BY ALEX GANGITANO AND TOBIAS BURNS |
A dismal July jobs report is thundering over the U.S. economy after President Trump once again changed his delivery date for tariffs. The Friday report from the Labor Department showed the U.S. employment situation to be much weaker than economists previously thought and follows a number of projections that already show growth is slowing down. The one-two punch of weaker employment and prolonged trade uncertainty immediately translated to financial markets on Friday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell a full percentage point in the first five minutes of trading. |
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BY SYLVAN LANE AND REMA RAHMAN |
President Trump's economic pitch took a serious hit Friday after the latest federal jobs report revealed stunning weakness in the labor market.
He responded by firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for what he called politically motivated revisions that lobbed off hundreds of thousands of job gains earlier this summer. The dismal jobs report raised serious questions about the strength of the U.S. economy, especially in light of looming tariffs causing anxieties in the global market. |
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Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer praised President Trump's decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after the Friday release of the July jobs report.
In a statement on social media, Chavez-DeRemer hailed Trump's decision to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the agency, which is housed in the Labor Department, released a stunningly bad jobs report earlier Friday. |
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President Trump on Friday accused the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Erika McEntarfer of faking jobs numbers, directing his team to fire the former President Biden appointee.
Trump blamed McEntarfer for the bad Friday jobs report, showing that the country added 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than previously reported. |
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"Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary on Friday criticized President Trump for proposing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) head be fired after reporting a decline in job growth.
Hours before his comments, Trump slammed Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in a Truth Social post alleging she altered job reports to favor former Vice President Harris during the November election and said he'd given his team orders to dismiss the Biden appointee "IMMEDIATELY." |
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BY ALEXANDER BOLTON AND AL WEAVER | President Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) are making slow progress toward a deal to clear some of the Senate's backlog of executive branch nominees to allow weary senators to leave Washington for the four-week August recess.
Walking off the darkened Senate floor at 10 pm Friday, Thune said negotiators "floated" proposals "back and forth all day" but he said the Democratic demands "are probably not going to be something at this point we can meet."
"No deal yet," he said. |
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Republican senators are getting ready to leave Washington without advancing a major sanctions bill against Russia, giving President Trump sole discretion over whether to follow through on his threats against Russian President Vladimir Putin if he refuses to halt his war against Ukraine.
Trump has given an Aug. 8 deadline for Putin to stop fighting or risk tariffs on countries that import Russian oil. As a preview, he announced 25 percent tariffs on India, a major importer of Russian energy. That's far below the 500 percent secondary tariff power Congress laid out in draft legislation.
While Senate Ukraine hawks wanted to see their sanctions bill pass before the monthlong break, they ultimately left the decision entirely in Trump's hands, at least for the summer. |
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The Senate on Friday passed its first tranche of government funding bills for fiscal year 2026 ahead of its upcoming August recess, but Congress is bracing for a potentially messy fight to prevent a shutdown when they return in September.
The chamber approved three bills that provide more than $180 billion in discretionary funding for the departments of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), military construction, legislative branch operations and rural development. |
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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) said Friday it will begin "an orderly wind-down of its operations" after seeing its budget cut through GOP-led legislation.
"Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations," CPB President Patricia Harrison said in a statement. |
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OPINION | China has just placed a major new national bet on commercializing fusion energy, and now is the time for the U.S. to respond.
Chinese state and industrial leaders are positioning the country to lead the world in innovation. They're working to replicate the ecosystem of ideas and invention that has made the U.S. so special on the world's stage, touching billions of lives with core technologies like the automobile and the internet. |
OPINION | Secretary of State Marco Rubio said all the right things last week after Hong Kong issued arrest warrants for 19 pro-democracy activists in other countries, including in the U.S.
"The extraterritorial targeting of Hong Kongers who are exercising their fundamental freedoms is a form of transnational oppression," Rubio declared in a statement. "We will not tolerate the Hong Kong government's attempts to apply its national security laws to silence or intimidate Americans or anyone on U.S. soil." |
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BY KENNETH P. VOGEL AND DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY |
When the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Eric Schiermeyer heard that President Trump was holding small group dinners with major donors, he saw opportunity.
Schiermeyer reached out to a lobbyist with connections in Mr. Trump's orbit, who arranged for him to attend a dinner with the president at his private Mar-a-Lago club on March 1 in exchange for donations to a pro-Trump PAC called MAGA Inc. totaling $1 million.
The personal and corporate donations were among dozens of seven- and eight-figure contributions to MAGA Inc. from crypto and other interests revealed in a campaign finance filing on Thursday night that hinted at the access Trump accords those willing to pay. |
BY LAURA SELIGMAN, ALEXANDER WARD AND LINDSAY WISE |
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's string of missteps has spurred infighting inside the Pentagon and raised concerns among some Republicans on Capitol Hill about his ability to run the department.
The problems are rooted in Hegseth's lack of managerial experience in overseeing an entity anywhere near as large as the Pentagon, which employs around 3.4 million people on a budget now approaching $1 trillion, according to current and former officials. White House officials were frustrated by Hegseth's refusal to part with his acting chief of staff despite their misgivings about the aide's qualifications, according to current and former administration officials. |
BY WAFAA SHURAFA AND SAMY MAGDY |
Every morning, Abeer and Fadi Sobh wake up in their tent in the Gaza Strip to the same question: How will they find food for themselves and their six young children?
The couple has three options: Maybe a charity kitchen will be open and they can get a pot of watery lentils. Or they can try jostling through crowds to get some flour from a passing aid truck. The last resort is begging.
If those all fail, they simply don't eat. It happens more and more these days, as hunger saps their energy, strength and hope. |
Some of America's favorite resort towns and beach getaways are a little quieter this summer, as President Trump's trade wars and immigration crackdown appear to be dampening the travel boom that has defined the summers since the pandemic.
On the Jersey Shore and Delaware beaches, and in the Poconos, travelers are spending less. Las Vegas tourism is sputtering. And Niagara Falls hotels are emptier this year, according to business leaders and a Federal Reserve policy report.
The pullback on summer vacationing is modest but coincides with Americans saying they feel worse about the economy than they have in years as they face a weakening labor market and longer bouts of unemployment. Meanwhile, international travel has fallen because of concerns about Trump administration rhetoric and policies. |
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