[naviga:h3]Home building up, but permits slide[/naviga:h3]

WASHINGTON — U.S. home construction rebounded in August at the fastest pace in seven months but applications for new building permits plunged, sending mixed signals for an industry that has been struggling with rising lumber costs.

Housing starts increased 9.2 percent in August to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.28 million units, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

Applications for building permits, considered a good indication of future activity, fell by 5.7 percent in August after an 0.9 percent rise in July.

Builders have struggled this year to deal with rising costs for lumber, land and labor. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that lumber prices have shot up by about $7,000 per home since the start of 2017, largely due to tariffs the Trump administration has imposed on imports of Canadian softwood lumber.

[naviga:h3]Global poverty rate drops to record low[/naviga:h3]

WASHINGTON — Global poverty has fallen to a record low.

The World Bank said Wednesday that 10 percent of the world’s population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2015 — the last year for which numbers were available — down from 11.2 percent in 2013. That means 735.9 million people lived below the poverty threshold in 2015, down by 68.3 million from 804.2 million two years earlier.

Still, the bank warned that the pace of poverty reduction has slowed, jeopardizing its goal of reducing the poverty rate to 3 percent by 2030.

Poverty dropped everywhere but the Middle East and North Africa, where conflicts in Syria and Yemen ratcheted the poverty rate to 5 percent in 2015 from 2.6 percent in 2013, raising the number of impoverished to 18.6 million from 9.5 million.

[naviga:h3]Germany closer to million electric cars[/naviga:h3]

BERLIN — Germans are beginning to embrace electric cars, with experts predicting the country will have a million hybrid or battery-electric vehicles on the road by 2022.

The government originally aimed to have that many e-cars in Germany by 2020, but slow uptake in the land of the Autobahn forced it to abandon that goal. A government advisory panel said Wednesday that recent additional financial incentives for buyers have helped provide the necessary jolt for Germany to reach the million mark two years late.

Official figures show some 460,000 electric or hybrid cars in Germany last month, and about 13,500 publicly accessible charging stations.