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Unemployment falls however is increased for Black, Hispanic employees

Unemployment falls but is higher for Black, Hispanic workers

A man hands his resume over to an employer at the 25th annual Central Florida Employment Council Job Fair on the Central Florida Fairgrounds. More than 80 companies recruited for over a thousand positions.

Paul Hennessy | LightRakete | Getty Images

Unemployment fell to 5.4% when the economy created 943,000 jobs in July, with strong increases in all population groups despite persistent labor market inequalities.

The unemployment rate for blacks and Hispanic Americans fell to 8.2% and 6.6% respectively, but the numbers are high compared to the unemployment rate for whites and Asians. Unemployment was lowest among whites at 4.8% and among Asians it fell to 5.3%.

These numbers represent a broad improvement on June when the overall unemployment rate was 5.9%. Broken down by group, it was 9.2% for blacks, 7.4% for Hispanic workers, 5.8% for Asians, and 5.2% for whites.

The total employment rate or the share of employed or jobseekers remained largely unchanged. However, it actually fell slightly among blacks, suggesting that the fall in unemployment may be partly due to some blacks dropping out of the labor market.

Still, blacks are almost as likely to be in the labor force as whites, but earn 23% less on a weekly basis at $ 799 compared to $ 1,012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics median wage data for the second quarter.

Hispanics, who are more labor market participants than any other demographic, earn 26% less than whites at $ 779 a week. Asians are the top earners overall, with an average weekly wage of $ 1,281.

Black and Hispanic workers are disproportionately represented in low-wage industries such as transportation and warehousing, and leisure and hospitality.

For example, black workers make up about 13% of the US workforce, but 21% of all transportation and warehouse workers. Hispanic workers make up 17% of the labor force but 24% in the leisure and hospitality industries.

The differences are even greater when one compares the wages of white men and women across the different demographic categories. White women earn 19% less, black women nearly 40% less, Hispanic women 43% less, and Asian women earn 7% less.

Asian men were the highest earners overall, with an average weekly wage of $ 1,473.

The general employment trend is moving in the right direction as the economy recovers from the pandemic, said Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the Department of Labor under the Obama administration.

“Because people of color were disproportionately affected by this downturn and we are recovering from it, workers of color are seeing disproportionate gains,” said Shierholz, senior economist and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

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J.D. Vance Transformed to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Purchase It?

J.D. Vance Converted to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Buy It?

Before he was a celebrity supporter of Donald J. Trump’s, J.D. Vance was one of his most celebrated critics.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s searing 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky, offered perplexed and alarmed Democrats, and not a few Republicans, an explanation for Mr. Trump’s appeal to an angry core of white, working-class Americans.

A conservative author, venture capitalist and graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Vance presented himself as a teller of hard truths, writing personally about the toll of drugs and violence, a bias against education, and a dependence on welfare. Rather than blaming outsiders, he scolded his community. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” he wrote.

In interviews, he called Mr. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue leading “the white working class to a very dark place.”

Today, as Mr. Vance pursues the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat in Ohio, he has performed a whiplash-inducing conversion to Trumpism, in which he no longer emphasizes that white working-class problems are self-inflicted. Adopting the grievances of the former president, he denounces “elites and the ruling class” for “robbing us blind,” as he said in his announcement speech last month.

Now championing the hard-right messages that animate the Make America Great Again base, Mr. Vance has deleted inconvenient tweets, renounced his old views about immigration and trade, and gone from a regular guest on CNN to a regular on “Tucker Carlson,” echoing the Fox News host’s racially charged insults of immigrants as “dirty.”

When working-class Americans “dare to complain about the southern border,” Mr. Vance said on Mr. Carlson’s show last month, “or about jobs getting shipped overseas, what do they get called? They get called racists, they get called bigots, xenophobes or idiots.”

“I love that,” Mr. Carlson replied.

Whether Ohio Republicans do, too, is the big question for Mr. Vance — who will crucially benefit from a $10 million super PAC funded by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who once employed Mr. Vance.

His G.O.P. rivals in the state have had a field day. Josh Mandel, a former treasurer of Ohio who is the early front-runner in the five-candidate field, called Mr. Vance a “RINO just like Romney and Liz Cheney,” referring to the Utah senator and the Wyoming congresswoman who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Capitol riot.

Liberals and some conservatives have also dismissed Mr. Vance for cynical opportunism. One Never Trump conservative, Tom Nichols, wrote of “the moral collapse of J.D. Vance” in The Atlantic.

Mr. Vance’s adherence to some of the most extreme views of Trump supporters shows how the former president, despite losing the White House and Congress for his party, retains the support of fanatically loyal voters, who echo his resentments and disinformation and force most Republican candidates to bend a knee.

Yet Mr. Vance’s flip-flops over policy and over Mr. Trump’s demagogic style may not prove disqualifying with Ohio primary-goers when they vote next spring, according to strategists. Although Mr. Vance’s U-turn might strike some as too convenient in an era when voters quickly sniff out inauthenticity, it is also true that his political arc resembles that of many Republicans who voted grudgingly for Mr. Trump in 2016, but after four years cemented their support. (Mr. Vance has said he voted third-party in 2016.)

“Will he be able to overcome his past comments on Trump and square that with the G.O.P. base? Maybe,” said Michael Hartley, a Republican strategist in Ohio who is not working for any of the Senate candidates. He added that Mr. Vance had the lived experience to address policies that lift working-class people “in a way that others cannot.”

Mr. Vance, 37, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Cincinnati, has carefully seeded the ground for his candidacy, appearing frequently on podcasts and news shows with far-right influencers of the Trump base, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.

In interviews, speeches and on social media, he has become a culture warrior. He threatened to make Big Tech “pay” for putting conservatives “in Facebook jail,” and he mocked Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the four-star general said he sought to understand “white rage” in the wake of the assault on the Capitol.

To Mr. Vance, it is a “big lie” that Jan. 6 was “this big insurrection,” he told Mr. Bannon.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance credited members of the elite with fewer divorces, longer lives and higher church attendance, adding ruefully, “These people are beating us at our own damned game.” But that was not his message at a recent conservative gathering where he blamed a breakdown in the American family on “the childless left.’’

Mr. Carlson, Fox’s highest-rated host, all but endorsed Mr. Vance during the candidate’s appearance last month. Mr. Vance also has the backing of Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, a rising conservative leader in the House. And Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who has ties to the Trump family, has endorsed the “Hillbilly Elegy” author.

“He has been consistent in being able to diagnose the anxieties of Trump’s base economically almost better than anyone else,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview. Although Mr. Vance once mocked Mr. Trump’s position that a southwest border wall would bring back “all of these steel mill jobs,” today he supports the “America First” agenda that reducing legal immigration will increase blue-collar wages, a link that many economists dispute. “Why let in a large number of desperate newcomers when many of our biggest cities look like this?” Mr. Vance said recently on Twitter over a picture of a homeless encampment in Washington.

Mr. Trump has met with all five major declared Ohio Republican Senate candidates — who are seeking the open seat of the retiring Senator Rob Portman — but has not signaled a preference. He is not likely to do so any time soon, according to a person briefed on his thinking. Among Democrats, Representative Tim Ryan has the field nearly to himself. Ohio, once a battleground state, has trended rightward in the Trump era.

Mr. Vance declined to be interviewed for this article. But an examination of his embrace of Trumpism through the ample record of his writings and remarks, as well as interviews with people close to him, show that it happened the way a Hemingway character famously described how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

The year 2018 appears to have been the turning point. That January, Mr. Vance considered a Senate bid in Ohio but ultimately decided not to run, citing family matters, after news reports brought to light his earlier hostile criticism of Mr. Trump.

Later that year, the furious opposition on the left to the Supreme Court nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh was a milestone in Mr. Vance’s political shift. Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha, whom he met in law school, had clerked for Justice Kavanaugh. “Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” Mr. Vance told a conservative group in 2019.

Although Mr. Vance has said that he came to agree with Mr. Trump’s policies on China and immigration, the most important factor in his conversion, he told Mr. Gorka in March, was a “gut” identification with Mr. Trump’s rhetorical war on America’s “elites.”

“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” Mr. Vance said.

(His adoption of Trump-style populism did not inhibit him from flying to the Hamptons last month for a fund-raiser with Republican captains of industry, as reported by Politico.)

Finally, the influence of Mr. Thiel, a founder of PayPal, whom Mr. Vance has called a “mentor to me,” appears to have been decisive in Mr. Vance’s embrace of Trumpism.

An outspoken and somewhat rare conservative in Silicon Valley, Mr. Thiel addressed the 2016 Republican convention and advised the Trump transition team. He is a fierce critic of China and global trade and a supporter of restrictionist immigration policies, and Mr. Vance has moved toward all those positions. Mr. Thiel, who did not respond to an interview request, is also paying for a super PAC for another protege, Blake Masters, in a Senate race in Arizona.

In March, Mr. Thiel brokered a meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s resort in Florida. Mr. Vance made amends for his earlier criticism and asked Mr. Trump to keep an open mind, according to people briefed on the meeting. If Mr. Trump were going to attack Mr. Vance — as he has other Republican 2022 candidates around the country whom he perceives to be disloyal — he probably would have done so already.

For now, the former president’s appetite for revenge in Ohio seems to be sated by attacking Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican who voted for impeachment in January. Mr. Trump held a rally in the state in June to back a primary challenger to Mr. Gonzalez. Mr. Vance was on hand, sharing a photo on Twitter to show his support for Mr. Trump.

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California shuts down main hydroelectric plant amid extreme drought

California shuts down major hydroelectric plant amid severe drought

In this aerial view, houseboats sit on Lake Oroville at low tide as the California drought emergency worsens in Oroville, California on July 25, 2021.

Robyn Beck | AFP | Getty Images

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – California closed a large hydropower plant on Lake Oroville when the water level fell near the minimum required to generate electricity, state water authorities said.

It is the first time since the power plant opened in 1967 that the state has shut down the Hyatt power plant due to a lack of water.

The blackout could trigger even more blackouts this summer as the state grapples with a historic drought and record-breaking heat waves.

Officials said the record low water level at Lake Oroville, an artificial water reserve in Northern California, was due to the drought aggravated by climate change.

Though California is experiencing constant drought, climate change has fueled high temperatures and arid soils, which significantly reduced water runoff to the reservoirs this spring, resulting in the lowest levels ever recorded at Lake Oroville, officials said Thursday.

“This is just one of many unprecedented impacts we are experiencing in California as a result of our climate-induced drought,” Karla Nemeth, director of the state’s water resources division, said in a statement.

Nemeth said the department anticipated the shutdown and planned a loss of water and network management. Officials have warned that the facility will no longer be able to generate electricity if the water level drops below 640 feet above sea level.

Dry land is visible in a section that is usually underwater on the shores of Lake Oroville, which is the second largest reservoir in California and has a capacity of nearly 35, according to daily reports from the state Department of Water Resources near Oroville, California % hat, 06/16/2021.

Aude Guerrucci | Reuters

Lake Oroville’s water levels are expected to reach 620 feet above sea level by the end of October. Nemeth said the state’s water board was working to “save as much water as possible”.

Although the facility is no longer generating electricity, officials said they will dump some water from the dam into the Feather River to help maintain the river’s temperature requirements.

Governor Gavin Newsom urged California residents in July to reduce household water use by 15% in order to maintain water supplies. Network operators have also urged residents to limit electricity usage to avoid blackouts as forest fires scorched the state, including the Dixie Fire, which has been burning for more than three weeks and decimated the gold rush town of Greenville.

“Falling reservoir levels are another example of why it is so important for all Californians to conserve water,” said Nemeth.

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After Trumka’s Demise, A.F.L.-C.I.O. Faces a Crossroads

After Trumka’s Death, A.F.L.-C.I.O. Faces a Crossroads

Richard Trumka’s twelve years as AFL-CIO president coincided with the ongoing decline of the organized workforce, but also with opportunities such as the election of a devout US president. With Mr Trumka’s death last week, the association faces a fundamental question: What is the purpose of the AFL-CIO?

For years, union leaders and senior officials have split into two big camps on this issue. On one side are those who argue that the AFL-CIO, which has around 12 million members, should play a supportive role for its constituent unions – that it should help build consensus on political and political priorities, for them To lobby Washington, provide research and communication support, and identify the best ways to organize and negotiate.

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that the Federation should play a leading role in building the labor movement – by investing resources in organizing more workers; by entering new branches of the economy; by funding non-traditional workers’ organizations, such as those representing undocumented workers; and by forging deeper alliances with other progressive groups, such as civil rights activists.

As President, Mr. Trumka identified more with the first approach, which several current and former union officials felt was particularly valuable given its close ties to President Biden. Liz Shuler, who has been acting president since Mr. Trumka’s death and hopes to succeed him, is said to have a similar orientation.

But while the association ponders its future, there is an inescapable fact that could sway the discussion: Mr Trumka’s approach did not seem to solve an existential crisis for the U.S. labor movement, where unions make up only 7 percent of the private sector workforce.

“The level of collective bargaining coverage of American workers is not comparable to that of any other similar democracy,” said Larry Cohen, a past president of Communications Workers of America. “If you’re not there to grow, you are in trouble. You’re just playing defense. You’ll be here until someone turns off the light. “

Funding for a dedicated department dedicated to the organization fell significantly during Mr Trumka’s presidency, to around 10 percent by 2019, according to documents on the Splinter website.

Ms. Shuler said in an interview on Friday that the department’s budget does not reflect other resources put into organizing, such as the millions of dollars the AFL-CIO sends to state unions and local labor councils that play an important role can organize campaigns.

Although union membership fell about 1.5 percentage points to below 11 percent during Mr. Trumka’s tenure, his influence in Washington contributed to several successes. These included a more worker-friendly revision of the North American free trade agreement, tens of billions of dollars in government aid to stabilize union pension plans, and a job creation bill now passing through Congress.

The economic rescue plan that Mr Biden signed in March sent hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to state and local governments that saw public sector unions, increasingly the face of the labor movement, as lifeguards.

But the cornerstone of Mr. Trumka’s plan to revitalize work was a law pending passage: the Right to Organize or PRO Law. The law would make organizing easier by prohibiting employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings and fines against employers who violate labor laws. The association invested heavily in choosing officials who could help pass the measure.

During an interview with the New York Times in March, Mr. Trumka identified the PRO Act as the workers’ last best hope. “Because of growing inequality, our economy is on the way to implosion, ”he said. “We have to find a way so that workers have more power and employers less. And that works best with the PRO Act. “

Ms. Shuler repeated this point, arguing that if the measure becomes law, the workforce will be prepared for a resurgence. “We have everything in harmony,” she said. “All that’s left is the PRO Act to unleash what I would say the potential for unprecedented organizing.”

But so far, workers’ hopes for a bill strongly opposed by Republicans and the business community have been dubious. While the House of Representatives passed the bill in March and Mr Biden strongly supports it, the odds are high in a divided Senate.

When asked if the AFL-CIO could support Mr Biden’s multi-trillion dollar job plan if it comes to a vote with no prospect of the PRO Act being passed, Mr Trumka refused to consider the option that he would have to make such a decision.

“I don’t see that,” he said in an interview. “This president and this government understand the power to resolve inequalities through collective bargaining.”

An alternative approach could have given higher priority to building power outside Washington by adding union membership and increasing the influence of non-union workers.

Daily business briefing

Updated

Aug 6, 2021, 6:12 a.m. ET

According to Mr. Cohen, former communications workers leader, one benefit of a large investment in organizing is that it allows the labor movement to bet in a variety of industries and jobs where workers are increasingly excited about union work , but in which traditional unions do not have a large presence – like the video game industry and other technology sectors.

Such funds can help workers who want to organize their free time from colleagues, as well as a small cadre of professionals to help them. “You have 100 people you pay $ 25,000 a year for and 15 full-time employees, and people can build where they live,” Cohen said.

Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO’s organizing director from 2002 to 2008 and then special assistant to its president, said the association’s role in organizing should include more than just directly funding these efforts. He said it was imperative to give membership a higher priority to all organized labor, as he had attempted under Mr. Trumka’s predecessor.

“We have challenged all levels of the labor movement to spend 30 percent of their resources on growth,” said Acuff, who criticized the leadership of the Federation under Mr. Trumka. “This wasn’t just referring to organizers. It meant using access to every lever, “such as pressure on companies to be more accepting of unions.

Mr Acuff also said the AFL-CIO must be more willing to place long bets on organizing workers who, with more members, may not pay off in the short term but help build power and influence for workers.

He cited the $ 15 struggle and a union, a year-long campaign to improve wages and facilitate union formation for fast food and other low-wage workers. The campaign, which received tens of millions of dollars from the Service Employees International Union, was successful in many ways, despite the fact that it produced few new union members. The AFL-CIO supported the US $ 15 battle but did not provide direct financial support.

Mr Cohen and Mr Acuff both cited the importance of building long-term alliances with outside groups – such as those advocating for civil rights or immigration or environmental issues – that can increase the power of workers, such as calling for an employer to resign while in a union Campaign.

During his tenure, Mr. Trumka tried at times to cultivate such alliances, but he was often hampered by resistance within the Federation.

Amid the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, Mr Trumka attempted to throw the AFL-CIO’s weight behind civil rights matters, including a speech he gave in Ferguson, Missouri, after a young black man, Michael Brown, who was there in 2014 shot by a police officer.

But Mr Trumka faced a backlash on that front from more conservative unions who felt that the AFL-CIO’s real job was to focus on economic issues that affect members rather than issues like civil rights.

“There have been some unions – not just construction – that have felt that the work is not what we should be focusing on,” said Carmen Berkley, a former director of the AFL’s civil, human and women’s rights division -CIO, in an interview last year.

Since Mr Trumka’s death, union leaders have begun to discuss what the association’s organizational and political challenges mean for the election of a successor. According to its bylaws, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Board will meet within three weeks to elect a successor for Mr. Trumka’s term, which expires next year.

One of the top candidates will be Ms. Shuler, who became the acting president after the death of Mr. Trumka as secretary / treasurer. If the Council selects Ms. Shuler to succeed Mr Trumka, this could advance her to the presidency next year and consolidate the direction of the Federation, a prospect that some reformers within the labor movement are concerned about.

Some of these reformers support Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, as the next president of the Federation. Ms. Nelson has advocated redirecting much of the tens of millions of dollars the labor movement spends on political activities to help more workers unionize.

But Ms. Shuler insists that choosing between investing in the organization and the other priorities of the association is the wrong one.

“I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive,” she said. “After the way modern organizations work, you no longer have large institutional budgets filled with line items. We organize everything related to the campaign. We’ll identify a target where it’s hot. ”Then, she said, the organizations raise money and get things done.

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Biden warns of financial peril from Covid regardless of July job positive aspects

Biden warns of economic peril from Covid despite July job gains

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden resisted the temptation to take a victory lap Friday following the release of strong July jobs numbers, instead telling the country that rising Covid cases pose an urgent threat to the economic recovery.

“My message today is not one of celebration,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “It is one to remind us that we have a lot of hard work left to be done, both to beat the delta variant and to continue the advance of our economic recovery.”

The highly contagious delta strain of Covid currently accounts for at least 80% of new infections nationwide.

Still, hiring rose last month at its fastest pace in nearly a year, despite fears over the delta variant and as companies struggled with a tight labor supply.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 943,000, while the unemployment rate dropped to 5.4%, according to the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The payroll increase was the best since August 2020.

The number of new jobs beat economists’ expectations by nearly 100,000, and the unemployment rate fell three tenths of a percent lower than experts had predicted it would.

In touting the strength and resilience of the economic recovery, Biden did something Friday that he rarely does: pointed to Wall Street analysts to validate his argument.

“What we’re doing is working,” he said. “Don’t take my word for it. The forecasters on Wall Street project that over the next 10 years, our economy will expand by trillions of dollars and will create 2 million good paying jobs.”

Trouble ahead

But July’s strong topline numbers do not accurately reflect a troubling new development in recent weeks: the rise in Covid infections and hospitalizations attributed to the delta variant.

That’s because the actual numbers for BLS monthly jobs reports are calculated during just the second week of the month, based on that week’s data.

In the three weeks since the July jobs figures were calculated, hospital emergency rooms and intensive care units have begun filling up again in parts of the country.

This has prompted some large employers and schools to freeze plans to fully reopen offices and campuses in the coming weeks.

The White House is deeply concerned that rising Covid caseloads could stall the economic recovery, imperiling Biden’s domestic agenda and Democrats’ electoral chances in the midterm elections.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki answers questions during the daily briefing on August 06, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee | Getty Images

Sticks and carrots

And after months of relying on incentives, celebrity endorsements and local outreach to persuade Americans to get vaccinated, the Biden administration took a tougher line this past week, adding sticks to the proverbial carrot-stick equation.

Federal employees who cannot prove they’ve been vaccinated will be placed under a host of unpleasant restrictions at work, like being physically separated from their vaccinated colleagues.

The Pentagon also announced plans to include the Covid vaccine among the mandatory vaccines administered to U.S. service members.

Biden didn’t touch on these measures in his speech Friday, choosing instead to describe various measures the administration is enacting to protect the economic recovery.

He repeatedly referred to Covid as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” a phrase that some critics say fails to capture the universal impact of rising caseloads and things like reinstated mask mandates.

As the White House often notes, more than 90% of Covid hospitalizations are people who have not been vaccinated against the virus. And while vaccinated people can contract and transmit Covid, they typically exhibit mild symptoms akin to a flu or a sinus infection.

The White House view

Both publicly and privately, White House aides say that the stubbornly high rate of unvaccinated Americans — 30% of eligible recipients — is creating a situation where one virus, the coronavirus, is essentially creating two different, parallel public health challenges.

On one track are the 166 million fully or partially vaccinated people, whose individual Covid infections the government has not officially tracked since March.

For them, the virus looks more like a seasonal flu from past years than it does like the debilitating, weekslong pulmonary crisis that millions of Americans experienced in 2020, before the vaccine became available.

But for the unvaccinated, many of whom are concentrated in the Southeastern United States, the delta variant virus is just as deadly, and far more contagious, than the original virus was in the early months of last year.

Biden, however, believes there is reason for optimism. “I’m pleased to report in the past week we have seen first-time vaccinations in America go up by 4 million shots,” he said Friday. “That’s more than we have seen in a long time.”

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.

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Tons of of Hundreds of Bikers Anticipated in Sturgis Regardless of Delta Variant

Hundreds of Thousands of Bikers Expected in Sturgis Despite Delta Variant

Although most major events closed last summer due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally rushed ahead and panicked health professionals when nearly half a million motorcycle enthusiasts came to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

This year’s rally, which began on Friday, is expected to attract an even larger audience, as the infectious Delta variant is producing more new virus cases nationwide than at that time last year.

Which route the virus will take through Sturgis remains to be seen.

It is more difficult to transmit outdoors, vaccines greatly reduce the risk of serious illness, and South Dakota has the fewest new virus cases per capita in the United States. At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are viewing Delta as contagious as chickenpox, and people are traveling from across the country – several southern states are in their worst outbreaks of the pandemic – to a region with a relatively low vaccination rate.

Hundreds of new cases have been linked to last year’s rally, but as infected bikers returned to their home states, it made contact tracing difficult and obscured the real bottom line.

Sturgis officials stressed that this year’s rally will offer coronavirus testing, free masks and hand sanitizing stations. For the first time, attendees are allowed to take alcoholic beverages outside without fear of being fined to limit the crowd in the bars.

These precautions are accompanied by warnings.

“We encourage people in a high-risk category, whether because of their age or comorbidities, to come next year,” said Dan Ainslie, Sturgis City Manager.

On Friday, the steady roar of the engines announced the arrival of thousands of bikers. In the morning, Main Street was crowded with visitors, walking shoulder to shoulder on sidewalks, or congregating near dozens of bikes parked outside of stores. A parade opened the 10-day rally, which was in its 81st year, with the Budweiser Clydesdale horses in the lead.

A local business owner, Toni Fisher, 63, had watched anxiously as more and more people poured into her hometown over the past week. Although she and her husband are both vaccinated, Ms. Fisher suffers from fibromyalgia and said she was concerned about the likelihood of developing a breakthrough infection that could affect her health for months.

All the minimal precautions people took last year like so much motorcycle exhaust drifted away, she said. “It’s wild boar this year,” she said. “Nobody cares.”

The pandemic devastated the massage business that Ms. Fisher runs, but she said she was unsure whether she would offer massages during the rally. She has a handful of masked appointments, and she and her husband are once again hosting campers in their garden. Her husband plans to deliver pizzas for extra cash during the rally – adding to Ms. Fisher’s worries.

Updated

Aug 7, 2021, 5:39 p.m. ET

She’s wearing face masks again when she goes to the grocery store, but says she’s practically alone taking precautions, even as the Delta variant is fueling rising infections across the country.

“I don’t know what to do here,” she said.

Other major outdoor events have returned this summer, in part because of vaccine availability. Attendees at the recent Lollapalooza music festival that pushed people to downtown Chicago were required to either show proof of vaccination or show a negative coronavirus test from the previous 72 hours.

There will be no similar screening process at the motorcycle rally in Sturgis. Vaccines will be made available at the event, including the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot, but they take time to boost the immune system.

Meade County, which includes Sturgis, has a vaccination rate of 37 percent – significantly lower than half of fully vaccinated Americans – and the six neighboring counties have even lower vaccination rates.

Dr. Shankar Kurra, the vice president of medical affairs at Monument Health, headquartered in Rapid City, SD, said the area had almost no virus cases in late June. But like in every other state, cases have risen in the past few weeks.

Understand the state of vaccine mandates in the United States

“With us all 100 percent of the cases were unvaccinated people,” said Dr. Kurra on the recent surge. “We want to make sure people have access to tests so that we can be detected early in the event of an outbreak.”

About a week before the rally began, bikers from across the country started packing up at hotels in Rapid City, said Steven Allender, the city’s mayor. Mr Allender said he has contacted local health officials about how best to prepare for the flow of visitors, but his office has failed to impose any restrictions on the event.

“The government tried to save lives, but failed because of the political climate and the debate over the use of masks,” Allender said. “I would say today that there is no stopping churches across the state from adopting an all-for-yourself stance.”

At the end of last year, Mr Allender issued a mask mandate in all city buildings and called on the city council to issue a more comprehensive regulation on the mask requirement – a measure that ultimately failed. South Dakota was one of several states that did not impose lockdowns or mask requirements during the height of the pandemic.

Sturgis is a relatively quiet town of around 7,000 residents for most of the year, next to 1.2 million hectares of forest and with a motorcycle museum as its main attraction. But every summer the city changes when bikers dismount. Last year, when the pandemic turned daily life in America upside down, forcing music festivals and other large gatherings to be canceled, more than 60 percent of Sturgis residents were in favor of postponing the motorcycle rally, according to a poll sponsored by the city. But this year there was little public concern.

The state’s Department of Tourism estimates that the annual festival, with notable sponsors such as Budweiser, Harley-Davidson and Coca-Cola, will generate sales of around $ 800 million this year. It’s a sight to behold: when drivers from the USA and Canada make the pilgrimage to Sturgis, at least in more typical years, the otherwise quiet stretch of Interstate 90 is overcrowded with motorbikes.

“The Sturgis rally is about jumping on your bike and exploring this great country on our open roads,” said state governor Kristi Noem in a statement. “Bikers come here because they want to be here. And we love to see them! Everything we do in life is at risk. Bikers get that better than anyone else. “

Jack Healy contributed to the coverage.

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Afghan warfare has entered ‘deadlier and extra damaging section,’ UN says

Afghan war has entered 'deadlier and more destructive phase,' UN says

Taliban fighters with a vehicle on a highway in Afghanistan.

Saibal Das | The India Today Group | Getty Images

The U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan on Friday said the war in the country has entered a “deadlier and more destructive phase” and questioned the Taliban’s commitment to political settlement. 

“A party that was genuinely committed to a negotiated settlement would not risk so many civilian casualties, because it would understand that the process of reconciliation will be more challenging, the more blood is shed,” Deborah Lyons told the U.N. Security Council on Friday. 

This comes after Afghan civilian casualties climbed to more than 1,000 in the past month, and as the Taliban continues to achieve territorial gains in Afghanistan. 

Fighting between the Taliban and Afghan security forces has raged since April when U.S. and coalition forces began their withdrawal from the country. The withdrawal is set to be completed later this month. 

On Friday, the Taliban captured its first provincial capital, Zaranj of the Nimroz province, since launching its offensive. 

The group also killed the Afghan government’s top media officer in Kabul on Friday, just days after attempting to assassinate the country’s acting defense minister, according to The Associated Press. 

The Taliban is also in control of large rural areas of Afghanistan, and is now challenging Afghan security forces in several large cities, Lyons said. This includes Herat, near the western border with Iran, as well as Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south, which are “under significant pressure.”

“To attack urban areas is to knowingly inflict enormous harm and cause massive civilian casualties. Nonetheless, the threatening of large urban areas appears to be a strategic decision by the Taliban, who have accepted the likely carnage that will ensue,” she said.

Peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban that began last year have not made any substantive progress, Lyons said. 

Lyons added that the U.N. expected a reduction in violence in Afghanistan after the U.S.-Taliban deal was signed in February. But instead, there was a 50% increase in civilian casualties in the country as more cities were attacked by the Taliban. 

Afghan citizens “expect far greater engagement and visible support” from the U.N. Security Council, Lyons said. She urged the council to issue a statement that calls for an end to violence in the country, and to ensure “a meaningful peace process.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki also addressed the recent attacks by the Taliban at a Friday press briefing, stating that their actions won’t help them gain international legitimacy.

“Our view is that, if the Taliban claim to want international legitimacy, these actions are not going to get them the legitimacy they seek,” Psaki said.

 “They do not have to stay on this trajectory. They can choose to devote the same energy to the peace process as they are to their military campaign.”.

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For G.O.P., Infrastructure Invoice Is a Likelihood to Inch Away from Trump

For G.O.P., Infrastructure Bill Is a Chance to Inch Away from Trump

Instead, the response was crickets.

Ms. Collins and Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, calmly pointed out that Mr. Trump had supported a much larger infrastructure plan in the past but failed to deliver. Mr. Portman, who had personally called Mr. Trump to encourage him to back the legislation, politely suggested that Mr. Trump change tactics and embrace the plan.

When the time came to vote to advance the measure on the Senate floor, the coalition of mostly moderate members found that, contrary to Mr. Trump’s efforts, the number of conservative senators supporting their plan had increased, not decreased — with members of Republican leadership, including Mr. McConnell and Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who is also retiring, joining their ranks.

Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said some of his constituents were “mad as hell” about his support for the bill — particularly about the idea of doing something that would make President Biden look good. But rather than follow Mr. Trump’s lead, he has made a point of talking up the agreement on conservative talk radio shows.

“I firmly believe that people — the longer they live with it, the more they look at it, the more they hear about it, the more they’ll like it, including conservatives,” Mr. Cramer said.

Several Republican aides said the developments left them feeling that while Mr. Trump’s influence over the Senate was not gone, he was diminished.

Indeed, many Republicans said they were puzzled over the point Mr. Trump was trying to make. The former president had proposed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package while in office, so his opposition to a leaner bill seemed motivated either by personal pique or a simple desire to see his predecessor and the opposing party fail.

“It’s not really so clear what Trump’s substantive objection is here,” said Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “He’s certainly not saying doing an infrastructure bill is bad; he spent his whole four years talking about how great it would be. So all he’s really saying is, ‘Working with Democrats is bad.’ And for a lot of these senators from closely contested states, they figure their electoral base just doesn’t agree that bipartisanship is bad.”

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Cuomo ought to resign over sexual harassment claims, New Yorkers say in ballot

Cuomo should resign over sexual harassment claims, New Yorkers say in poll

People attend a protest to demand the resignation of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo after a third woman accused him of sexual harassment on March 2, 2021 in New York City.

Hit by Betancur | AFP | Getty Images

A whopping 70% of New York voters say Governor Andrew Cuomo should step down, according to a poll released Friday.

A solid majority of the state’s electorate, 55%, said in the Quinnipiac University poll that Cuomo should face criminal charges in connection with what New York attorney general investigators described as the sexual harassment of at least 11 women.

The poll was conducted on Wednesday and Thursday following the damning report on the conduct of the Democratic third-term governor released Tuesday by AG Letitia James.

It was released hours after the Albany County, NY Sheriff’s office announced it had received a criminal complaint from a former Cuomo executive assistant.

That assistant had told investigators for the James report that Cuomo had groped her chest and buttocks and made repeated suggestive comments on various incidents.

James said Cuomo’s behavior violated federal and state laws.

The poll found that 63% of voters believe Cuomo should be charged and removed from office if he does not step down. A slightly higher percentage of respondents said they believed the allegations that Cuomo sexually molested several women.

While Republicans were most likely to say Cuomo should resign, with 88% of GOP voters supporting the idea, 57% of Governor’s Democrats also believed he should resign now. Leading Democratic MPs in New York and President Joe Biden have also urged Cuomo to step down.

Cuomo has stubbornly denied any wrongdoing and has declined requests to stop.

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The poll also found that Cuomo, 63, now has his “lowest job approval since he took office in 2011,” with just 28% of voters approving his performance and 63% opposing it.

This is significantly lower than the previous all-time low, which had a breakdown of 39% to 48% agreement / disagreement.

The survey, which asked 615 self-identified registered voters who were called on landlines and mobile phones, shows an error rate of 4 percentage points.

“New Yorkers of all stripes are sending a clear message to Governor Cuomo that it is time to step down,” said Quinnipiac University poll analyst Mary Snow.

A Marist poll conducted Tuesday evening, hours after James released the Cuomo report, found that 59% of registered voters felt he should step down. An identical percentage of those polled said that the State Assembly should steal him if he doesn’t quit.

Cuomo faces the likelihood of being charged by the congregation on the allegations.

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Conor Lamb Enters 2022 Pennsylvania Senate Race

Conor Lamb Enters 2022 Pennsylvania Senate Race

PITTSBURGH – Rep. Conor Lamb believes he knows what it takes for Democrats to win in Pennsylvania nationwide.

He looks at President Biden, whose narrow victory in the state – named four days after Election Day – got him over the top and into the White House.

“People will use the word moderate,” Lamb said Thursday at his home in Pittsburgh’s South Hills. “We are a swing state. I don’t think we’re ideologically too advanced either way. ”

On Friday, at a union hall on Hot Metal Street in Pittsburgh, Mr. Lamb announced his long-awaited entry into the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race, vowing to “fight for every single vote in our state on every single square inch of ground” and presenting himself as a middle class enough to be elected nationwide.

The question is whether he’s liberal enough to win the Democratic primary.

A Navy veteran and former prosecutor, Mr. Lamb, 37, is likely the last major candidate to step into what is expected to be major competitive battles in both parties for the seat of Senator Pat Toomey, a retiring Republican.

It is the only vacant Republican-owned seat in a state that Mr Biden has held, and the Democrats see this as their best opportunity to expand their pinpoint control of the Senate, in which the 50-50 partisan split has Vice President Kamala Harris with the cast leaves decisive votes. A single extra seat would mean a simple Democratic majority in the Senate and at least shield the White House a little from the whims of individual senators who are now a huge influence, like moderates Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

Mr Lamb became famous in 2018 when he won a special election to the House of Representatives in a district that Mr Trump had run in double digits. He won twice more in a redrawn but still politically mixed district, staking out independent positions, including voting against MP Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House. But while he calls himself the strongest potential Democratic candidate precisely because of his two-sided, centrist approach, aspects of his record, including guns and marijuana, are not up to par with many primary voters.

“Progressives are the most active in the party and that makes it difficult for Lamb,” said Brendan McPhillips, who led Mr Biden’s 2020 Pennsylvania campaign and does not work for a Senate candidate.

The progressives’ early favorite and alleged front runner for the Democratic nomination is Lt. Gov. Something of a folk hero on the national left, John Fetterman, with roughly 400,000 Twitter followers, who enjoy his posts in favor of “legal weed” and his frequent beatings on Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema for not “voting like Democrats”.

As the 14-year-old mayor of Braddock, a poor community outside of Pittsburgh, Mr. Fetterman tattooed the dates of the local murders on his arm. As lieutenant governor, he fought to pardon longtime prisoners of conscience.

Known for a casual work wardrobe of unlocked craftsman shirts and jeans or even shorts, and for his imposing presence – he’s six feet tall and has a shaved head – Mr. Fetterman, 51, hopes to appeal to some working-class white voters who float over to Support Mr Trump. He has outperformed the fundraising field, raising $ 6.5 million this year.

Still, Mr Fetterman’s challenge is the downside of Mr Lamb’s: He could win the May primary but be seen as too liberal for Pennsylvania general election voters. “He’s the candidate many Republicans would like to face,” said Jessica Taylor, an analyst for the bipartisan Cook Political Report.

In an incident in 2013 when he was Mayor of Braddock, Mr. Fetterman faced potential liability in the primary. After hearing what he thought were gunshots, Mr. Fetterman stopped a black jogger and held it at gunpoint until the police arrived. The man was found unarmed and was released. Bringing on the episode in February, Mr Fetterman said he made “split-second decisions” when he believed a nearby school might be at risk.

However, with police and vigilante violence against black men a high profile issue for Democratic voters, some party officials and strategists have expressed fears that if nominated, Mr Fetterman could lower black voter turnout. An outside group supporting the election of black candidates has already run a radio ad in Philadelphia attacking Mr. Fetterman over the incident.

“It’s definitely a problem,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “It hasn’t disappeared and keeps reappearing. It hoists red flags. “

In a statement, Mr Fetterman’s campaign stated that four months after the incident in Braddock, an 80 percent black town, he was “overwhelmingly re-elected” because voters “know John and know this had nothing ”. to do with race. ”It added that he“ ran and won across the country, and he is the only candidate running for this Senate seat to have done so ”.

If Democratic voters resist Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Lamb, a path could open up for alternative candidates, including Val Arkoosh, a district official in the electoral suburbs of Philadelphia and the only woman in the race, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a telegenic youngster State legislature from North Philadelphia.

Mr Kenyatta, who would be the state’s first black and first openly gay Senate candidate if he won the election, has traveled extensively seeking local support but lags behind his rivals in fundraising.

Ms. Arkoosh, a medical doctor and chairman of the Board of Commissioners in Montgomery County, the state’s third largest county, has endorsement of Emily’s list of Democratic women who support abortion rights.

Together, Mr. Fetterman, Mr. Lamb, and Mrs. Arkoosh outperformed their Republican counterparts for the quarter ended June.

While Democrats see a model in Mr Biden’s 81,000-vote win last year in the state that swept suburban swing voters horrified by Mr Trump, Republicans are currently playing and narrating almost entirely against grassroots Make America Great Again the fable of a stolen election 2020.

There is a proven road to statewide victories for Republicans in Pennsylvania that was embarked on last year by two GOP nominees who were elected treasurer and auditor. They did so by running before Mr Trump in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, where many higher educated voters had traditionally supported Republicans but were repulsed by the harassing, divisive former president.

Mr. Toomey, the outgoing Republican senator, recently warned: “Candidates must run on ideas and principles, not on loyalty to a man.”

But few of the Republicans fighting to succeed him seem to have listened.

Sean Parnell, a former Army Ranger who lost a house race to Mr. Lamb last year, sued every 2.6 million Pennsylvania Mail-In votes, a case that was rejected by the US Supreme Court, and said he support an Arizona-style review of the 2020 Pennsylvania ballot papers. Donald Trump Jr. supported his Senate bid.

And Jeff Bartos, a Philadelphia area real estate developer and large party donor who was expected to appeal to voters in the suburbs, has similarly courted the Trump base and a “full forensic examination” of the Pennsylvania elections demanded, although several courts have denied lawsuits alleging fraud or administrative misconduct.

Neither Mr. Parnell nor Mr. Bartos raised as much cash last quarter as Dark Horse candidate Kathy Barnette, a former finance manager who lost a race in Congress on Philadelphia’s main line last year. Ms. Barnette has charged far-right cable channels Newsmax and OAN with election fraud.

A longtime Republican adviser to the state, Christopher Nicholas, said there are three lanes of travel available to GOP candidates: “Super MAGA-Trumpy, Trump-adjacent and not so much-Trump.”

Lately, he said, almost everyone has pushed themselves into the “super-MAGA-Trumpy” lane.

“As a Republican, you have to be careful how far to the right you go to win the primary so you don’t get irreparable harm in the general election,” said Nicholas.

Mr Lamb faces a similar challenge to a moderate in the Democratic primary.

He is sure to be hit hard by some previous positions, including his opposition to a ban on assault weapons in 2019 and his vote last year to permanently extend the Trump administration’s individual tax cuts.

More recently, Mr. Lamb has kept pace with his party: in April he supported Mr. Biden’s demand to ban the sale of future offensive weapons; in May he advocated the end of filibuster.

Mr Lamb said in an interview that the attack on the Capitol was a turning point for him, particularly in how Republican leaders came to accept Mr Trump’s false accusation that the 2020 vote had been rigged.

He alluded to this again in his announcement on Friday: “If you take such a big lie and put it at the center of the party,” he said of the GOP leaders, “you can’t expect them to talk about anything else Tell the truth”. . “