$38,000 Fines Waived for Ontario Amish Families Convicted for Not Using ArriveCan App
Lawyers with The Democracy Fund (TDF) won the case after seven months of negotiations and multiple court appearances on behalf of the group known to avoid modern technology due to their faith.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
22 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
US employers likely added 115,000 jobs last month as labor market continues to cool
The U.S. job market has cooled considerably from red-hot days of 2021-2023 when the economy bounced back with unexpected strength from COVID-19 lockdowns and companies were desperate for workers. So far this year employers have added an average 124,000 jobs a month, down from 168,000 in 2024 and an average 400,000 from 2021 through 2023. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Hiring decelerated after the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate 11 times in 2022 and 2023. But the economy did not collapse, defying widespread predictions that the higher borrowing costs would cause a recession. Companies kept hiring, just at a more modest pace. Advertisement But the job market increasingly looks under strain. A survey released Wednesday by the payroll processor ADP found that private companies cut 33,000 jobs last month. 'Though layoffs continue to be rare, a hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers led to job losses last month,' said ADP chief economist Nela Richardson. (The ADP numbers frequently differ from the Labor Department's official job count.) Advertisement Employers are now contending with fallout from Trump's policies, especially his aggressive use of import taxes – tariffs. Mainstream economists say that tariffs raise prices for businesses and consumers alike and make the economy less efficient by reducing competition. They also invite retaliatory tariffs from other countries, hurting U.S. exporters. The erratic way that Trump has rolled out his tariffs – announcing and then suspending them, then coming up with new ones – has left businesses bewildered. Manufacturers responding to a survey released this week by the Institute for Supply Management complained that they and their customers were reluctant to make decisions until they understood where Trump's tariffs would end up. 'That whiplash has to stop and it has to stay stopped,' said Susan Spence, chair of the ISM's manufacturing survey committee. Trump's assault on the federal bureaucracy could also show up in June's job report. Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, expects federal jobs dropped by 20,000 last month, 'reflecting a hiring freeze, voluntary quits and retirements.'' For now, she wrote in a commentary Wednesday, court rulings 'have put massive federal layoffs on hold.'' The president's deportations – and the threat of them – also are likely to start having an impact on the job market by driving immigrants out of the job market. In May, the U.S. labor force – those working and looking for work – fell by 625,000, the biggest drop in a year and a half.
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
‘Palantir Poses a Grave Threat to Americans,' Says Former U.S. Secretary of Labor
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recently wrote in The Guardian that Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a 'grave threat to Americans.' This is because he believes it's at the center of a dangerous mix that involves artificial intelligence, military power, mass data collection, and growing influence from tech billionaires who don't support democracy. Interestingly, it was reported earlier this year that Palantir was chosen by the Trump administration to help collect and combine huge amounts of personal data from agencies like the IRS, Department of Defense, and Homeland Security. Don't Miss TipRanks' Half-Year Sale Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Make smarter investment decisions with TipRanks' Smart Investor Picks, delivered to your inbox every week. As a result, Reich warns that this AI-powered 'super-database' could be used to go after immigrants, punish political opponents, and spy on everyday Americans, all under the name of government efficiency. Reich compares Palantir to the 'palantír' in The Lord of the Rings, a powerful object used to twist reality and manipulate people. Palantir's software already helps the military and law enforcement analyze personal data, and its CEO, Alex Karp, has said that the company's mission includes disrupting institutions, scaring enemies, and even eliminating them. But Reich's bigger concern is who is guiding it. Peter Thiel, Palantir's co-founder and biggest investor, helped Trump pick government advisors, many of whom used to work for him. Thiel has said that he prefers the politics of the 1920s, a time before women's voting rights and social programs, which Reich sees as a clear rejection of modern democracy. He believes that people like Thiel are using their money and power to reshape the government in ways that benefit themselves, not the public, by helping Trump build tools that could silence critics and control the population. Take Reich's Views with a Grain of Salt However, it is worth noting that Robert Reich served as a Democrat and likely has some bias. After all, it's not like the Democratic Party itself is free of faults. Indeed, in a candid three-hour interview on the 'Joe Rogan Experience' earlier this year, Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized the Biden administration for pressuring Facebook to censor COVID-19 content—even content that was true—while also admitting that his company went too far in complying with censorship demands, especially around the 2016 election. In addition, he revealed that government officials aggressively contacted Meta to demand the removal of satirical content and threatened consequences if action was not taken. Reflecting on these events, Zuckerberg said that he regretted falling into media narratives about misinformation and election interference, and described Meta's fact-checking system as overly biased and reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984. Separately, it is also worth noting that Karp previously pushed back against claims that Palantir had been involved in creating a database of personal information on Americans for the Trump administration. Is PLTR Stock a Buy? Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on PLTR stock based on three Buys, nine Holds, and four Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. Furthermore, the average PLTR price target of $105.29 per share implies 20.2% downside risk.
CNBC
10 hours ago
- CNBC
With June jobs report looming, DOGE government layoffs could start becoming a factor
For federal government workers who worked at agencies tied to this year's job cuts, an apparent slowdown in the labor market is happening at the worst possible time. A gradual pullback in hiring and job openings has come at the same time that hundreds of thousands of federal workers are out looking for employment, the casualty of layoffs recommended by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Although economists almost universally downplay it, one straw in the wind may have come Wednesday, when payrolls processor ADP said private sector hiring in June unexpectedly contracted by 33,000 jobs, far lower than economists' estimate of 100,000. And while the impact from the DOGE layoffs has been fairly muted so far in relation to total job growth, recent trends show that's about to change, according to data from the Indeed Hiring Lab. "There are still a lot of questions about how that's all going to trickle into the labor market. A lot of people are out there looking for work from the federal government," Indeed senior economist Cory Stahle said. "The big question is whether or not they're going to be able to find them given the weaker demand for the higher education, white-collar jobs now." From January through April of this year, the number of job openings fell by 5% while the hiring rate has hovered around levels last seen in 2014, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the same time, Indeed said it has seen applications from workers at federal agencies soar by 150%, a trend that has been particularly acute at knowledge-work jobs such as data analytics, marketing and software development. While May provided some hope, with applications dipping by 4%, there are still signs that the DOGE efforts are having an impact on the broader labor picture. "Demand coming from employers has really pulled back a lot more for these white-collar jobs than it has for many of other kind of in-person skilled labor roles," Stahle said. "So that's a real big challenge for anybody entering the labor market right now." The DOGE factor is a significant consideration as policymakers look for cracks in what had been a strong, and virtually uninterrupted, expansion in the labor market since the Covid pandemic. An update on conditions comes Thursday when the BLS releases the June nonfarm payrolls count. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones expect to see growth of just 115,000, which, if accurate, would mean that every month in the first half of the year produced fewer than 150,000 new jobs. Outside of the pandemic year in 2020, it's the slowest start to a year since the financial crisis. The unemployment rate is expected to edge higher to 4.3%. The efforts this year by DOGE to pare the federal workforce have resulted in more than 280,000 positions cut, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. To be sure, it's difficult to gauge what the exact impact on the headline jobs numbers will be, given that many of the displaced workers have found other employment and some of the initial layoffs have been reversed. Also, job openings at the federal level are virtually unchanged this year, though that doesn't necessarily mean the vacancies will be filled. However, Stahle said the efforts by the Trump administration to reduce head count are not the only obstacles facing job seekers. He also noted that tech jobs are harder to come by as the Federal Reserve keeps its interest rate benchmark elevated, even in the face of persistent calls from President Donald Trump to ease monetary policy. Higher rates discourage debt-dependent tech companies from borrowing and thus expanding, keeping hiring in check, Stahle said. "A lot of the tech startups and other companies rely on borrowing to grow and hire, and if the cost of borrowing goes up, it can naturally restrict things," Stahle said. "They went on a hiring spree [after the Covid pandemic].They brought in a lot of people and haven't necessarily needed to hire as a result."
