Something very strange is going on in America’s labor market. The employer’s survey in the June jobs report showed 272,000 jobs gained in May, and nearly 2.8 million jobs over the past year. These are both amazing figures given that the economy is at full employment.
While the employer’s survey is surely fine, the household survey, also produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), tells a strikingly different story, almost as though the country had two different labor markets.
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An electric vehicle (EV) producer that was once a splashy start-up company has filed for bankruptcy.
Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday after trying and failing to secure more investment to stay afloat, the company announced. The company once attracted robust interest and hype, marketing itself as the Apple of vehicles, but it struggled to run as a public company and was stuck with thousands of EVs that it did not sell, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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A pro-life group in South Dakota filed a lawsuit to block an amendment enshrining abortion in the state constitution from appearing on the November ballot, alleging the initiative contained fraudulent signatures, the Associated Press reported.
South Dakota Secretary of State Monae Johnson approved the measure in May after it received over the required number of signatures from supporters. Life Defense Fund filed a complaint on Thursday alleging a number of issues, including that Dakotans for Health, which sponsored the amendment, did not file an affidavit confirming petition circulators’ residency and that petitioners misled supporters about what they were signing, according to the AP.
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In a story that deserves more attention, Ukraine recently attacked a Russian early warning radar facility designed to detect nuclear attacks. This insane action conferred no military advantage on Ukraine—the station monitored potential launches in the Middle East—but it carried with it the risk of igniting a nuclear war. From the perspective of the country being attacked, the only reason to attack an early warning system would be to blind one’s enemy as a prelude to a nuclear attack.
Nuclear war is the most dangerous game. It means the end of civilization. If this horror show ever comes to pass, it is likely more than half of the people on our planet will die. Many console themselves that they’ll die instantly and that most of the consequences will borne by others, but no one can be sure.
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How did Juneteenth, once just a regional celebration, become a federal holiday instead of the far more significant Emancipation Proclamation? The latter freed over 3 million slaves, including the ones in Galveston, Texas that didn’t know of their freedom. Let’s walk through some of the facts of the latter’s superiority over the former before grappling with the politics of our times.
President Abraham Lincoln issued The Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. It never became a federal holiday despite the wishes of some organizations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), presented a proposal in 2014 seeking to establish “A National Holiday Commemorating Emancipation of the Slaves” for the “history and story” to be “properly researched and archived for the American People. It acknowledged the importance of the document for all Americans and sought for the holiday to be celebrated on January 1 of each year as a Jubilee. The NAACP resolution was presented during the Obama Administration. It was written before the word “slaves” was swapped for “enslaved peoples.”
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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced on Monday that he had signed an executive order to create a new “task force” to study reparation payments for black Chicagoans.
The Black Reparations Co-Governance Task Force will study “all policies that have harmed Black Chicagoans from the slavery era to present day and make a series of recommendations that will serve as appropriate remedies,” Johnson said in a press release obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Chicago Office of Equity and Racial Justice will lead the task force, which has already overseen 25 departments in the city who have submitted “racial equity action plans,” according to their 2024 equity report.
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