TV News LIES

US prices rose 2.7% in the year to November, according to federal data released a day after Donald Trump claimed they were falling “very fast” on his watch.

The latest consumer price index, released on Wednesday morning, was down from 3% in September, and short of economists’ expectations of about 3.1% for last month.

It comes amid questions over the strength of the US economy. The longest US federal government shutdown in history halted collection of key data. There was no inflation report for October, and data was only collected for the second half of November.

In a live TV address on Tuesday night, Trump claimed prices were falling “rapidly”, despite evidence to the contrary. “I am bringing those high prices down, and bringing them down very fast,” the US president said.

Price growth, which surged in the US to its highest level in a generation three years ago amid economic disruption wrought by Covid, fell back sharply. It has stubbornly remained above standard levels, however, and after retreating to 2.3% in April, it has since climbed higher – amid persisting concerns around affordability.

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The job market continues to show signs of cooling.

U.S. employers added just 64,000 jobs in November, according to a delayed report from the Labor Department Tuesday, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from 4.4% in September. That's the highest unemployment rate in more than four years.

The jobs report was initially set to come out earlier this month, but the government's ability to monitor the job market was hampered by the six-week federal shutdown.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/16/nx-s1-5645023/jobs-employment-labor-marketThat delayed job tallies for October and November, both of which were released on Tuesday. The report showed the U.S. saw a net loss of 105,000 jobs in October. That was led by a large drop in the federal workforce, as 162,000 government workers who'd taken buyouts earlier in the year were officially dropped from the payrolls.

Furloughed federal workers were unable to conduct their usual survey of households in October, so the unemployment rate for that month remains unknown.

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A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by sending automated emails and messages blaming the government shutdown on Democrats.

In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said the Department of Education (DOE) cannot compel federal workers to engage in partisan speech.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), represented by the Democracy Forward and Public Citizen Litigation Group, previously sent a cease and desist letter and also filed a lawsuit against the Education Department over the political statement issued in staff email responses.

“Nonpartisanship is the bedrock of the federal civil service; it ensures that career government employees serve the public, not the politicians,” Cooper’s memorandum reads. “But by commandeering its employees’ e-mail accounts to broadcast partisan messages, the Department chisels away at that foundation."re

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Thousands of Starbucks workers are gearing up to vote on whether to go on strike next week. 

The strike authorization vote is set to begin Friday and will remain open for several days, with Starbucks Workers United expected to share results after voting ends. Employees represented by the union have staged two national strikes over the last year, most recently in May to protest Starbucks' new dress code. Thousands of workers also walked off the job in December 2024.

As the voting gets underway, the union is also planning a series of rallies and pickets over the weekend outside Starbucks stores in dozens of U.S. cities.

Starbucks Workers United originated in Buffalo, New York, in 2021 and now represents 12,000 workers in approximately 550 Starbucks cafes across the country.

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Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

The company announced the cuts in a memo from its chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted.

However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs,underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said.

Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company’s new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang’s role in steering the company’s AI strategy.

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The White House budget director, Russell Vought, said on Friday that the Trump administration will freeze another $11bn worth of infrastructure projects in Democratic states due to the ongoing government shutdown.

Vought said on social media the US army corps of engineers would pause work on “low priority” projects in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore. He said the projects could eventually be canceled.

The White House office of management and budget (OMB) said Donald Trump “wants to reorient how the federal government prioritizes Army Corps projects”.

The Trump administration has already frozen at least $28bn meant for transportation and energy projects in Democratic-controlled cities and states, as the president pressures his opponents in Congress to end the shutdown, which began on 1 October.

Trump has also vowed to cut “Democrat agencies” and has sought to eliminate 4,100 federal jobs as he looks to inflict pain on his political opposition.

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