They'll start showing up next month on farms across New Jersey. Thousands of seasonal workers will plant fields and trim trees, then tend and harvest crops during the spring and summer. Up to 180 work at Joe Marino's Sun Valley Orchards in Swedesboro, Gloucester County, and many - including migrant farm hands from Mexico - earn $7.25 an hour, the state and federal minimum wage. They would see their paychecks increase under a proposal by Assembly Speaker Sheila Y. Oliver (D., Essex) to boost the state minimum rate to $8.50 and to tie it to the consumer price index, which measures the cost of living. Oliver says the move would provide "livable wages for the lowest-income earners," while helping the economy by increasing consumer spending. About 40,000 New Jersey residents currently earn the $7.25 rate. http://bit.ly/yhxQOR

Nearly $17 million in federal funds will be allocated by the Army Corps of Engineers to continue deepening of the Delaware River shipping channel by five feet. U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews said Tuesday he has been advised by the Army Corps the money will be released as part of this year’s allocation to the agency. While the funds are not designated for any specific purpose, Andrews, D-Haddon Heights, said the “Army Corps’ plan is to spend it on the Delaware.” The money, if allocated, would go toward deepening the river channel from 40 to 45 feet in an area between Penns Grove and the Beckett Street Marine Terminal in Camden, said Ed Voight, chief of public and legislative affairs for the Corps’ Philadelphia regional office. http://bit.ly/x0Qggd

Women's History Month is an annual observance to highlight the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society. Celebrated from the 1st to 31st March in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, corresponding with International Women's Day on March 8th, it is observed during October in Canada, corresponding with the celebration of Persons Day on October 18th. A weeklong observation in Sonoma County, California in 1978 was subsequently championed by Gerda Lerner

Americans will once again be able to request free COVID tests from the U.S. government, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Beginning September 25, U.S. households will again be able to order four free tests through COVIDTests.gov. The Biden-Harris Administration re-opened the website on Monday and each household can get four free COVID tests sent to them via the United States Postal Service.

Waiting for a Halloween costume or Christmas gift? The White House says it's helped broker an agreement with Walmart, FedEx and UPS for the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to become a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week operation supply chain in an effort to relieve supply chain bottlenecks and move stranded container ships that are driving prices higher for U.S. consumers. With three months until Christmas, toy companies are racing to get their toys onto store shelves as they face a severe supply network crunch. Toy makers are feverishly trying to find containers to ship their goods while searching for new alternative routes and ports. Biden was scheduled to hold a virtual roundtable today with the heads of Walmart, FedEx Logistics, UPS, Target, Samsung Electronics North America, the Teamsters Union and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Chase Doran Brownstein from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and the Stamford Museum and Nature Center has described two new dinosaurs, a herbivorous hadrosaur and a carnivorous tyrannosaur, that lived in the North American paleolandmass Appalachia during the Late Cretaceous epoch, some 85 million years ago. The specimens he examined were collected in the 1970s from the Late Cretaceous Merchantville Formation in New Jersey and Delaware. The remains of the 'Merchantville tyrannosauroid' were re-examined by a team at Yale University, who also analyzed fossils of what is dubbed a new herbivorous duck-billed hadrosaur. The Merchantville Formation, named by Knapp (29) in 1895, is a geological formation - a clayey glauconite sand - in the northeastern United States whose strata date back to the Late Cretaceous, around the time of the Santonian and Campanian age. Dinosaur remains are among the fossils that have been recovered from the formation. In a study of the rocks of Cretaceous age exposed in the banks of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in 1954 described the oldest of the marine units as consisting of dark blue to black, micaceous, glauconitic silt and dark greenish-brown, micaceous, glauconitic, very fine quartz sand containing considerable admixtures of silt and clay. This unit, because of its evident similarity to the type material in New Jersey, was called Merchantville and this designation has been used since that time by the Delaware Geological Survey and others.