By Gretchen McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

PITTSBURGH — Sarah Tuthill has a pretty straightforward philosophy to assemble a food board for parties: Keep things simple, but also make your spread memorable by arranging the food and drinks thoughtfully.

The made-to-order cheese and charcuterie boards crafted at her tiny storefront and commercial kitchen, EZPZ Gatherings in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania, are a case in point.

Not only are the cured meats, seasonal fruits, homemade spreads and various cheeses drool worthy, but they’re also artfully designed to make a table look pretty.

Richly layered and vibrant, they boast a contrasting mix of colors and textures. Some are traditionally arranged on wooden boards, but depending on the theme or season, Tuhill also might add a touch of whimsy by using woven harvest baskets or wooden bowls. Or she might opt for modern and minimalistic by placing pieces on acrylic or melamine boards.

As she details in her recently released how-to book, “Gathering Boards: Seasonal Cheese and Charcuterie Spreads” (Rowman & Littlefield, $27.95), the Aspinwall native and Penn State University grad also has been known to line up crackers on the vintage shirt-sleeve ironing board she found in an antique store. Big on repurposing, she also likes to tuck candles, jars of olives or flowers into a primitive wooden tool caddy.

“A lot of it comes down to social media,” Tuthill says of her distinctive displays. “Everyone is posting these beautiful pictures, and the bar is raised. You can’t just slap things on a [plain] board.”

Though she has always been a foodie and has dabbled in floral and interior design, Tuthill didn’t set out to be a food entrepreneur after graduating from college with a degree in advertising. Most of her career has been in communications, including many years as a freelance writer.

She only started toying with the idea of EZPZ Gatherings around 2018 because she longed to write a book and wanted to do something to “get my hands dirty” by doing it professionally.

“I love writing, but was drawn to doing something more hands-on, creating something tangible, but still creative,” she says.

While she has always loved to entertain and was known among family and friends for making beautiful hors d’oeuvres and other spreads, Tuthill knew she didn’t want to be a full-service caterer.

“So I zeroed in on appetizers,” she says, officially opening EZPZ Gathering in December 2019, just before the charcuterie craze took off during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Initially, Tuthill worked out of the food incubator kitchen her friend, Josephine Caminos Oria, opened in 2013. Then the pandemic hit “and I was done before I even started,” she says with a rueful laugh.

Back to the drawing board

No one would have blamed her if she threw in the towel. But Tuthill dug in, using the downtime to continue honing her packaging skills and further educate herself about cheese varieties, flavors, textures and production methods.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” she says.

Because so many were stuck at home and in search of hobbies, it also allowed her to start teaching online classes. “So many Zoom book clubs wanted cute snacks,” she remembers. “People wanted to learn and experience something rather than just sitting around.”

The public’s desire to create beautiful gathering boards at home only grew once pandemic restrictions were lifted and the charcuterie board craze exploded.

Today, the one-room storefront Tuthill took over in 2022 — one of the first local niche businesses focused on creating boards for dinner parties, graduation parties and other celebrations — now doubles as a “boarding school” in which fellow Pittsburghers can take workshops to learn the art of cheese and charcuterie styling.

As she notes in her book, “The truth is, you don’t have to be a culinary genius to throw a good party. In fact, you don’t have to know how to cook at all. By merely presenting food and drinks in an inventive, beautiful or whimsical way, you can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.”

Many of her ingredients are sourced locally at specialty shops (Pennsylvania Macaroni Co. is a favorite haunt) but she also fills her boards with items from chain grocery stores like Trader Joe’s. “It’s a little bit of everything, depending on the season.”

Tuthill was approached to write her book on boards in 2022 in the most Pittsburgh manner. A woman saw a story about Tuthill’s shop and her background as a writer in a local paper. “And lo and behold, she cut it out like grandmas do and sent it to her son,” who works for Rowman & Littlefield Publishing. And the rest, she says, “is history.”

She closed her shop at the beginning of 2023 to focus on the project, and did most of the writing last summer. The tome hit bookshelves on May 13, and can be found on Amazon and in Barnes & Noble.

Meant as a “how-to-do-it” for people who like to entertain, the book — beautifully photographed by Kari Hilton and sprinkled throughout with family stories — includes specific suggestions for each season, along with styling tips. The section on summer gathering boards, for instance, includes “Picnic in the Park” and “Lakeside Snackle Box” boards while fall features a “Game Day Tailgate Box” and a Halloween-inspired “CharBOOterie.”

Along with a handful of recipes for go-to dips and sides, Tuthill offers tips on serving temperatures, knife selection and serving sizes. She also includes suggestions for wine pairings and decor, along with tips on glassware, lighting, party flow and post-party clean-up.

For an end-of-summer picnic, Tuthill recommends focusing on foods that are easy to pack and eat, and can withstand some heat, such as the skewers and Chautauqua Salad featured below.

“And of course a [pre-made] cocktail or fancy drink is always fun,” she says. She suggests using mason jars for a summer sangria because they’re super cute and close tightly.

“You just pour ice and vodka over the top,” she says, “and it’s all self contained.”

Summer on a Stick

Serves 6, PG tested

Skewers make for stress-free (and mess-free) picnicking, and take the guesswork out of what goes with what. This summer spin on Caprese salad swaps out the tomato for slices of juicy peach.

6 slices chilled prosciutto (slightly thicker slices work best)

1 ripe peach, sliced

6 small mozzarella balls (cherry-sized)

6 fresh basil leaves

Skewers or toothpicks

1. Fold prosciutto into ribbons: Fold a single slice in half longways, then gently fold it back and forth like an accordion. Pinch the bottom while fanning out the folds.
2. Thread a piece of peach onto a toothpick, followed by mozzarella ball, basil leaf (folded in half or into quarters if large). Finish with a prosciutto ribbon, then place onto a serving platter. Repeat with remaining ingredients.

— Sarah Tuthill

Mason Jar Sangria

Serves 2, PG tested

Mason jars make the perfect vessel for individual cocktails-to-go and can be found in just about any supermarket or craft store.

1 ripe peaches, sliced

1 ripe plumb, sliced

1/2 cup berries

3 ounces vodka

6 ounces dry white wine

6 ounces lemonade

1 12-ounce can sparkling water or club soda

1. Fill 2 half pint jars with seasonal fruit (You can use the same ones you’re serving for your picnic!)
2. Top each with a shot of vodka and 2 shots of white wine. (I prefer a dry white like sauvignon blanc in the summertime.) Add a couple ounces of something sweet like lemonade or lemonade concentrate.
3. Screw on the lids, give them a shake and let the jars sit in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight.
4. Pack them up and when you’re ready to enjoy, top off with chilled soda water and add a festive straw.

— Sarah Tuthill

Chautauqua Salad

Serves 2-4, PG tested

“This salad is a key component of our family’s favorite summer meal” in Chautauqua, N.Y., writes Tuthill.

There, it’s almost always served alongside nothing more than corn on the cob and a crusty loaf of bread on nights when it’s too hot for the oven or grill. But it’s also a refreshing salad that’s perfect for a picnic.

3/4 cup red wine vinegar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup virgin olive oil

1 large cucumber, peeled and sliced thinly

2 large tomatoes, sliced

1. Prepare dressing: In a shallow bowl, dissolve sugar in the red wine vinegar. Whisk in the oil.
2. Gently fold in tomatoes and cucumbers and allow to sit, at room temp, for at least 20 minutes.

— Sarah Tuthill

---

©2024 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Aaron Bolton, MTPR and KFF Health News

Missoula is one of Montana’s largest cities but is surrounded by rural mountain communities where cattle ranching is king. Despite the latitude and altitude, in recent years this region has experienced punishing summer heat waves.

It has been difficult for residents to adapt to the warming climate and new seasonal swings. Many don’t have air conditioning and are unprepared for the new pattern of daytime temperatures hovering in the 90s — for days or even weeks on end. Dehydration, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and abnormalities in heart rate and blood pressure are among the many health complications that can develop from excessive exposure to high temperatures.

It can happen anywhere and to anyone, said Missoula firefighter Andrew Drobeck. He remembers a recent 911 call. The temperature that day had risen to over 90 degrees and a worker at a local dollar store had fainted. “She’s sensitive to the heat. Their AC wasn’t working super good,” Drobeck said. “I guess they only get a 15-minute break.”

Drobeck said many of the heat calls his department receives are from seniors who struggle to stay cool inside their older homes. Montana’s population is among the oldest in the country. About 1 in 4 residents are over 60. Those over 65 are especially vulnerable to heat-related illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As people age, their bodies don’t acclimate to heat as well as they did when they were younger, including not producing as much sweat.

In July, a heat dome that settled over much of the western U.S. baked the region and shattered two types of temperature records: daily highs, and number of consecutive days over 90 degrees. Although the Northwest, including western Montana, is typically cooler, the region experienced record-breaking heat this summer.

Emergency responders like Drobeck have noticed. Drobeck says 911 calls during heat waves have ticked up over the last few summers. But Missoula County officials wanted to know more: They wanted better data on the residents who were calling and the communities that had been hardest hit by the heat. So the county teamed up with researchers at the University of Montana to comb through the data and create a map of 911 calls during heat waves.

The team paired call data from 2020 with census data to see who lived in the areas generating high rates of emergency calls when it was hot. The analysis found that for every 1 degree Celsius increase in the average daily temperature, 911 calls increased by 1%, according to researcher Christina Barsky, who co-authored the study.

Though that may sound like a small increase, Barsky explained that a 5-degree jump in the daily average temperature can prompt hundreds of additional calls to 911 over the course of a month. Those call loads can be taxing on ambulance crews and local hospitals.

The Missoula study also found that some of the highest rates of emergency calls during extreme heat events came from rural areas, outside Missoula’s urban core. That shows that rural communities are struggling with heat, even if they get less media attention, Barsky said. “What about those people, right? What about those places that are experiencing heat at a rate that we’ve never been prepared for?” she said.

Barsky’s work showed that communities with more residents over 65 tend to generate more 911 calls during heat waves. That could be one reason so many 911 calls are coming from rural residents in Missoula County: Barsky said people living in Montana’s countryside and its small towns tend to be older and more vulnerable to serious heat-related illness.

And aging in rural communities can pose extra problems during heat waves. Even if it cools off at night, an older person living without air conditioning might not be able to cope with hours of high temperatures inside their home during the day. It’s not uncommon for rural residents to have to drive an hour or more to reach a library that might have air conditioning, a community center with a cooling-off room, or medical care. Such isolation and scattered resources are not unique to Montana. “I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Barsky said. “There are no air-conditioned spaces in at least 50 miles. The hospital is 100 miles away.”

Heat research like the Missoula study has focused mostly on large cities, which are often hotter than outlying areas, due to the “heat island” effect. This phenomenon explains why cities tend to get hotter during the day and cool off less at night: It’s because pavement, buildings, and other structures absorb and retain heat. Urban residents may experience higher temperatures during the day and get less relief at night.

By contrast, researchers are only just beginning to investigate and understand the impacts of heat waves in rural areas. The impacts of extreme heat on rural communities have largely been ignored, said Elizabeth Doran, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Vermont. Doran is leading an ongoing study in Vermont that is revealing that towns as small as 5,000 people can stay hotter at night than surrounding rural areas due to heat radiating off hot pavement. “If we as a society are only focused on large urban centers, we’re missing a huge portion of the population and our strategies are going to be limiting in how effective they can be,” Doran said.

Brock Slabach, with the National Rural Health Association, agrees that rural residents desperately need help adapting to extreme heat. They need support installing air conditioning or getting to air-conditioned places to cool off during the day. Many rural residents have mobility issues or don’t drive much due to age or disability. And because they often have to travel farther to access health care services, extra delays in care during a heat-related emergency could lead to more severe health outcomes. “It’s not unreasonable at all to suggest that people will be harmed from not having access to those kinds of services,” he said.

Helping rural populations adapt will be a challenge. People in rural places need help where they live, inside their homes, said Adriane Beck, director of Missoula County’s Office of Emergency Management. Starting a cooling center in a small community may help people living in town, but it’s unrealistic to expect people to drive an hour or more to cool off. Beck said the Missoula County Disaster and Emergency Services Department plans to use data from the 911 study to better understand why people are calling in the first place.

In the coming years, the department plans to talk directly with people living in rural communities about what they need to adapt to rising temperatures. “It might be as simple as knocking on their door and saying, ‘Would you benefit from an air conditioner? How can we connect you with resources to make that happen?’” Beck said.

But that won’t be possible for every rural household because there simply isn’t enough money at the county and state level to pay for that many air-conditioning units, Missoula County officials said. That’s why the county wants to plan ahead for heat waves and have specific protocols for contacting and assisting vulnerable rural residents.

“Ideally we’d be in a situation where maybe we have community paramedics that can be deployed into those areas when we know that these events are going to happen so they can check on them and avoid that hospital admission,” Beck explained. She added that preventing heat-related hospitalizations among rural residents can ultimately save lives.

This article is from a partnership that includes MTPR, NPR, and KFF Health News.

---

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said officers were justified in the shooting of a man who was allegedly wielding a knife in the subway over the weekend, leaving three bystanders including another officer injured.

"This was a bad guy and I saw the video," Adams said during a Tuesday press conference.

Adams claims the suspect, who is recovering after being shot by police, had over 20 prior arrests.

The New York Police Department has been criticized over the incident, with many stating the suspect was targeted for not paying a fare and it did not warrant injuring innocent bystanders. But Adams said the man was not pursued by police because of fare evasion, but because he had a knife and officers repeatedly asked him to drop the weapon.

"This is not a city where any and everything goes. There's a reason there's a fare on our subway and bus. If lawmakers want to make the subways and buses free, then fine. But as long as there are rules, we're going to follow those rules," Adams said.

RELATED STORY | NYPD officer, 2 bystanders shot after police open fire at man wielding a knife near Brooklyn subway

The shooting happened Sunday afternoon at the Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.

Just after 3 p.m., two NYPD officers confronted a 37-year-old man with a blade, initially following him onto the elevated platform after seeing him enter without paying, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said at a news briefing Sunday.

According to Maddrey, the officers told the man to stop, but he verbally threatened them and they noticed he had a knife. They followed him onto a train that had pulled into the station and fired two Tasers, but neither incapacitated him. The man was advancing on the officers with the knife when both officers fired multiple rounds, he said.

The man was hit several times and remained hospitalized in stable condition Monday. One passenger, a 49-year-old man, was struck in the head and was hospitalized in critical condition. Another, a 26-year-old woman, suffered a graze wound.

The wounded police officer was hit under his armpit and a bullet lodged in his back, but he is expected to make a full recovery.

RELATED STORY | Is public transit becoming less safe?

Police and Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials say that the encounter, including the officers being threatened with the knife, is captured in video recordings. They have not released the footage.

A video from a bystander posted online after the shooting showed a chaotic scene, including upset passengers fleeing, police running to help the injured, and the wounded officer suddenly realizing he had also been hit by a bullet.

Police said in the aftermath that another man made off with the knife from the crime scene. The department is now looking for that man and released an image of a person wearing a blue hat featuring the logo of the defunct Hartford Whalers ice hockey team.

By Shalina Chatlani, Stateline.org

Mercedes Dodge was raised by first-generation immigrant parents from Peru in a modest home in a rural part of southeastern Texas, where there weren’t many health care providers. Sometimes they had to travel to Houston, over an hour and a half away, to get basic health care.

Partly because of that experience, Dodge became a physician assistant. Since 2008, she has provided psychiatric and primary care services to adults and children, many of whom come from communities like hers.

Dodge, who now lives in Austin, Texas, has built up a loyal base of patients, including many who are part of military families. But when any of them move out of Texas, she has to stop treating them, even via telehealth, unless she gets a license to practice in that state.

“I do my best and collaborate with them, but they already feel alone,” Dodge told Stateline. “I wonder, ‘Why can’t I be the glue? Why can’t I step over state lines and provide the care that they deserve?’”

Physician assistants, commonly known as PAs, are licensed clinicians who have a master’s degree and can practice in a range of specialties. Their three years of training typically includes 3,000 hours of direct patient care, and they are an increasingly critical part of the health care workforce, which in many states isn’t keeping pace with a growing and aging population.

By 2028, the nation as a whole will be short some 100,000 critical health care workers — doctors, nurses and home health aides — according to a new report from Mercer, a management consulting firm.

The looming shortage is one reason why 13 states have joined the PA Licensure Compact, a multistate agreement that allows PAs to practice in any participating state, without having to get an additional license.

Delaware, Utah, and Wisconsin enacted the legislation in 2023.

Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia followed suit this year. Ohio became the latest state to enact it in July.

The PA compact is one of several that have emerged over the past several years, especially since the expansion of telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are similar compacts for doctors, nurses, occupational therapists and social workers.

One challenge has been completing the background checks required for providers who want to practice under the compacts. For example, Pennsylvania’s participation in the nursing and medical licensure compacts was delayed as the FBI denied the state access to its fingerprint database. They later reached an agreement on how to move forward.

The PA compact grants a “privilege to practice,” allowing PAs to practice in participating states without getting an additional license. The nursing compact gives nurses a multistate license, while the physician licensure compact just expedites the licensing process.

Some large states, such as California and New York, don’t participate in compacts for doctors, nurses, social workers or PAs. Some state lawmakers in those states say joining interstate compacts would reduce the quality of their states’ health care workforces, because other states require lower standards of education and training.

“We are proud that New York’s high standards have resulted in our state being an international destination in health care,” New York Democratic Assemblymember Deborah Glick wrote in an op-ed last year for the Times Union newspaper in Albany. “While it’s possible that it may make sense at some point for New York to join a licensure compact, we should pause before we allow a quick fix to lower New York’s standards.”

In other states, such as Texas, doctors who have succeeded in limiting the “scope of practice” of Texas PAs oppose the compact because they believe it might allow out-of-state PAs to go beyond those limits for their patients who reside in Texas. The American Medical Association and its state affiliates argue that allowing PAs to provide care traditionally provided by physicians puts patients at risk.

Dr. G. Ray Callas, president of the Texas Medical Association, said he values the role that physician assistants play in the health care system, but that his organization objects to any measure that might “give PAs authority to do more in health care than they are trained to do.”

“TMA is not opposed to appropriate, expedited licensure, but we do oppose these compacts when they expand scope of practice and create a patient safety issue, lowering the standard of care in Texas,” Callas said in a statement.

Supporters of the compact say that fear is unfounded, and that the agreement has no effect on state scope of practice rules. The model legislation for the compact specifies that PAs who treat patients in another state can only do so “under the Remote State’s laws and regulations.”

Last year, the Texas legislature considered legislation to join the PA compact, but it died in the state Senate.

Monica Ward, president of the Texas Academy of Physician Assistants, said her group will keep pushing for the bill.

“In the rural areas of Texas, there is absolutely a need and a shortage of health care providers,” Ward said. “We’re surrounded by multiple states, so it’s nice to be able to reduce those administrative burdens, paperwork and possibly fees for those that are looking to work in Texas.”

It will take 18 to 24 months for the compact to become fully operational and for PAs to apply for the privilege to practice in other areas. The compact commission also needs to create a data system to keep track of licenses.

This model of licensure may not have worked even five years ago, said Tennessee Republican state Rep. Jeremy Faison, who sponsored his state’s compact legislation.

“It would have had major pushback and people would have asked, ‘What are you trying to do? We like to control what we’re doing in our state,’” said Faison. “But because we live in a global society and people move around so much more than ever before, I think the average person has embraced this.”

Faison told Stateline that for states such as Tennessee, which borders eight states, joining the compact makes economic sense because it will encourage people to move to the state.

Financial stability was 32-year-old Aneil Prasad’s motivation for getting a compact nursing license. He moved from New Orleans to Asheville, North Carolina, last year.

“It allows people to seek out better-paying jobs and move themselves ahead, buy houses and have better health and education and all that,” Prasad said. “And then the less competitive places are forced to raise their wages in order to attract people.”

After moving from Louisiana to North Carolina with his multistate license, Prasad said his wage increased from $21 an hour to $36 an hour. He notes that while the multistate license for nurses costs a bit more than a regular license, it would be much more expensive for him to apply for a new license in every state.

Since Texas hasn’t joined the PA compact, Dodge maintains active licenses in her home state as well as Alaska, California, Florida, New Mexico and Washington. She said the process to get them was expensive and time-consuming. Licenses can cost upward of $500 and can take three to nine months to obtain. Dodge said it’s been worth the trouble to help her patients, but she would appreciate an easier pathway.

“I got all these state licenses to follow my patients,” she said. “So when the PA compact license gets enacted in Texas, I hope it’s going to help me continue following my patients and I’ll be the glue that they need.”

---

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Sarah Foster, Bankrate.com

For 13 years, the 3% annual salary boost that Ricardo M. could count on every October felt like a beacon of stability and a nod that his loyalty as a plumbing supply salesman was being rewarded.

But in the aftermath of a post-pandemic inflation surge, those raises have since lost their luster. His grocery bills have doubled. The cost of filling up his Toyota 4Runner has jumped to $70 a week, and he’s had to dip into his savings to avoid taking on credit card debt. All the while, his pay increases have stayed the same.

“Inflation has taken it all,” says Ricardo, a California resident who requested that his last name be abbreviated, so he could speak freely about his employment situation. “I know costs are going up everywhere, and I understand that a business has to make money and stay profitable. But at the same time, don’t forget about the people who are bringing you business. I don’t make enough for the sales that I generate.”

Economists have celebrated inflation’s rapid dissent, and perhaps even more, the relatively little pain it’s caused the U.S. job market. For over a year now, wages have been rising faster than inflation as prices slow and the job market holds up, giving Americans an opportunity to recover the buying power that they lost after ultralow interest rates, supply shortages and a stimulus check-fueled spending boom combined to form the worst inflation crisis in 40 years.

But the race isn’t over yet. The past 16 months of “real” wage growth — as economists have called it — haven’t been enough to offset the 25 months where prices were rising disproportionately faster than Americans’ paychecks, according to a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data from Bankrate.

Bankrate’s 2024 Wage To Inflation Index

Since the beginning of the post-pandemic inflation surge in Jan. 1, 2021, prices have risen 20.0%, compared with a 17.4% increase in wages over the same period, Bankrate’s second-annual Wage To Inflation Index found.

Inflation feels akin to taking a pay cut, helping explain why Americans have been so downtrodden about the U.S. economy. Despite a half-century low unemployment rate at the time, the majority (59%) of Americans said in a Bankrate poll from December 2023 that they felt like the U.S. economy was in a recession.

Americans could even take these frustrations to the voting booth come November. Most adults (89%) say the economy will be an important factor in determining their vote, with two-thirds (62%) calling it very important, according to Bankrate’s Biden and Americans’ Personal Finances Survey from November 2023.

To be sure, some ground has already been recovered. Thanks to over a year of “real” wage growth, the current gap between wage growth and inflation (2.6 percentage points) marks major improvement from when it was at its widest in the summer of 2022 (3.9 points).

Yet, wages have recently lost some momentum. In Bankrate’s 2023 index, Americans’ paychecks were on track to fully recover from post-pandemic inflation by the fourth quarter of this year. Now, Americans’ paychecks are on pace to bounce back by the end of the second quarter of 2025, updates to Bankrate’s index for 2024 found.

The job market has cooled more than expected this year

Wages are taking longer to recover amid a faster-than-expected cooldown in the job market, which has already stripped workers of some of their bargaining power to ask for higher pay.

Between the second quarter of 2023 and 2024, prices rose 3.194%, nearly matching the 3.187% expected increase from last year’s index. Wages, however, rose 4.03% over the same period, after previously being on pace to grow 4.6%.

The labor market functions much like any other open market, economists say. Wage growth is often a reflection of who has the upper hand: the employer or the employee.

When there are too many job openings and not enough workers, employers compete for talent by lifting pay or offering big bonuses. But too few jobs for the number of people seeking work might make Americans hesitant to leave their current positions, wary about how greener other pastures might actually be in a more competitive job market.

If they’ve been on the hunt for a while, they might be inclined to settle for a job that pays less. And if they’re so inclined to negotiate for higher pay, they might not ask for as much.

“We’re seeing wage growth cool because demand is falling,” says Sam Kuhn, labor economist at Appcast, a recruiting platform. “In 2022, there were serious labor shortages. As that gap has closed, there’s just less incentive to give out higher wages or yearly raises.”

Illustrating the shift, there’s now just one job opening per every unemployed worker, the smallest ratio since April 2018, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. Employers have created an average 96,000 jobs in the private sector over the past three months, a massive slowdown from a three-month moving average of 203,000 in March. The hiring rate, meanwhile, has plunged to levels that are even lower than they were before the pandemic. Unemployment is now the highest since before the pandemic.

ADP’s Chief Economist Nela Richardson has watched wage growth for job changers dip from a high of 16.4% in June 2022 to the most recent level of 7.3%, according to data that her firm collects. Americans who’ve stayed at their current positions, meanwhile, saw their pay increase 4.8% for the second month in a row, ADP data also shows. In the leisure and hospitality sector, Richardson says she’s starting to notice that workers are accepting new positions for less pay than they were making previously — echoing trends from before the pandemic and painting a picture of a slowing labor market.

“There’s a lot of reasons workers switch jobs that aren’t tied primarily to compensation,” she adds. “It could be a better shift, a better team, a better location.”

What happens next for the U.S. job market can have grave implications for Americans’ prospects of catching up. In June, economists projected that job growth over the next year would average 115,000 jobs a month, Bankrate’s quarterly Economic Indicator Survey found. That would represent an even sharper slowdown in labor demand, with job growth currently averaging 197,000 over the past 12 months.

A cooling economy means less inflation, but slower wage growth, too, setting Americans back in their game of catch up. Richardson says a valid concern is whether their wages will recover at all.

“Will workers make up the ground lost when real wages weren’t growing with inflation? From what I see in key sectors, the answer is not likely,” Richardson says. “It’s really about can the wage level remain above current inflation, to get a better picture for workers.”

Not all workers have lost ground to inflation

Some workers are even further ahead — or behind — in their race against inflation, depending on the specific industry in which they work.

Bankrate’s analysis found that pay has risen faster than inflation in two industries: leisure and hospitality (23.7%) and accommodation and food services (23.3%), compared with a 20% rise in prices from the start of 2021 to the end of June. Paychecks are furthest behind in education (13.6%), construction (14.1%) and financial activities (14.3%) during that same timeframe.

Meanwhile, after increasing at a faster rate than inflation in Bankrate’s 2023 Wage to Inflation Index, pay in the retail sector (up 19.4% since the beginning of 2021) has since fallen behind.

The industries where wage growth has boomed correspond with where labor demand was the strongest. At one point, a record 11.1% of jobs within the accommodation and food services sector and 10.9% of positions within leisure and hospitality were vacant, the most of any other industry. On the flip side, job opening rates in the industries with the slowest wage growth peaked at much lower levels, with construction at 5.4% and education hitting 4%, according to Bankrate’s analysis.

That’s not to say Americans in inflation-beating industries are feeling particularly better off. The average hourly earnings of workers in the financial activities sector ($45.73), for example, are more than two times as high as those in leisure and hospitality ($22.18).

The more money workers make, the better positioned they are to absorb higher prices in their budgets. Low-income households tend to spend more money on essentials that they can’t cut back on, whereas upper-income Americans have more options to free up cash, such as trimming discretionary spending or their savings contributions.

Workers making less than $50,000 a year (at 43%) were nearly twice as likely as those who earn $100,000 or more a year (24%) to feel that they’re living paycheck to paycheck, according to a Bankrate survey from July.

Americans working jobs in retail, leisure and hospitality and food services were also more likely to have lost their jobs during the pandemic, making it hard to say whether they’re truly better off today, says Elise Gould, senior economist at the independent Economic Policy Institute.

“Even if their wages have risen, it has been very hard for people to make ends meet on the kinds of wages that our labor market has been delivering over the last 50 years,” Gould says. “But the fact that people are struggling doesn’t mean that they didn’t experience real wage growth. Both things can be true.”

‘I don’t know if it’ll get as good as it was’

Robert Santy, a psychotherapist based in Connecticut, has taken on 20 extra clients in the four years since the pandemic. He says the decision was equal parts personal necessity and societal urgency.

For starters, every corner of Santy’s budget has grown more expensive. Car insurance for his family of five is costing him $10,000 a year. His monthly electric bills often range between $600-$800. His cell phone bill jumped by $40 a month, and even his grocery costs can easily reach $1,000 a week. He’s taken on longer hours simply to replace some of his lost income.

“It’s nickel and dime, nickel and dime, and everyone wants a piece of the pie,” he says. “My pie keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller.”

But whether it’s lingering stress from the pandemic or financial anxieties surrounding inflation and recession fears, Santy says he’s been in no need for clientele over the past four years, either. He often takes calls from patients after hours and goes to his office on weekends to catch up on paperwork. He estimates that he gets about four cold calls a week from new, inquiring clients, whom he has to turn away because he doesn’t have enough room for them in his schedule.

“People are highly stressed, highly anxious, struggling financially. That leads to family squabbles, relationship issues,” he says. “You get the cable company, the electric company, the cell phone company, your mortgage goes up, your taxes go up. Any one thing might be manageable, but when it’s death by a thousand needles, that just wears on people over time.”

Contributing to his rising expenditures, his two youngest children are in college, while his oldest daughter is living at home on an extended job hunt after graduating two years ago. Him and his wife are now earning nearly $300,000 a year as a household, but they feel like they had an easier time getting by when they were in their early 20s, earning just $22,000 a year. Still feeling surprised by bills or unexpected expenses, he’s had to temporarily halt his retirement contributions.

“I’m certainly in better shape financially than I’ve ever been in my life, but I’m not where I thought I was going to be or where I think I should be,” Santy says. “It’ll get better, but I don’t know if it’ll get as good as it was. I realize everything goes up and up and up, but did it have to go up so much so quickly when I didn’t have time to adjust? It felt like it just happened overnight.”

Even if wages recover, inflation may have already damaged the American psyche

Americans look at inflation differently than economists. Analysts track annual rates of change in inflation to determine whether the U.S. economy is overheating, while the typical American consumer focuses on how much the items they see everyday have risen in cost.

Just 6% of the nearly 400 items the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks are cheaper today than before the pandemic, a Bankrate analysis of inflation data shows. Key essentials that consumers regularly buy — like gasoline, groceries, utilities, rent and more — have risen at a faster rate than overall inflation. Car insurance, meanwhile, is up almost 50% since February 2020.

Inflation can have a profound effect on consumer psychology. Nearly half of adults (47%) say money has a negative impact on their mental health at least occasionally, Bankrate’s Money and Mental Health Survey from May 2024 found. Almost two-thirds of them (65%) cited rising prices as a reason.

“It will require that workers continue to enjoy some restoration of buying power through real wage gains,” Hamrick says, referring to when Americans could start to feel better. “To the extent we see falling prices for goods within a fairly normal, not recessionary, economic environment, that would be helpful.”

Ricardo is already gearing up for his annual review next month. He’s preparing to make a case for why he deserves a bigger raise than usual, citing his sales numbers and translating how it adds to his company’s bottom line. He hopes to use the money to visit his five grandchildren, who live across the country in both Florida and Seattle.

But even if he doesn’t get the money he’s hoping for, he says he’s unlikely to quit. He hopes to retire within the next few years and is afraid of taking a pay cut by starting over somewhere else.

“I’m waiting for them to one day tell me, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.’ That’s what you want to hear after 16 years,” he says. “Hopefully, I don’t get disappointed with what I’m going to hear.”

---

Visit Bankrate online at bankrate.com.

©2024 Bankrate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Former President Donald Trump thanked the law enforcement officers who initiated a traffic stop and took the man accused of an apparent assassination attempt into custody.

The Martin County sheriff and several deputies met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday.

President @realDonaldTrump meets with the Martin County Sheriffs Office Deputies who activated the traffic stop on I-95 and took Ryan Routh into custody pic.twitter.com/XEZRR9anBQ

Margo Martin (@margommartin) September 17, 2024

"Great job, thank you very much," Trump told the group. "I'm still here."

RELATED STORY | Trump: Law enforcement was 'absolutely outstanding' responding to gunman

Scripps News West Palm Beach reporter Meghan McRoberts said the deputies gifted Trump the handcuffs used on suspect Ryan Wesley Routh.

Routh was taken into custody on Sunday after the deputies pulled him over on I-95. The Secret Service said he had fled a treeline area outside of Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach after an agent fired in his direction.

The agent apparently had seen the rifle Routh was allegedly armed with pointing through a fence near where Trump was playing golf.

The Secret Service said Routh never fired his weapon and did not have a line of sight of the former president.

It's still unclear when and how Routh obtained a firearm. The FBI, however, said it has no information indicating that Routh was working with anyone else.

Eddie Muller, alias the “Czar of Noir” and the host of “Noir Alley” on TCM, will host the 7th annual Noir City Detroit Film Festival — one of the most popular film noir events — at the Redford Theatre in Detroit this weekend, Sept. 20-22.

Muller will present eight crime noir films over three days. All shows are double features and are as follows:

On Friday, Sept. 20, at 7:30 p.m.:

• 1951’s “Victims of Sin”
• 1946’s “Night Editor”

On Saturday, Sept. 21, at 1 p.m.:

• 1944’s “Laura”
• 1947’s “Framed”

On Saturday, Sept. 21, at 8 p.m.:

• 1947’s “Brute Force”
• 1954’s “Black Tuesday”

On Sunday, Sept. 22, at 1 p.m.:

• 1952’s “Never Open That Door”
• 1949’s “The Window”

All double features are $15 each. The All-Access Pass costs $55, which includes admission to all eight films, a commemorative poster and an early admission meet-and-greet with Muller on Friday, Sept. 20, at 5:30 p.m., who will sign his books, including “Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir.”

It also includes a private reception with Muller in the Redford lobby on Saturday, Sept. 21, at 6 p.m. Refreshments will include coffee and dessert. There will be special cocktails from “Noir Bar” for sale, as well as beer and wine.

The Redford is located at 17360 Lahser Road, Detroit.

Tickets can be purchased online at redfordtheatre.com or at the box office.

For questions or more information, contact the Redford at 313-537-2560.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are poised to vote on a bill Tuesday pushed by Senate Democrats that would codify protections for in vitro fertilization.

This comes after former President Donald Trump said at a campaign rally last month that if he wins a second term in office, his administration would make IVF treatment free to all women.

RELATED STORY | 'We want more babies': Trump says government or insurance should cover IVF costs

IVF addresses fertility issues in women by fertilizing an egg with sperm in a laboratory. However, many women require multiple rounds of treatment, and a single round can cost tens of thousands of dollars with no guarantee of success.

Democrats are saying that if Republicans want to protect IVF access they should vote on this Senate bill. But Republicans like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley claim it is a political move by Democrats trying to create a talking point that they can campaign on heading into the 2024 election.

"I'm gonna vote no," Hawley said Tuesday. "This isn't an IVF bill. This is an abortion bill. This is a impose abortion on states, on the voters, without their say at all. This is taxpayer funding for all abortions no matter what. This is override state regulations on cloning. I mean, if they wanted to vote on IVF, hey I'm fine with that. Put an IVF bill on the floor. I would support IVF, mandating insurance coverage for it as Trump suggested. But that's not what this is and they don't want it to pass... this is just an exercise in political gamesmanship, sadly."

RELATED STORY | Tim Walz and wife Gwen used IUI, not IVF, to conceive their kids. Here's the difference

This is not the first time that Senate Democrats have tried a move like this. Senate Republicans blocked a Democrat-led push to protect IVF access in June.

However, given Trump's most recent comments on IVF, Democrats view this as an opportunity to get Senators on the record again and see if they can garner any additional support from Republicans.

Senators are expected to begin voting on the bill at 2:45 p.m. ET and it would need 60 votes to pass. However, at this point, it does appear poised to fail.

The post Freshen up your WDET swag, become a sustaining member today appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was charged Tuesday in Manhattan federal court with sex trafficking and racketeering following indictment by a grand jury late Monday.

Combs was taken into custody Monday night and charged Tuesday morning on three counts: racketeering conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and transportation to engage in prostitution.

The 14-page document alleges Combs coerced or forced victims to participate in sex parties called “freak offs” that were often recorded.

The unsealed indictment reveals an investigation into Combs’ activity spanning as far back as 2008 and alleges he and his associates engaged in criminal activities including interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, coercion and enticement to engage in prostitution and sex trafficking. They are also accused in the complaint of committing narcotics offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.

Combs’ attorney Marc Agnifilo said Tuesday the rap mogul would plead not guilty and that he expects a “long battle with a good result” for his client.

Michigan Central Station announced it will begin offering guided tours of the historic station and a local restaurant that will open inside the arcade.

According to Michigan Central, guided tours will be offered in partnership with Detroit History Tours and cost $20 each and they'll begin in October. More information is available at the Michigan Central website.

VIDEO BELOW: Public tours begin at Michigan Central Station Public tours begin at Michigan Central Station

Detroit History Tours is honored to be powering tours of The Station, said Bailey Sisoy-Moore, the Hamtramck-based companys owner. From The Stations legendary past to its exciting future, we are excited to share this landmarks story with the world.

Also, later this year, officials say Yellow Light Coffee & Donuts will open inside the station's historic retail arcade.

It will be the first food-and-beverage tenant inside Michigan Central Station since it closed in 1988.

VIDEO BELOW: 'It's inspiring': Michigan Central Station now open for non-reserved, self-guided tours 'It's inspiring': Michigan Central Station now open for non-reserved, self-guided tours

Yellow Light opened in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood in 2020 and offers donuts, breakfast sandwiches, in-house coffee and more.

It will be located on the station's east entrance and offer take-out and dine-in options daily

Offering our in-house roasted coffee, scratch-made doughnuts and biscuit sandwiches to Corktown and Southwest is beyond exciting for our growth in Detroit, said Christine Driscoll. Were also humbled that we will be part of this newest chapter in The Stations history starting this fall.

Michigan Central Station reopened to the public in June and had more than 167,000 visitors during its open houses over the summer.

Noah Haggerty | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — A mind-bending hypothesis is gaining traction among scientists: The universe may be teeming with microscopic black holes the size of an atom, but with the mass of a city-sized asteroid.

Created just a split second after the Big Bang, these hypothetical black holes would whip quietly through the solar system roughly once every few years, traveling over a hundred times faster than a bullet.

Some have even argued that an immense explosion that flattened a Siberian forest in 1908 could have been the result of one of these micro black holes impacting Earth.

Now, researchers say they’ve figured out a way to test whether these cosmic bullets truly exist.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Physical Review D, physicists at MIT say the presence of a tiny black hole speeding through the solar system could be identified by the gentle gravitational nudge it exerted on the Earth and other planets, which would alter their orbital paths by no more than a few feet.

The possibility of proving the existence of micro black holes is generating excitement among some astrophysicists because it could help them to explain a mystery that has taunted them for almost a century: the nature and composition of dark matter.

In the 1930s, astronomers started noticing anomalies in the way galaxies were moving. Lurking in the dark and empty expanse of intergalactic space, something was generating tremendous amounts of gravity to tug on the galaxies — yet it seemingly refused to interact with light or any other force.

Scientists found this mysterious gravitational tugging everywhere. In order to account for it, they hypothesized that it was being caused by invisible mass, or dark matter, that made up roughly 85% of all matter in the universe.

Some physicists have suggested dark matter may be made up of exotic undiscovered particles. Others, such as the MIT researchers, think dark matter probably is just regular matter that is extremely hard to detect. And black holes, the researchers say, are a prime example of the properties of dark matter.

“It’s just fantastic that the most conceptually conservative response is to say, ‘It’s just super tiny black holes that were made a split second after the Big Bang,’” said David Kaiser, a physics professor at MIT and an author on the study.

“It’s not inventing new forms of matter that have not yet been detected. It’s not changing the laws of gravity,” he said.

Still, black holes are not the sole potential culprit and there remains a lot of debate in the field.

Physicists have, in their quest to find dark matter, searched for new exotic particles, as well as regular matter that may have been overlooked — such as black holes of varying sizes. So far, they have come up empty-handed.

Until now, astronomers have been unsure how to search for black holes of a particularly pesky size — those that are too small for their gravity to bend star light.

The MIT researchers determined, through modeling, that these tiny black holes may have formed from pockets of dense matter that collapsed on themselves immediately following the Big Bang.

The researchers simulated what might happen if one of these primordial black holes made a flyby within the orbit of Jupiter. They found that the orbits of Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury could veer off their original course by up to 3 feet over a decade.

The researchers said they would expect to detect a black hole nudge somewhere between once a year to once every century — depending on the abundance and masses of the black holes.

To put their own minds at ease, the researchers also calculated the likelihood that one of these tiny black holes would strike Earth and found it would only happen roughly once in a billion years.

Even then, the black hole wouldn’t lead to an apocalypse.

Instead, it would pass straight through the Earth, leaving the planet relatively unbothered.

Scientists in the 1970s even showed that a black hole impact would look strikingly similar to an streaking light and explosion over Russia 116 years ago that scientists believe was caused by a small asteroid or comet. (Although, a black hole would also leave an “exit wound.”)

Detecting the existence of mini black holes will require extremely precise measurements of where planets are and models of where they’re supposed to be. Fortunately, scientists have the tools to accomplish this.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, for example, has created a detailed model of the solar system that uses Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory of gravity to calculate the expected orbits of the planets and account for hundreds of asteroids in excruciating detail. (They even calculated how the Earth’s ocean tides affect the moon’s orbit.)

NASA scientists also have developed an extremely precise means of determining the distance between the Earth and Mars. By measuring the time it takes radio signals to travel from Earth to spacecraft orbiting Mars, or to rovers on its surface, scientists can calculate the red planet’s distance from Earth within two feet.

“It’s really only a few decades where we’ve had that level of accuracy,” Kaiser said. “From a series of space program missions, we can worry about if Mars is 50 centimeters off from where we expect it to be.”

To convince the skeptics, the scientists also would have to show that the nudge wasn’t caused by a passing asteroid.

The researchers say that the speed of the black holes — which would be traveling more than two times faster than anything else in our solar system — would create an unmistakably unique wobble in the planets’ orbits.

And astronomers are pretty good at spotting objects with a mass similar to that of the hypothetical black holes. In 2017, researchers identified the first object from another star to enter our solar system, which had far less mass than a microscopic black hole would.

Whether or not they detect a passing black hole, the scientists say it will push forward humanity’s understanding of dark matter.

“Of course I’d love to discover dark matter in the solar system,” said Benjamin Lehmann, a postdoctoral student at MIT and an author of the study. However, “if this kind of observation is what helps us to close this window and say dark matter is not in the form of these primordial black holes, that’s really important information.”

By proposing a method for simply testing this possibility, “they’ve done … exactly what we should be doing in dark matter searches,” said Vera Gluscevic, a cosmology professor at USC who was not involved with the study. “We should not leave any stone unturned.”

Although the scientists plan to keep refining planetary motion models and dig through historical observations from the last few decades for signs of the black holes, the main test will be to simply watch and wait.

___

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Tim Henderson | Stateline.org (TNS)

At 43, Sharon Reese is a housing market refugee — forced to return to her Ohio hometown after 18 years in Las Vegas, despite a successful career training dancers for nightclub acts.

“If you don’t have between $600,000 and $800,000, you’re not buying a house out there,” Reese said. “Las Vegas has a lot of opportunity, and it was affordable in 2006, but it’s become unaffordable. We quit our jobs and moved across the country. We’re hoping this is the right decision for us.”

Reese and her family are unpacking at her parents’ Youngstown home, a temporary stop until she and her husband, who was a casino worker in Las Vegas, can find jobs and a house of their own with their young daughter. Youngstown is one of the last two metro areas in the country where a household with nearly any income should be able to find a single-family home they can afford to buy, according to an analysis of April data by the National Association of Realtors.

Before the pandemic, there were 20 states that were considered affordable as a whole under the group’s definition, including the presidential election swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. As of this year, there is none. Even the states with the closest match between income and home prices — Iowa, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan — didn’t make the cut.

Since the pandemic, two states, Montana and Idaho, have surpassed California as the most unaffordable states for local homebuyers, according to the analysis. Hawaii and Oregon round out the list of the five least affordable states.

The Realtors’ analysis assigns affordability scores to states and large metro areas on a scale of 0 to 2. A score of 0 means that no household can afford any home on the market.

A score of 1 means that homes on the market are affordable to households in proportion to their position on the income ladder — in other words, 100% of families can afford at least some homes on the market. And a score of 2 would mean that all households can afford all homes on the market, but no state or metropolitan area even reached a 1.

The least affordable metro area was Los Angeles, which scored only 0.3, while the metro areas of Youngstown (0.97) and Akron (0.95) in Ohio were rated most affordable.

According to the latest estimates from July by real estate company Redfin, median single-family home sale prices were $175,000 in Youngstown and $239,500 in Akron. That compared with $487,000 in Las Vegas, $490,000 in Boise and $1 million in the Los Angeles area.

The Las Vegas area, where the Reese family had lived for 18 years, had a score of 0.5 on the Realtors’ scale. No state earned an overall score of 1, though Iowa, West Virginia and Ohio came close, at nearly 0.9. The least affordable states, Montana, Idaho, California, Hawaii and Oregon, all had scores around 0.4.

Nationwide, home affordability has evaporated over the past three years as interest rates have gone up, according to a monitoring index maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. It measures affordability more simply than the Realtors’ analysis, focusing solely on the ability of a homebuyer with the median household income to buy the median-priced house.

By that measure, the national affordability percentage was above 100% between January 2019 and April 2021. But it fell as low as 67% last year and remained below 70% in June, meaning a homebuyer with the median income had only two-thirds of the earnings needed to buy the median-priced house.

Home prices have increased by 47% nationwide just since 2020, according to a June report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. A major factor is that there aren’t many homes for sale: Many current homeowners are reluctant to sell because they’re locked into historically low interest rates. Meanwhile, investors have gobbled up single-family starter homes, reducing the supply.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said there are signs of more houses coming up for sale. For example, there was a 20% increase in houses and condos for sale in July compared with July 2023, according to the association.

“We are still short on inventory, but I think the worst is over,” Yun said. “We have seen mortgage rates begin to decline, so it’s less of a big financial penalty to move and give up a low interest rate. And the second factor is just the passage of time — life-changing events always occur, a death, a divorce, a new child or just job relocation, and that means changing residence.”

Along with high prices and interest rates, home buyers are getting slammed by higher property taxes and insurance costs, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Home prices in northeast Ohio might be lower because the area has a stable population, curbing competition and bidding wars, said Alison Goebel, executive director of the Greater Ohio Policy Center, a Columbus nonprofit aimed at revitalizing Ohio cities.

“Our population numbers have remained fairly steady in the last several decades, so we don’t have egregious demand and supply issues like you see on the West Coast and other rapidly growing areas,” Goebel said.

Montana and Idaho are the least affordable states: Housing prices are exploding in both, as deep-pocketed newcomers — many of them white-collar employees working in high-wage jobs based out of state — have driven up prices beyond what longtime residents can afford.

The city of Boise scored 0.4 on the Realtors’ affordability scale, on par with the New York City area. Like Montana, Idaho has natural beauty that is attracting people who are cashing out of more expensive areas, said Nicki Hellenkamp, Boise’s director of housing and homelessness policy.

“It’s one of the Zoom boom towns, where it’s beautiful but the wages are low, and the cost of living is low. If you sell your house in Los Angeles and buy two houses here, as my uncle did, then you can have a very different standard of living,” Hellenkamp said.

It’s not just home prices — rents are up 40% in Boise since the pandemic began, she added.

“Obviously wages didn’t go up 40%, so some people have been displaced,” Hellenkamp said.

The city is working on modest proposals to help with down payments and to create more affordable apartments, she said, but building more affordable housing will mean state and federal cooperation to help solve labor shortages and soaring material costs.

“We can’t do this alone as a city. This issue is a big one,” Hellenkamp said.

A state housing task force in Montana made recommendations in June to streamline construction of houses and apartments statewide and create incentives for cities to loosen zoning and allow denser housing.

A member of the task force, Kendall Cotton, said he personally found it impossible to buy a house in Montana, but was happy to recently purchase half a duplex for his growing family.

“We were thrilled to have that as an option, just to get our foot in the door and start on our journey to homeownership,” Cotton said. “Montana is an in-demand place. We’ve been kind of discovered in the last couple of years.”

Republicans and Democrats have come together to support fighting restrictive zoning, said Cotton, director of the Frontier Institute, a nonprofit policy and educational organization.

“We’re a free-market organization that tends to lead from right of center, but when I was at the governor’s press conference to support these issues, I was standing shoulder to shoulder with a Democratic socialist city council member and we were all united on this,” Cotton said.

Shallon Lester, a YouTube influencer who moved from New York to Montana and paid $1 million for a five-bedroom house in Bozeman in 2022, said she likes both the lower cost of living and the lifestyle there. Locals tend to think she’s an outsider “invading” the area, she said, but “people like me take nothing from this economy — we only give. We spend and spend.”

“People who are remote workers are sick of the cost of living in cities,” Lester added. “There’s a mass return to the concept of the simple life.”

Even in the Youngstown metro area, which includes a slice of Pennsylvania, housing can be a challenge for residents with low incomes. A forthcoming regional housing study has found a 4,000-unit shortage for households making less than $25,000 a year; 7,500 people are on a waiting list for subsidized housing. Black and Hispanic residents are more likely to struggle with housing costs, as are older people, young singles and families with young children, according to preliminary conclusions discussed in April.

But for many, Youngstown is a rare island of affordability. Jim Johnston, 40, a digital account executive at media company Nexstar in Youngstown, said many of his high school classmates from the area, who now live in places such as Montana, Illinois and Maryland, envy his decision to stay there and buy a $250,000 house in 2022 when interest rates were lower.

“One of them has a mortgage payment three times mine for the same size house, and a child care bill that’s bigger than my mortgage,” said Johnston. “They could put an extra $50,000 or $60,000 a year in their pockets. Remote work has opened up new possibilities for them, and they’re considering this very seriously.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

School groups are applauding the $615 million in yearly savings. Republicans warn of long-term consequences for educator pensions.

By DAN MERICA Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Tuesday that would prohibit political campaigns and outside political groups from using artificial intelligence to misrepresent the views of their rivals by pretending to be them.

The introduction of the bill comes as Congress has failed to regulate the fast-evolving technology and experts warn that it threatens to overwhelm voters with misinformation. Those experts have expressed particular concern over the dangers posed by “deepfakes,” AI-generated videos and memes that can look lifelike and cause voters to question what is real and what is fake.

Lawmakers said the bill would give the Federal Election Commission the power to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in elections in the same way it has regulated other political misrepresentation for decades. The FEC has started to consider such regulations.

“Right now, the FEC does not have the teeth, the regulatory authority, to protect the election,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who co-sponsored the legislation. Other sponsors include Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat; Rep. Derek Kilmer, a Washington Democrat; and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican.

Fitzpatrick and Schiff said the odds were against the bill passing this year. Nevertheless, they said they don’t expect the measure to face much opposition and could be attached to a must-pass measure in the waning days the congressional session.

Schiff described the bill as a modest first step in addressing the threat posed by deepfakes and other false AI-generated content, arguing the legislation’s simplicity was an asset.

“This is really probably the lowest hanging fruit there is” in terms of addressing the misuse of AI in politics, Schiff said. “There’s so much more we’re going to need to do, though, to try to attack the avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.”

Congress has been paralyzed on countless issues in recent years, and regulating AI is no exception.

“This is another illustration of congressional dysfunction,” Schiff said.

Schiff and Fitzpatrick are not alone in believing artificial intelligence legislation is needed and can become law. Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Pennsylvania Democrat, and Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, introduced legislation earlier this month that aims to curb the spread of unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes. A bipartisan group of senators proposed companion legislation in the Senate.

Opposition to such legislation has primarily focused on not stifling a burgeoning technology sector or making it easier for another country to become the hub for the AI industry.

Congress doesn’t “want to put a rock on top of innovation either and not allow it to flourish under the right circumstances,” Rep. French Hill, an Arkansas Republican, said in August at a reception hosted by the Center for AI Safety. “It’s a balancing act.”

The Federal Election Commission in August took its first step toward regulating AI-generated deepfakes in political advertising when it took a procedural vote after being asked to regulate ads that use artificial intelligence to misrepresent political opponents as saying or doing something they didn’t.

The commission is expected to further discuss the matter on Thursday.

The commission’s efforts followed a request from Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights organization, that the agency clarify whether a 1970s-era law that bans “fraudulent misrepresentation” in campaign communications also applies to AI-generated deepfakes. While the election commission has been criticized in recent years for being ineffective, it does have the ability to take action against campaigns or groups that violate these laws, often through fines.

Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen who helped the lawmakers write the bill being introduced Tuesday, said he was concerned that fraudulent misrepresentation law only applies to candidates and not parties, outside groups and super PACs.

The bill introduced Tuesday would expand FEC’s jurisdiction to explicitly account for the rapid rise of generative AI’s use in political communications.

Holman noted that some states have passed laws to regulate deepfakes but said federal legislation was necessary to give the Federal Election Commission the clear authority.

This story is part of an Associated Press series, “The AI Campaign,” exploring the influence of artificial intelligence in the 2024 election cycle.

The Associated Press receives financial assistance from the Omidyar Network to support coverage of artificial intelligence and its impact on society. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org

By CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY Associated Press

MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) — The election director in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb where votes will be fiercely contested in this year’s presidential race, recently organized a five-hour training session. The focus wasn’t solely on the nuts-and-bolts of running this year’s election. Instead, it brought together election staff and law enforcement to strategize on how to keep workers safe and the process of voting and ballot-counting secure.

Having a local sheriff’s deputy at early voting locations and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher are among the added security steps the office is taking this year.

Tate Fall, Cobb County’s election director, said she was motivated to act after hearing one of her poll workers describe being confronted during the state’s presidential primary in March by an agitated voter who the worker noticed was carrying a gun. The situation ended peacefully, but the poll worker was shaken.

“That made it really real for me — that it’s so easy for something to go sideways in life, period, let alone the environment of Georgia and elections,” Fall said. “I just can’t have someone being harmed on my conscience.”

Across the country, local election directors are beefing up their security in advance of Election Day on Nov. 5 to keep their workers and polling places safe while also ensuring that ballots and voting procedures won’t be tampered with. Their concern isn’t just theoretical. Election offices and those who run them have been targets of harassment and even death threats since the 2020 presidential election, primarily by people acting on former President Donald Trump’s lies that the election was stolen from him through widespread fraud or rigged voting machines.

The focus on security comes as threats of political violence have been on the rise. Trump was the target of a potential assassination attempt over the weekend, just nine weeks after another threat on his life. Federal agents last year fatally shot a Trump supporter who threatened to assassinate President Joe Biden, and the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was severely injured in a hammer attack by a man promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.

In just the last year, a gun was fired at a window of the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, election office, several election offices in five states were sent letters filled with a white powder that in some cases tested positive for the powerful opioid fentanyl, and bogus 911 calls were made to the homes of top state election officials in Georgia, Maine, Michigan and Missouri in a potentially dangerous situation known as swatting.

“This is one of the things that I have to say is just crazy, outrageous to me — the election threats to workers of both parties and their families, the bullying, the harassment,” Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, said during a recent agency-sponsored online event. “These folks, they are not doing it for pay. They’re not doing it for glory. They’re doing it because they believe it’s the right thing to do to defend our democracy.”

Her agency has completed more than 1,000 voluntary physical security assessments for election offices since the start of 2023. Election officials have been using that help to identify gaps and request money from their local governments to make upgrades.

They also have been aided by a U.S. Election Assistance Commission decision in 2022 that allowed certain federal money to go toward security features such as badge readers, cameras and protective fencing.

California’s Los Angeles County and Durham County, North Carolina, will have new offices with significant security upgrades for this year’s election. They include bulletproof glass, security cameras and doors that open only with badges. Election workers across the country also will have new procedures for handling mail, including kits of Narcan, the nasal spray used for accidental overdoses.

In Durham County, a central feature of the new office will be a mail processing room with a separate exhaust system to contain potentially hazardous substances sent in the mail.

“We have countless reasons why this investment was critical,” said the county’s election director, Derek Bowens, pointing to threats against election officials in Michigan and Arizona and the suspicious letters sent to offices in Oregon, Washington, California and Georgia.

Bowens and others who have worked in elections for years said their jobs have changed significantly. Threats and harassment are one reason why some election officials across the country have been leaving. In some places, election workers are being trained in de-escalation techniques and how to respond to an active shooter.

“Security to this extent wasn’t on the list before. Now it is,” said Cari-Ann Burgess, the chief election official in Washoe County, Nevada. “We have drills that we work through, we have emergency plans that we have prepared. We are a lot more cautious now than we ever have been.”

In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, about a four-hour drive from where Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in July, election officials estimate they now spend about 40% of their time on security and working with local law enforcement and emergency managers on election plans. This involves regular trainings to prepare for anything that might interfere with voting or counting ballots.

“It’s very volatile, and Luzerne County reflects what is going on across the country” said County Manager Romilda Crocamo, who oversees the election office staff. “It seems that people are very emotional, and sometimes that emotion escalates.”

Crocamo is considering purchasing panic buttons for poll managers who will be at some 130 voting locations throughout the county on Election Day. State law in Pennsylvania prohibits law enforcement from being inside polling locations, but Crocamo and her team are speaking with local officials about having emergency responders with their radios at the sites should something happen.

Many local officials said they have increased the law enforcement presence at election offices, including on election night when poll workers are bringing in ballots and other material from voting locations. Added law enforcement also is planned in the weeks after Election Day, during the canvass of the votes and certifying the results.

In Los Angeles, law enforcement canine teams will be helping scan incoming mail ballots for suspicious substances. It’s part of an updated approach that includes a new $29 million election office that consolidates operations that previously had been spread across the county.

Dean Logan, who oversees elections for Los Angeles County, said security remains a top concern. He pointed to social media posts suggesting ways to damage ballot drop boxes and hamper mail voting. He said the letters with white powder were designed to disrupt election operations, and it’s the responsibility of election officials to ensure that doesn’t happen.

The office will have round-the-clock security and additional staffing from the county sheriff’s department for the November election.

“It’s important to me that we can tell voters they don’t have to be worried about the security of their ballots,” he said. “We’ve taken steps to keep them safe.”

Election officials say security is a balancing act, ensuring safety while making sure polling places are welcoming spaces for voters and providing enough access to election offices so the public can trust the process.

In Michigan four years ago, a large crowd of Trump supporters created a tense and chaotic scene when they gathered outside Detroit’s ballot counting operation the day after the election, chanting “Stop the count!” as they banged on the windows and demanded access.

Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said her office is much better prepared this time, with more cameras, armed security and bulletproof glass. Observers will now be checked in and screened by security outside a large room used for counting ballots at the city’s convention center.

“My biggest concern was to protect the staff and the process,” Winfrey said. “And in doing so, our building — it may look the same, but it’s not the same.”

Black women have long been a loyal voting bloc for the Democratic Party, and the prospect of Kamala Harris becoming president is fueling a Detroit movement to support her in November.

Hundreds of handheld pagers exploded near simultaneously across Lebanon and in parts of Syria on Tuesday, killing at least eight people, including members of the militant group Hezbollah and a girl, and wounding the Iranian ambassador, government and Hezbollah officials said.

Officials pointed the finger at Israel in what appeared to be a sophisticated, remote attack that wounded more than 2,700 people at a time of rising tensions across the Lebanon border. The Israeli military declined to comment.

A Hezbollah official who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press that the new brand of handheld pagers used by the group first heated up, then exploded, killing at least two of its members and wounding others.

RELATED STORY | US and Europe warn Lebanon's Hezbollah to ease strikes on Israel and back off from wider Mideast war

Lebanons health minister, Firas Abiad, said at least eight people were killed and 2,750 wounded 200 of them critically.

Iranian state-run IRNA news agency said that the countrys ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, was superficially wounded by an exploding pager and was being treated at a hospital.

Photos and videos from Beiruts southern suburbs circulating on social media and in local media showed people lying on the pavement with wounds on their hands or near their pants pockets.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the groups members not to carry cellphones, saying that they could be used by Israel to track their movements and to carry out targeted strikes.

Lebanons Health Ministry called on all hospitals to be on alert to take in emergency patients and for people who own pagers to get away from them. It also asked health workers to avoid using wireless devices.

RELATED STORY | A closer look at Hezbollah's tunnel threat

AP photographers at area hospitals said the emergency rooms were overloaded with patients, many of them with injuries to their limbs, some in serious condition.

The state-run National News Agency said hospitals in southern Lebanon, the eastern Bekaa Valley and Beiruts southern suburbs all areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence had called on people to donate blood of all types.

The news agency reported that in Beiruts southern suburbs and other areas the handheld pagers system was detonated using advanced technology, and dozens of injuries were reported.

The Hezbollah official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media said the explosions were the result of a security operation that targeted the devices.

The enemy (Israel) stands behind this security incident, the official said, without elaborating. He added that the new pagers that Hezbollah members were carrying had lithium batteries that apparently exploded.

Lithium batteries, when overheated, can smoke, melt and even catch on fire. Rechargeable lithium batteries are used in consumer products ranging from cellphones and laptops to electric cars. Lithium battery fires can burn up to 1,100 Fahrenheit.

RELATED STORY | Amid heightened tensions, US deploys additional military resources to Middle East

The incident comes at a time of heightened tensions between Lebanon and Israel. The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israeli forces have been clashing near-daily for more than 11 months against the backdrop of war between Israel and Hezbollah ally Hamas in Gaza.

The clashes have killed hundreds in Lebanon and dozens in Israel and displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border. On Tuesday, Israel said that halting Hezbollahs attacks in the north to allow residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal.

Israel has killed Hamas militants in the past with booby trapped cellphones and its widely believed to have been behind the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Irans nuclear program in 2010.

Today we are raising voices in the fight against childhood cancer.

We're highlighting a special community golf classic to honor the memory of 13-year-old Justin Townsend, who died of brain cancer in 2014, and to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Related Video: After losing son to brain cancer, Michigan family starts nonprofit to help find cure 13Forever: After losing son to brain cancer, Michigan family starts nonprofit to help find cure

The group 13Forever was founded by Justin's family. They've created the Team J-Bird Golf Classic to honor his memory and benefit St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

The 4th annual event will be held on Saturday, October 5, at the Bello Woods Golf Course in Macomb Township, and they're looking for golfers to participate.

Roy Townsend, Justin's father, and Jackie Townsend, Justin's sister, spoke with 7 News Detroit about the golf classic and the work they do in the fight against pediatric cancer.

Watch the full interview in the video player above.

To learn more about 13Forever and their upcoming events, click here.