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      How Wall Street Learned About Last Week’s Labor Data Before the Public

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      The Labor Department provided insight into a recent lapse in which revised payrolls data were given out à la carte before they were online.Banks and research firms that serve hedge funds managed to confirm a closely-watched economic data last week as much as 20 minutes before the data was posted online, giving them a possible jump on financial market trading — the latest in a series of lapses at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Now, details into what happened are beginning to emerge.A technical issue prevented the data, which showed a large downward revision to job growth in 2023 and early 2024, from publishing on the agency’s website at 10 a.m. as scheduled last Wednesday, according to details provided by the Department of Labor.In response, agency technology staff began to load the data onto the site manually. At that point, starting a bit after 10:10 a.m., other bureau staff could see the update on the website — even though it wouldn’t be visible to the public until 10:32 a.m. And bureau staff began replying to people, including Wall Street firms, who called or emailed with questions. That enabled some to get access to key data before others.It isn’t clear how many investors got early access to the data, or whether anyone actually traded on the information. The revisions ultimately did not have a huge effect on stock markets. But the fact that Wall Street funds that make money by betting on every minor move in economic data — including reports like this one — managed to access the figures before the public at large has raised serious questions about what happened.Part of the problem, according to the information provided by the department, is that the payroll revision data was not considered a “news release” like the monthly jobs data and inflation numbers. Those data are subject to strict to controls to avoid leaks. Instead, it was considered a “website release,” which has fewer guardrails.Unlike with a news release, the bureau had no backup plan to make sure there was a way to quickly push a website update out to the broader public, such as with prepared social media posts of data highlights.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Solingen, Germany, Becomes Reluctant Symbol of Migration Battles

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      After a stabbing attack that prosecutors say was committed by a Syrian who was rejected for asylum, the city of Solingen finds itself at the center of a longstanding debate.Two days after a deadly knife attack in the German city of Solingen, the youth wing of the far-right AfD party put out a call for supporters to stage a protest demanding the government do more to deport migrants denied asylum.The authorities had identified the suspect in the stabbing spree that killed three people and wounded eight others as a Syrian man who was in the country despite having been denied asylum and who prosecutors suspected had joined the Islamic State. The attack tore at the fabric of the ethnically diverse, working-class city in the country’s west.But even before the right-wing protests had begun on Sunday, scores of counterprotesters had gathered in front of the group home that housed the suspect and other refugees. They carried banners that read, “Welcome to refugees” and “Fascism is not an opinion, but a crime,” and railed against those who would use the attack to further inflame an already fraught national debate over immigration and refugees.The dueling protests — not unlike those recently in Britain — are emblematic of Germany’s longstanding tug of war over how to deal with a large influx of asylum seekers in recent years. The country needs immigration to bolster its work force, but the government often finds itself on the defensive against an increasingly powerful AfD.The party and its supporters are attempting to use the stabbing attack to bolster their broader anti-immigrant message, with some blaming the assault on “uncontrolled migration” even before the nationality of the suspect was known.“They are trying to use this tragedy to foment fear,” said Matthias Marsch, 67, a Solingen resident who was at Sunday’s counterprotest and worries about a rightward drift in society. “I’m here to stand against that.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris and a New Economic Vision

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      Kamala Harris is beginning to offer the first definitive clues of a new economic vision — one with the potential not only to offer a unifying vision for the Democratic Party but also to serve as the foundation for a governing philosophy that crosses party lines.In recent years, both parties have broken with a markets-know-best default setting. The question is, what comes next?One influential school of thought, advanced by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, argues for increasing the supply of essentials such as housing, health care and clean energy, in part by using government to break the choke points that make these goods too scarce and costly in the first place. This has truth — the much-criticized million-dollar-toilet problem gets at something real.But it doesn’t fully reflect the realities of how powerful interests hold captive parts of our economy, and then our political system. A second intellectual camp focuses on these forces, and its avatars include Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission and the modern antitrust movement, and the U.A.W. leader Shawn Fain and re-energized labor unions. Yet it, too, is incomplete as a governing wisdom, as it lacks affirmative answers for our largest challenges, like how to decarbonize quickly and at scale, and how to contend with a rising geopolitical competitor in China.Ms. Harris’s early proposals suggest she is drawing from both strands in telling a more holistic and entirely new story about how the economy works and the aims it should serve. Put differently, her slogan “We’re not going back” might well extend beyond political and social rights to include a different brand of economics.This new story has two themes — call them “build” and “balance.” The first focuses on pointing and shaping markets toward worthy aims; the second corrects upstream power imbalances so that market outcomes are fairer and need less after-the-fact redistribution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Las Vegas, Trump Calls Harris a ‘Copycat’ Over ‘No Tax on Tips’ Plan

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      Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday fumed over the fact that when it comes to exempting tips from being taxed, he and his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, are on the same page.Mr. Trump, before a gathering of supporters at a Las Vegas restaurant, complained that Ms. Harris had stolen his idea and sought to cast her as an opportunist who was pandering to service industry workers by cribbing from one of his signature proposals.“She’s a copycat,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s a flip-flopper, you know. She’s the greatest flip-flopper in history. She went from communism to capitalism in about two weeks.”A Harris campaign spokesman declined to comment. This month, while in Las Vegas herself, Ms. Harris said she would seek to end federal income taxes on tips if she were elected. Mr. Trump first floated the idea in June, and it quickly garnered bipartisan support.He has publicly stewed over her embrace of the plan, especially in Nevada, a battleground state that Mr. Trump lost in 2016 and 2020.Before President Biden withdrew from the race in late July, Mr. Trump had appeared to be on a trajectory to end his electoral drought in the desert — where one of his hotels towers over the Strip. Mr. Biden, whose campaign called the “no tax on tips” overture a “wild campaign promise,” had been trailing Mr. Trump by an average of seven percentage points in Nevada.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Orange Blossom Trail,’ by Joshua Lutz and George Saunders

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      In “Orange Blossom Trail,” the photographer Joshua Lutz and the author George Saunders pay tribute to the hard living across one stretch of American highway.With an austere frankness, the 62 photos by Joshua Lutz in ORANGE BLOSSOM TRAIL (Image Text Ithaca Press, $40) document the hard living, low-wage jobs and big-box landscapes along a single stretch of highway that runs 400 miles from Georgia to Miami, cutting right through Orlando, Fla.High shutter speeds hide road workers’ faces in shadow. Corporate storefronts and commercial vans appear without ceremony, as if snapped from a camera phone. Commuters wait for a bus, reduced and sad, while a sign for “Mighty Wings” floats mockingly above them.Though not without dignity — see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges — his photos lack any social agenda. They find an unlikely manifesto in the three previously published texts by George Saunders, our Chekhov of suburban realism, threaded through the book.Joshua LutzJoshua LutzSaunders’s 2022 allegory of death and hope, “My House,” casts a certain entropy over Lutz’s close-ups of oranges — the region’s alleged cash crop — overtaken by rot and snails. In “Exhortation” (2013), a story told in the voice of an embarrassing middle manager trying to psych up his employees, Saunders expertly confuses the objects of our allegiances. In a sincerely Buddhist essay from 2007, he asks us to view misfortune “with clarity, rather than judging.” It’s almost a caption for Lutz’s images, as attuned to ironically pleasing harmonies of shades of orange — across workers’ safety vests, loan shark signs, a child’s slightly tragic coloring book — as they are to any drama of the working class. Mindfulness, often prescribed for happiness, can be brutal.Joshua LutzNot quite an illustrated Saunders, nor an annotated Lutz, this bizarre almost-collaboration confronts the demoralizing American grind with an attitude between sympathy and resignation. An attitude that’s rare in art because we seldom admit it to ourselves. More

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      John Lansing, Who Guided NPR Through Tumultuous Times, Dies at 67

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      He led the broadcasting organization during the coronavirus pandemic, a decline in revenue and a period of extreme political polarization.John Lansing, who as chief executive of NPR from 2019 until earlier this year guided the broadcasting organization through a global pandemic, an imploding media landscape and widening political polarization that called into question some of its journalistic principles, died on Aug. 14 at his home in Eagle River, Wis. He was 67.An NPR representative confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.Mr. Lansing, who had been in the news business since he graduated from high school, arrived at NPR with a mission to broaden its reach beyond traditional radio into media like podcasts and newsletters.He also announced what he considered his “north star”: a commitment to expand NPR’s audience to include a younger and more diverse demographic, and a parallel commitment to diversify, equity and inclusion in its coverage, sources and staff.His changes included documenting the diversity of sources, introducing unconscious bias training and hiring people of color for both on- and off-air positions.“I felt that we needed to double down our efforts in D.E.I. throughout our organization in order to fulfill the promise to reflect the entire American public in terms of what America looks like,” he told Current, a magazine covering public media, in 2021.Mr. Lansing started as NPR’s chief executive in October 2019 and was still settling into the role when the Covid pandemic hit. It presented a very different challenge: Radio listenership declined precipitously with the shift to remote work, and NPR developed a $25 million deficit as corporations pulled back sponsorship dollars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Farm Workers Union Battles With California Grower, Wonderful Nurseries

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      Wonderful Nurseries, owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick, has sued the state to overturn a labor organizing law championed by the United Farm Workers.The allegations ricocheted through the agricultural fields and into a Central Valley courthouse, where one of California’s most powerful companies and an iconic union were trading charges of deception and coercion in a fight over worker representation.Some farmworkers at Wonderful Nurseries — part of the Wonderful Company, the conglomerate behind famous brands of pomegranate juice and pistachios, as well as Fiji Water — said they had been duped into signing cards to join a union. On the other side, the United Farm Workers, the union formed in the 1960s by labor figures including Cesar Chavez, contends that the influential company, owned by the Los Angeles billionaires and powerhouse Democratic donors Stewart and Lynda Resnick, is trying to thwart the will of workers through intimidation and coercion.For months, the back and forth has played out before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which arbitrates labor fights between workers and growers, and in a courthouse not far from Wonderful’s sprawling fields.In May, the company filed a legal challenge against the state that could overturn a 2022 law that made it easier for farmworkers to take part in unionization votes.After vetoing a previous version over procedural concerns, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure following public pressure from President Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker. The U.F.W. heralded the bill’s enactment as a critical victory, but several big growers said that it would allow union organizers to unfairly influence the process.The law paved the way for farmworkers to vote for union representation by signing union authorization cards, a process known simply as card check. Its passage coincided with an era of greater mobilization to unionize workers during the pandemic and a willingness to press demands for better working conditions and respect from employers, said Victor Narro, project director and labor studies professor at the U.C.L.A. Labor Center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More