Good Friday morning, and welcome to the holiday weekend.
The likelihood of anything getting of substance done today at work is next to zero, particularly as the day progresses and folks depart early in hopes of squeezing out every last drop of the official end of summer.
Labor Day weekend is so melancholy.
This is a good time to remind everyone that we here at CivMix will be taking Monday, Sept. 6 off to observe the holiday, which, for the record, was created by the labor movement in the late 19th century to pay tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers. It became a federal holiday in 1894.
And, of course, there’s a New York connection…
Back in the day, when people worked seven days a week, 12+ hours a day – even kids – in order to eke out a living, labor unions started to emerge and grow more prominent and vocal about the need to establish worker protections. They began organizing strikes and rallies to protest unsafe and unsanitary conditions and demand better pay, vacations, days off etc.
Says the interwebs:
“Many of these events turned violent during this period, including the infamous Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which several Chicago policemen and workers were killed. Others gave rise to longstanding traditions: On September 5, 1882, 10,000 workers took unpaid time off to march from City Hall to Union Square in New York City, holding the first Labor Day parade in U.S. history.“
The weekend is traditionally commemorated with lots of outdoor activities – barbecues, picnics, parades, fireworks displays, etc.
As for today, in case you were wondering, it’s National Welsh Rarebit Day, (also known as Welsh rabbit). It’s actually a British dish that first appeared in the early 1720s and contains no meat at all.
Instead, the dish features toasted bread covered in a mixture of hot cheddar cheese, beer (or ale or milk), and seasoning, such as mustard, cayenne pepper, paprika, and Worcestershire sauce. It is sometimes also accompanied with tomatoes, and when topped with a poached egg it is known as a “golden buck.”
I personally have never had it, but I do love grilled cheese. Maybe this is a good day to try something new…if I can find it on a menu locally…preferably somewhere that delivers.
The holiday weekend weather, sadly, does not look all that promising. Today and tomorrow are OK, with partly cloudy skies and temperatures in the mid-60s today, and mostly sunny skies with temperatures in the mid-70s tomorrow. That’s about as good as it gets, as Sunday and Monday are both calling for rain.
In the headlines…
President Biden is scheduled to spend at least part of Labor Day weekend at his home in Delaware despite the ongoing fallout from the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan.
Despite the Taliban’s effort to project themselves as responsible stewards after seizing power, there was still no word on when a new government would be announced.
Afghanistan’s neighbors have closed their land borders to people trying to flee, trapping tens of thousands of people eligible to resettle in the U.S. and other countries but were unable to enter the airport in Kabul before the international airlift ended.
Lawmakers and media organizations are calling on the Biden administration to help get more than 100 government-funded media employees out of Afghanistan, where they risk retribution from the Taliban for their affiliation with the U.S. government.
The president and First Lady Jill Biden paid an evening visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, one week after the ISIS-K terror attack at Kabul’s international airport that killed 13 US service members and injured 20 more.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to halt a new restrictive Texas abortion law has plunged the fight over the issue into a new phase of turmoil, with both sides of the issue scrambling to make sense of a legal terrain.
When a reporter asked at a White House press briefing about how Biden reconciled his Catholic faith with his support for legal abortion, press secretary Jen Psaki discounted any notion of an ideological conflict.
Biden launched a “whole-of-government” response to oppose a new law in Texas that bans most abortions.
With increasing frequency, the Supreme Court is taking up weighty matters like the Texas abortion case in a rushed way, considering emergency petitions that often yield late-night decisions issued with minimal or no written opinions.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would vote later this month on legislation designed to protect abortion rights, following the Supreme Court’s decision to leave in place a new Texas law that bars the procedure after about six weeks of pregnancy.
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 midnight order letting Texas ban most abortions is another sign that Chief Justice John Roberts is struggling to steer the Roberts Court at a time when an even bigger abortion case is looming
No lawsuits appeared to have been filed in response to the Texas law, but call centers for abortion services turned into help lines crowded with crying women. Some began seeking services by crossing state lines.
Biden’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low, sliding all the way to 43%, a drop of 6 points in a single month.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin made it clear that his fellow Democrats have work to do to win his vote for their sprawling economic plan — and prevent Biden’s agenda from collapsing.
In a strongly worded op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, the moderate senator called on fellow Democrats to “hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation.”
“Instead of rushing to spend trillions on new government programs and additional stimulus funding, Congress should hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation,” he wrote.
Millions of jobless Americans who have depended on federal unemployment aid as a financial lifeline are about to lose those benefits just as the delta variant of the coronavirus poses a renewed threat to the economy and the job market.
An estimated 7.5 million people will lose their benefits when federally funded emergency unemployment programs end. Millions more will see their checks cut by $300 a week.
Jobless claims fell to a new pandemic low as businesses held on to workers despite the surging Delta variant.
Initial jobless claims fell by 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 340,000 in the week ended Aug. 28, the Labor Department said.
The level of continuing claims, the measure of ongoing benefits, was 2.75 million, a decrease of 160,000 from the previous week. The decrease in the number of continuing claims represents the lowest level for insured unemployment since the Covid era began.
Walmart will increase its minimum wage to $12 an hour and raise pay for hundreds of thousands of its U.S. store workers as a tight labor market continues to create fierce competition for staff.
The World Health Organization is monitoring a new coronavirus variant called “Mu” — known by scientists as B.1.621 — and has added it to the list of “variants of interest” because of preliminary evidence it can evade antibodies.
The new coronavirus variant “mu” is not at the moment posing a great risk to Americans, according to White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“We’re paying attention to it, we take everything like that seriously, but we don’t consider it an immediate threat right now,” Fauci said at a press briefing.
As the school year starts for districts across the United States, child COVID-19 cases are up, with about 204,000 cases added last week. For the week ending August 26, children accounted for 22.4% of reported weekly COVID-19 cases.
A kids’ vaccine cannot come soon enough, but the process is taking longer than some initially expected.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has called a meeting of its vaccine advisers for September 17 to discuss booster doses of coronavirus vaccine.
The FDA is considering whether to authorize a lower dose of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine for boosters than the dose given in the first two shots, people familiar with the deliberations said.
Fauci said he would not be surprised if the recommended full regimen for the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines in the U.S. becomes three doses, instead of two.
A new study out of the University of Virginia School of Medicine shows that antibody levels in recipients of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine were slightly higher than recipients of the Pfizer vaccine.
The sudden craze among COVID-19 vaccine skeptics to take Ivermectin – an anti-parasitical treatment commonly used in horses –has caused an overwhelming amount of people needing treatment for overdosing on the drug across Oklahoma.
Doctors and public health officials say they have spent the pandemic fighting rampant misinformation on top of a deadly virus, but the ivermectin craze is one of their strangest battles yet.
The authorities in Hawaii are struggling to transport tanks of oxygen from the mainland as the state’s hospitals grow increasingly strained by new coronavirus infections.
Two musicals are back on Broadway: “Waitress,” about a gifted baker in an abusive marriage, and “Hadestown,” a contemporary retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.
The New York State Department of Health released a 20-page guidance for schools to test for COVID-19 as students and teachers return to the classroom in the coming days — including a weekly testing requirement for unvaccinated school personnel.
The deadly flooding in the Northeast, on the heels of destruction from Louisiana to California, shows the limits of adapting to climate change. Experts say it will only get worse.
Three days after Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, its weakened remnants tore into the Northeast and claimed at least 43 lives across New York, New Jersey and two other states.
Speaking from the White House, Biden said the damage indicated that “extreme storms and the climate crisis are here,” constituting what he called “one of the great challenges of our time.”
At least 11 people were found dead in basements after torrential rains flooded New York City — nearly as many as those killed by Hurricane Ida in Louisiana, where the storm made landfall.
As the New York City region regained its footing after record-breaking rains that left much of the area’s transportation disrupted, the city’s transit lines were slowly resuming yesterday afternoon, though with a number of suspensions and continuing delays.
It takes the MTA up to 15 years to clean each of the subway’s 10,000 gunked-up drains, according to a report published by the agency’s inspector general.
Gov. Kathy Hochul faced the first test of her ability to manage a disaster amid the deadly and paralyzing flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida.
She declared a state of emergency, toured the damage with local officials and pledged to make addressing the growing threat of extreme weather a priority.
Hochul vowed to “intensely” investigate the MTA’s response to the rapid deluge that disrupted subway service.
Both Hochul and Mayor Bill de Blasio faced a barrage of questions about whether the state and city should have been better prepared for Wednesday night’s record rainfalls that paralyzed the city and killed at least nine people.
The storm caused chaos for fans and matches at the U.S. Open after the U.S.T.A refused to cancel any play or tell New Yorkers to stay home.
Hochul signed a bill that will extend the state’s eviction moratorium through Jan. 15, following its approval by the state Legislature in a special session called by the governor to reactivate the law after it expired earlier this week.
Hochul had some shade for her predecessor, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, remarking, “We don’t govern by press conference.”
The Hochul administration quickly took care of some pressing issues this week in calling legislators back to Albany to deal with things like a pending eviction crisis and establishing a cannabis control board. Critics said it may have been a little too quick.
De Blasio has been spending the past few weeks calling allies and labor leaders to gather their thoughts on him launching a bid for governor in 2022.
The mayor is reportedly asking potential supporter to hold off on making any 2022 gubernatorial endorsements until he decides whether he’ll run.
The city teachers union filed a complaint with a state labor board over an “impasse” in ongoing negotiations over the implementation of the city’s new vaccine mandate for public school educators, union officials said.
At least one employee at Donald Trump’s family business testified before a grand jury as prosecutors in Manhattan weighed whether to charge a senior executive at the company with tax-related crimes, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer is so far withholding support of de Blasio’s proposed redevelopment of Soho.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie announced new leadership positions in his conference.
Nauman Hussain pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide charges, admitting for the first time that his failure to keep up repairs on his stretch limousine led to the Oct. 6, 2018, crash that killed all 18 people on board and two pedestrians in Schoharie.
Troy’s DeFazio’s Pizzeria will open a satellite location in Albany today in partnership with the city’s first distillery since prohibition, the Albany Distilling Company. (ADCo).
The Catskills and Hudson Valley rank 9th in the nation among the top 10 most profitable areas for new Airbnb hosts who welcomed their first guests in the first six months of 2021, according to Airbnb.
A federal judge sentenced a Troy pizzeria owner to three years of probation for importing about 125,000 masks from China to sell above market value during early days of the pandemic.
The 1863 Club at Saratoga Race Course will be available for the first time for private events during the racing off-season, which begins after Labor Day and runs through June, the New York Racing Association said.
The FAA has opened an investigation into Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic after the rocket that sent the British billionaire to the edge of space allegedly veered off course, the agency announced.
