At the FIERF 32^nd Technical Conference held last September in Long Beach, Calif., Weber Metals’ Justin Owen made a presentation about the process by which OTTO FUCHS (OF)/Weber Metals made the decision to invest $180 million in what they say is North America’s largest forging press. This became the largest single investment decision in company history.

Long Beach, Calif., is perhaps best known as the retirement home of the legendary cruise ship Queen Mary, which is permanently moored there and is currently an operating hotel and museum. But on Sept. 11-12, Long Beach hosted some of the forging industry’s best and brightest technical people, industry professionals, suppliers and educators at what was FIERF’s 32^nd Technical Conference.

John Peter Zenger was a New York journalist who, in 1733, voiced his disagreement with the Crown’s governor in New York, William Cosby, who replaced a disagreeable judge with a more agreeable jurist. Zenger’s paper, the New York Weekly Journal, wrote articles critical of the royal governor, who in turn criticized the paper for its “divers scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections.”

It wasn’t too long ago that hybrid electric vehicles were a novelty on North American roads. Now they are common.

My previous column (April 2018) covered the March 1 imposition of tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. The Trump administration’s seemingly sudden declaration of a tariff policy became real when, on March 8, the President signed an order imposing a 25% tariff on imported steel and a 10% tariff on imported aluminum.

Last May the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began a rollback of Net Neutrality rules, a set of Obama administration regulations that heavily regulated Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide equal Internet access to all available Internet sites.

On April 29 of this year, President Trump signed an executive order that established the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy (OTMP) within the White House.