Minnesota adds jobs; unemployment rate steady

by MinnPost staff 08/17/201708/17/2017

Holding steady. MPR reports: “Minnesota’s unemployment rate came in at a seasonally adjusted 3.7 percent in July as employers added 7,700 jobs, state officials said Thursday. … The July jobless rate was unchanged from June and remained significantly below the 4.3 percent rate for the nation. … Minnesota has added 66,701 jobs in the past year, an increase of 2.3 percent, compared with a national growth rate of 1.5 percent during that period, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development reported.”

Was the firing … fair? KSTP’s reports: “There has been a shakeup in State Fair management a week before this year’s event is scheduled to begin. … State Fair livestock manager Greg Harder — the man in charge of the thousands of animals that will start arriving next week — is no longer with the fair, according to fair officials.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar has an essay in Time. She writes: “American hate is not new — and it is not scarce. While Nov. 8, 2016, acted as a wake-up call for many Americans, to most people of color and indigenous people the election of President Trump served as an affirmation of our nation’s divisions. We have never truly defeated hate. We merely allow it to take new forms: Nazis, the KKK, white supremacists, white nationalists — emboldened by reflective leadership — are again comfortable gathering en masse, without hoods. Take a good look, America; this is real, and it is not going away. It is painless to denounce the events in Charlottesville and to question how or why such events occur. We need to recognize that racism has never been subtle, though it has gone underreported. This is the same fight as the civil rights movement, the Civil War — we are fighting over human rights. So the solution is not compromise.”

Aw jeeze, grab a tissue. The AP’s Kyle Potter reports (via the Pioneer Press): “David and Elizabeth Weinlick’s life together began like a reality TV show, blossomed into two decades out of a romance novel, and now seems destined to end in tragedy. … David Weinlick and Elizabeth Runze were strangers when they said ‘I do’ in front of thousands of shoppers and in the national spotlight at Minnesota’s Mall of America in June 1998. Now it seems the thing that will end what they call ‘our great love story,’ is cancer, after David was diagnosed with terminal and inoperable stage IV colon cancer.”