par with the national rate in December, although the labor force and payrolls shrank, according to state figures released Friday. Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate was 6.7%, down one-tenth of a percentage point from November’s adjusted rate of 6.8%, the state Department of Labor and Industry said. The rate shot up from 4.7% just before the pandemic hit to 16.1% in April, Pennsylvania’s highest rate in more than four decades of record-keeping. The national rate was 6.7% in December. In a survey of ...

Construction business receives three quality paving awards

Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc., a heavy construction services and products company received three quality paving awards at the 61st annual PAPA Conference. PAPA works in conjunction with PennDOT to determine and award the best paving project in each of PennDOT’s 11 engineering districts. They also recognize and award one project from the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Projects in each district are evaluated on ride smoothness, mixture quality, joint construction, pavement density, and any innovative features used during the production and placement of the asphalt mixes. PennDOT projects ...

Existing home sales rise in 2020 to highest in 14 years

WASHINGTON — Sales of existing homes rose 0.7% in December, pushing the entirety of 2020 to a pace not seen in 14 years and providing one of the few bright spots for a U.S. economy mired in a global pandemic. Rising sales in the final month of the year lifted activity to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.76 million units in December, the National Association of Realtors reported Friday. For all of 2020, sales rose to 6.48 million, the highest level since 2006 at the height of the housing boom. That represented a 5.6% gain from the 5.34 million previously owned homes sold ...