News in Brief

Date: 02 August 2025 - 22:40

News ID: ۱۴۲۱۰۶

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) -- President Donald Trump fired a top Labor Department official on the heels of a market-shocking weak scorecard of the U.S. job market, accusing her without evidence of manipulating the figures and adding to already growing concerns about the quality of economic data published by the federal government. In a second surprise economic policy development, the door for Trump to make an imprint on a Federal Reserve with which he clashes almost daily for not lowering interest rates opened much earlier than anticipated when Fed Governor Adriana Kugler unexpectedly announced her resignation on Friday afternoon. Trump accused Erika McEntarfer, appointed by former President Joe Biden, of faking the jobs numbers. There is no evidence to back Trump’s claims of data manipulation by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the statistical agency that compiles the closely watched employment report as well as consumer and producer price data.

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Authorities are scouring a mountainous area of western Montana for a military veteran who they say opened fire at a bar, killing four people. Michael Paul Brown, 45, fled The Owl Bar in the small town of Anaconda in a white pickup truck but ditched it at some point, said Lee Johnson, administrator of the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation, which is overseeing the case. He urged residents late Friday to stay at home and on high alert. Brown served in the U.S. Army as an armor crewman from 2001 to 2005 and deployed to Iraq from early 2004 until March 2005, said Lt. Col. Ruth Castro, an Army spokesperson. Brown was in the Montana National Guard from 2006 to March 2009, Castro said. He left military service in the rank of sergeant.

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JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki, one of Indonesia’s most active volcanoes, erupted for a second straight day, sending a column of volcanic materials and ash up to 18 kilometers (11 miles) into the sky early Saturday and blanketing villages with debris. No casualties were immediately reported. Another eruption Friday evening had sent clouds of ash up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) high and had lit up the night sky with glowing lava and bolts of lightning. The two eruptions happened in a span of less than five hours. Indonesia’s Geology Agency recorded an avalanche of searing gas clouds mixed with rocks and lava traveling up to 5 kilometers (3 miles) down the slopes of the mountain. Drone observations showed deep movement of magma, setting off tremors that registered on seismic monitors.

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BEIJING (AP) -- A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a Suzhou subway station, Japanese media outlets said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in both China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. The Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name but, citing the Japanese Consulate General in Shanghai, said she was with her child inside a subway station when the attack took place. The child was not injured, and the mother had returned home after reportedly getting treated at a hospital, NHK reported. In Tokyo earlier Thursday, two Chinese men were seriously injured in attacks, and four male assailants wielding unspecified weapons remained at large, according to a statement released by the Chinese Embassy in Japan. The identities of the assailants were unclear.

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BOGOTA (Reuters) -- Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe was sentenced by a judge to 12 years of house arrest for abuse of process and bribery of a public official, in a long-running case over connections to former right-wing paramilitaries. Uribe was convicted of the two charges on Monday by Judge Sandra Liliana Heredia in a witness-tampering case that has run for about 13 years. He has always maintained his innocence. Heredia read the sentence to the court in an afternoon hearing on Friday. Uribe will be fined $578,000, Heredia’s ruling said, and barred from public office for more than eight years. Uribe, whose legal team has said it will appeal, is to report to authorities in Rionegro, in Antioquia province, where he resides, and then “proceed immediately to his residence where he will comply with house arrest,” the ruling said.

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MERRITT ISLAND, Florida (AFP) -- An international team of four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked Saturday with the orbiting International Space Station (ISS). “Docking confirmed!” SpaceX posted on social media, along with a video showing the spacecraft making contact with the ISS at 2:27 am Eastern Time (0627 GMT), far above the southeast Pacific Ocean. American astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov are joining the ISS on a six-month mission. They lifted off Friday morning from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, their capsule mounted on a Falcon 9 rocket. It is the 11th crew rotation mission to the ISS under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, created to succeed the Space Shuttle era by partnering with private industry.