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US wages rose at a solid pace this summer, posing challenge for Fed’s inflation fight

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Wages and benefits grew at a slightly faster pace in the July-September quarter than the previous three months, a benefit for workers but a trend that also represents a risk to the Federal Reserve’s fight against inflation. Compensation as measured by the Employment Cost Index increased 1.1% in the third quarter, down from a 1% rise in the April-June quarter, the Labor Department said Tuesday. Compared with a year ago, compensation growth slowed to 4.3% from 4.5% in the second quarter. Still, that is faster than the rate of inflation, suggesting Americans saw an increase in their purchasing power after pay trailed inflation for much of 2021 and 2022. Fed officials consider the ECI one of the most important measures of wages and benefits because it measures how pay changes for the same mix of jobs, rather than average hourly pay, which can be pushed higher by widespread layoffs among lower-income workers, for example. Growth in pay and benefits, as measured by...

Will MAiD changes give drug users access to assisted death?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

In today’s Big Story Podcast, it can be difficult to sort fact from fiction, or anecdotes from data, when it comes to a subject like assisted dying. The topic itself is so emotional. The stories of those who don’t qualify or from family left behind, can be heartbreaking. And the terms and conditions used to assess someone’s eligibility for the process are complex and opaque.All of that is an environment ripe for misinformation — or for potential disasters to be imagined. Jocelyn Downie is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculties of Law and Medicine at Dalhousie University. She works at the intersection of health care ethics, law, and policy. “You can make it seem like the sky is falling by talking about people having access to MAiD, as if all people with substance use problems are having access to MAiD. That’s not true. And you get people concerned.”Next year, restrictions on the MAiD law will fall away, allowing mental illness to be a sole condition for MA...

BHP approves $6.4B second stage of Jansen potash project in Saskatchewan

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

TORONTO — BHP says it has approved a plan to spend $6.4 billion for the second stage of its Jansen potash mine that it is developing in Saskatchewan.The decision comes as the company is still building the first stage of the project, which is expected deliver first production in 2026.The company says the first stage is 32 per cent complete and on schedule.BHP says the additional investment will make Jansen one of the world’s largest potash mines, doubling production capacity to about 8.5 million tonnes per year.The company says the decision to go ahead with the second stage while it is still building the first stage will allow it to take advantage of the current project team and continued use of existing contractors.BHP also says it will mean reduced overhead and savings on mobilization and demobilization costs. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 31, 2023.The Canadian Press

2 die in Bangladesh as police clash with opposition supporters seeking prime minister’s resignation

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Police in Bangladesh on Tuesday clashed with opposition supporters as the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party enforced a three-day transport blockade across the country to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the transfer of power to a nonpartisan caretaker government to oversee general elections next year.Hasina on Tuesday ruled out dialogue and warned the opposition of consequences if they continue the blockade.At least two people died and scores were injured on the blockade’s first day. The ruling Awami League party warned that the opposition would be confronted if they continue to create what it called anarchy. At least six people including a policeman have died in the political chaos in the South Asian nation since a massive opposition rally on Saturday.The government has been under pressure for months as the Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has staged anti-government protests. El...

Freedom Under Fire: 5 takeaways from AP’s series on rising tension between guns and American liberty

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

In a country shadowed by the threat of mass shootings and neighborhood violence, courts have embraced an increasingly absolute reading of the right to guns. That raises difficult questions about how to protect the full range of freedoms Americans cherish.With nearly 400 million guns in civilian hands, the violence they enable feels to many like a threat to their right to worship in peace, go to school and be safe at home. To many others, an unfettered right to own and carry guns is essential to protecting those liberties.With shooting deaths in the U.S. up sharply, the Associated Press examined the rising tensions between those beliefs and the struggle for answers. Here are the key takeaways from each story:Amendment vs. commandment: Do guns belong in churches?When two pastors rise to their respective pulpits on a Sunday morning, both shoulder a growing weariness about shootings in the world outside their doors. But their views on how to respond are diametrically opposite.“I’m reall...

In a first, MIT trains students to resolve clean energy conflicts

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — As the United States injects hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy through its signature climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, criticism is growing louder about where, how and whether new development should be allowed.As opposition grows, once-routine regulatory processes are taking several years, if they are completed at all. Some communities are concerned about landscape changes, some property values and others wildlife preservation. Layered on top of these debates is misinformation, which sows doubt and mistrust among developers and communities.A new class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a glimpse into a novel way of resolving these types of conflicts.MIT is offering a first-of-its-kind course that trains students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Supervised by a professional mediator, students work directly with developers, local officials and community members. Students get academic cred...

In the shadow of loss, a mother’s long search for happiness

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

AJIJIC, Mexico (AP) — There’s a look Sandy Phillips came to know each time she arrived somewhere a gunman had made famous. Her road trip through mass shooting sites went on for a decade and always seemed to have a new stop. When she reached it, she’d lock eyes with someone and see the catatonia, as plain as the weight of every leaden step they’d taken since the news that upended their life.She, too, had inched through days when all the world’s laughter went silent and its beauty was lost. In a morning fog, she’d question if it all was a nightmare, and in the black of night, when the grisly visions clawed her awake, she’d lie there wishing it was she who had died. Life became a torturous cycle punctuated by her own sobbing. She was sure she was creeping toward insanity.Now she found herself in Newtown or Parkland or Uvalde or whatever fresh hell had just been put on the map. She had lessons to share, advice that could only be amassed by someone who’d lived through the same. So, she’d...

Abuse victims say gun surrender laws save lives. Will the Supreme Court agree?

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

As Janet Paulsen prepared to leave her husband, who had become increasingly volatile over their 15-year marriage, she slipped down to his gun safes one night while he slept to try to change the combination locks.“There were 74 firearms in my house,” said Paulsen, who was stunned by how many guns she found, but could not figure out how to change the codes. “When I went to get my protection order, I brought pictures of all of those firearms with me.”Georgia, where she lives, is not among the 21 states with gun surrender laws that can force people to relinquish their weapons while they are deemed a risk to themselves or others. So Paulsen’s husband, whom she accused of threatening and erratic behavior, was only ordered to stay away from her and their 13-year-old twin boys until a court hearing.That changed a few days later when she said he tried to track them through a phone locator app, a violation of the protection order that prompted a misdemeanor charge, two hours in jail and a cou...

Veterans are more likely than most to kill themselves with guns. Families want to keep them safe.

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

FLINT, Texas (AP) — She leaned out of the tent at a small-town summer festival, hoping someone would stop to ask about her tattoos, her T-shirt, the framed pictures of her son on a table in the back of the booth.Barbie Rohde has made herself a walking billboard for this cause. She feels called to say the words, as much as they sometimes rattle the people who stop at her booth: “veteran suicide.”A man in an Army cap recoiled and walked away. His wife said she was sorry, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and struggles to speak of it.“I worry for him and for us every day,” she said.Rohde reached underneath her display tables, grabbed a gun lock and wrapped it in a blue bandana, printed with the phone number for the Department of Veterans Affairs crisis line: call 988, press 1.“Here’s some free goodies for you,” she said, and tucked it discreetly into the bag with two T-shirts the woman bought.Rohde runs the most active chapter of a nonprofit called Mission 22, aimed at end...

For parents who’ve been through shootings, raising kids requires grappling with fears

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 18:05:00 GMT

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (AP) — By the time Hollan Holm pulls the family minivan into Chickasaw Park, the buzz rising from a crowd clustered around a large picnic shelter makes clear this afternoon’s story-sharing is already underway.In the thick heat just outside the pavilion, a youth football coach recounts the grief of losing his 19-year-old son, shot dead in the parking lot of a local liquor store in 2012. Under the rafters, a mother of five, infant son balanced on her hip, recalls her 15-year-old cousin, gunned down just across the park last December.Holm also carries a story of trauma. But it’s from his own youth, when it was shattered by gunshots.“Dad, are you speaking today?” asks his daughter, Sylvia, a sixth grader wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban fighter at 15 for asserting girls’ right to an education.“They’ve got other folks lined up,” says Holm, who a generation ago survived one of the first school mass shootings to...