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North Korea releases images of Kim Jong Un visiting a uranium enrichment site, giving rare glimpse inside its nuclear program

3 Mins Read

New pictures of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un touring what state media said is a uranium enrichment facility have given an extremely rare glimpse inside the isolated nation’s closely guarded nuclear weapons program.

According to a report from Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Friday, Kim visited the facility – a bright, sterile warehouse filled with long rows of cylindrical machinery – which is used to produce weapons-grade nuclear material for the North’s growing arsenal.

The report comes as North Korea continues to ramp up its illegal nuclear weapons program and strengthens relations with Russia, deepening widespread concern in the West over the isolated nation’s direction under Kim.

The location and exact date of Kim’s visit to the site were not disclosed in the report, but the purpose of his inspection was clear, according to KCNA: to lay out a “long-term plan for increasing the production of weapon-grade nuclear materials.”

Experts say the images – which show Kim flanked by men in military uniforms and crisp white lab shirts – underscore North Korea’s growing confidence in its position as a nuclear power.

“Kim is exceptionally confident these days and he’s particularly interested in making sure that his calls for a massive increase in nuclear capabilities are not misinterpreted,” said Ankit Panda,  Stanton Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adding “these disclosures lend credibility to North Korea’s plans and demonstrate that they’ve come a long way in their enrichment capabilities.”

It’s a theme the North Korean leader has touched on frequently in recent years, including this week.

In a speech celebrating the 76th anniversary of North Korea’s founding on Monday, Kim pledged to “exponentially” expand the regime’s nuclear arsenal, reiterating bellicose rhetoric he has used in the past.

During his visit to the purported enrichment facility, Kim expressed repeated satisfaction with the technical capabilities of North Korea’s nuclear sector and emphasized the need to increase the number of centrifuges for greater production, according to state media.

Park Won-gon, professor of North Korean Studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said the timing of the disclosure is also important.

The disclosure comes at a time of heightened tensions between North Korea and the West, with the US and its allies accusing North Korea of providing substantial military aid to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Both Moscow and Pyongyang have denied North Korean arms exports, despite significant evidence of such transfers.

In June, the two autocratic nations pledged to use all available means to provide immediate military assistance in the event the other is attacked, according to a landmark defense pact agreed to during a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang.

Since the location of this facility was not revealed in the KCNA report, it’s unclear whether the images are from a site already known to international observers, such as the Yongbyon nuclear research facility, or something entirely new. North Korea is believed to have several sites for enriching uranium.

“I’m not sure we can establish the site from the images,” said Martyn Williams, a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center, “but it’s certainly the first time we’ve seen this set up and in this level of detail.”

This post appeared first on cnn.com

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Russia expels six British diplomats it accuses of spying and sabotage activity

2 Mins Read

Russia’s FSB security service said on Friday it had revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats in Moscow whose actions it said showed signs of spying and sabotage work.

Britain’s embassy in Moscow did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet KGB, said it had documents showing that a British foreign office department in London responsible for Eastern Europe and Central Asia was coordinating what it called “the escalation of the political and military situation” and was tasked with ensuring Russia’s strategic defeat in its war against Ukraine.

“Thus, the facts revealed give grounds to consider the activities of British diplomats sent to Moscow by the directorate as threatening the security of the Russian Federation,” the FSB said in a statement.

“In this connection, on the basis of documents provided by the Federal Security Service of Russia and as a response to the numerous unfriendly steps taken by London, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, in co-operation with the agencies concerned, has terminated the accreditation of six members of the political department of the British Embassy in Moscow in whose actions signs of spying and sabotage were found,” it said.

The six diplomats were named on Russian state TV, which also showed photographs of them.

“The English did not take our hints about the need to stop this practice (of carrying out intelligence activities inside Russia), so we decided to expel these six to begin with,” an FSB employee told the Rossiya-24 state TV channel.

The FSB said Russia would ask other British diplomats to go home early if they were found to be engaged in similar activity.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was cited by the state TASS news agency as saying the activities of the British embassy in Moscow had gone well beyond diplomatic convention and accusing it of carrying out deliberate activity designed to harm the Russian people.

This post appeared first on cnn.com

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Typhoon Yagi: Asia’s most powerful storm submerges parts of Vietnam and Thailand

2 Mins Read

Typhoon Yagi, Asia’s most powerful storm this year, has left dozens dead since sweeping across southern China and Southeast Asia last week, leaving a trail of destruction with its intense rainfall and powerful winds.

After hitting the Philippines, where it killed more than a dozen people, it churned westwards towards southern China and shortly after parts of Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos.

Nearly a week since it made landfall, many farms and villages in northern parts of Vietnam and neighboring Thailand remain under water as communities struggle to cope with severe flooding and the looming threat of landslides.

In Vietnam, the death toll has risen to at least 226 as a result of the storm and the landslides and flash floods it triggered, the government’s disaster agency said Thursday, according to Reuters. The storm caused widespread damage to infrastructure and factories.

Video captured by a car’s dashcam earlier this week showed the moment a steel bridge collapsed over the engorged Red River in Vietnam’s Phu Tho province, plunging drivers into the raging waters.

The downpours also inundated Thailand’s northern province of Chiang Rai, submerging homes and riverside villages, making rescue efforts difficult.

At least 33 people have died across Thailand since mid-August due to rain-related incidents, with at least nine deaths this week after Yagi, Reuters reported citing the local government.

Storms are being made more intense and deadlier by the warming ocean, scientists have long warned. While developed nations bear a greater historical responsibility for the human-induced climate crisis, developing nations and small-island states are suffering the worst impacts.

This post appeared first on cnn.com

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For decades, Chinese workers have retired relatively early. That’s about to change

6 Mins Read

For decades, Chinese workers have wrapped up their working lives at relatively young ages: 60 for men and as early as 50 for women.

But all that is about to change as the Chinese government passed new legislation on Friday laying out a plan to delay the retirement age over the course of 15 years, starting January 1, according to state news agency Xinhua.

Existing rules stated that men in urban areas could retire at 60 and receive their pensions, and women at 50 or 55, depending on their occupation. The new rules gradually push back the age to 63 for men, and to 55 and 58, respectively, for women.

The measures, which were approved by the country’s top lawmaking body following signaling from a key Communist Party body in July, also lay out plans to extend the minimum working period for employees to receive a monthly pension from 15 to 20 years, with changes starting from 2030.

They also include some flexibility in retirement age, especially for those who have already completed the minimum working period.

The change, which the government has been considering for about a decade, comes as China’s economy slows while Beijing grapples with the looming consequences of a rapidly aging population and a pension funding crisis.

The announcement sparked immediate widespread discussion – and backlash – across Chinese social media.

Some social media users appeared encouraged that the changes weren’t more drastic and included some flexibility. One comment on the X-like social media platform Weibo that garnered thousands of likes said: “As long as there are options to retire or not based on our will, I have no objections.”

Others voiced discontent over the prospect of delayed access to their pension and years of extra work, as well as concern about whether the policy would strain China’s already tough job market, where unemployment levels among young people remain stubbornly high.

“Delayed retirements just means you can’t get your pension until you hit 63, but it doesn’t mean everyone will have a job until then!” wrote one user.

Chinese state media in recent days has hailed the anticipated changes as an urgent and necessary reform for an outmoded system, highlighting how the existing policy had been in place since the 1950s when life expectancies and education levels were both lower.

“The current retirement policy framework has remained unchanged for 73 years. Especially since the reform and opening up (starting around 1978), the demographic, economic and social landscape has transformed dramatically,” demographer Yuan Xin was quoted by state media as saying earlier this week.

The existing retirement age is seriously mismatched with the current “national realities” and the new normal of future economic and social development, said Yuan, who is deputy head of the China Population Association and a demographer at Nankai University in Tianjin.

China’s existing retirement ages are lower than those in a number of major economies. The 2022 average standard retirement ages across Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries stood at 63.6 years old for women and 64.4 years old for men.

Other countries have also grappled with how to manage the retirement age. Major protests erupted in France in 2023 in response to a government attempt to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. The US has also been debating retirement reform and gradually increasing the retirement age, with Social Security incentives in place for retirees who delay taking benefits until age 70.

Demographic and economic challenges

The changes come as China’s leadership has become increasingly concerned by the country’s demographic challenges, which some economists warn could see the still-developing country fall into the trap of “getting old before it gets rich.”

China’s population has shrunk for the past two years, and it 2023 it recorded its lowest birth rate since the founding of Communist China in 1949, despite a reversal of the country’s long-standing “one-child policy” from 2016 and government-led efforts to incentivize more young couples to have children.

China’s elderly now account for more than 20% of the population, according to a report earlier this month from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which said about 297 million were aged 60 and above by the end of last year.

Demographers cited in state media have said that, between 2030 and 2035, the elderly population will make up 30% of the total population. That is likely to increase to more than 40% of the population by the middle of this century – making China a “super-aged society.”

Those projections have seen the government ramping up efforts to expand elderly care services and boost private-sector efforts to build a “silver economy.”

It’s also put heightened focus on the ability of the country’s pension system to handle a shrinking workforce alongside its burgeoning elderly population.

A 2019 report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top government think tank, forecast that China’s state pension fund would run dry by 2035 because of its dwindling workforce. Years of strict pandemic-related restrictions, which have shrunk the coffers of local governments, could make the pension shortfall even more pronounced.

Early last year, thousands of elderly people protested in several major cities against big cuts to their medical benefits payments, fearing that local governments were dipping into their individual accounts to cover the shortages in the state pension fund.

Even for those of working age, employment remains a steep challenge following the pandemic and a raft of government-led industry crackdowns in recent years. In July, the youth unemployment rate hit 17.1% among those aged between 16 and 24 who are not students, and was 6.5% for those 25 to 29 that month, according to state media.

Employers continue to pull back on hiring as the economy slows and people, especially in tech sectors, have widely noted age discrimination in hiring for those over 35.

The new regulations also call on the state to “support young people’s employment and entrepreneurship, strengthen the development of employment positions for older workers … and strengthen the prevention and governance of employment age discrimination.”

This post appeared first on cnn.com

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After success in Paris, Los Angeles looks to elevate Olympic Games in 2028

3 Mins Read

After a successful 2024 Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, the bar has been set high for the next summer Games in Los Angeles in 2028, something that key stakeholders in that event say the city will be ready for.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at CNBC x Boardroom’s Game Plan sports business event on Tuesday that what is making her anxious is “all that we need to do in our city to prepare” for the 2028 Games. However, she said that much like the last time Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1984, she believes the city will not only improve to host the Games but will benefit once they are over.

That includes work on public transportation. Bass said she is hoping there will be “no cars to the venues,” and that viewers will take public transportation to the Games — a pledge that will require an investment in both bus and subway infrastructure, as well as collaboration with other cities to borrow buses.

Bass said the city is also doing “whatever we can to eliminate street homelessness,” including building more than 18,000 new units for the unhoused population.

Bass said there will also be discussions with companies in Los Angeles around work schedules to shift employees to remote work during periods of high traffic, as well as find ways to shift truck deliveries into the night, like what happened during the 1984 Games.

“I think there is a way we can organize the region so that traffic will be less and manageable,” Bass said.

LA 2028 President Casey Wasserman attended the Paris Games, an event that he told Ross Sorkin “reminded people why they fall in love with the Olympics,” and one he said organizers will look to build upon in Los Angeles.

While no new permanent venues will be built for the Los Angeles Games, the first time in Olympics history, there are some challenges in utilizing all the city’s landmarks in the way Paris was able to feature famous locations like the Eiffel Tower by hosting beach volleyball nearby. Wasserman said Los Angeles got a glimpse of that with the Olympic Torch handover ceremony, when Tom Cruise scaled the Hollywood Sign and the Olympic Rings replaced the “OO”’s in the sign — which Wasserman noted was done with CGI.

“That’s obviously a longer, complicated conversation,” Wasserman said of altering the Hollywood Sign for the Games. “But I think it’s a pretty spectacular opportunity if there was a way to do it.”

Actress Jessica Alba, who is on the Los Angeles 2028 board of directors, said the Games will present all different aspects of the city’s culture, from Hollywood to fashion to food, as “a global platform to showcase what they got.”

“LA is a main character,” Alba said. “We want it to be a main character during the Olympics.”

Disclosure: CNBC parent NBCUniversal owns NBC Sports and NBC Olympics. NBC Olympics is the U.S. broadcast rights holder to all Summer and Winter Games through 2032.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

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Caroline Ellison seeks to duck prison sentence for role in FTX collapse

4 Mins Read

Lawyers for Caroline Ellison, the star witness in the prosecution of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, are recommending no prison time for their client’s role in the implosion of the crypto empire that was run by her former boss and ex-boyfriend.

In a court filing Tuesday night, the attorneys said that, at most, Ellison should be sentenced to time served and supervised release because of her swift return to the U.S. from FTX’s Bahamas headquarters in 2022 and her choice to voluntarily cooperate with the U.S. attorney’s office and financial regulators in helping them understand what went wrong at FTX and sister hedge fund Alameda Research.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over Bankman-Fried’s case, cited Ellison’s testimony when he decided in March to sentence the FTX founder to 25 years behind bars.

Ellison, who ran Alameda Research, agreed to a plea deal in December 2022, a month after FTX spiraled into bankruptcy. Unlike Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of all seven criminal fraud charges against him, Ellison pleaded guilty to conspiracy and financial fraud charges, rather than go to trial.

The Tuesday filing also refers to the recommendation of the court’s Probation Department that Ellison be given a sentence of “time served with three years of supervised release” as a credit to her “extraordinary cooperation with the government” and “her otherwise unblemished record.” Lawyers added that the department’s presentence report, which referenced numerous character testimonials speaking to Ellison’s ethics and integrity, also recommended that she not be fined.

“Caroline poses no risk of recidivism and presents no threat to public safety,” the filing says. “It would therefore promote respect for the law to grant leniency in recognition of Caroline’s early disclosure of the crimes, her unmitigated acceptance of responsibility for them, and — most importantly — her extensive cooperation with the government.”

In the filing, FTX CEO John Ray, who has been guiding the crypto firm through bankruptcy proceedings, describes Ellison’s cooperation as “valuable” in helping his team protect and preserve “hundreds of millions of dollars” in assets. He added that she has worked with his advisors to provide information regarding private keys to cryptocurrency wallets that contain “estate assets, DeFi positions, FTX exchange internal account information, the use of third-party exchanges for pre-petition trading, and pre-petition auditing practices.”

The 67-page document describe large swaths of Ellison’s life, starting from her earliest days in Boston and stretching into her protracted and troubled romance with Bankman-Fried. In that time, she “moved around the globe at his direction, first to Hong Kong and later the Bahamas,” and “worked long, stressful, Adderall-fueled hours,” the filing says.

Bankman-Fried forced Ellison into a sort-of isolation, culminating in her moral compass being “warped,” the lawyers say. At his direction, Ellison helped “steal billions,” all while living “in dread, knowing that a disastrous collapse was likely, but fearing that disentangling herself would only hasten that collapse.”

“Bankman-Fried convinced her to stay, telling her she was essential to the survival of the business, and that he loved her,” all “while also perversely demonstrating that he considered her not good enough to be seen in public with him at high-profile events,” the filing says.

An attorney for Bankman-Fried didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The document makes a point of noting that she has “drawn comfort from a new partner,” whose name is omitted from the document, but whom her friends recognize as “supportive and a positive, grounding influence.” She’s also written a novel, that’s “unrelated to the facts of this case.”

Ellison, who turns 30 in November, has a sentencing hearing on Sept. 24, in the same courthouse where she took the stand for several days in Bankman-Fried’s trial. Her former roommates and ex-FTX executives, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, will be sentenced in October and November, respectively.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

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Trump Media shares sink to new post-merger low after presidential debate

2 Mins Read

The share price of Trump Media plunged more than 10% on Wednesday, a day after majority shareholder Donald Trump gave a widely panned presidential debate performance against Vice President Kamala Harris.

The company’s stock price closed at its lowest level since the Truth Social app owner began publicly trading as DJT on the Nasdaq in late March.

Investing in Trump Media stock is often seen as a way to bet on the political fortunes of Trump, the former president and current Republican nominee.

Trump Media has said its business hinges at least partly on Trump’s popularity, and analysts say the company’s value will rise or fall based on his electoral prospects.

The stock drop Wednesday could signal that some Trump’s supporters were not pleased with what they saw at Tuesday night’s debate in Philadelphia.

Liberal and conservative political commentators said Harris appeared more prepared, articulate and even-keeled than Trump, who repeatedly bit on bait that she tossed to throw him off topic.

Harris’ team, projecting confidence, challenged Trump to another debate right after the first one ended.

Trump said he may not agree to that. In a Truth Social post Wednesday, he repeated his claim that Harris only wanted another debate because she was “beaten badly.”

“Why would I do a Rematch?” he wrote in the post.

Trump Media had surged as much as 10% during trading Tuesday, possibly indicating optimism about how Trump would fare in the debate.

The company’s gains on Monday and Tuesday were a respite from a weekslong rout that saw the stock price sink as much as 75% from its intraday high in late March, when then-privately held Trump Media merged with a blank-check firm.

The slump coincided with President Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Harris to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket.

It also came in the run-up to the date when Trump and other company insiders can start selling their shares.

Trump owns nearly 57% of the company’s stock. That stake at Wednesday’s closing price was worth about $1.9 billion.

It is unclear if Trump plans to start selling off his stake when a lock-up agreement lifts on Sept. 19.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

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Trump’s ‘concepts of a plan’ fumble is even worse than it seems

5 Mins Read

In theory, the question should have been easy.

Debate moderator Linsey Davis on Tuesday night pointed out to former president Donald Trump that he had repeatedly promised during his first two presidential bids to present a new approach to health care. She pointed out, too, that he hadn’t delivered one.

“So tonight, nine years after you first started running,” Davis said, “do you have a plan, and can you tell us what it is?”

Trump treaded water for a bit, bashing the Affordable Care Act but also taking credit for “saving it.”

Davis was not hoodwinked. “So just a yes or no,” she followed up: “You still do not have a plan?”

“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump replied.

Don’t we all, Mr. Trump. Don’t we all.

This should theoretically have been an easy question because Trump should have assumed someone at some point would ask. Davis was responding specifically to Trump’s most recent promises to revamp access to and the cost of health care, but she was also responding to those literal nine years of similar promises. When Trump pledged a new health-care policy shortly before the 2020 election, I created this chart showing his past similar promises, none of which had been kept. (You will note that the line labeled “now” is not actually now.)

Over and over, promises of a new health-care plan. Over and over, no plan. Or even concepts of one.

Trump’s failures to deliver on his health-care policy promises in particular are punchlines in his political career, surpassed only by his efforts as president to launch “infrastructure week.” Remember that time Trump handed a journalist a giant binder of paper with his policy proposals, only to have her visibly flip through a few pages that were blank? That was his health-care plan! Or, it seems, some of the concepts.

So, again: Trump should have had an answer. Except that, as I wrote on Wednesday, he’s not used to having to answer difficult questions. He’s not used to being in a place where the interviewer isn’t sycophantic and he can’t simply walk away. Davis had a unique opportunity and earned a revealing response.

The damage done, though, wasn’t simply in the clumsy phrasing, one that will live alongside “alternative facts” in defining an aspect of Trumpism. Nor was it simply that it revealed the hollowness of all of those Trump promises on health care. It was also unusually problematic for Trump in this moment against this opponent.

Trump and his allies have spent the past few weeks pillorying Vice President Kamala Harris for having no delineated policy proposals. This is ironic in part because Trump in 2015 publicly rejected the idea that voters actually cared about such proposals (which is generally true). But, still: This was one central line of attack. On matters of policy, his team insisted, Trump would prevail over Harris easily, in part because she had nothing to offer.

What does Trump have to offer? Well, concepts of plans.

His supporters will counter that he does have policy proposals, ones articulated in what his team calls “Agenda 47.” It was presented largely through video snippets in which Trump talks generally about things he wants to do, most of them very familiar. This section of his website has been de-emphasized in favor of the “platform” Trump helped write for the Republican convention (which is somehow even vaguer). But when I looked at it in June, there was no specific proposal on health care — and very few mentions of it in general. (Search for yourself!)

This has made it much easier for Harris and her allies to suggest that the thick sheaf of proposals compiled by the Heritage Foundation — the infamous “Project 2025” — is what Trump actually plans to do if he is elected again. Trump correctly points out that the descriptor “Trump’s ‘Project 2025’” is misleading, since he didn’t write it. But his critics correctly point out that the authors of the document are largely people who worked for Trump when he was president and can be expected to return to the federal government if he wins. And, since Trump has no plans of his own, their plans would become his.

It is okay if Trump doesn’t have a detailed proposal for overhauling the health-care system. It is a system that is notoriously complicated and involves countless competing priorities. It is one in which expense is unevenly distributed, making it that much harder to figure out a fair way to cover the costs. The reason the Affordable Care Act was such a big deal in the first place (to paraphrase Joe Biden) was that it managed to address a significant chunk of the issue in one fell swoop (through a clunky and patchwork process).

But for that reason Trump should stop pretending he has a plan. It’s not that people thought he did, mind you. Even when he first started touting his imminent proposal, it was understood that he was blowing smoke. Donald Trump, the political neophyte who shrugs at policy details, was not going to be the person to slice this Gordian knot. But he keeps saying it because he says untrue things all the time, and his supporters grant him the benefit of the doubt.

Trump’s “concepts of a plan” comment, though, will make it that much harder for anyone else to grant him that benefit before Election Day.

This post appeared first on washingtonpost.com

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To bash immigration, JD Vance bashes America’s economic dominance

5 Mins Read

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has long expressed hostility to immigration, even legal immigration, in the face of declines in birth rates in the United States. Since being elevated to serve as Donald Trump’s running mate, his hostility has manifested in more aggressive ways, most notably in his recent elevation of baseless claims that immigrants in a small town in his state — again, legal immigrants — are eating other people’s pets and otherwise making life in the area worse.

The political goal is unsubtle, certainly. Even when presented with the fact that no evidence of the alleged pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio, exists, Vance encouraged his and Trump’s supporters to continue hyping the claim anyway. Elevating the idea that immigrants are scary or harmful is central to Trump’s politics, particularly this year.

But it also means that Vance ends up meandering into some dubious territory. As when he was asked during an interview on CNBC whether he didn’t acknowledge that there are also positive economic aspects to immigration.

“If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants,” Vance replied, “then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country — the most prosperous city in the world. America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens.”

The claim that “Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens” is false for multiple reasons. First, that Harris is not centrally responsible for the administration’s immigration policies (overheated rhetoric about being “border czar” notwithstanding). Second, the total is wildly inflated, counting people stopped at the border among the “flood.” The actual number of immigrants entering the country — many of whom are given permission to stay while asylum claims are adjudicated — is far lower. Though, again, the immigrants at issue in Springfield, most of whom are from Haiti, are here legally and permitted to work, making them more obvious contributors to the economy than those without work permits.

But the most clearly ludicrous claim from Vance is his assessment that America isn’t the most prosperous country in the world. It is. And immigration plays an obvious role in that.

Data from the World Bank demonstrates the United States’ ongoing leadership on the metric of gross domestic product, the numeric proxy for “prosperity.” This country has the highest GDP by far and has had it for some time.

Vance, a former venture capitalist, might be expected to know this. And as he continued his answer, he moved the goal posts a bit, suggesting that while eggheads or people who work at a “Wall Street bank” might think America is prosperous, the Biden administration has overseen “skyrocketing inflation, lower take-home pay” and dissatisfaction with the economy. (That last complaint is heavily partisan and driven by claims like Vance’s, so we can set it aside.)

Inflation has risen since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s true. It is also true that this is not unique to the United States. And it is the case that the country’s median, inflation-adjusted annual income jumped to more than $80,000 in 2023, recovering to levels last seen before the pandemic hit. Vance refers to “take-home pay,” which is a way to double-dip on the inflation critique, since rising wages are moderated by rising prices. That said, income increases have been outpacing inflation for some time.

What’s critical to note here is that American prosperity is intertwined with historic immigration patterns — and that, moving forward, immigration will be essential to continued prosperity.

The most obvious reason is that America is getting older. The youngest baby boomers turn 60 this year; the oldest turn 78. America is getting grayer, with more people relying on taxpayer-funded programs for seniors, even as a smaller percentage of the population is paying taxes. Vance wants way more American-born babies to fill that working-age population hole. But immigration remains a central U.S. advantage in increasing our population and meeting that need.

As for his assertion that it was somehow ludicrous to think that immigration and prosperity were linked, we can again look at the numbers. There is no correlation between the most-prosperous countries in the world and the percentage of their populations that is foreign born, it’s true. The chart below, contrasting GDP (vertical axis) with foreign-born populations (horizontal) just shows countries all over the place.

But if we adjust for population size, a correlation emerges. Countries with the higher percentages of foreign-born workers among the most prosperous countries are also those with the most GDP per resident. (Notice that the countries form more of a line, though the United States is still an outlier.)

The causation here doesn’t necessarily run in that direction; more prosperous countries are more appealing places for immigrants to seek out, as the United States has seen over the past half-century. But it is the case that immigration and prosperity overlap.

Vance is a politician, one running as part of a ticket predicated on presenting immigration as a central problem for the country and a central failing by his and Trump’s opponents. As such, Vance once again ends up wandering into dubious territory, this time suggesting that the country is not the wealthiest and most economically powerful in the world.

Not every American is wealthy, sure, even on a global standard. But it is broadly true that Americans enjoy more prosperity than residents of other countries — and that immigrants to the United States contribute to that prosperity.

This post appeared first on washingtonpost.com

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A contentious race to be a tiny Michigan county’s top election official

11 Mins Read

BELLAIRE, Mich. — Sheryl Guy planned to oversee one last presidential election, and she hoped it would go more smoothly than last time.

In 2020, the clerk in northern Michigan’s sparsely populated Antrim County initially misreported that Joe Biden won the heavily Republican area. Within days she corrected the tabulations with the accurate vote totals, but the error still provided fodder for far-fetched theories that spread across the country as Donald Trump falsely claimed he had won.

Guy, 63, has weathered vilification, lawsuits and death threats. She was looking forward to retirement after the election this fall — until she realized who might take her job.

Winning a five-way Republican primary for county clerk last month was Victoria Bishop, who promised to shake up the office, hand-count ballots and scrub people from the voter rolls. With no Democrat running, Bishop was all but assured of winning in November.

This gnawed at Guy, who recently left the Republican Party and views Bishop’s pledges as signals that she will entertain the kinds of baseless claims that thrust the county into national headlines in 2020 and eroded public trust in elections. She decided to launch a write-in campaign to try to keep her job.

“It’s my obligation to do this, to do what’s right,” she said from behind a desk scattered with papers.

The unusual race in this bucolic county near the northern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula shows the persistence of false claims about the last presidential election and how the effort to fight them often falls to local officials. With mail voting beginning this month in Michigan and many other states, election officials from both parties have raised concerns about misinformation and the potential for violence as Trump raises the specter of fraud and warns that he, if elected, may try to prosecute those who oversee voting.

County and municipal clerks are the engines that make elections run — often with tight budgets, small staffs and intense deadlines, all of which can lead to mistakes. They register voters, mail absentee ballots, oversee in-person early voting, conduct Election Day activities, count ballots and transmit the results to the state for certification. Once little-known civil servants, since 2020 they have been shoved into the political limelight and subjugated to routine harassment. A wave of election officials have quit or retired in recent years, and their departures create openings that could be filled by those who want to transform long-standing voting procedures.

Guy came to work for the county as a switchboard operator as soon as she finished high school in 1978 and worked her way up the ranks over the following decades. “I graduated on Friday, started on Monday,” she said. “I’m very boring. Never left.”

This is Guy’s fourth time running for clerk since 2012 but the first time she faces an opponent.

Guy’s campaign manager, Daniel Bean, spent Sunday and Monday distributing 100 yard signs that feature Guy’s name in bold letters and these instructions: “Write in & fill in the oval.” He keeps reminding voters it’s Sheryl with an S, not a C, but he’s also confident the county’s board of canvassers will consider the intent of voters when it decides which ballots to count for her. A leading concern: that voters will forget to fill in the oval next to her written-in name.

Bean worked with Guy for four decades at the county before he retired as sheriff last year. In 2020, he briefly thought something nefarious may have happened with the election results, he said, but he investigated and quickly determined ordinary human error was at fault. He fears Bishop’s election could plunge the county back into acrimony and arguments over debunked allegations of hacked machines.

“This county has been through a lot in the past years, and I don’t think it needs this again,” he said as he sipped coffee in the back of the Hen’s Den, a diner adorned with small American flags and a sign with a stern-faced chicken.

Bishop, 78, often wears a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrase “Michigan first” as she promotes a message of ridding the voter rolls of dead people and those who have moved out of the county. Bishop, who has not publicly spelled out her views on the 2020 election or what she believed happened in Antrim County, declined to comment for this story. But in a letter to the Antrim Review newspaper this month, Bishop expressed frustration about Guy’s abrupt plans to try to keep her job.

“She did not like the way you voted, so now she wants to throw away your vote and stay in office, temporarily,” Bishop wrote, arguing Guy would leave office early so a replacement could be appointed. Guy wrote back a week later to say she planned to serve a full term if elected.

An election under scrutiny

The 2020 errors in Antrim County began in a mundane way. Guy and her staff received last-minute paperwork for a candidate for local office, and when they added him to the ballot, they did not update all the voting machines. That caused the machines to report their vote tallies into the wrong spaces on the spreadsheet of election results.

Guy spent all night working on the election but didn’t realize she had a problem until she left the office and started hearing from residents who found Biden’s victory in the county impossible to believe. The day after the election, she and her staff struggled to understand what happened and got incorrect results again when they first re-tallied the votes. Within days, they determined Trump had won with 61 percent of the vote. The state later confirmed that result with a hand count.

But the damage had been done. Trump seized on the problems as he raged about his losses in Michigan and other swing states and sought to challenge the results. His legal team asked the county’s prosecutor to turn over voting machines — a request he rebuffed.

A Trump ally in the county sued over how the election was conducted, and a month later a judge granted him the opportunity to examine voting equipment. Soon, a team arrived by private jet to photograph the machines and study their inner workings. The team published a report falsely claiming the machines were intentionally flipping votes for Biden, and Trump tweeted that it revealed “massive fraud.”

The judge soon dismissed the lawsuit, and appeals courts declined to revive it. But already the false notion that voting machines were designed to help Biden had taken root with a segment of Trump’s base. Trump allies used the problems there to justify a draft executive order to seize voting machines. Trump didn’t issue the order but did mention Antrim County in his speech on Jan. 6, 2021.

“In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden, and the same systems are used in the majority of states in our country,” Trump said that day. Soon after, his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters and others harassed and threatened Guy. One told her she would go before a firing squad. “Nasty stuff,” Guy said. “Dirty, rotten, nasty.”

The tension mounted. At times, she asked deputies or maintenance workers to escort her and her staff out of the building. Guy started locking the door to her house for the first time. She put on weight as she found herself stress-eating and drinking more Coors Light and Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Her husband urged her to resign.

“Never quit a job in my life,” she said. “I don’t know how. And so I wasn’t going to be a quitter on my people either.”

Bishop’s plan for Antrim

Across a county dotted with lakes, forests and cherry orchards, Bishop has put up giant neon-yellow signs promising to “Restore election integrity in Antrim County!” In one campaign flier, she tells voters, “Recent elections have left me with many questions, and I believe many of you may have the same questions.”

Her campaign is run by her husband, Randy Bishop, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Trucker Randy on a local radio program. On his show, he questions how elections are run, rails against the Republican establishment and touts a health program that he says will allow people to lose weight without exercising. In recent weeks his show has featured ads for MyPillow, MAGA Water and a northern Michigan “gun doctor” who will repair “anything but an Abrams tank.”

Last month, he expressed frustration that Guy was considering a write-in campaign, saying she seemed worried about what would happen if his wife got the job. “What is Sheryl Guy covering up?” Randy Bishop asked on the show. “What is she afraid that Vicki may find once she takes office in January?”

Two years ago he sued Guy and other county officials for $1 million, alleging the county’s election practices violated his constitutional right to equal protection under the law. A judge quickly threw out his case.

Guy criticized Victoria Bishop’s plans to change how elections are run, saying she would risk subjecting the county to costly litigation if she pursued them. State and federal law specify how the voter rolls must be maintained, limiting the ability of county clerks to take voters off them. Counting ballots by hand instead of machine is time-consuming and less accurate, according to election experts.

But Bishop in her letter to the Antrim Review said critics had mischaracterized her plans, saying she wanted to use hand counts simply to confirm that the number of ballots matched the number of voters.

As a meeting of the Coffee Klatch Conservatives broke up on Wednesday, Bishop’s supporters called her idea common sense. Some said they were annoyed that Guy launched her write-in campaign after primary voters had their say.

“I don’t think that’s a good policy — to say you’re not running, and then you don’t like the results, and you do a write-in campaign,” Sue Leassner said.

Tom Stillings, a former chairman of the Antrim County Republican Party, said he doesn’t believe Guy has fully explained what happened in 2020 and thinks Bishop might be able to find out more.

“Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I want an explanation,” he said.

But one attendee, Marina Friend, said she planned to write in Guy’s name because she didn’t think Bishop knew enough about overseeing court records and other duties of the county clerk. “She’s a known quantity,” Friend said of Guy.

Several hours later, three dozen Guy supporters — a mix of Democrats and Republicans — met with her to talk about the mechanics of the campaign and brainstorm ways to get the word out about her candidacy. They discussed handing out bracelets and keychains with Guy’s name on them so voters could easily remember her name when they go to the polls. They sorted out who could lend them a fence post driver so they could put up extra-large campaign signs. And they emphasized the importance of fundraising. “We’re looking for money,” her campaign manager told the group.

Guy has made inroads with local Democrats, who now wave her signs alongside ones for Vice President Kamala Harris during weekly rallies.

“Sheryl was always a good clerk. We liked her, and we felt this was something we needed to do, so we’re supporting her,” said Lou Ann McKimmy, one of the Democratic organizers.

“Most people in the county have her name on their birth certificate, their death certificate, their marriage certificates,” she said. “It’s local.”

Bracing for a long election night

Write-in campaigns are rare — and most typically fail. But there are noteworthy successes, as in 2010, when Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska won the general election as a write-in candidate after losing the Republican primary.

Guy isn’t running with a party affiliation, and she considers herself an independent now. Guy rolled her eyes as she said she voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. She liked that he wanted to keep American soldiers out of war but never believed he understood how average people lived, she said. She broke with her longtime party after Trump tried to overturn the results and said she plans to vote for Harris in November.

Guy will be responsible for supervising her own election, but she typically turns over many of the duties to her chief deputy, Connie Wing. Vote tallying this year may stretch well into the day after the election because workers will need to go through all the write-in ballots.

That unusual, long process could serve as a breeding ground for new false claims about how elections are conducted. Wing said she is braced for phone calls, sharply worded emails and requests for records.

“I’m ready for it,” Wing said. “I think at this point, I just expect it.”

This post appeared first on washingtonpost.com

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