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@ISIDEWITH submitted…3 days3D
The U.S. economy has added more than two million jobs over the past year. But more people who are out of work are having a hard time getting back in. As of November, more than seven million Americans were unemployed, meaning they didn’t have work and were trying to find it. More than 1.6 million of those jobless workers had been job hunting for at least six months, according to the Labor Department. The number of people searching for that long is up more than 50% since the end of 2022. On average, it now takes people about six months to find a job, roughly a month longer than it did during the postpandemic hiring boom in early 2023, according to the Labor Department. The pain is largely in high-paying white-collar jobs, including in tech, law and media, where businesses grew fast when the economy reopened from the pandemic but now have less need for new hires. A labor market that looks healthy in the headlines is, under the surface, weaker than it seems. The unemployment rate, at 4.2%, remains well below the average during the decade before the pandemic. But there is now just about one job posting per unemployed worker, down from two in early 2022. Strong hiring has narrowed to a thin set of industries. The government’s monthly jobs report on Friday will provide another snapshot of the market’s health. More people getting unemployment benefits are drawing on public aid longer. New data released last week from the Labor Department show that 1.8 million people continued to file for previously granted unemployment benefits as of late December, near the postpandemic high.Year-over-year wage growth has fallen to 4%, down from about 6% at the height of the early 2020s hiring spree. That’s a sign that many employers don’t have to jostle so hard to attract workers. To date, the labor market has been weakening primarily due to less hiring—not widespread layoffs. But once companies decide to reduce payrolls, job cuts often snowball quickly, which could spark a much faster jump in the unemployment rate, said Veronica Clark, a Citigroup economist.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…3wks3W
The Senate on Wednesday gave final approval to a defense policy bill directing $895 billion toward the Pentagon and other military activities, moving over the objections of some Democrats who opposed a provision added late in the negotiations that would deny coverage for transgender health procedures for minors.The 85-to-14 vote, coming a week after a divided House passed the same measure, cleared the bill for President Biden’s signature.Most Republicans and many Democrats supported the measure, which provides a 14.5 percent pay raise to junior enlisted service members and a 4.5 percent pay raise for all other service members. It also expands access to meal assistance, housing and child care programs that benefit those in uniform.But several Democrats withheld their backing in protest of a provision preventing TRICARE, the military’s health care plan for service members, from covering “medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” for children under 18.The language, which would affect the gender-transitioning children of service members, was recently added to the measure at the insistence of Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who refused to bring a defense bill to the House floor without it, according to aides familiar with the negotiations.Twenty-one Democrats, led by Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, proposed an amendment to strip the provision from the bill, but the matter was never brought to a vote. Several of them took to the floor on Tuesday to lodge their objections.“It’s flat-out wrong to put this provision in this bill and take away a service member’s freedom to make that decision for their families,” Ms. Baldwin said, estimating that the provision could negatively affect as many as 6,000 to 7,000 military families.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…1 day1D
The Los Angeles Fire Department had its budget cut by a staggering $17.6 million this financial year, records show — as fire crews continue to battle out-of-control blazes ravaging the City of Angels.The drastic decrease in funding for the fire department was the second-largest cut to come out of embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass‘ 2024-25 fiscal year budget, according to city figures.The police budget, meanwhile, increased by $126 million, a graphic shared by LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia shows.Bass had initially wanted to cut the fire department by even more — a staggering $23 million.The details on Bass’ budget slashing resurfaced as the mayor faced widespread backlash Wednesday after it was revealed she was away in Africa for the Ghana president’s inauguration — even as wind-whipped wildfires turned parts of her city into an apocalyptic hellscape.In her absence, Bass found time to praise firefighters and other emergency crews for working “overnight to protect Angelenos affected by fires.”“Angelenos should be advised that the windstorm is expected to worsen through the morning and to heed local warnings, stay vigilant and stay safe,” Bass said in a post on X.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…2mos2MO
It is an extraordinary new coalition. Along the way to his decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump drew at least some Arab American and Muslim voters who are outraged by the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza. He managed to do so without alienating the right-leaning American Jews who see Mr. Trump as Israel’s strongest champion.Even in an election marked by a reordering of the country’s traditional political teams, these strange bedfellows stand out. The two groups hold sharply divergent expectations for the president-elect. And both strongly pro-Israel Trump voters and some of Mr. Trump’s Arab American backers are skeptical that his ascent this week is the start of a durable cross-ideological, interfaith coalition.But in Dearborn, Mich., a majority-Arab city, Ms. Harris won just 36 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results, a roughly 34-percentage-point drop from Mr. Biden’s share of the 2020 vote in similar results released after that election. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate to the left of Ms. Harris, picked up 18 percent of the vote. But Mr. Trump’s support also jumped — to 42 percent of the vote from less than 30 percent four years ago, though turnout was lower.But in interviews throughout the campaign, Arab American and Muslim supporters said they were ready to take a chance on him anyway.Some were already aligned with the socially conservative views of the Republican Party. Many were nostalgic for the relative quiet of 2019.They also noted his efforts to campaign in Dearborn and the time spent in the area by his surrogates, especially Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman and an in-law of Mr. Trump’s, and Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Germany and acting intelligence chief.By contrast, they said, they saw Ms. Harris as inaccessible to the community.
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@ISIDEWITH submitted…1hr1H
Donald Trump will face sentencing over his New York “hush money” conviction on Friday, after the US Supreme Court declined to grant him a last-minute reprieve.The decision will force the president-elect to face public proceedings in the criminal case that he has fought strenuously to avoid. His lawyers had appealed to the high court on Wednesday to postpone the proceeding, claiming that allowing it to go ahead days before his inauguration would create a “constitutionally intolerable risk of disruption to national security” and interfere with his efforts to get his 34 felony convictions overturned.In a 5-4 decision handed down just hours before the sentencing was set to go ahead in a state court in lower Manhattan, a majority of the justices declined to do so, saying “the burden that sentencing will impose on the president-elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial” especially as Trump was unlikely to face any prison time. They added that any issues with the evidence presented at trial — some of which Trump’s lawyers have claimed was inadmissible — “can be addressed in the ordinary course on appeal”.Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberals on the bench in refusing to grant Trump’s appeal.Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he appreciated the Supreme Court’s time but vowed to continue fighting the case. “For the sake and sanctity of the Presidency, I will be appealing this case, and am confident that JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL,” he said.Lawyers representing Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump’s sentencing was repeatedly postponed while he mounted his third campaign for the White House and pursued various appeals against his conviction. Last week Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the “hush money” trial in New York earlier this year, finally set a firm date, in order to bring what he called “finality to this matter”.Trump will probably not face any punishment when he is sentenced, however, as the judge previously indicated he would not impose a fine or condemn Trump to prison time.
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Biden has been to enough presidential and vice-presidential funerals over the years to know what tweaks and specifics he’ll want for his own.Still, an uncomfortable thought has circulated among some Biden aides and longtime supporters in the days since Carter died: If Biden passes while Trump is president, would he get a state funeral? Trump has already railed against the flags set to still be at half-staff through his inauguration – would he lower them for the only person who ever beat him, or would he decline to like he initially did when Arizona Sen. John McCain died in 2018? They hope Biden lives a long time, but, several of those aides and supporters told CNN, they want him to live to see the end of Trump’s time as president and not have to worry about questions like these.Trump, who again criticized Carter in his press conference on Tuesday, will also be in Washington for the funeral, after briefly paying his respects to the coffin during a visit to the Capitol on Wednesday evening. If he and Biden speak there, it will be their first in-person conversation since Biden welcomed him to the Oval Office post-election, and one of their few conversations ever overall.
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