Monday briefing: Trump's firing of a labor official; Texas Democrats; Gaza aerial images; Russian volcano; and more
Texas Democrats fled the state in an attempt to block a change to election maps.
A Post photographer captured rare aerial images of Gaza from an aid flight.
Police are searching for a former U.S. soldier accused of killing four people.
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Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Fire that started at Stripes gas station an act of arson, investigators say
A man has died from severe injuries suffered in a fire that he started at a Stripes gas station on South Padre Island Drive on July 29, according to the Corpus Christi Fire Department. Arson investigators determined that the fire was intentional based on evidence gathered at the scene, witness interviews and security camera footage from a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store, according to a written statement from Assistant Fire Chief Juan 'Tony' Perez. The man, identified by the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office as Santos Ligues, succumbed to his injuries at Brooke Army Medical Center in the early morning of Aug. 3. Investigators are looking further into the details of the commercial fire that ignited at the station at 5939 South Padre Island Drive. Officers from the Corpus Christi Police Department responded to the call of a fire at 5:39 p.m., according to a departmental news release. First responders arrived at 5:44 p.m. and found a vehicle and gas pumps engulfed in flames underneath one of the awnings and the injured man in the parking lot, Fire Chief Brandon Wade said. The first crew of firefighters to arrive immediately tended to the injured man, while another pulled a hose line to extinguish the vehicle fire, he said. Medics first took him to Bay Area Medical Center. However, an ambulance later transferred him to the hospital burn unit in San Antonio due to the severity of his burns, Perez said. Perez said that the department collected statements from witnesses and spoke with the victim's family members at the end of last week and over the weekend to compile a report that explained the cause of the fire. He said that the man's family is believed to be from San Antonio. The Corpus Christi Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Corpus Christi Fire Department says gas station fire was intentional Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How reliable is the jobs data? Economists and Wall Street still trust it
WASHINGTON (AP) — The monthly jobs report is already closely-watched on Wall Street and in Washington but has taken on a new importance after President Donald Trump on Friday fired the official who oversees it. Trump claimed that June's employment figures were 'RIGGED' to make him and other Republicans 'look bad.' Yet he provided no evidence and even the official Trump had appointed in his first term to oversee the report, William Beach, condemned the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics appointed by former President Joe Biden. The firing followed Friday's jobs report that showed hiring was weak in July and had come to nearly a standstill in May and June, right after Trump rolled out sweeping tariffs. Economists and Wall Street investors have long considered the job figures reliable, with share prices and bond yields often reacting sharply when they are released. Yet Friday's revisions were unusually large — the largest, outside of a recession, in five decades. And the surveys used to compile the report are facing challenges from declining response rates, particularly since COVID, as fewer companies complete the surveys. Nonetheless, that hasn't led most economists to doubt them. 'The bottom line for me is, I wouldn't take the low collection rate as any evidence that the numbers are less reliable,' Omair Sharif, founder and chief economist at Inflation Insights, a consulting firm, said. Many academics, statisticians and economists have warned for some time that declining budgets were straining the government's ability to gather economic data. There were several government commissions studying ways to improve things like survey response rates, but the Trump administration disbanded them earlier this year. Heather Boushey, a top economic adviser in the Biden White House, noted that without Trump's firing of McEntarfer, there would be more focus on last week's data, which points to a slowing economy. 'We're having this conversation about made-up issues to distract us from what the data is showing," Boushey said. 'Revisions of this magnitude in a negative direction may indicate bad things to come for the labor market.' Here are some things to know about the jobs report: Economists and Wall Street trust the data Most economists say that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a nonpolitical agency staffed by people obsessed with getting the numbers right. The only political appointee is the commissioner, who doesn't see the data until it's finalized, two days before it is issued to the public. Erica Groshen, the BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said she suggested different language in the report to "liven it up", but was shot down. She was told that if asked to describe a cup as half-empty or half-full, BLS says 'it is an eight ounce cup with four ounces of liquid.' The revised jobs data that has attracted Trump's ire is actually more in line with other figures than before the revision. For example, payroll processor ADP uses data from its millions of clients to calculate its own jobs report, and it showed a sharp hiring slowdown in May and June that is closer to the revised BLS data. Trump and his White House have a long track record of celebrating the jobs numbers — when they are good. These are the figures is Trump attacking Trump has focused on the revisions to the May and June data, which on Friday were revised lower, with job gains in May reduced to 19,000 from 144,000, and for June to just 14,000 from 147,000. Every month's jobs data is revised in the following two months. Trump also repeated a largely inaccurate attack from the campaign about an annual revision last August, which reduced total employment in the United States by 818,000, or about 0.5%. The government also revises employment figures every year. Trump charged the annual revision was released before the 2024 presidential election to 'boost' Vice President Kamala Harris's "chances of Victory," yet it was two months before the election and widely reported at the time that the revision lowered hiring during the Biden-Harris administration and pointed to a weaker economy. Here's why the government revises the data The monthly revisions occur because many companies that respond to the government's surveys send their data in late, or correct the figures they've already submitted. The proportion of companies sending in their data later has risen in the past decade. Every year, the BLS does an additional revision based on actual job counts that are derived from state unemployment insurance records. Those figures cover 95% of U.S. businesses and aren't derived from a survey but are not available in real time. These are the factors that cause revisions Figuring out how many new jobs have been added or lost each month is more complicated than it may sound. For example, if one person takes a second job, should you focus on the number of jobs, which has increased, or the number of employed people, which hasn't? (The government measures both: The unemployment rate is based on how many people either have or don't have jobs, while the number of jobs added or lost is counted separately). Each month, the government surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies at over 630,000 locations — including multiple locations for the same business — covering about one-third of all workers. Still, the government also has to make estimates: What if a company goes out of business? It likely won't fill out any forms showing the jobs lost. And what about new businesses? They can take a while to get on the government's radar. The BLS seeks to capture these trends by estimating their impact on employment. Those estimates can be wrong, of course, until they are fixed by the annual revisions. The revisions are often larger around turning points in the economy. For example, when the economy is growing, there may be more startups than the government expects, so revisions will be higher. If the economy is slowing or slipping into a recession, the revisions may be larger on the downside. Here's why the May and June revisions may have been so large Ernie Tedeschi, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, points to the current dynamics of the labor market: Both hiring and firing have sharply declined, and fewer Americans are quitting their jobs to take other work. As a result, most of the job gains or losses each month are probably occurring at new companies, or those going out of business. And those are the ones the government uses models to estimate, which can make them more volatile. Groshen also points out that since the pandemic there has been a surge of new start-up companies, after many Americans lost their jobs or sought more independence. Yet they may not have created as many jobs as startups did pre-COVID, which throws off the government's models. Revisions seem to be getting bigger The revisions to May and June's job totals, which reduced hiring by a total of 258,000, were the largest — outside recessions — since 1967, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. Kevin Hassett, Trump's top economic adviser, went on NBC's 'Meet the Press' on Sunday and said, 'What we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers.' Hassett blamed a sharp drop in response rates to the government's surveys during and after the pandemic: 'When COVID happened, because response rates went down a lot, then revision rates skyrocketed.' Yet calculations by Tedeschi show that while revisions spiked after the pandemic, they have since declined and are much smaller than in the 1960s and 1970s. Other concerns about the government's data Many economists and statisticians have sounded the alarm about things like declining response rates for years. A decade ago, about 60% of companies surveyed by BLS responded. Now, only about 40% do. The decline has been an international phenomenon, particularly since COVID. The United Kingdom has even suspended publication of an official unemployment rate because of falling responses. And earlier this year the BLS said that it was cutting back on its collection of inflation data because of the Trump administration's hiring freeze, raising concerns about the robustness of price data just as economists are trying to gauge the impact of tariffs on inflation. U.S. government statistical agencies have seen an inflation-adjusted 16% drop in funding since 2009, according to a July report from the American Statistical Association. 'We are at an inflection point,' the report said. 'To meet current and future challenges requires thoughtful, well-planned investment ... In contrast, what we have observed is uncoordinated and unplanned reductions with no visible plan for the future. Christopher Rugaber, The Associated Press Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
New York Post
9 minutes ago
- New York Post
Blaming ‘the system,' Kamala Harris falls for the oldest temptation
August is usually downtime in Washington, DC: Congress is in recess, the heat and humidity contribute to the desire to escape town for cooler weather, the president is normally somewhere else and cable news is focused on shark attacks. Not this August. Cable news especially, along with some newspapers, seem to be fixated on the person Democrats will nominate for president in 2028. We are just eight months into President Donald Trump's second term — and we are being forced to listen and read speculation about an election a political lifetime away. Part of it can be blamed on former Vice President Kamala Harris, who received headlines for announcing she is not running for governor of California and will not seek the presidency again. Harris told Stephen Colbert on his soon-to-be canceled 'Late Show' the reason she will not run again: 'The system is broken,' she said Funny how Democrats claim the system is broken only when they lose. The larger part of the media's preoccupation with politics is that many 'can't stop thinking about tomorrow' instead of living in the present. For many, politics has become a false god. Like those ancient gods described in the Old Testament that could never deliver what the people claimed to want, the political 'gods' are worshiped no matter how many times they fail to keep their promises. If, as Harris claims, 'the system' is broken, much of the reason is that we have asked the government to do what it was never created to do. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! Even as Trump, however imperfectly, is trying to fix it, too many voters still put too much faith where it doesn't belong. It is here that CS Lewis offers valuable insight. In his classic work 'The Screwtape Letters,' a demon-in-training named Wormwood is assigned by his Uncle Screwtape (aka Satan) to distract his 'patient' (aka us) from the plans of 'the enemy' (aka God). Kamala Harris would do well to read this excerpt, since she blames a broken system for her loss, and her decision not to run again. 'Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics,' Lewis' Screwtape advises. Keep up with today's most important news Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters 'Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. 'Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. 'Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is 'out there' in the 'broken system' rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.' William Shakespeare had his own analysis of the human condition. Students may remember this comment by Cassius in 'Julius Caesar': 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.' It means that fate and destiny do not control us, but rather the good or bad choices we make are the result of our own actions, determined by the worldview to which we cling and in which we believe. Imagine if politicians began speaking like Lewis and the Bard, telling voters, 'I can't do more for you than you can do for yourselves.' With so many addicted to politics and 'the system,' voters might quickly drive the career politicians from office — and the ratings on cable news would drop like a stone. Cal Thomas is a veteran political commentator, columnist and author.
