First Run News

As a candidate, President Trump repeatedly questioned the validity of the Labor Department’s jobs reports. Now it is his administration that is releasing the monthly estimates. No matter who is in the White House, however, civil servants in the Labor Department collect and analyze data the same way. Here are the basic ground rules.

The May job numbers raise a depressing possibility: that this is as good as it will get for the United States labor market. At first glance, the new numbers seem like a bit of a mystery. The unemployment rate fell to a 16-year low, yet job creation slowed and the number of people who are neither working nor looking for work rose. But the data aren’t really inconsistent.

Unemployment sank to 4.3 percent in May, its lowest level in 16 years, the government reported Friday, but halfhearted wage growth and a shrinking labor force revealed the economy’s stubborn weak spots. While the downsides sent bond prices lower, the report is unlikely to deter the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates when its policy makers meet in Washington this month.

Unemployment sank to 4.3 percent in May, its lowest level in 16 years, the government reported Friday, but halfhearted wage growth and a shrinking labor force revealed the economy’s stubborn weak spots. While the downsides sent bond prices lower, the report is unlikely to deter the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates when its policy makers meet in Washington this month.

BIRMINGHAM, England — Birmingham Northfield, a modest residential area on the southwest border of England’s second-largest city, has backed the Labour candidate for Parliament the last 25 years.

The bomber who killed 22 people at a pop concert in Manchester, England, last month had met in Libya with members of an Islamic State unit linked to the 2015 Paris terrorist attack, according to current and retired intelligence officials. The content of the communications between the attacker, Salman Abedi, and the terrorist cell remain unknown.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Looking out over a sea of people in told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.” Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library.

MANILA — The gray smoke that belched for hours from a popular hotel-casino in Manila was initially dismissed by the police as the work of a disgruntled gambler with a bottle of gasoline.

WASHINGTON — Senators, spies and a president spent years in a pitched battle over how the history is told of one of the most controversial chapters of America’s campaign against terrorism, the detention and interrogation of prisoners in secret C.I.A. jails. But recent moves by the Trump administration have increased the likelihood that much of what is known about the macabre humiliations that unfolded in those jails around the world will remain hidden from pub

WASHINGTON — Senators, spies and a president spent years in a pitched battle over how the history is told of one of the most controversial chapters of America’s campaign against terrorism, the detention and interrogation of prisoners in secret C.I.A. jails. But recent moves by the Trump administration have increased the likelihood that much of what is known about the macabre humiliations that unfolded in those jails around the world will remain hidden from pub